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The Prozac Variations
- Rutgers University Press
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93 TOM GRIMES In Susan Sontag’s essay on Roland Barthes she writes that “his late writing . . . was organized in serial rather than linear form. Straight essay writing was reserved for the literary good deed.” So I’ve decided to take a risk. Rather than writing an essay, I’ve arranged in serial form, and edited, the journal I kept when I wasn’t able to write, between the years –. The journal contains my reflections on literature, my life as a writer, my doubts about myself as a writer, my depression, the drug I took to overcome it, and how the drug affected my life as a writer, which is the only identity that’s ever mattered to me, which in itself is a risk. No one should judge him or herself so exclusively, but I do. Ibsen wrote, being a writer means that you sit down every day to judge yourself. I believe that’s true. And Flaubert wrote, “We work in the dark, our passion is our task, we give what we can. The rest is the madness of art.” I believe that, too. The journal arose this way: twelve years ago I awoke in the middle of the night, convinced I was wanted for crimes I hadn’t committed. I was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I’d just finished my third novel, City of God, and would shortly turn forty. I remember feeling briefly happy at the beginning of that summer, but also slightly puzzled. On the trip to Iowa City, I found myself floating in a motel pool, looking up at the sky as the interstate traffic washed past, and thinking, how did I get here? I experienced, I suppose, what V. S. Naipaul calls “the enigma of arrival.” Weeks later, my paranoia and delusions started. For the first time in over a decade I was unable to write fiction. After several months of sleeplessness , anxiety, waiting to be arrested, and wondering how I’d survive in prison— of course, I thought, I’ll have all that time to write, and read; I’d even tutor other prisoners, who, rather than regularly assaulting me, would wind up calling me “teach”—that’s when I began to take Prozac for, according to my psychiatrist, “major depression with an obsessive feature.” My primary concern was: how The Prozac Variations CH020.qxd 7/15/09 7:43 AM Page 93 94 TOM GRIMES would this drug, and this illness, which runs in my family, affect my life as a writer? Would it change me? And if my obsessive nature receded, would my desire to lock myself in a room three to four hours a day to obsess over invented characters, and the clarity and music of my sentences? He didn’t know. So taking the drug presented me with a risk. Refuse to take it and fall into a deeper depression—which ultimately turned out to be manic-depression? Or take it and hope it didn’t change the chemistry that made me a writer? When the delusions and paranoia became too intense and relentless to live with, I said, I’ll take the pill. And since I couldn’t write fiction, I wrote what follows, beginning with my fear of seeing my life as a writer come to an end. //: Reading Jung reassured me that I have not dried up creatively. The last book was dark, the new one needs to be light, perhaps, and I just haven’t been able to see my way to it. Told my editor my next book was going to be “happy.” He said, “You don’t do happy.” Maybe I need to link the dark with the light for it to work. /: City of God seemed to work out my death dread, making death seem less, or somewhat less, judgmental, individual, terrifying. With this fear somewhat alleviated, am I free to look at my life now and discover that I’m actually afraid of being here? If I “locate” my “identity” (my shrink’s words), will my need for personas and masks—hence my writing—vanish? (Jung says no.) I find the entire notion of “identity” fuzzy. I don’t understand this solid, unchanging thing underneath all the personas. Is it synergistic, the sum of all personas plus something? Or is it separate, which is, I would think, impossible. /: Is it possible my fear of death has taken on this other guise? I have, at times...
