A Template For An Enviable Asset
To some writers, Vera Nabokov remains much more than “just a wife,” but rather a template for an enviable asset. It’s undeniably easier to prioritize one’s art with a 24/7 writing coach who also manages “the mini-country that is home,” to quote novelist Allison Pearson.
I have a very quick, very short response to this. It is HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Two quick points:
If you consciously think of your spouse as an “asset,” enviable or otherwise, you are an ass. Your spouse is a person and maybe he or she has better things to do than lick your God-damned stamps.
Yes, Koa Beck. Yes. It is undeniably easier to write if you have a 24/7 writing coach who also does all the shopping and all the cleaning and reads and edits your content and shines your shoes and picks up the kids from day care and treats you like a little tin god. You know who has that? NOBODY. Maybe Nabokov did, and power to him if he did, but it is incredibly laughable and silly to think that anybody in the Year of Our Lord 2014 is going to sit still for that kind of thing.
My wife and I both have jobs, and long commutes, and twin five-year-olds who take up an enormous amount of our time. I have to shoehorn writing time into that little sliver of time between when the kids go to bed and when I do. Sometimes I’m up late writing, and sometimes I’m up early in the morning and right, but other than that, the amount of spare time I get to use to write is minimal. (Not to mention that I’m a bad person and I like playing video games when I get a free hour or two on the weekends.)
Instead of beating people up because they don’t have a Vera Nabokov folding their umbrellas for them, how about giving people a little slack?
