Three writers—three works of fiction—made me want to do this for a living. I read them all during eighth grade, though I don’t remember the order.
One was Alice Munro’s collection Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You—in particular, the story “How I Met My Husband.” Another: Anne Tyler’s Morgan’s Passing. And a third: Deborah Eisenberg’s “What It Was Like, Seeing Chris,” which I read in The New Yorker, to which my parents subscribed; to their chagrin, I often tore the covers off and taped them to my door.
Tyler is known, unfairly and dismissively, as a commercial writer. Her work had some mass appeal, and some of her more popular books—The Accidental Tourist, say—could be found in airports. That made them bestsellers and integral to the publishing world, but perhaps the more snobbish types might not have considered them literary—that is, elite and erudite and not for the masses. I disagree completely. She crafted worlds populated by characters who were estranged from themselves, surprised at the paths they found themselves on. I loved them.
Munro, tagged “our Chekhov” by critics, and Eisenberg are quite different. They each have a way of writing so that you know something is happening but you don’t know what—not until the end, maybe. Their prose is more muscular, more in the Hemingway iceberg tradition: the deeper meaning lurking below the lines.
Each time I read these women, their work left me with sizzling with some kind of after shock. It was all so silvery and diaphanous and real and imagined and ineffable, yet expressed. Words on a page had left an emotional imprint, a little secret I carried around with me, tiny assuagements of the intense loneliness which was my most constant companion. I guess maybe when I look back on it, what I’m talking about is: hope. I could be lifted away from the misery with something as low-tech and accessible as the printed word.
Yet it would be more than 20 years before the misery really subsided. There are many ways to overcome the feeling that you hate yourself so much that you wish you’d never been born, or that you are radioactively lonely and can’t go on. For me, the combination of realizing my writer dreams, finding someone wonderful to commit to loving me, and having kids—those made up the trifecta of life improvement.
A few weeks ago, the strangest thing happened: I found out how all of those things, the three ingredients of the trifecta, connected.