Is It “That” Time Yet?

I was listening to NPR the other day, an interview with Judy Blume, who is much in the news lately for several reasons. A movie has been made of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. In conjunction with that, a documentary of her life, Judy Blume Forever, is forthcoming, as well as adaptations of a couple of her other novels. But the most notable bit of the interview for me was when she confessed that, at 84, she was unlikely to write another novel. ”I’m an extrovert,” she said. “I like people. I don’t want to coop myself up any more.”

At the same time, I’ve been reading Don Winslow’s gangster trilogy, the first two of which, City on Fire and City of Dreams, are out now, with the third and final book due next year. He, too, has publicly announced he’s not writing any more novels. If you’re active on Twitter, you’ve seen him become more and more politically minded, to the extent that he is putting all his energies into activism and political commentary.

And, more worrisome to me, I heard Dennis Lehane say in an interview that he didn’t know if he was going to write more novels, though his new release Small Mercies, is by all accounts an example of him at his best. He did say he would write another if something grabbed him the way this book did, but the notion of quitting?

I spent most of my working life shoehorning my writing in and around a challenging career and family. I write every day and have done for forty-some years. Before I’d heard these people talk about it, I would have said you’d have to pry my pen (keyboard) from my cold dead fingers to make me quit. I didn’t know you could do that.

And yet—age brings a growing awareness of the limited nature of time—my time. All the things I planned to do and haven’t done, the people I’ve sworn to spend time with and haven’t, the other modes of building and creating that attract me. And trout fishing . . .

So maybe at one level I can understand the impulse to step away from a work that is difficult, unheralded for the most part, a work that no one much cares whether you’re doing it, a work without much in the way of tangible recompense. Very few of us are going to make even a small fortune at this, very few of us are going to see much acclaim. It is a temptation, I think, to throw up one’s hands and say Fuck It.

On the other hand—all three of the writers I mentioned have had their work heard, have tasted success in the way the world defines it. Is it easier to give up what you’ve had? In most of our cases, it would be more of a discard of hope.

Then I think of Robert Parker, who literally died at his desk, John Updike revising poems while he was dying of lung cancer. Maybe there is a spark there that cannot give up the ghost.

It’s a conundrum. I love my chicken-scratching, ticky-tacky keyboard tapping too much at the moment to give it up. And I’ve gone without much acclamation for long enough it doesn’t bother me particularly to know I’m unlikely to see the success a Winslow or a Parker saw.

It is the work. Still and now. A former teacher, afflicted with lung cancer, used his limited time to write a memoir of his dying. I have no answers, other than to know that it’s not time to quit yet. Like the urge to write, the urge to quit is personal. And I hope that if I ever do give it up, I’ll be able to do that with the grace of a Judy Blume. It is all any of us wants, I think. The grace to know our own minds.