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I've never been good at making friends. When I was young,
my brother's and sisters' friends were my friends, and then in college I
met my husband, a very social creature with lots of friends with whom we
got along well and enjoyably passed the time. But he was always the one
to bring new people into our circle and arrange the outings. Other than
my husband, I never had a best friend or confidant. Since our marriage has gone seriously downhill over the last several years
and we've grown more and more distant from one another, I find I have
no one to share my feelings with. I find that fears, despondency and self-pity dominate my thoughts rather
than hopes and aspirations. I have several acquaintances at work with whom I sometimes talk, but
only superficially. I've opened up to my sisters but only on a
limited basis. I don't really feel comfortable talking about my intimate
problems with them. I've considered therapy, but find the idea of having
to pay someone to listen to me incredibly depressing. Interestingly, I've
found that writing down my thoughts seems to alleviate the heavy gloom
that sometimes envelops me, and helps me to clarify my feelings and look
more optimistically at my situation. Any kind words of advice? Down in the Doldrums Alone Dear Down, Some of us aren't so socially adept, perhaps because, like
you, we inherited comfortable social situations and never had to build
them for ourselves. We perched on the perimeter and absorbed enough
conviviality to satisfy us, not knowing where it comes from. One does
develop social skills eventually, and I'm sure you must be more adept
than you realize. Of course, it takes a while to develop a friendship to
which you can entrust yourself honestly. But it starts with a single small
step: You call up someone and arrange to meet for coffee or a walk, and
you talk about this and that, and when you sense that intimacy is offered,
you give up your secret -- you're going through a bad patch right now
and beset with gloom and despond -- and then the other person chooses
how to respond. Maybe she is tongue-tied, maybe she rushes to assure you
that all is well, maybe she says a dumb thing, like, "Oh well, it happens
to all of us," but maybe not; and maybe she responds in a way that says
she's been there herself. If writing can alleviate some of the worst of the
gloom, then you're lucky, and by all means pursue it and set aside time
for it. But you need to beat the bushes and find a real person to hang out
with, and then find another, and maybe even a third. Sometimes they
move away, you know. Dear Mr. Blue, I'm 55, and my first book was accepted at a big publishing house and is
now in galleys, which I read tonight and somehow feel is dated,
negligible. The book won't come out for another seven months and I feel
let down. It is no longer compelling to me. I just feel really horrible at
how much I sacrificed to do this. The ego that made me get it done seems
sick. How do I unwind from this? How can I be a person again? Why did
I go so crazy to get this book out? A Supposedly Lucky Writer Who Feels Anything But Dear Supposedly, You may be suffering post-partum depression here, a
natural reaction to the stress and hard labor you've been through. But
before you unwind, give your full attention to the galley proofs and steer
the book through its last stage of correction. This demands your full
attention, so postpone the letdown a little longer. And then turn your back
on this book. Mortify your ego with selfless generosity and good deeds.
Repair whatever human connections may have been sacrificed to this
book. Enjoy the end of your travails. And then, in seven months, go out
and tell the American people why they ought to buy three copies apiece. Mr. Blue Garrison Keillor's column appears every Tuesday in Salon Books.
Feeling blue about your prose? In the doldrums over your last date? Ask Mr. Blue. Dear Mr. Blue, Saturday, my wife went to lunch with friends. She said she'd be back around 6 p.m. She finally rolled in around 3 a.m. Sunday morning, drunk as a senator. We had words; among hers were "trapped," "I'm a terrible mother" and "If I want to go out and have a few drinks with my friends I don't want to feel guilty about it." After about an hour of this I realized that my wife is having a midlife crisis à la any number of Richard Benjamin movies. She wants to hang out late at the office, go drinking with her single friends and rely on me to take care of our splendid little 3-year-old carnivore of a daughter. She would like to meet a younger and less self-conscious fellow with whom to entertain herself sans commitment. She is having a guy's midlife crisis. So, in the space of a few days I had to face the fact that my marriage is a hoax and my wife is a better guy than I. We're trying to work this out. I don't know how to move along because I really like spending time with our daughter. And aside from the marriage being defunct and her lack of patience with child care, I really enjoy living with and being around my wife; we'd make pretty good roommates. Above all, I don't want to muck up my daughter's life. Oy. Got any thoughts? Hapless in Honolulu Dear Hapless, Don't abandon the ship at the first sight of the reef. It's a good ship. You like each other, you have a sweet little daughter, so don't leap to conclusions about the marriage based on one drunken discussion in which you each said some jagged things. Try to avoid having any more of those conversations in which you sit around and sum up your life or your marriage in broad, dark terms. Don't discuss anything important when you're drunk, and don't take her seriously when she's drunk. This is far from hopeless, and I think you should sit tight, be patient, practice great kindness toward your wife and see how you both feel in three months. Or six. And meanwhile, devote yourself to being a good father. Dear Mr. Blue, Back in the age of the typewriter, you did a first draft, then proceeded to revisions, covering it with all kinds of marks. Then you retyped the whole thing, an arduous process that forced you to go through your manuscript word by word and led to additional changes as you went. Everything went through three drafts before it was turned in. Now the word processor corrects your typos and revision is as easy as can be and you can tinker endlessly with your work, but I have concluded that I must go back to the old-fashioned way. I am finished with a 150,000-word manuscript and feel I must print it out, mark it up and retype the whole thing. This will take months. But it's the only way to force the original through the brain a word and a page at a time. What do you recommend? Luddite Dear Lud, I recommend that a writer put his manuscript through at least one paper stage of rewrite, and perhaps more than one. There is a danger with electronic writing that a sort of tonelessness and flabbiness creeps in. You can sometimes spot these passages in books, where everything goes slack and pages pass and there's no focus, no edge and no narrative voice either: Somehow the ease of writing to a screen facilitates this literary sleepwalking. On computers, people tend to write in pages and paragraphs, not sentences. To guard against it, you print out your work and you go over it with a pencil and revise, and then you make the changes onto your disc. It's a little more tedious, but it sharpens the editing. You're very ambitious to think of retyping the whole manuscript on a typewriter; I'm not sure I could ever go back to that.
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