This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (6 page)

If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, you'll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull. You will take bits from books you've read and movies you've seen and conversations you've had and stories friends have told you, and half the time you won't even realize you're doing it. I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I've had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It's from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you've forgotten, that ideas start to grow. (I could make a case for the benefits of wide-ranging experience, both personal and literary, as enriching the compost, but the life of Emily Dickinson neatly dismantles that theory.)

When I was putting my first novel together in my head I didn't take notes, nor did I write down my customers' orders. I figured if I came up with something that was worth remembering I would remember it, and I would forget about the rest. (This approach did not extend to what people wanted for dinner.) I don't think my theory on memory is necessarily true—I'm sure I've forgotten plenty of things that would seem good to me now—but not writing things down, especially in the early stages of thinking them through, does cause me to concentrate more deeply and not become overly committed to anything that isn't firmly in place. Also, in the early stages of thinking up a novel I'm not exactly sure what I would write down anyway. It's like walking through a field in a snowstorm and for a long time I see nothing but the snow, but then in the distance there's something, a tree or a figure or smoke, I just don't know. I always have the sensation that I'm straining to see what's in front of me. The snow lessens for a minute and I catch a glimpse of an idea, but when I get closer the light starts to fade. I squint constantly. It goes on like this for a long time. If I were taking notes they would read:
I see something. A shape? I have no idea
. It's not exactly the stuff that literary archives are made of.

The Patron Saint of Liars
, the novel largely assembled at a now-defunct Nashville branch of T.G.I. Friday's, started like this: there was a girl in a Catholic home for unwed mothers and she goes into labor. The home is far out in the country, maybe forty-five minutes from the hospital, and the girl decides she's not going to tell anyone what's going on. She's not going to cry out because she wants to ride in the ambulance with her baby, although I think that should be plural, I vaguely remember she had twins. (Were I in analysis, I would say in retrospect this idea probably had something to do with the fact that I had left my husband and was very, very glad I wasn't pregnant and didn't have a child. But who knows? I certainly wasn't thinking about that at the time. I rolled some silverware into napkins, took daiquiris to the businessmen at table eight. It was 1989, and we sold frozen strawberry daiquiris by the tankerful.) So here's this girl giving birth in the middle of the night and there are other girls in the room, girls who live on her hall, her co-conspirators come to help her. I looked at each one of them. I spent days thinking of their stories while I bused tables and ran the dishwasher and restocked the expediter's table in the kitchen. (Parsley, parsley, parsley! We were all about parsley at Friday's. “To have no green would be obscene,” another waitress told me.) I think the novel is going to be about the girl giving birth, but there's another girl in the room named Rose and she's come all the way to Kentucky from California in her own car and she has a secret. This girl has a husband. From there I start to stretch the story in every direction. What happened to Rose in California? Who were her parents and who was this husband and why did she marry him in the first place? Who does she meet and who will she marry later and where did he come from? I puzzled it out, went down dead ends and circled back, made connections and plot twists I never saw coming. All in my head.

While this noisy novel dominated my thoughts during shifts, my actual writing time was devoted to applications. I was applying to every fellowship program I could find, desperately hoping to land someplace that would feed me and put a roof over my head and give me time to put my fully imagined novel on paper. The stuff of dreams for people in my position is all contained in a single book called
Grants and Awards for American Writers
, which is issued yearly by the PEN American Center. If you want to know when a contest deadline is, or find out what prizes and fellowships are available, this is the place to look. I was down to being one of three finalists for a spot at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (now called The Radcliffe Institute) and spent a few extremely hopeful weeks before finding out I didn't get it. That was a dark day of waitressing (though, happily, I got the fellowship four years later). Just about the time I had enough seniority at Friday's to land the best section in the high-cash Friday night/Saturday night/Sunday brunch trifecta, I heard from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a residency program that offered small apartments and a stipend of $350 a month to ten writers and ten visual artists, from the beginning of October until the beginning of May. I was in. It was the spiritual equivalent of Charlie Bucket finding the golden ticket in his Wonka bar. I quit my job, packed up my car, and drove to Cape Cod.

I
made a decision on the trip up: I was going to put writing first. I should have done this earlier, but there were always too many other things going on. Mostly I was falling in love, and then falling out of love, and then falling in love with someone else. Love, with all its urgency, wound up getting more of my attention than writing. Work got a good deal of attention as well, and by work I mean waitressing. On top of that I was a good friend and a good daughter. I budgeted in a certain amount of time to feel guilty about what I had done in the past and anxious about what I would do in the future. I didn't know exactly where writing fell in this inventory. I was sure it wasn't at the bottom of the list but I also knew it had never been safely at the top. Well, now it was being transferred to the top. I could see the genius in not having given one hundred percent of myself over to writing before. It kept me from ever having to come to terms with how good I was, or wasn't. As long as something got in the way of writing, I could always look at a finished story and think it could have been a little better if only I hadn't spent so much time on life's pressing minutiae. How much better I never knew, because I never knew how much of myself I was holding back. Now, though, I would have seven months to write the novel that was in my head, seven months to live up to the incalculable gift that had been bestowed on me by the Work Center. It was my intention for at least this seven-month chunk of my life to do my best work and see how good it was. I had an impetus now: desperation. The only thing waiting for me back at home was my job at Friday's. If I wanted a better life for myself I was going to have to write it.

When I arrived at the Work Center, I lugged my computer—a mid-eighties behemoth whose parts were packed into many boxes—up the narrow staircase to my tiny apartment. I made my single bed, hung up my towels, and went to the grocery store. The last of the summer tourists were decamping, and I caught a glimpse of what a ghost town Provincetown would be in the winter. The next day I got up, made a cup of tea, and sat down at my desk. Even though I had spent the last year living with the novel in my head, I had not committed one word to paper. That was the moment I remembered that I had never written a novel and had no idea what I was doing.

