The following rant courtesy of Lauren Hough, who is writing about people and their writing or whatever you call it “advice.” (Insert primal scream).
I have been taking writing classes and seminars and being a part of groups and dropping out of groups for forty fucking years now. When I got started I couldn't get shit published because I'd never been published. Confessional writing (which is the same as trendy “trauma essays” now) was all the rage in the late 80s-early 90s, and if you didn't have a confession of something seriously traumatic, you were fucked. Couldn't get published. And I didn't know I could mine that shit back then, much less how to do it.
(I didn’t know when I started typing that I would start swearing like this, so clearly I have hit a vein.)
I couldn’t get published because I hadn’t been published, and I didn’t have the trauma to confess, except I did, but it was still hidden by layers of shame and my desire to be a holy and cleansed member of the Catholic Church. Which was, itself, a trauma response (If I go to confession (AGAIN) will that cleanse me? Will I be worthy of love?). I was too busy burying and hiding my trauma and shame by molding myself into a good wife and a good mother, by accepting children lovingly from God, by baking our bread and making Knox blocks out of organic apple juice, instead of going to therapy. And I was writing poetry I thought could be ecstatic and religious, but in a good way, like not all syrupy, but edgy, and there was nothing like that out there, and I was going to break through this “I’m too religious for normal folk but too irreverent for religious folk” when…
…Anne Lamott wrote her memoir, Operating Instructions, about how hard it was having babies on your own (I KNOW, I DID THAT) and trying to be religious (I KNOW, I WAS DOING THAT, I married a fucking priest. Literally.) And that was followed by Travelling Mercies, and then a whole slew of books about her edgy faith, and took all the air out of that space so that I was left without room to speak.
Because if you said it was like Anne Lamott, they said, “Yeah, isn’t she great? No thanks!”
In those days, I had a five year old, and had been a single mom for three years, and then I married and popped out two babies in a row, so I also had two under 18 months and people asked me every day if they were twins. I wrote during their naptime, if I could, and sent out submissions that I typed and retyped because there was no internet until 1996, and then it was AOL but there was still no WWW as we know it today. And email submissions, and simultaneous submissions, were not allowed. I sent out self-addressed, stamped envelopes and self addressed postcards with each manuscript and poem, and watched them flood back to me. I confess that I had nothing to confess, because there was nothing *wrong* with me, but also, I had already confessed my sins and still felt dirty, and still felt insufficient, and kept on baking cookies and going to Mass and sewing doll clothes and homeschooling if necessary. I wrote Erma Bombeck-like columns in the local weekly paper and life was a gauzy dream.
He drank. A lot. I wrote about this in my memoir, which hasn’t been published yet, but may be someday, so I won’t belabor the point, but he drank for any and all reasons, controlled his life to a T, and tried to keep his addictions in check (tl:dr, he couldn’t). I rolled with the tides and got pregnant FOUR more times, and none of them, thank God, stuck. It was only when I started therapy, I mean, FOR REAL started digging into my trauma, that I saw his drinking, and under the drinking, his trauma, which affected all of us. For two years I tried to “step over the body,” as they say in Al-Anon, and then for one year, I gave up, and then it fell apart like the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore—the drinking and the trauma were the ship, and our marriage was the bridge, and we could no longer be girdered together.
He and I are our own peninsulas now, and Godspeed to ya.
One of his parting shots was, “If you were going to be published, it would have happened by now.” In other words, I had missed the window. I was 38.
Since then I have had seven books published, some by big presses and some small. I don’t suck, I have lots of good things to say, and I have figured out what to say and how to say it. There’s a LOT more in between all these lines, but I put it into the memoir that will see print some day (2027?).
I’m not that mad anymore. Just a little. It keeps me spicy. And I stay on my own peninsula, with my beloved (current) husband and my cats.
But hey, good news! The Bereaved is now available as an audiobook. The audio was released yesterday and you can download it anywhere you get your audiobooks—Audible, AudioBooks, Libby, Amazon, and soon, Libby (I hope).
Something in Lauren’s spate of writing advice she never asked for hit a trigger this morning, and I remembered all the times I was told I couldn’t write or I would never write or I was just a little too late, or too early, and it set me down this path. I never did get over myself. I’m still at it.
Thanks for reading.
Just found Book and Bone. It is inspirational.. And spicy. (Hell, yeah)🔥
Well I’m glad you kept writing and got rid of that bridge!