Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Problem family
When domestic abuse showed up in my neighborhood, I had to decide whether to help or keep my distance.
By Jill Wolfson
[06/28/99]

The tyranny of fashion
As clothing comes to signify less and less about a person, I wonder if I should bother getting dressed at all.
By Erin J. Aubry
[06/25/99]

Column
Dog day
The death of a beloved friend makes plain the beauty of this world.
By Anne Lamott
[06/24/99]

Kickin' it
Mia Hamm's soccer prowess has finally launched women's sports into the mainstream. But is she ready for icon status?
By Ethan Zindler
[06/23/99]

Wild Thing
Oracles of history
At the turn of the millennium, Kathleen Krull's "They Saw the Future" gives kids a look at futures past.
By Polly Shulman
[06/22/99]

Complete archives for Mothers Who Think

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

But when you write technology features for a living rather than short, hip fiction, nobody sends mash notes saying you've changed his life, nobody invites you to cocktail parties that are later chronicled in the New York papers and nobody offers you a fellowship. Not that I could pack off to Provincetown even if it were offered: For better or worse, my place right now is at home as a full-time mother and very part-time writer.

As for the new author, my emotions are equally split between honest admiration for what I remember as her precise, self-assured style and unalloyed envy over her splashy debut in the magazine that remains the Holy Grail to English-language fiction writers.

"It's like winning a Tony for your very first Equity role," I tried to explain to a friend and fellow stay-at-home parent who had danced off-Broadway.

She was unimpressed. "But you have your children," she said, as if that cleared up everything.

I do indeed have my children, and I do routinely use them as my excuse for not writing fiction. But there is nothing to prevent Lahiri from someday having children as well. More to the point, I spent my entire 20s unencumbered by children, a permanent relationship or even, at times, a steady employment and still I managed to complete not a single story that I consider worthy of publication.

Maybe it's time to come clean. I have been starting, but never quite finishing, short stories since I was 17 years old. I have a whole filing cabinet of works in progress that I have dutifully (or is that pretentiously?) moved from place to place and stage to stage in my life. As painful as it is to contemplate, perhaps I am not and will never be a writer of fiction.

But all may not be lost. Some good bits have piled up in that cabinet over the years, funny and poignant and just absurd enough to be appealing. They just need someone with more perseverance, or maybe more talent, to finish them.

The story of Lahiri's I remember most clearly from our workshop days was perfectly crafted and undeniably exotic, nearly impossible for anyone else to have written. Her New Yorker stories are a bit less intimidating -- they're good, in places very good, but the emotional ground they cover is hardly off-limits, even to a middle-aged, middle-class, middlebrow Yankee with a strong background in suburbia.

What with the buzz of the new millennium and the energizing prospect of a completely toilet-trained household, I may still have time to make a mark. Splashy debuts notwithstanding, writing isn't particularly a vocation only of the young, and I don't, after all, have my heart set on winning a gymnastics medal or making the cover of Tiger Beat magazine. And I have managed to learn a few things in the years since I shared workshop space with Lahiri: How to go on day after day with very little sleep; how to work through the despair of dense material; how to write well in short, frantic bursts late at night or early in the morning; how to push deadlines to infinity and beyond with aplomb; and how happy you can be finishing something, even if that something isn't the most compelling or important piece ever written.

Perhaps the worst is behind me. My fiction filing cabinet, for example, has already survived its most ignoble trip yet, displaced, by the baby, from a spare room to my newest home "office" -- a dim corner of the master bedroom mere inches from the bed itself. That cabinet may yet disgorge a story or two, sometime in the distant, toddler-free future. If and when that day ever comes, one thing is already obvious -- any honest editor, however enthusiastic, will have a hard time by then calling me a "new" writer.
salon.com | June 29, 1999

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

  Get a printer-friendly version

  E-mail a friend about this article

  Backflip this article to find it again

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Search Salon