Funny You Should Ask

by Elissa Sussman

Someone once said that choosing to be a writer was like choosing to be slapped in the face repeatedly.

It’s also the reason I’m pretty sure that no one actually chooses to be a writer. It’s a terrible choice.

“What did drinking give you?” “Distance,” he says. “Distance.” “It was a way to avoid the things I didn’t want to confront,” he says. “Drinking was a way to pretend that they weren’t happening. A way to escape what I was feeling. My insecurities. My fears. My shame. My inadequacies as an actor. As a person.”

“You go to rage first,” she’s told me. “It’s your safe place when emotions are high.”

It’s almost like I’m coming home. Not to a place, necessarily, but to a feeling. To a possibility of more. And that completely and utterly terrifies me.

It’s one of my favorite memories from our marriage. But even then, Jeremy had never looked at me the way that Gabe is looking at me now. With an expression of immense pride. And awe. It should make me feel good. It doesn’t. Because all I can think about is what Jeremy said that night. “It’s the only reason you have a career at all.” “It” being Gabe. The assumption that I’d slept with him. The tawdry nature of my article. The public’s obsession with the private lives of celebrities.

All marriages, just like all countries, have conflict. Sometimes patriotism is strong enough to overcome it—weighing what is shared against what could be lost—but sometimes, the conflict highlights that the country itself was founded on unsteady ground.

It’s a question my wife asked me when we first met. About success. How I defined it.

I felt safer in the fantasy.