Writing Grab On to Me Tightly . . .
“Mutual funds were hot shit, and if one could string words into near-meaningless banalities one was guaranteed at least a few rounds of interviews on the financial writing scene.”
I SPENT THE SUMMER OF 2001 sitting in a cubicle high up in the World Trade Center writing mutual fund brochures for a global financial powerhouse that I felt pretty certain couldn’t care less whether I lived, died, or pissed in the wind. I was making $54,000 a year at the time, an outrageous sum to my 26-year-old mind, both in terms of its relation to the actual amount of work I did and the future I’d envisioned for myself in my undergrad days. I was an English major, after all, and had taken every conceivable combination of writing workshops without once giving a thought to the kind of job I might land. My grasp of money and its consequences was so poor that I entrusted my mother with my student loan forms and took a fifth year basically just for the fuck of it. A year and a half after graduation I moved from Michigan to New York with $1,500, believing it to be a good bit of money. It was not. But luckily the economy and job market were stellar, mutual funds were hot shit, and if one could string words into near-meaningless banalities one was guaranteed at least a few rounds of interviews on the financial writing scene.
At the time that I began my corporate adventures I had not read a word of Richard Yates. Yet my head swam with the kind of delusions and rationalizations that afflict so many of his white-collar worker drone characters, the most famous of which is Revolutionary Road’s Frank Wheeler. This is only a temporary thing. It’s such good money and you can write on the weekends. You work for a big corporation but there’s a devilish irony at play here too because you used to be in punk bands and insert a caustic edge into even your most innocuous-seeming office banter and you’re really in the end only an imposter collecting a paycheck and not a real actual corporate dude so ha!
This type of thinking can carry you for a while—even a whole lifetime—especially if the boat is not rocked, and by that summer I’d worn myself quite a groove: spend six or eight weekends grinding out a short story, send it out to all the little magazines, suppress if possible the faint flickers of hope, then file away the rejections as they came in one or three or eight months later. I wouldn’t exactly say I was depressed during that time, but if Fitzgerald was correct in his assessment that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function, then it was a test I was failing and a kind of minor-league crack-up had certainly begun. I worried endlessly that I was not writing enough and that what I did write would never be published; I kept constant tabs on my few writer friends, despairing at their various successes; I greedily devoured every hot book of the moment, staring at the photo of the invariably young and attractive person on the back cover, wondering what mysterious thing they possessed that I did not. Meanwhile, I had all the money I needed, at least for my solitary renter’s life, as well as top-tier health insurance and 401(k) programs. It was a rather joyless existence, all discipline, perseverance, and deferred contentment, which was perfectly in keeping with my only slightly warped view of the way a real writer should exist.
Now it all seems like such a very long time ago.
At some point in the fall of 1998, when I was new to the city and sending out résumés though not yet employed, I pulled a large floor speaker up to my roommate’s computer (there was then no chair in the apartment) and wrote a very short story about an encounter I’d had six years earlier, the memory of which I could not shake. It was about a time one very hot day in the summer of 1992 when I met a girl with scars on her arms who was reading Naked Lunch. It was her bible, she said. We talked for maybe ten minutes. And that was it, that was the end of our interaction. In the ineffable way of memory, though, I kept envisioning the scene, and the original players, two real people, ceased to be real. New words bubbled up, dimly at first, and their conversation seemed to be one I was accidentally overhearing rather than one I was piecing together over a period of years. The story I wrote was six pages long. I called it “Scars,” sent it out some number of times, and no one ever published it. But I thought of it regularly, and as time passed the voices of those two young characters grew louder in my head. Their histories became clearer and I saw them in different situations, moving and speaking and laughing. In August 2001, a few weeks before I started grad school, I returned to them and in a single sitting expanded the story from six to twenty pages. New characters stepped out of the ether and the writing, as it is on only rare and therefore very happy days, was effortless. I called the story “My Hideous Bride” after a song written by the main character, whose name was now Vim Sweeney. I felt even then that it represented a turning point for me as a writer, a loosening, a freeing. So when the first fiction workshop of my MFA career assembled in the final week of August and my teacher Irini Spanidou asked who would like to be the first up to bat, mine was the only hand that shot up.
The critique went down a week later and I remember only that I was insanely nervous, shaking almost. Irini said in her closing comments that she was interested in the voice and characters of the story and had it ever occurred to me to try and break the thing open, write a little longer, see what might happen, and maybe make it into a, well, a novel? The answer was no. It was all I could do working forty hours a week to put together 6,000 words, but I think I equivocated and hinted that, yes, writing a novel about these people had been my intention all along. I went out into the night feeling I don’t know what. Fall was coming, my favorite time of year, and I’d written a pretty good story. My classmates and teacher took me seriously as a writer and shit, allow me just a sliver of optimism here because the worm might really be turning for me and. . . .
The following Tuesday I went to work and a hijacked plane crashed into the building next to the one in which I was sitting. A short time later my building was hit. By ten thirty that morning, of course, neither building existed. I stayed away for two weeks, first in New Jersey and then in Michigan, until implicit pressures became explicit and I was urged back to work by people above me with a greater interest in the fate of the company than I’d been able to muster in even my brightest moods. And my mood in the period following September 11 was by no means bright.
This is not the time or the place to go into all that I was feeling back then. It should suffice for now to admit that the next couple of years were the worst of my life. Yet they were also the best in a way (and it took almost until this second to arrive at that conclusion), because I was tapped in to something rare, an overwhelming sense of what truly mattered and what I really wanted from life. On the evening of October 20, 2001, I sat down in this very room and started writing the book you now hold in your hands using “My Hideous Bride” as a starting point. I lasted three more months at the job and then quit and threw everything into the novel. I wrote every day. When I wasn’t writing or at school talking about writing I was out walking aimlessly, listening to the sounds of the city and my life savings blowing away in the wind, and thinking about my book and the people in it and what was going to happen to them and how I could make it better and would I ever finish it and even if I did would it ever be published and even if it was would anyone anywhere ever give two shits?
That last question is obviously one I can’t answer. Everything that happens next is beyond my control. Writing Grab On to Me Tightly As If I Knew the Way both drove me insane and kept me from breaking apart entirely. And as I contemplate its origins in the final lap of another summer, far removed from the one in the book yet still in view of the one that came before times got bad, I am grateful for its existence in the physical sense as a thing you can put on your shelf, but also as an intangible force that gave back everything I put into it and more.
July 24, 2005