You have to think about what you are writing for. To whom (though, granted, the internet might as well be sending letters to the moon, except for a few good friends and loyal readers) and … and … I was going to say, Why, but that’s the question hanging over everything, lately. And I’ve always tried to be entertaining.
Isn’t that the saddest epitaph, can’t you just see it: “She always tried to be entertaining”. But being somewhat ill, as I am, as I have always been, is not the funnest thing to bring to the page. No way. This life is way more interesting than mine. You don’t want to know who I am—and you don’t need to. I don’t want pity, for christ sake, I wanted some semblance of the literary life, the exchange of ideas … exchange, hell. I wanted to tell you what I think … the merest nubbin of which has appeared here. Come closer, go away. Writers are people for whom writing is more difficult than others. Chop suey. Fried rice, is all my brain is, some days. The reference from Portnoy’s Complaint, to the effect that his father became suddenly aristocratic and snotty in Chinese restaurants but what the hell, their brains were only so much fried rice anyway. His father’s voice. I’ve just finished another Roth novel—good god, what a master. What locking yourself alone in a room every day—and not knowing how to do anything else—will produce. This one was Sabbath’s Theater, and only a few times were his shifts in Who’s Thinking Now hard to follow. Hell, a few times he shifted within a sentence—and that is fucking masterful writing. You get away with that when you have built up such a narrative voice—well, this is what the novel as art form gets away with, isn’t it. Time, and thinking, are different in the novel than in any other art form, and if you like to be taken on that ride, which I do, it is a thrill like no other.
A thrill because this is the way life is, the way the thinking accompanies your daily, lived life. Circling round to past and future, fantasy and fact. I suppose we could argue which is reality? The life of the body—or the life of the mind?
I end with this quote from Nora Ephron not because I have cancer, because I don’t, but debilitating illness has been so much a part of my life that it interests me how people think about life and death. I don’t know which holds more fascination.
I don’t know that they are separate, at all.
I disagree with Elizabeth Edwards when she says that there are only two choices—to go on living, or begin dying. What I believe instead is that at a certain point in life, whether or not youve been diagnosed with illness, you enter into a conscious, ongoing, unending, eternal, puzzling, confusing negotiation between the two. Some days one of them wins, and some days the other. This negotiation often includes decisions as trivial as whether to eat a second piece of pie, and as important as whether to have medical treatment that may or may not prolong your life. —Nora Ephron
Ephron,”…at a certain point in life, whether or not youve been diagnosed with illness, you enter into a conscious, ongoing, unending, eternal, puzzling, confusing negotiation between the two.”
I’d been trying to work out how to write about this without seeming maudlin, without scaring my children, without bringing the You’re Only As Old As You Think Ghouls down on my head. You’re braver than I am; I think it might be because you’ve spent the past several weeks entering into a conscious, puzzling, confusing negotiation between writing it and the dishonesty of not writing it. And we won.
I would like to comment but the lady with keyboard diarrhea has nothing to say, except you sound very strong.