Why We Write (25 page)

“M
eg Wolitzer,” Nick Hornby wrote in the
Believer
, “is an author who makes you wonder why more people don’t write perceptive, entertaining, unassuming novels about how and why ordinary people choose to make decisions about their lives.”

Hornby’s praise is understated, verging on dismissive. Perceptive and entertaining, yes, but unassuming? Not so much. Meg Wolitzer’s wit and popularity should not be cause to mistake her for a literary lite. Wolitzer starts small and goes wide, and her mission is ambitious: to depict who we average Americans really are, when no one’s looking.

Wolitzer took a distinctly
assuming
position on the subject in the
New York Times Book Review
on March 30, 2012, writing
in essay form what every one of her novels demands. “Many first-rate books by women and about women’s lives never find a way to escape ‘Women’s Fiction,’” she wrote, “and make the leap onto the upper shelf where certain books, most of them written by men,…are prominently displayed and admired.”

Meg Wolitzer

Why I write

Though it’s pleasing, as a writer, to think that most of your life is a quest toward doing the kind of work that absorbs you most, sometimes I think that a good deal of my life is, perhaps, essentially a quest toward freedom from anxiety. Being engaged in prose, especially when it’s going well, can keep the anxiety of the world away.

Writing is the only thing I know that can do that; the work becomes an airtight container. Poisonous things are not allowed in; after all, you’re the bouncer! You have deep control, and where else can you find that? You can’t control other people or your relationships or your children, but in writing you can have sustained periods where you’re absolutely in charge.

I write, as Zadie Smith said, to reveal my way of being in the world, my sensibility. What am I but my sensibility: my self, my experiences, the changes I’ve made and seen?

A certain kind of writer writes to meet her ghosts. I’m not brave in that way. In a sense I need to be
lanced
when I write. Nor do I write or read to escape. There is no escape; I don’t know what that even means. When I work, I want to achieve a sort of tilt, to create a skewed world, an interesting world.

I like the physical sensation of writing, too. It gives me a kind of ruddy vigor, like some sort of exercise you want a reward for afterward. I find it deeply satisfying to have worked something out in a novel. My husband’s a science writer, and this is the closest I’m ever going to get to his world, to working on cosmic puzzles and theories.

I’m a big Scrabble player, and I used to write puzzles. With my cowriter Jesse Green, I created a weekly cryptic crossword for
7 Days
magazine in New York, way back when. Sometimes I think of writing as being like that: cryptic, filled with clues, inscrutable, elegant. What’s the way out of the locked room of the hell of a novel going nowhere? I’ve been known to jump up and down (well, subtly) when I come up with a solution to a problem in my fiction. Working it out is a kind of exercise you’ve given yourself that no one else will give you. It’s a very personalized form of homework.

I write to hammer out an idea that I’d be hammering out in my head anyway—to make some kind out concrete thing out of it. It’s a natural extension of the inner jabber. When I have inner jabber plus imperative, that’s a book.

Writing for Mom

I had a fairly unusual situation, growing up: I had a mother who was a writer, though unlike me, she came to writing very late. I was six or seven when she sold her first short story to the old
Saturday Evening Post
. I saw the pain and excitement of her experiences. When I started writing, I wrote for her.

In first grade, I had a teacher who’d invite me up to her desk, and I’d dictate stories to her, because she could write them down faster than I could. My mother saved the stories, and looking at them now, I can see that I started to write as a way of figuring out the world. As I got a little older, I loved to rush home and show my mother what I’d written, knowing there would be an encouraging response.

I gave a reading once, and an older woman stood up and said that her daughter was trying to be a playwright, and she was worried that her daughter wouldn’t be able to make a living. I said she should encourage her talents, and that the world would do its best to whittle away at her daughter, but a mother should never do that.

At Brown, I studied with the great writer John Hawkes, who we all called Jack. One day I ran into him on campus, and because I wanted to please him, a lie sprang to my lips. I blurted out, “I just finished writing a story.” Then I had to run home and actually write it.

Later on in a writing life, when you’re being published fairly frequently and you don’t have to obsessively please another person, there’s no thrilling Helen Keller “water” moment, but a series of moments: the excitement of knowing that you’re not writing into the void, that here’s a vessel for your work. That protégé/mentor thing is a way in, and then eventually you don’t need it anymore.

