How Literature Saved My Life

Real Life

At a very early age I knew I wanted to be a writer. At six or seven, I wrote stories about dancing hot dogs (paging Dr. Freud …). Through high school, being a writer meant to me being a journalist, although my parents, freelance journalists, were anti-models. I saw them as “frustrated writers.” Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. They saw themselves the same way. They were always keeping the wolf from the door, if that is the expression, by writing yet another article they didn’t want to write. They worshipped “real writers,” i.e., writers who wrote books. Henry Roth. Hortense Calisher. Jerzy Kosinski. Lillian Hellman. I wanted to write books, be worshipped.

Hellman’s statement to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions,” was my mother’s mantra. For many years, she was the West Coast correspondent for the Nation. Draconian, omnipotent, she read a few of my early short stories, e.g., “A Few Words About a Wall,” which she overpraised by way of dismissing. She died of breast cancer during my junior year of college.

My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic-depressive and constantly checking himself into mental hospitals, where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy treatments, died a few years ago at ninetyeight. I’ll never forget him running back and forth in the living room and repeating, “I need the juice,” while my third-grade friends and I tried to play indoor miniature golf. Thirty years later, I asked him once what he thought of my writing, and he said, “Too bad you didn’t become a pro tennis player. You had some talent.” I sent him a galley of my book The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, in which he plays a major role; he sent me back a list of errata. When the book tied for fifteenth place on the best-seller list one week, I clipped the listing and sent it to him. He asked me whether that counted—being tied for last. I live in fear of becoming my father.

I was the editor of my junior high school and high school papers. In high school I worked at McDonald’s. Got fired. I worked at a fabric store. Got fired. My freshman year at Brown—where I was an almost unfathomably devoted English major who closed the library nearly every night for four years and who, at the end of one particularly productive work session, actually scratched into the concrete wall above my carrel, “I shall dethrone Shakespeare”—I worked as a custodian. Got fired. (Despite once being an athlete, I have never been good at simple, physical maneuvers—never learned how to snap my fingers properly, blow a bubble, whistle, dive, rope-climb, swing higher and higher on a swing.) One of my fellow student-custodians asked me if I was this bad on purpose or whether I was really that uncomprehending of the relation between soap and water. I also worked as a proofreader at the Rhode Island Historical Society. I worked as a TA at Iowa. I house-sat whenever and wherever possible. I got a lot of grants. I made a very small amount of money stretch a long way.

I first started teaching at a private high school, with branches in Santa Monica and Malibu, for the children of the rich and semi-famous. The kids would be, say, the daughter of the comedian Flip Wilson, the girlfriend of the son of Elizabeth Montgomery, Rob Lowe’s little brother. They weren’t, needless to say, interested in their schoolwork. I would sit in the front of the class and pretend to have answers to their questions about geometry, history, science. “Who wrote The Scarlet Letter?” Maybe look at the spine of the book; might be a clue there. (Where was Google? This was 1985.) The entire day would go by like that. During recess and even during class, they would be running to the...