The weather turned cool. I had drinks with the publicity team at Grove, my new publisher. They asked what I wanted to do for a tour. They knew my father was sick and delicately inquired as to whether I felt okay about traveling. I said I wanted to do my job, to promote the book for all our sakes. I could come back to the city once a week or so.
I must have sounded heartless, like I cared more about being a writer than about anything else. But the truth was, my father didn’t seem much to need me around anyway. He talked to Spencer every day. The only times I saw him were when I called and made a plan to go over.
“Of course your father would rather hang out with Spencer than with you,” Neal told me. “You don’t fit in with their friends like he does. You don’t care about the art world. You hold yourself apart, skeptical. You see through your father. You and your mother give him a hard time. Spencer is just fun and full of praise. Who would you rather have lunch with? Someone who was always feeling hurt by you or someone who told you all the time that you were great?”
More than jealousy for his time, I increasingly felt envy for his professional life. If you lock yourself away from your family your work gets to go deeper. I’ve been distracted for most of my life, certainly for the thirteen years since I became a mother. I’ve written in libraries, in coffee shops, and once on the couch in the middle of an active Nerf gun battle between my son and several neighbor children. It’s possible that the best work I’ve done was several years ago at the artists’ colony MacDowell, where for two weeks I did exactly what my father has always done—shut everyone else out.
When I told my parents I was going to do that, my father rolled his eyes. He thought residencies were lame. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead at a writers’ colony. My mother snapped at him: “Your whole life is a writer’s colony.”
It was true. He’d lived his whole life for writing. I always just did it when I could, after I made sure my son was taken care of. Would I be a better writer if I had an office at home with a door that locked? If I hadn’t helped Oliver with his homework? If we didn’t eat dinner together as a family every night?
From the moment Oliver started eating solid food, he loved cucumbers. Whenever we ate out, I would pick the cucumber slices out of my salad and give them to him. I cut up cucumbers when he wanted a snack and served them, lightly covered in salt, in a little bowl. In the decade since, I have not eaten very many cucumbers myself. If there are cucumbers, they go on his plate, not mine. Cucumbers are his thing. I don’t even ask myself whether I like them. Art was my father’s thing. He piled it high on his plate. It didn’t occur to me to get any for myself. If he offered to share it, I refused. No, I thought. That’s yours.
And it’s not martyrdom. My favorite thing to do is to take trips with Oliver and Neal. We’ve gone out West, where we drove through deserts and walked through canyons; to England, where Oliver marveled over every pasty and cup of tea; and to Cuba, where we explored Communist museums and cave paintings. Those are the best memories of my life. Still, I sometimes wonder if I would be as celebrated a writer as my father if I’d stayed single, childless, cloistered. To be a great writer or artist, how ruthless do you need to be? How single-minded? Do you have to be the kind of ruthless where in front of your wife of forty-seven years you tell your doctor that you only care about writing?
If I’d had more children, as I’d always thought I would, would I have written any books at all? I longed for another baby when Oliver was a few years old. Since then, I’ve published a book every two years or so, at the same rate that in another era I’d have given birth. I’m content with my compromises except when I see a toddler girl with barrettes in her hair. Then I think, I should have five of those, lined up in a row on my Christmas card. If it meant I wrote half as many books—or no books—so what?
Perhaps my role as a writer who is not the best writer in my family is the cost of paying attention to my family. Or maybe I should have picked one kind of writing and stuck with it rather than switching every few years. My father wrote poetry for a decade and art criticism for forty years. In the past twenty years I’ve done national news reporting, New York City history, memoir, and generational lament. Maybe my real problem is that I’m too easily distracted, every year on to the next shiny thing. If only I were more serious. If only I’d gone to an Ivy League school and gotten a more classical education like those terrible Harvard kids. The roulette wheel of self-recrimination always stops in the same place: if only I were a different person, I could be really great.
“Should I have closed a door on my family?” I asked my shrink. “Would I be a better writer, as good as my dad?”
“Your father had a thirty-four-year head start,” she said. “Oliver will be out of the house in less than five years. Then you can close a door and work all day every day for forty years if you want. Personally, I’d rather read something by someone who had a full life before locking out the world.” I find what she says—you can have everything, maybe just not all at once—comforting, though I fear she’s humoring me.
Over at my parents’ place after I’d brought them soup and more frozen yogurt, my father, still in his pink cloud, told me he wanted to hear anything I had to say to him.
I looked across the table and realized he meant it. I commended him for asking. I was surprised and impressed that he seemed so open. It felt new. I said, “I think I’ve said it all before but maybe this will be a little clearer. You’ve said you didn’t think I liked Spencer. I’ve only met him a couple of times, but I liked him. He seems smart and helpful, and he makes you happy. If I bristle when you talk about him, it might be because of what he symbolizes. He’s the latest in a very long list of Things or People You Are Way More Interested in Than Me: alcohol, AA, art, fireworks, writing, and those Harvard students who talked to me like I was their maid.
“You hated your parents for never seeing you. I could have hated you for never seeing me, but I don’t. I love you. And in the end, I’m grateful. If you had paid real attention to me at any point, would I have worked so hard and done so much trying to be worthy of attention? Maybe not. Your disinterest has been at once the saddest part of my childhood and the greatest gift of my life.
“When you heard you were dying, the first words out of your mouth were ‘I’m a writer.’ You didn’t look at Mom, but if you’d seen her eyes! I think you see what Spencer does for you, but I don’t think you see what she does. She’s given you a fifty-year writing residency. Since your diagnosis, she and I have both made it possible for you to keep doing your favorite things: smoking, writing, hanging out with Spencer. I just want you to consider that other people in your situation might have other priorities right now.”
He thanked me for my honesty, and he seemed to take it in.
When I got home, I told Neal what I’d said, and I asked him why I felt so crummy even though I was glad I’d said it. He said, “Maybe part of you hoped that when you told him he’d never found you interesting, he’d say you were wrong.”