I recorded my life copiously and artfully in my journals. I practically memorized the work of writers I loved. These minor successes stoked the grandiose ideas I had about what I would achieve and by what age I would achieve it. I’d won a few grants and awards, published a couple of stories and essays. Without a book, but not entirely without literary acclaim. I was a bit like you then, Elissa Bassist. That I hadn’t written the book by the time I was twenty-nine was a sad shock to me. The one I felt pulsing in my chest like a second heart, formless and unimaginable until my mother died, and there it was, the plot revealed, the story I couldn’t live without telling. The one that I’d known was in me since way before I knew people like me could have books inside of them. One thing that was actually two things pressed together, like the back-to-back quotes on my chalkboard: how much I missed my mother and how the only way I could bear to live without her was to write a book.
It was a book I read again and again and that line about the woman who sat thinking of only one thing was at the heart of the reason why. The quote by Eudora Welty is from her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. On one side of the chalkboard I wrote, “ The first product of self-knowledge is humility,” Flannery O’Connor and on the other side I wrote, “ She sat and thought of only one thing, of her mother holding and holding onto their hands,” Eudora Welty. It was one of those two-sided wooden A-frames that stand on their own and fold flat. When I was twenty-nine I had a chalkboard in my living room. How do I reach the page when I can’t lift my face off the bed? How does one go on, Sugar, when you realize you might not have it in you? How does a woman get up and become the writer she wishes she’d be? And I fear that even if I do manage to write, that the stories I write-about my vagina, etc.-will be disregarded and mocked. The truth: I am sick with panic that I cannot-will not-override my limitations, insecurities, jealousies, and ineptitude, to write well, with intelligence and heart and lengthiness.
That said, I’m high-functioning-a high-functioning head-case, one who jokes enough that most people don’t know the truth. I’ve been clinically diagnosed with major depressive disorder and have an off-and-on relationship with prescription medication, which I confide so it doesn’t seem I throw around the term “depression.” “Depressed writer”-because the latter is less accurate, the former is more acute.
I know I’m not the first depressed writer.
#DEAR SUGAR RUMPUS MOVIE#
I start to think that I should choose another profession-as Lorrie Moore suggests, “movie star/astronaut, a movie star missionary, a movie star/kindergarten teacher.” I want to throw off everything I’ve accumulated and begin as someone new, someone better. But it’s not that I want to die so much as have an entirely different life. I often explain to my mother my phobia that to be a writer/a woman/a woman writer means to suffer mercilessly and eventually collapse in a heap of “I could have been better than this.” She pleads with me: can’t it be different?Ĭan it? I want to jump out the window for what I’ve boiled down to is one reason: I can’t write a book. Think of the canon of women writers: a unifying theme is many of their careers ended in suicide. I understand women like me are hurting and dealing with self-trivialization, contempt for other more successful people, and misplaced compassion, addiction, and depression, whether they are writers or not. Several months ago, when depression hooked its teeth into me, I complained to my then-boyfriend about how I’ll never be as good as Wallace he screamed at me on Guerrero Street in San Francisco, “STOP IT. I get up, go to the computer, feel worse.ĭavid Foster Wallace called himself a failed writer at twenty-eight. I lie facedown on my bed and feel scared. I look up people I used to love and wonder why they never loved me. I’ve sat here, at my desk, for hours, mentally immobile. I am up late asking you a question, really questioning myself. Right now, I am a pathetic and confused young woman of twenty-six, a writer who can’t write. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor.Īnd that’s when I can write, which doesn’t happen to be true anymore.
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