Girl, What Is Wrong With You?

Or: Why do I write novels instead of having a husband?

First, California, all dazzle, all of the big smiles on the faces of my friends, a new neighborhood, a little bit of bliss before reality sets in. Every city in America has problems, and mine does too, but for now, for right now, a relief, a new home, bright light, a little bit of secret glamor. I feel more like keeping things to myself, the way my life is, and it’s quiet and nice that way. 

But then, the novel, of course, the novel, always the novel, and if not this novel then the last novel or the next one. I just finished my last pass before we head into copy edits on my new novel, and for the last few weeks, I’ve known what that means: This novel isn’t mine anymore. 

We write novels in a bubble. For years, we outline, we plot, we develop, we write, then we go through rounds and rounds and rounds of edits with friends, agents, editors. It is relentless, painstaking work. It requires all parts of the brain, at the macro and micro levels. In a sense, to write a novel is to create and solve a puzzle you made by yourself. 

A friend said to me once that whenever you write a novel, a portal opens up in your mind and then it closes and you can never get back to that same exact place again. And it’s true. Throughout the process, what is inherently intimate to you -- as it is you alone with your mind, on the page -- begins the excruciating process of becoming public. Person by person, you expose your tender mind for feedback. 

But over the years it takes to write a book, the novel becomes the thing you live around. You are either thinking of it or drafting it or outlining it or writing it or editing it or waiting for feedback on it or you’ve sent it off and now you have a month of downtime during which you will appear to your friends as a normal person for the first time in months, suddenly showering, showing up on time, going on dates, being out in the world. All before the novel gets sent back to you and you are back at your desk, painstakingly pecking away at character development, a shoddy sentence, a sour note in a scene.

At dinner a few weeks ago, a woman challenged me about whether I wanted to have children or not. I said I would be open to it, if the right man showed up, but that it wasn’t like I had a clock ticking. The answer seemed to mystify her: Why didn’t I just want children? Couldn’t I just say it? The implication was clear: There was no way I could be happy as I was, just dating and writing novels and working at a great job. I needed a husband, I needed a child.

This isn’t an argument or a sentiment specific to her, to be clear. One needs look no further than the tweets going viral every day about how miserable us childless women must be or will be once we realize how childless we are.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot as I finalize this novel. I have thrown everything I have at this work. The effort to create, edit, sell, and publish this novel has been nothing short of Herculean, and that is true of most novels. But why do I do it? And what is the feeling that I have when a novel is in the liminal space between finished and published, that gap between the novel being mine before it is suddenly out there, for everyone? 

There is certainly a psychology to it. In my research on trauma, most survivors of trauma can more easily process what happened to them through writing. In my work with a therapist, another thought has come to me: Whenever something bad happened to me as a child, I would go to my bedroom and hide. That is when I would write. Writing is, then, my way of understanding. Often, I don’t realize what I’m processing in a story or a novel until years later, when I can look back and see that I was working out something that was buried deep in my subconscious. 

It occurs to me, now, that on a larger scale, I am still re-enacting the same trauma response: Something happens to me, I hide in my room and I write about it. Some experts theorize this stems from trauma survivors having no voice and being unable to speak up for themselves. And maybe it is true -- it is easier for me to be alive on the page sometimes than in person. 

But then, why publish it? Why sell it? What happens then? This gets more muddy for me. This is where I disassociate. There seems to be a complete split between the part of me that writes the work and the part of me that fields the business and marketing side. I think it has to be that way for me to share it with the world. I think otherwise, I couldn’t bear it. 

Then again, that can’t be entirely true. I have seen it: How a novel can remind you that someone else feels what you feel, how a book can come alive in your hands and pull you out of your own world and into something else, how when I was on book tour for The Book of X, so many people came to me and shared the hardest parts of their lives with me, and how even though the pain all of us had been through was unbearable, there was a new space to stand in with the pain, a new recognition that everyone is carrying a burden that we can never see, that we can only understand if they share it with us, and even then, we can never truly experience their pain. Maybe writing is the closest we can get to a shared human experience without having to speak, and that opens up a new way of connecting. Novels are built on words, and words are simply a symbol of all we see and think and feel. Language can feel so rigid — I will never be able to say exactly what I mean. But if I get close enough, if I melt language down and mold and shape it, I could create a series of words that opens up a space for us to meet in the beauty and pain of our shared experience of life.

It is maddening and blissful, gorgeous and painful, joyful and bittersweet. It never gets easier, it only changes shape. It fascinates me to no end, and no novel leaves me the same. And I feel lucky that I can do it. I feel lucky that I have figured out how to do something that I will never master, something that will always humble me, something that will never allow me to have an ego because whatever I create will always fall short of what I had imagined -- and that’s beautiful, that’s the goal, that’s the push. Every great writer I know isn’t in competition with anyone else -- they’re in competition with themselves, with the ideal novel they can see in their mind, and capturing that, putting it on a page, nailing it. All I want is to write a novel someone will read after I’m dead. 

And in small moments, very very very small moments, I feel like I made something magical with this new book. When I’m driving through Los Angeles and the sun is shining through the window and my dog is riding shotgun and my favorite song is playing and the windows are down, I’ll let myself feel it, for a moment: I think I wrote a great fucking novel. I think I did it this time. Maybe I did it this time. And all of the years of work, all of the love I poured into this art that will go out into the world as if on its own two legs, to live a life far beyond me, to fail or succeed, to sell or bomb, all of that could make you, on a Tuesday night, cry when you send in that final draft. 

But you know, maybe I should give all of that up. Maybe it’s time to find a man and have a kid.