After class I drifted up to my office and was met there by Edwina, a devotee of mine asking about recommendation letters. Edwina wanted to complete two programs this summer—an internship with a Black, female-run film-production company whose last feature won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and a summer course in art semiotics at Brown. She wanted to be a producer, she told me, but a respected one, one who could bring about cultural change. She told me that when she had worked as an intern at another film company last summer there was this woman, one of the more powerful executive producers, who had her PhD in classics from Harvard. Every time she left a room her degree was mentioned in hushed and reverential tones. Edwina’s goal was to be like her: a cloud sweeper, weather controller, “bone-bringer,” as well as a revered mind with an impressive degree.
After agreeing to write them （I do believe that anyone who does not write recommendation letters if asked is monstrous, and even though I am the most selfish human being I know, I write them, and write them from scratch without asking the requestor to write a draft of them first） and dispensing with some quick advice, I urged her out. I could tell she was disappointed at not speaking more—I did quite like her and liked to see what she was reading and give her recommendations and hear her gossip about her other classes and classmates and professors, but I could not give her my full attention. All I could think about was Vladimir’s book. I didn’t pick it up to read it again—to do so in my office would be humiliating—but I wanted to see if I could think about it and re-create the passages in my mind.
When I was reading in the library, I was overwhelmed with a mixture of genuine admiration and seething jealousy. The book was funny, clear, awake, vivid. The prose was spare but the voice was not sacrificed in his exact word choice. It felt both like life and beyond life. He was a truly great writer, and though this book, an epigrammatic roman à clef, might not have catapulted him into fame, I had no doubt, reading it, that he would have it all—the bestseller; the interviews; the columns; the articles not only about his writing but about the decoration of his home, his fitness routines, his office, his food consumption, his work habits and sleep habits and opinions on politics.
For context, I have published two novels—my last one at forty-three years old. I have since then published mostly nonfiction work about literature for academic journals and occasionally, at more desperate times, written book reviews for our local newspaper. My first novel was deemed to hold promise; my second novel was deemed a disaster. The first I felt was a complete and utter lie, the second meant something to me but was roundly dismissed for being solipsistic. Since that time, for the past fifteen years, I have been trying to balance the important with the truthful. This has meant endless false starts, long projects of research that have been abandoned, mornings when I have woken up at five and prayed for an urgency of voice to come to me only to be disappointed. I have watched writing the female experience—particularly the motherhood experience （the subject of my second book） rise and reach praise and prominence in the past decade. I do not think I was ahead of my time; I think I wasn’t as unapologetic as this new crop of writers are. These new young mothers write with force and wit and humor. They embrace the I I I with fervor. They don’t shy away from talking about the banality of existence that comes with being a mother—the lunches in rest stops, the weariness of the body, the bad and mortifying toys and food and games and lackluster vacations and compromises that fall like an avalanche over the false totem of one’s own self-regard. I suppose I had always been too shy to address that banality head-on. My second book was a discussion of three women—a career woman, a mother, an artist. They begin in their own worlds, full chapters apiece. Then the narratives begin to intercut. Over the course of the book, it is revealed they are, in fact, one person. The response of critics at the time—some male, mostly female, boiled down to “who gives a fuck.” I won’t say I was undervalued, because I don’t believe that. Alice Munro was winning every award at the time, with her gentle, insightful stories of women’s lives. Generosity. Margaret Atwood wrote exciting books that practically lived inside of a uterus. Be a Fan. There were the others—Lorrie Moore, Joy Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Barbara Kingsolver—the list is long—who wrote my kind of female experience. No, my work was simply not enough—not loud enough, not forceful enough, not realistic enough, not poetic enough, not funny enough, not speculative enough, not good enough.
When I was in my PhD program, I had lunch with one of the university’s writers in residence. I was a messy and distended twenty-seven-year-old with yellow teeth and bad clothing who smoked incessantly, but I remember believing that there was a flirtation to the lunch. And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath. At this lunch I was supposed to be asking questions about melding creative work with an academic life. I was in the English lit department and the lunch came about because I had attended one of his classes and mentioned that I wished to write fiction, and he, who had taken the same path of academia and literature, extended an offer of advice. We had lunch in a spot he suggested, which felt like the pinnacle of elegance—not fussily fancy, not achingly hip, a place that was refined, classic, the kind of place I could never imagine picking. John and I were engaged to be married at the end of the year. There was a moment at this lunch when the writer in residence （whose career I thought at the time was enviable, but now I realize was probably an ongoing series of disappointments and slights） reached for my hand and I pulled mine away as if from a hot stove.
I still, to this day, do not know if he was truly reaching for my hand or if I misconstrued the gesture—he could have been reaching for the salt. The moment sticks in my mind mostly because it reminds me of how timid I have always been （God, you are a pussy, Sidney used to scream at me during her teenage rampages）。 I had lusted after this writer in residence, constructed elaborate fantasies about us meeting in darkened hallways or him sitting alone in a classroom and me straddling him on the chair from where he taught. But when he moved his hand toward mine it was as if I was as limited and repressed as an Edith Wharton heroine. A swirl of fear and morality welled as I jerked my hand from the table back into my lap. We continued speaking as if nothing had happened （and again, perhaps nothing had）。 I remember one thing he said about writing at the time, which enraged me with its cliché. I had asked him, in a pretentious way, I’m sure, if he had any credo about writing—anything he truly lived by. He said, “I only write if I have something to say.”
I remember feeling so angry about this bland statement—about how hokey the advice was, how banal and corny. But there was a deeper rage as well—the rage of embarrassment. I was a working-class girl who, despite a parental divorce and some suffering in my adolescence, had gone to a decent university. I had become energized in the academic setting and got myself into a well-regarded graduate program. There I had met my future husband. I would never have anything to say. I knew theoretically that everything was happening all the time and that I only needed to sit and look closely and I would find a story worth telling. I didn’t yet know that many writers find what they want to say in the writing. After I left the lunch I avoided the writer in residence. He called several times to discuss a short story I sent him and I never called him back. I saw him at a conference many years later—we were waiting for the same elevator. I said hello and he deliberately ignored me, almost comically so, for the entire week.