Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

I don’t write because I think I have something to say. I write because if I don’t, everything feels even worse.

It’s strange, to not be the youngest kind of adult anymore. I’m thirty-one now, and my mother is dead.

I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for.

‘Strap on your long iron,’ he says. ‘Never leave home without it,’ I say. Somehow in my interview he wheedled the golf stuff out of me.

Oh, this. I missed it on the first read.

I’ve waited tables since I was eighteen, so I went from new server to workhorse in six weeks.

Another foreshadowing

We were all trying to be writers, with jobs that got us by. Nia and Abby were working on novels, I was writing stories, and Russell was a poet.

When he kissed me he smelled like Europe.

Life was light and cheap, and if it wasn’t cheap I used a credit card.

I look back on those days and it feels gluttonous, all that time and love and life ahead, no bees in my body and my mother on the other end of the line.

I look into my eyes, but they aren’t really mine, not the eyes I used to have. They’re the eyes of someone very tired and very sad, and once I see them I feel even sadder and then I see that sadness, that compassion, for the sadness in my eyes, and I see the water rising in them. I’m both the sad person and the person wanting to comfort the sad person. And then I feel sad for that person who has so much compassion because she’s clearly been through the same thing, too. And the cycle keeps repeating.

I’m sad for an infinite number of my selves.

You taste like the moon, Luke said out in that field in the Berkshires. Fucking poet.

Foreshadow

Red Barn.

Reread: holy shit this is a real place

Before he was anything else, he was familiar.

I worked on the same chapter the whole time I was there. Two months. Twelve pages.

‘I’m usually better at protecting myself from this kind of thing.’ ‘From heartbreak?’ ‘Yeah.’ My throat is closing. ‘I can usually get out of the way before it hits me straight on.’ ‘That’s not really heartbreak then, is it?’

men who wrote tender, poetic sentences that tried to hide the narcissism and misogyny of their stories.

It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.

I don’t want to spend too much time on the phone, then have it be awkward in person like in that story ‘The Letter Writers’ about a man and a woman who fall in love through ten years of correspondence, and when they meet their bodies can’t catch up to their words.

‘Did David write his book?’ I ask. ‘He didn’t even start it.’ She blows on her tea. ‘And I’ve written two hundred and sixty pages since he left.’

Yes, queen.

I wanted her and no one else to tell me the story of how she died.

Success rests more easily on men.

But I can’t go out with a guy who’s written eleven and half pages in three years. That kind of thing is contagious.

Not one of the events in August makes me feel like getting married is a good idea. It was nothing I ever aspired to, anyway. My parents were married twenty-three years and never made it look appealing.

Marriage is the polar opposite of a fairy tale, my mother said.

Are you more of an adult because two men are giving you the illusion of self-sufficiency?’

The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out.

I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t happy, living in Ann’s big house without Caleb, who was in college and never called, but I wasn’t sad. I barely had any emotions at all. But at night I terrified myself with this fear that somewhere inside me someone wanted to die.

As a child Edith Wharton had been scolded by her mother for wanting to be alone to make things up, and forbidden to read novels until after marriage. When her mother died, she sent her husband to the funeral. She stayed home to write. She was thirty-nine, and she published her first novel the following year.

After her mother died, her perceptions were more intense, she wrote later, ‘as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant.’ That summer she had her first breakdown. It lasted two years.

The Kroks are back in town.

Cool, the Harvard Krokodiloes is a real, true-to-life group.

‘You’re thoroughly overqualified. Hablas español?’ ‘Si. Viví dos años a Barcelona con mi novio Paco que era un profesor de Catalan pero me hizo loca y tuve—’

A dustup down at the gazebo. I feel the memory fall through my body like a stone.

He pulls the Q-tip out and puts it in a plastic tube. ‘So, you gonna write the Great American Novel?’ I’m tired of that question. ‘You gonna cure ovarian cancer?’

Harry comes in for the dinner shift and tosses out my coffee and gets Craig to pour me a glass of red wine. ‘You drink this, then you call.’ But alcohol doesn’t have that effect on me. It makes me tired then sad then puking.

‘You drink this, then you call.’ But alcohol doesn’t have that effect on me. It makes me tired then sad then puking.

‘Health insurance sucks.’

Ditto

I squat there and think about how you get trained early on as a woman to perceive how others are perceiving you, at the great expense of what you yourself are feeling about them. Sometimes you mix the two up in a terrible tangle that’s hard to unravel.

‘You’re a writer.’ He’s really not pleased by this. He tips his head back. ‘First woman who doesn’t make my skin crawl and she’s a writer.’ ‘Guess you have a problem with that.’ ‘I don’t date writers.’ ‘Who says this is a date?’ ‘This is a date. This is my first date in a very long time. Please don’t say it’s not a date.’

‘You just need to write it out and get it over with.’ ‘I don’t know why I feel this way. It’s like performance anxiety or something. What if I can’t get it up?’ ‘Your readers will just spoon you and tell you it doesn’t matter in the least and that it happens to everyone.’ ‘It’s the whole reason for the book, this scene.’ ‘No, it’s not. Maybe it once was, but it’s not anymore. You have to let that go. It isn’t a short story with its one perfect culmination. It’s messy.’ ‘Yeah, I know. A novel is a long story with something wrong with it,’

A novel is a long story with something wrong with it,’

don’t know how everyone else is getting by, paying their bills and sleeping through the night.

I think of all the people playing roles, getting further and further away from themselves, from what moves them, what stirs them all up inside.

He seems genuinely happy for me. You can’t always count on a guy for that.

The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.

After the vivid chaos of the Van Gogh, where nothing is muted, nothing is blended, and the world seems to be separating into fragments before his eyes, Matisse’s vase of white flowers beside a window by the sea is serene and buoyant, as if everything can float if you let it.

He has a mother, and I do not.

I wish my own room of my own wasn’t so claustrophobic.

?

The Last September

‘Don’t tell us the girl is sad. Tell us she can’t feel her fingers. Emotions are physical.’