“I can’t decide: Was it a good trade?”
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
The books that I can't finish have been stripped of their dust jackets. They lie scattered around the house, the author's name a reproach along the spine. In the bedroom, Haruki Murakami's half-read 1Q84 is the bedrock of a tower of other books — all read, some more than once — that has grown tall in the past year. In the living room, The Kept, by James Scott, one of my former teachers, nestles among tooth-shredded board books and crumpled copies of Highlights magazine; its pages are by far the most pristine on the shelf.
It would be kindest to explain these books, and their cohorts, with a sheepish smile and a carnival barker's sweeping arm: Witness the coffee can of stubby crayons at the dining room table! Step lively — there are Cheerios underfoot! Of course I don't finish books; I have two children, ages 4 and 2.
The truth is less spectacle than private shame: I read a lot, almost as much as I did before I had kids. The first months of my baby's life coincided with another blessed arrival — that of my e-reader — and in his earliest weeks of 24-hour nursing and soothing, I finished 42 books. But I can no longer read books, or write stories, in which terrible things happen to children. As a reader, depictions of child suffering yank me violently from the safe world of narrative and into real, corporeal panic. As a writer, an unwelcome foreboding prevents me from letting my deepest fears pour out onto the page.
I am a better mother for this bargain, more capable of shaking off a parent's day-to-day anxieties without such ugly imagery residing in my head. I am also an incomplete reader and a constricted writer, these once-dominant parts of me now halved and quartered.
I can't decide: Was it a good trade?
Maritsa Patrinos / BuzzFeed
A teacher told me that the key to writing fiction is not to look into your own heart, but to try to see into someone else's. I took it as my credo with no qualms. I had no trauma to reveal, no compelling secrets; where else would I find my subjects if not within others?
Yet even as I squeezed into the minds and bodies of the characters I invented, details from my own life crept in. I began writing fiction at the end of the tumultuous year after my boyfriend's stepfather's death, never realizing how much of the experience was still churning inside me until I turned it loose in my stories. The images snapped to life like a flame: the Orthodox Jewish funeral, where I policed the buffet table to prevent violations of kosher law; the collage of children's art on the kitchen wall, where fifth-grade masterpieces shed crumbling poster paint; the bereft cocker spaniel, who hurled his creaking frame against the bathroom door whenever I closed it behind me.
I knew that I couldn't tell these stories from my own point of view — I was weary, angry, and obsessive over trivialities. So I invented other protagonists and had them examine the situation with something like detachment, finding their own emotions from a different source. I pulled the threads of my own narrative and spooled them out until I could look at the whole experience with a distant, critical eye. My own struggles faded. I was empowered, having rewritten my own story until it was one I could embrace. I got married, to the same boyfriend, and started a graduate program in creative writing.
There, I grew bolder. I took on stories about my fears: secrets kept between husband and wife, jealous siblings who drove a wedge into marriages. I wrote about the shifts and tests of adulthood, efforts to buy a home, succeed at a job, have children. I remember my first story about pregnancy loss: In it, a woman attends a party with all of her friends, a few days after experiencing a miscarriage. Her friends all knew of the pregnancy, but she cannot bring herself to tell them of its end. I remember feeling proud as my character's growing anxiety poured out in paragraphs, leaving me clear-eyed and calm behind the keyboard.
I finished graduate school. I kept working on those stories, revising, polishing, in some cases starting all over again. I sent them out, got them back, and sent them out again.
Then I got pregnant, and a line was drawn, as dark and vivid as the streak of melanin crossing the arc of my belly: Part of the world was off-limits to me now.
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