Now that I was sitting still in front of a blank screen, I was appalled by all the things I hadn't considered. Sure, I had some characters, a setting, a sketchy plot, but until that minute I had never considered the actual narrative structure. Who was telling this story? I wanted to write the story in an omniscient third, a big Russian-style narrative in which the point of view moved seamlessly between characters because these were people who were not forthcoming with each other and a single first-person narrative couldn't possibly tell the whole story. But I didn't know how to construct an omniscient voice. (I would take a running jump at it in the next two novels I wrote as well, and I always retreated. It wasn't until my fourth novel,
Bel Canto
, that I finally figured out how to do it.)

If I hadn't put together a narrative structure, what in the hell had I been doing all that time? I panicked. From the moment I arrived in Provincetown I felt the sand slipping through the hourglass. Seven months left no time to dither. I decided to give each of my three main characters a first-person point of view. The narratives would not move back and forth, everyone would have one shot to tell his or her story, and that was it. Like many decisions, this one was both arbitrary and born of necessity. Would it work? I doubted it, but I couldn't identify any other options. From my window I saw the occasional writer or painter in the parking lot. They would stop and talk to one another, head off into town. I was upstairs having the revelation that the gorgeous, all-encompassing novel that had been with me for the last year was junk. I had to come up with another idea, fast. I had to hit the delete key and get rid of every trace of the awful work I'd done so far.

I did wind up writing the book I came to write, and a great deal of the credit for that goes to my friend Diane Goodman, who was living in Pennsylvania at the time. Long-distance phone calls were expensive in those days and I was hopelessly broke; still, talking to Diane proved a wise investment. She told me that I was not allowed to throw out anything I'd written. “Calm down,” she said again and again. “Stick it out.” It was life-saving counsel. Without it, I could have spent the next seven months writing the first chapters of eighteen different novels, all of which I would have ultimately hated as much as I hated this one. I was used to writing short stories. I was programmed for bright, impassioned binges of work that lasted a day or two or three, and knew nothing about the long haul. Novel writing, I soon discovered, is like channel swimming: a slow and steady stroke over a long distance in a cold, dark sea. If I thought too much about how far I'd come or the distance I still had to cover, I'd sink. As it turns out, I have had this same crisis with every novel I have written since. I am sure my idea is horrible, and that a new idea is my only hope. But what I've realized over the years is that every new idea eventually becomes the old idea. I made a pledge that I wouldn't start the sexy new novel I imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present. Keeping that pledge has always served me well. The part of my brain that makes art and the part that judges that art had to be separated. While I was writing I was not allowed to judge. That was the law. It was the lesson I had been unable to learn back in Jane Cooper's poetry class at Sarah Lawrence, but I was older now and it was high time.

Not only did I learn how to write a novel in Provincetown, I found the perfect person to read it. Elizabeth McCracken was another of the writing fellows at the Work Center that season, and she lived three houses away from me. If I looked out my kitchen window I could see if her light was on. Sometimes you don't realize what's lacking in life until you find it. That was the way I felt about Elizabeth. I had plenty of friends, and a few extremely close friends, but I'd never had a true reader, someone who didn't automatically love everything I did, someone whose criticism and praise were always thoughtful and consistent. She knew when to be tough and when just to be encouraging. She read everything I wrote and could say, “You know, you've already done this too many times” (as when she told me to cut about ninety-five percent of the dream sequences in
State of Wonder
, pointing out that enough of the characters in my books had received wise counsel from dead people already). Whatever I gave her, she read immediately, which is what every writer desperately wants, and she brought the full weight of her talent and intelligence to bear on all of it. I tried my best to do the same for her. Of course we didn't know it was going to be like this when we first met. We went for ice cream. We talked about books and movies, swapped magazines, got along. But two writers becoming friends pretty quickly get to a point when they're going to have to read each other's work. It's nervous-making, because if you like the person but you don't like her work, you know the friendship is going to go only so far. For Elizabeth and me, the moment of truth came about two weeks after we met; she gave me a story and I gave her the first chapter of my novel, and after we had read the pages we went down to the Governor Bradford, one of the few bars in Provincetown that stayed open all winter, and talked the night away. We had so much to say, so much praise and advice, so many good ideas. We had found each other.

Over the years I've come to realize that I write the book I want to read, the one I can't find anywhere. I don't sell my books before I finish them, and no one reads them while I'm writing them, except Elizabeth. I write my books for myself, and for her. You might infer from this that our books and our writing processes are very much alike, but it isn't the case at all. Not only is our work different, but
how
we work is incredibly different: I get everything set in my head and then I go, whereas Elizabeth will write her way into her characters' world, trying out scenes, writing backstories she'll never use. We marvel at each other's process, and for me it's a constant reminder that there isn't one way to do this work. I love Elizabeth's books, but the road she takes to get to them would kill me.

Paradoxically, a single winter day in Provincetown is somewhere between seventy and eighty hours long. I had never encountered such an overwhelming amount of silent, unstructured time. After years of saying I needed more freedom, I suddenly found that I needed more structure. My novel needed structure as well. Knowing I should write a long, beautiful description has never gotten me out of bed in the morning, which is probably why I never made it as a poet. The thing I relied on most heavily to get me up and typing was the power of plot. It was my indispensable road map. I also realized—and learned this more with every novel I've written—that the plot had to be complicated enough and interesting enough to keep me sitting in a straight-backed kitchen chair seven days a week. (Brace yourself: a lengthy diatribe about plot now follows.)