Archives for December 2018

Once,  many years ago, I was sitting with a bunch of writers at the Old Timer's tavern, and we were all telling funny stories about how crazy our families are.  At the family reunion, Aunt Louise having to be talked down from a tree. That sort of thing.

One of us, a young man from Indiana, was quiet. Until he felt compelled to tell us about his own dysfunctional family. We all leaned forward. His father wasn't always candid with him, he said. And his mother was generous to a fault. 

When we all burst out laughing, he was terribly hurt and then we all felt bad.

That's why I'm not revealing his identity—nor, the identity of the consultant who sends out an email every week with her personal musings on life. Experiences she's had, and lessons she's learned.Like all of us these days, the consultant wants to be authentic. She wants to be real. She wants to be so authentic and real that we'll hire her, because that's the sort of people people hire these days, supposedly.

She does not write about the business in which she is expert.

Instead, she tells us about a long hike she took without having trained sufficiently or brought the right equipment.

She confesses what "most people don't know": She didn't get into the college she wanted to go to on her first attempt.

Also, her teenage daughter got super drunk once.

She writes things like:

"As I prepare my newsletter this weekend, I am acutely aware of the violence, sadness and strife in the world. It can sound trite and privileged to even talk about 'going with the flow' of life."

Indeed, it cannot sound any other way!

"Most of us know that taking time off is important. It refreshes us and enhances our creativity and productivity. Then why do so many of us, most of us, not take the time off we need to rejuvenate ourselves? I ask myself this question because I, too, have a hard time unplugging."

See "trite and privileged," above.

Not long ago, she shared some news!

"The last couple of weeks, I've been especially kind to myself, and it has felt great."

Midday monkey business, with peanut butter!? Sadly, no. She's been allowing herself to skip her 6:00 a.m. workout, and sleep until 7:00.

To paraphrase an old saw: Better to be thought tedious than to write a weekly newsletter and remove all doubt.

… write "less" when "fewer" is called for, or "farther" when "further" is needed, or "hopefully" at all—even though these distinctions don't matter to anybody except other writers and people who shop at Whole Foods. (Good writers care about the opinion of other good writers.)

… call moments "special," utter the term "adult beverage," congratulate the birthday boy for being "90 years young," describe everything that's amusing as "amazing" or perpetuate other smarmy banalities that debase the language that they love. (They also don't gas on about how much they love the language, because that's lame too.)

… "bounce concepts" off of other writers. Concepts, they bounce off their keyboard. (Usually, the concepts shatter on first contact.) They bounce drafts, if the concept held together, off of other writers.

… choose themes like "Think Forward" for their gatherings. (See International Association of Business Communicators, 2019 World Conference.)

… talk incessantly about how every writer needs an editor. (Instead, they acknowledge it grudgingly.)

… describe themselves as "passionate." (Or, as one communicator calls herself on her LinkedIn profile, "multi-passionate." I think that means she'll enthusiastically do anything for money.)

… drink while they write. (Though they do occasionally write when they drink.) [Who said that?]

… write, "As corny (or clichéd or trite) as it sounds …" They rewrite it in such a way that it doesn't sound that way—or they throw the whole thing out.

… write "listicles" that conclude with a request for readers to contribute more items.

We used to make fun of our mother for her taste in films. Sophie's Choice. Terms of Endearment. And, for kids, the saddest one of them all, Kramer vs. Kramer.

Mom was a depressive liberal novelist living with my Republican ad agency father an upscale little town full of Stepford wives. It was said that all the Democrats in Hudson, Ohio, could fit into the phone booth at Saywell's Drugstore. Mom once told a neighbor she would like to get together after she finished her book next fall—and she realized the neighbor assumed she meant reading a book, not writing one. Mom felt misunderstood and quietly mocked by these women, who she imagined spent their days "decoupaging their wastepaper baskets." 

Mom, meanwhile, spent her days writing unspeakably sad books, with titles like Dog Lady. She published one about a cancer-ridden woman running a divorce colony in Reno. The book she considered her masterpiece was Last Words. It was about a boy dying of leukemia—a boy so ugly and unlikable that the only person with any emotional interest in his suffering was the next-door neighbor: an undertaker, who hoped to embalm him when he died.

St. Martin's said they would publish it if she wrote a happier ending. She refused.

Even members of the family found the manuscripts unreadable. And scary.

It was as if she was using the books to scream at the top of her lungs: Hey, sports fans, don't you see how terrible everything really is? And it was as if the sports fans were replying: Please, Carol: We're trying to watch the game.

She ultimately died from her depression—not from suicide, but from all the medications, prescribed or not, that made days bearable (which in her case meant they had to be occasionally joyful). I was in college then, most of the time enraged at her for the blight of her self-indulgent sadness on the first sunny April days of my own life. And then immediately and finally aware that she had done the best she could. 

I don't share her depression. She raised me better than her parents raised her, and life treated me better than her life treated her.

She had a point, of course, about everything being terrible. Chemistry aside—chemistry included—she was right to be sad. Unspeakably terrible things happen every day—by accident and on purpose. And people are sometimes unbelievably stupid in how they react. I was recently in a Catholic church at the saddest funeral I have ever attended. The priest used the moment to remind us that while the Church "screws things up," we should all give the Church credit when it gets it right—times like this. 

Even when it's not self-serving, it's worse than banal—it's brutish—to ask people who are suffering to focus on the positive. Acknowledging their pain is at once the least and often the most you can do. (And it's surprisingly hard to do, because you must try to comprehend that pain first, which means feeling a bit of it yourself.)

But between earthquakes (and even during them) it must be true that acts of cruelty large and small are overwhelmingly outnumbered by acts of love, small and large. And as a writer—or an artist of any kind (and all human beings are artists of a kind)—it seems to me that our talents are well spent rendering these lovely moments though books or barroom conversations, at kitchen tables or in keynote speeches: noticing them, recognizing them, defining them and describing them so dramatically that people will listen to them, and be inspired to do likewise.

It's artistically fashionable to describe the world as hopelessly fucked up. And from artists like my mother, emotionally understandable.

But it's artistically correct to describe the world as something far more complicated than that: A world of flowers and timely touches and personal notes. Of it-was-nothing, you'd-do-the-same-for-me, what-do-you-need-me-to-do. Of warring parents in terrible pain managing not to motherfuck one another in front of the kids, and other heroic and unnoticed abstentions. 

Like a mother plotting suicide for years but trying not to do it because (as she wrote in her journal):

Know first hand, from suicide in immediate family, that murder of self inevitably means partial murder, psychic homicide, of those left behind. Some of wreckage permanent: close survivors limp and jerk, jerk and limp, to one extent or another, like old soldiers when it rains, until closing of own graves. When too profoundly depressed to feel anything, not hope, certainly, not curiosity, still entertain one conviction; one immutable intelligence begins somewhere at base of spine, ascends: the utter stinkiness of suicide.

Heard about man who committed suicide by flying six-place airplane into side of Sierra Nevadas. Took five souls (pilot jargon for passenger) with him. See suicide of mother same way: psychic smear.

And it's a son, now almost as old as she was when she died not of suicide—feeling grateful for being spared that psychic smear because she put one foot in front of the other every day: many, many, many days, just for my sister and me.

And, in return, donating the deepest love I can—the deep-dark-red love that I received. In writing and in person, every time I'm thoughtful enough and generous enough to do it.

Kramer vs. Kramer is the happiest movie I know.