Writers & Lovers

by Lily King

You don’t realize how much effort you’ve put into covering things up until you try to dig them out.

‘Listen, Casey Kasem,’ Dana says, tossing her last roll-up onto the pile. ‘You spend enough time at the racetrack, you know your horse, okay? You always know your horse.’

If it’s cancer, I won’t have to pay anyone anything. I’ll move back in with Caleb and Phil, ruin their lives for a year or two, and die.

Silas leaves me a message, then another, and I don’t call back. I’ve made my choice. I’m done with the seesaw, the hot and cold, the guys who don’t know or can’t tell you what they want. I’m done with kissing that melts your bones followed by ten days of silence followed by a fucking pat on the arm at the T stop.

Fucking yes

Something awful rises up in me, and I have to get out. I have to get out. I have to get out of this body right now.

The panic feels loud as hell in my head, like being next to a speaker at a concert. I turn back on the light and try to read. The words remain words. I can’t hear them. I can’t lose myself in them.

Darkness Visible

Nearly every guy I’ve dated believed they should already be famous, believed that greatness was their destiny and they were already behind schedule. An early moment of intimacy often involved a confession of this sort: a childhood vision, teacher’s prophesy, a genius IQ. At first, with my boyfriend in college, I believed it, too. Later, I thought I was just choosing delusional men. Now I understand it’s how boys are raised to think, how they are lured into adulthood. I’ve met ambitious women, driven women, but no woman has ever told me that greatness was her destiny.

I’m like a bag of panic held in by a thin sac of skin. I clench and unclench discreetly in my metal chair that has come up from the basement.

The Evening of the Holiday, Beloved, Independent People, Troubles, Housekeeping, Woodcutters

‘She’s your age, she’s beautiful, and she’s into you.’ ‘It’s just that je ne sais quoi.’ But I know the quoi. She is reading in churches and auditoriums. She’s going to London tomorrow for a European leg of her book tour.

I’m scared of men at this time of night when I’m on foot, not on my bike. I’m scared of men in cars and men in doorways, men in groups and men alone. They are menacing. Men-acing. Men-dacious. Men-tal.

I hate male cowardice and the way they always have each other’s backs. They have no control. They justify everything their dicks make them do. And they get away with it. Nearly every time.

My mother was a real person. I am not a real person. She had convictions and took action. She had purpose and belief. She helped others. I help no one. She helped found that donation organization. I couldn’t even write one thank-you letter for a refrigerator. All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams. It’s all I’ve wanted. And now I’m not even able to do that. I haven’t been able to go near my book since I spoke to Jennifer Lin.

I go inside and lie on my futon and wait to explode.

‘Woodcutters. By Thomas Bernhard.’

She has been smiling the whole time, which makes it hard to stop talking. And talking about characters in books is exciting and soothing to me at the same time.

‘Have you always been such an enthusiastic reader?’ ‘Not really. I liked reading, but I was picky about books. I think the enthusiasm came when I started writing. Then I understood how hard it is to re-create in words what you see and feel in your head. That’s what I love about Bernhard in the book. He manages to simulate consciousness, and it’s contagious because while you’re reading it rubs off on you and your mind starts working like that for a while. I love that. That reverberation for me is what is most important about literature. Not themes or symbols or the rest of that crap they teach in high school.’

‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—’

‘Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita.

‘Can we do something sometime?’ I say, desperate at the sound of the revving engine. ‘No.’ He eases the clutch. ‘I can’t get all tangled in your ropes.’

What if this is all the life I get?

I’ve forgotten what gets revealed right after you break up with someone.

There’s a particular feeling in your body when something goes right after a long time of things going wrong. It feels warm and sweet and loose. I feel all that as I hold the phone and listen to Manolo talk about W-4s and the study hall schedule and my mailbox combination and faculty parking. For a moment all my bees have turned to honey.

‘On the count of three we are going to raise our hands high and let out a barbaric yawp.’

I think of Holden Caulfield, wanting to catch children before they fall off the cliff, and I get it now. I take a long breath. A kid from eleventh grade gives a little whoop.

What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.

When I was a kid I used to expect to win tournaments and often did, but I stopped having expectations about achieving anything long ago.

Isn’t our whole life just one long improvisation? What are we so scared of?’

When you are writing something new, when you are in the blank-page stage, what you need, all you need, is your creative, sensual, wide-open brain. Your creator, not your critic. Your worm on the ground.

When you are writing your blank-page first draft, you don’t know what you have to say, and even if you think you know what you have to say, you end up saying something different. And you might think you are saying one thing and then someone who reads it thinks you are saying something else.

Listen to that. It has a story to tell.