Hi! What a perfect time to have a Substack titled “The Art of Losing”! I’m losing things left and right over here. My patience for people’s rigid hot takes on current events, for one. Sleep. Friends—just to name a few! It’s been a soul-crushing couple of weeks. If you’re feeling similarly, I’m truly sorry. I wish you wide-open space and time to be able to mourn your losses.
As I’ve mentioned before on here, when I’m feeling hurt and confused, I turn to writing. And the essay I’m about to share with you is one I began out of this very state of mind… As you’ll see, I wrote it in the wake of the publication of my novel, Wildcat. At the time, I wasn’t able to place the essay anywhere, so it’s just been living in my computer. And if you’ll remember, being able to share previously unpublished things I’ve written was an impetus for this Substack in the first place. Soooo, without further ado, here ya go!
If you’re a woman, writing about yourself is dumb.
I’m paraphrasing the feedback the author Melissa Febos describes getting as a young woman writer in her essay, “In Praise of Navel-Gazing.” Febos goes on to defend the idea of female personal writing as high art. (And spoiler: I will too.) But of course I recognized what she was saying.
As a young woman writer, both in college and graduate school, I’d gotten the message about what serious writers did. And these serious writers were mostly males and they were writing fiction. I really got this message when I couldn’t get a specific male professor of mine, with whom I’d had a great rapport, to blurb my food memoir. When he never responded to my email and two very polite follow-ups, it dawned on me: Ahh, this female domestic memoir is beneath him!
In the same essay, Febos also defends the idea of writing as therapy. As I read this defense, I felt strange, like I must’ve been in the wrong writing circle for the past decade. Wasn’t this the reason most of us were writing— to heal ourselves? Or at the very least: to figure something out, to exert control in a way that we couldn’t in our real lives? I mean, that’s what I’d been doing for a long time.
Becoming a mother only strengthened this practice. I was confused from the very beginning. I’d never felt so powerful and so powerless. But let’s begin with the former: After the birth of my first son, I specifically remember feeling sorry for men. Their poor incapable bodies! My father had been a gynecologist and for a few moments at least, I felt that I understood clearly and plainly why he’d neglected me and pored over my older brother: because he was threatened by the power of the female. He saw what women were capable of on a daily basis and it was threatening. I became obsessed with the following lines from a Sharon Olds poem:
I have done what you wanted to do, Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, I have done this thing, I and the other women this exceptional act with the exceptional heroic body.
But when I went out into the world—when I left the safety of my mind and home—I only saw the way my culture dismissed the female body. Instead of questioning why the United States had no universal paid parental leave policy, I saw tired women posting memes of the “Mama needs coffee” variety. Listening to the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast, I came across an audio clip of Sharon Olds (my Sharon Olds) describing her experience submitting poems to literary journals in the early 1970s:
These were love poems, many of them, and they had children in them. And the editor would say, ‘If you wish to write about your children may we suggest The Ladies’ Home Journal. We are a literary magazine.’
I began writing my next book, a novel, when I was pregnant with my second son. Looking back at that time, I can see how my feelings of powerlessness—ironically—motivated me. In his book of essays, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, Alexander Chee says: “I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about.”
What I really cared about was women and their history of powerlessness and how it has shaped us. I was mildly obsessed with the idea of surrendering, which was my best strategy as a parent, especially after the second baby, when I had a newborn and a two-year-old. Trying to “overpower” a tantrumming two-year-old was a fool’s errand. Plus, a part of me—if we weren’t in public of course—was always proud of them when they fought for what they wanted. Yes, I’d think. You will need this quality in life.
When I finished a draft of the novel I was writing, I shared it with my then-agent. That was May of 2018. When, six weeks later, she told me she didn’t want to represent it, I wasn’t that surprised. I was accustomed to people not wanting to invest in me. See: my father and aforementioned male professor. There was also another male professor on my thesis committee (different from the one who wouldn’t blurb my book) who admitted to “skimming” my thesis. (The women on my committee gave careful notes, along with the email addresses of their agents.)
I got some other people to read it. I made some changes and began looking for another agent. I worked on other projects. I took care of my kids. I listened to podcasts. In one of them, I caught an interview with a Franciscan priest on the NPR show, “On Being with Krista Tippett.” I typically shy away from all things Christian, but this guy didn’t sound very Christian. His name was Richard Rohr, and at one point, he explained to Tippett his ongoing work with men:
In the early ’90s, I started reading everything I could cross-culturally on this rather universal phenomenon of male initiation, that on every continent, culture after culture, it was never assumed that the young male naturally grew up. He had to be taught… unless the male was led on journeys of powerlessness, he would always abuse power.