Shame

I sold my first novel to Random House for five thousand dollars while I was still at Brown. It came out eighteen months later.

I was all set to go to Stanford for grad school, but I decided to move to New York City and see if I could make it as a writer instead. I lived in the Village and ate tons of Indian takeout. I wasn’t focused on money. All I knew was, I’d sold my novel and I wanted to live as a fiction writer.

I went to MacDowell [Colony] right after I moved to New York. It was so long ago that I had my folk guitar with me, with its no-nukes sticker on the side, and I sat under a tree and played “The Water Is Wide.” Do I distance myself from that girl? Absolutely not. Living with our own ridiculousness is something writers have to do.

Over the next few years I kept selling novels for incrementally slightly larger advances. It was such a different era, and it never occurred to me to think of how many—or how few—copies I was selling. I felt I was successful simply because I was being published. I was very grateful and happy. It never occurred to me that this joy could be in peril, but of course it always is. Some of the writers I came up with eventually disappeared.
Was it because they couldn’t get published anymore? Because they just stopped writing? In some cases I really don’t know.

I never had any money until 1992, when one of my books was made into a movie. It was perfect timing. I had a new baby, and I had no idea how I was going to write and also be a parent. The movie deal bought me time. It got me off the hamster wheel of writing and teaching.

I’ve resumed my place on that hamster wheel now, because I have a kid in college, and one who’s rapidly heading there. As I’ve mentioned, my husband’s a writer, too, so we’re both living that fragile, one-foot-on-a-banana-peel life. We make corrections as we need to. I feel that there’s no shame in doing whatever you need to do to make a living as a writer. It’s exhausting but exciting.

I was in a car full of writers once, being driven to some event, and everyone in the backseat was talking about our failures and disappointments. The driver turned around and burst out, “You’re all so talented! Why should you feel so much shame?” We had to laugh at ourselves. We knew we were describing a feeling that a lot of writers have.

Sometimes Zeus. Sometimes not.

I have very different kinds of writing days. With some books, I have that springing-from-the forehead-of-Zeus, improbable, and productive experience. There might be day after day of engagement, and the world drops away, the contents of my brain recast in miniature on the page. When I was writing my novel
The Position
, I had the feeling that I was simply the amanuensis.
It was my job to write the book down like a secretary. I wrote that book very fast.

With other books, there might be days and days of fatigue and lethargy—and in my own experience, this ends up being because there’s a faulty or not fully realized imperative at the heart of the book.

The imperative: imperative

While I’m writing, I ask myself the question that a reader inevitably asks a writer: why are you telling me this? There has to be an erotic itch, a sense of book as hot object, the idea that what’s contained in the book is the information you’ve always needed.

If the answer to the question “Why are you telling me this?” doesn’t come quickly, if I’m writing without urgency, that’s my first sign that something’s amiss. When novels or stories feel like they’re going nowhere, they’ve lost their imperative, their reason for being.

Imperative is the kind of thing we associate with urgent, external moments—say, with political causes. I also associate it with art. You know that something might be righted, whether it’s a social wrong or incomplete information. That’s what art gives you: a more complete view, a view of corners you wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

Years ago, I sold a novel based on Freud’s famous patient Dora, written from her point of view, essentially attempting to reclaim her story from Freud and return it to her. I really enjoyed writing the first fifty pages, and I traveled to Vienna to research it. And then, not long afterward, I realized that I didn’t
want to write this book. I felt constrained by the language I had to use because it was set in a long-ago time, and it was a first-person book. Reclaiming the narrative and returning it to her was great in theory but not in reality. Once I knew that, I lost the imperative to write it.

Some novels are like big pocketbooks; they’ve got the whole world in them, and the writer and the reader have to dig around a bit to find what they’re looking for. Some novels are more slender containers. This one would have had to be the latter kind. I was surprised I had so much trouble, because I’m very interested in psychoanalysis, and I thought such a book would be a way to write about the subject with force. But I found myself relying too heavily on lyricism, which, for me, is something of a trap.

Lyricism can break sentences into shining, separate, discrete objects, and that can either contribute to a work’s power or merely make the prose feel pretty, writerly, and admirable, but lacking in force. My trip to Vienna ended up as a single paragraph in my next novel after I dropped Dora and her world. Everything makes a good soup eventually, even if in a totally unrecognizable form.