I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

by Jami Attenberg

Eventually I thought: What about my ideas? When do I own them? And once I realized that, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could not stay where I was any longer. The solution was to write my way out of the problem. That meant writing early in the morning, late at night, and on weekends. It meant carving out time, claiming it for myself. I thought: I will write this first book, and then maybe another after that. This is the thing I want to do.

I had decided to operate in service of my ideas. There are plenty of reasons why I write. This is just one of them. The sense that I want to own something, own my work, own my creativity, own my name. It is perhaps not the purest reason, not truest of heart, for there is some ego attached to it. But it is real. I own these words. I own these ideas. Here is my book.

These details we inherit, can we claim them, can we recognize them? It doesn’t always feel comfortable. But if we can do it with love or humor or forgiveness or at least some generosity, some understanding of the other, it only strengthens the work. Only strengthens the self.

There was a partnership emerging from the words. Wildness, yes, but I was taming it, claiming it for myself.

I wrote with great delight. I cracked open the book not with ease—for writing a book is never easy—but with something like steadiness. I didn’t know if I was any good at it, but I could see with my own eyes that I had certain kinds of skills necessary for the job: diligence, and determination, and focus. I loved feeling like I could.

Here I was, showing up, a writer.

A great lesson: When someone tells you not to bother dreaming, they’re not on your side.

In fact, we receive so much from other writers when they show us how it’s done. When they position a character’s heart directly on the page for us, when they’re inventive in form or structure, or emotionally true in a way that feels radical in its familiarity. Or when their sentences are so crisp as to be nearly audible, like a piece of paper torn in two—all of this shows us how to do it ourselves, how it’s possible, but also it emboldens us, releases us from our fears about our own work. An encouragement by example. We learn from them, but also, they tell us we can. Without even knowing it. Enter here. Start here. Begin now. This is why it’s always important to be reading. This is why we must always chew on the words of others. It’s nutrition. Eat your dinner.

He was tough to love but he had been loved, nonetheless. People had flown in from all over the world for the funeral. I didn’t know if people would do the same for me. This is what we think about at funerals: the dead, but also ourselves, too.

how do you explain that nearly no one is good enough, it has to do with how much work you put in, your diligence, your persistence, some fortune, some luck.

The better questions to ask: What kind of stories should I be telling? What would I be willing to do to make it all work? What do I love about writing? What are the voices that need to be elevated from my world and from outside of my world? What secrets of mine would I be willing to tell? What do I know already? What do I need to learn? Is that a ghost in the shadows or just another person slipping into the night?

I have learned other things, too. That people will age. That time will not stop. That eventually we will all collapse, in one way or another. And that I cannot alter my basic truths, where I came from, who I am. But I can rearrange their importance in my life. I can alter the hierarchy. I can choose which needs are in charge. What is running the show emotionally. That is perhaps the only thing I can control.

The thing with being a novelist—or really with any creative endeavor—is we have to willingly enter into the not knowing. We have to embrace that fact that there are myriad nuances to be unfolded.

The trick of life is understanding that even when we are simply standing to the side, as I did as a child near the ice, watching other people taking risks, we are engaging in the not knowing, too. Everything is a risk. That’s what’s hitting so many people so hard right now, here, as we approach May 2020. They didn’t know that they didn’t know.

had arrived at a moment in my life where I recognized I should have curiosity about everything.

Where were you when you first realized that someday you would die? It comes in waves, the realization. I keep reremembering it. It scares me less, each time.

I wandered down a road full of bookstores, and felt the same comfort I always do when I am surrounded by books, by people who love books, by people who dare to devote their lives to selling them, promoting them, placing them gently on a shelf so that others may admire them.

As I walked through, I thought: I came all this way to meet you. Hello, hello. The ossuary felt earthy, organic, and alive.