Trump was president at the time, and I instantly loved this notion of men going on journeys of powerlessness. During his tenure in charge, I’d often catch myself wishing he menstruated—just to throw a minor wrench in his plans. I wanted his own body to annoy him, to get in his way for a short time. While I was imagining things: what if he got pregnant? Can you imagine him breathing through the contractions, Mitch McConnell massaging his lower back?
Another word for powerlessness might be vulnerability. And in another interview I sought out, I listened to Rohr discuss how mainstream Christians are always praying to the “all mighty” god, but how maybe this wasn’t very helpful. (It wasn’t true either; there was the whole dying-on-the-cross event.) Praying to an “all vulnerable” god, however, might be. Because—at least this was my understanding of what Rohr was saying—how can you yourself be vulnerable if you’re worshipping a god that never is? How can you yourself respect vulnerability if your god is always in control and with a plan? (Mainstream Christians allege that Jesus’s dying on the cross was all part of the plan! God has a plan. Trust in him!)
After a gigantic revision, my manuscript sold in the summer of 2020.
The following summer, I’d signed up for an online seminar taught by the author Garth Greenwell, during which he described reading a book as entering an author’s consciousness.
Maybe because I was still on my Richard-Rohr kick (I’d just finished one of his books, Falling Upward) and god was still very much on my mind, but this statement from Greenwell led me one step further: to think of an author as the god of her book.
Because much like the Christian god made the world, the author too makes everything happen within the walls of her book. No matter the genre, or whether the book is from the point of view of one character or many, the book as a whole originates from one brain. In the weeks and months that followed, I found myself quite enthralled by this idea—of playing god.
In her novel Transit, one of Rachel Cusk’s characters is a writer speaking at a writing conference, and he sums up how I was feeling in the months leading up to my book’s release:
Only then did you know that you’d got the better of the things that had happened to you: when you controlled the story rather than it controlling you.
How rare a feeling, and how intoxicating: to go your whole life as a powerless, silly woman and then to be the man with a plan? The one in charge.
Ah, but the metaphor I’ve put before us has only been partially explored. Because if an author is the god of her book, who or what are the readers? I’m reminded again of the critically-acclaimed male professor who skimmed my thesis and then offered critiques on my work that made no sense to me.
Wildcat is a novel, and it is indeed fiction, but the main character, Leanne, shares some things in common with me. One is that she also has a Republican mother who wants to hold her political opinions without being questioned or challenged by anyone with a differing point of view. Well, if my mom (also a mainstream Christian) was going to read my book, she would have to be faced with a differing point of view.
In that book, Falling Upward, Rohr writes: “I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then I must watch my reaction to it.” He does this because he has become a bit of a Christian guru, and he knows how intoxicating power is. He does this because he believes in the all-vulnerable god.
My book came out six weeks ago, and although I know that my mom bought my book, I haven’t heard anything from her since. I have heard from my step-dad, and from what I’ve gathered it seems as though my mom is not a fan of the world I created.
What I’m trying to say is: you can play god as a writer. You can create your own world where anything can happen—one where women are in charge and the men aren’t even allowed to blurb books. But unless you’re Jonathan Franzen, I don’t think us writers need to worry about letting the power corrupt us completely. We play our part, but the readers get a say too. Sometimes they’ll take their opinion to Goodreads or Amazon—so many daily humiliations readily available! But even the bad takes are somewhat rewarding. The critiques are still an acknowledgment of some kind. Sometimes it’s the reader’s silence that speaks the loudest.
In this metaphor, reading a book and not acknowledging it at all is a kind of agnosticism. The reader is quite literally: unmoved. And well, if this is the response of your own mother, what can I tell you but: welcome to another journey in powerlessness. Write it all down. Maybe it’ll spur you on into a new world.
Lololol Trump giving birth with Mitch as his doula. Now that I write that, it seems a too-fitting metaphor for their havoc. Moving on, I loved this line: “a part of me—if we weren’t in public of course—was always proud of them when they fought for what they wanted. Yes, I’d think. You will need this quality in life.” And finally lol “so many daily humiliation’s available!” on Amazon and Goodreads. Good one. 😂