Image by Sandy Millar, via Unsplash
I was having my weekly coffee with a friend this morning, who’d recently finished reading my book & Sons. He had another commitment to get away to, but he asked if we could talk about the book next week. And he asked a question I’ve never been asked before: “How would you like to talk about it?”
Having been in lots of situations where a group of people were talking about what I’d written, I can tell you that the same handful of questions and comments come up over and over.
- How do you know so much about (plow truck driving, table tennis, being in a big band…)?
- I really liked it! (Usually followed by the recounting of one particular scene that stuck out to them.)
- I know someone like that, or we’re going through something similar right now…
- It would be better if (followed by some major restructuring that completely negates my work as a writer, and takes agency for themselves)
- There’s a typo on page 187.
So, if not just those, how WOULD I like to talk about it?
Well, the surrounding conversation was about letting go of imagined futures, about those richly imagined stories we’d once built about who we were bound to be. Stories in which we had become professional baseball players, or musicians, or college faculty members. When those mirages inevitably vanish, I think we don’t do enough work to acknowledge our grief. And what is grief, really, but coming to terms with a new future that doesn’t include the old one? We grieve our partners, because our own future doesn’t include them. We grieve our pets, because our own future doesn’t include them. And I think it makes sense to grieve our truncated dreams, whatever they were, when our own future doesn’t include them
That’s what my best writing does.
I shared a story with my writing group a year or so ago, and they reiterated their core complaint with my work, which is that the characters don’t have enough bad things happen to them. They subscribe to the aphorism (of unclear origin) that the writer’s job is to get the protagonists up into a tree and then throw rocks at them.
I’m not interested in hostility as the basis for writing, and I’ve talked a lot about that in this space. But they followed that recommendation with the idea that this story felt to them like “wish fulfillment.”
Close, but no.
I think, in the work that feels closest and most successful, I’ve played out one of my lapsed selves, as realistically as I know how to do. That means knowing its disappointments and disillusionment as well as its successes and pleasures. I’ve been able to be a professional table tennis player, and to know how much of the rest of life I wasn’t able to taste because of the singular focus required to be that good. I’ve gotten to be a college faculty member, gotten to be tall and attractive, gotten to be a professional musician, and I’ve learned those lives well enough to NOT have them be merely rainbow-pony wish fulfillment.
I’ve done the same thing on behalf of others. I wrote a book in which my mother had some of the life she never got to have, and felt what it meant to have her success be both powerful and anonymous. I wrote a book in which our local road foreman got some of the respect and resources he’s deserved, while still acknowledging how brutal the work is.
Wanting those other lives so badly, on behalf of myself and others, is what made them worth writing about. It’s what’s lifted those stories beyond the realm of their instigating ideas, and made them fully inhabited. That’s not wish fulfillment. It’s a form of grief, allowing the lapsed dreams to be realized so fully that I can finally let them go.
“Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” This statement, spoken by Toni Morrison in 1981, is the basis of my writing. No one else has written about the lives I’ve lost, so I guess I have to do it myself.
Herb Childress 