Karen, tell me what’s preventing you from writing your book?
Well, that’s a damned good question. I think it’s the depression. I think I’m lazy. I think that I don’t have the right, or “write” environment. I have no privacy. The tapes playing in my head tell me that if I’m not working, then I shouldn’t be doing anything. I’m tired. My brain chemistry is off. I’m afraid. I’m deluding myself. I have other things to do. It’ll never sell anyway. The idea simply exhausts me.
Okay, seriously? Have you any idea at all?
I don’t really. But I wonder if it’s really all that important. Maybe what I need to do is focus on the writing, not the reasons why I’m not writing.
But won’t the same things continue to stop you if you don’t come to terms with them?
What does it matter whether I recognize them? They aren’t human beings who require acknowledgment in order to find motivation to move on. They’re just blocks, placed there by yours truly. Of course I do sometimes wonder if they are in fact surmountable, or my albatross to bear for the rest of my days as I struggle to tell the story. But then, I’ve always had a flair for the dramatic.
So you don’t believe any of it has merit?
Oh, I think it all does. I think that things are easy or difficult, or somewhere in between. I think that the degree of simplicity or difficulty can change at the drop of a preposition, and one should expect it. And I think that you have to move forward regardless.
I get it. So, I have to go back to my original question. Why aren’t you writing?
Because in point of fact I am terrified that I won’t be able to finish it and that if I do, no one will care about it. That a hundred will buy it, and thousands will taunt it as an empty work of a lost soul.
Then why write it? I’ve heard publishers say that books should be written for an audience, not an individual. Isn’t writing a book for yourself quite frankly setting yourself up for failure?
Maya Angelou has said, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." This one speaks directly past my heart to my core. It makes me vibrate. I run the risk of not finding a publisher willing to take on my book for the very reason you cite. But I don't really have a choice. The compulsion to write is overwhelming on the best of days, and painfully exhausting on the worst.
But aren’t you really just talking about journaling?
Sure I am. A journal is a record of events or transactions. A personal journal, or “diary,” is a record of anything at all – memories, thoughts, ideas, feelings, intentions. A book is basically a collection of pages - any kind of pages, really. Bound sheaves of paper seem to be the defining quality of a book. So, going down the “a equals b, but b does not necessarily equal a” path of logic, while all books may not be journals, all journals are certainly books. Yeah, in that case, I’ve started at least 25 books in my lifetime in the form of journals. I guess it was time to bring them all together into one cohesive story of some kind.
Why? Why not just leave it at the neat stack of journals on the bookshelf? Why a story?
Well, some might chalk it up to middle age, and I couldn’t really coherently argue that. What I know is that stories are our life’s breath. They define us. No one has ever spoken to this as eloquently as Joseph Campbell, or understood it as completely as Walt Disney. Joseph Campbell believed that we are guided in our lives on this planet by myths and stories. They define our norms, our destinations, and generally our chosen paths. What we know is based unequivocally on what has been or has been imagined, and has been passed down through ages and generations. And Walt? Well, he was hands down one of the THE most gifted storytellers of his century, and perhaps the millennium. There is a reason that Disney still has the power of magic over the children of this planet, young and old. The story doesn’t have to be new – they rarely are. It just needs to touch you. And the great stories have crossed millennia, countries, and cultures, touching generation after generation. Mine won’t be new. My life and my experiences aren’t new, but they’re mine. And they have unfolded in a very personal way that is mine. Perhaps they will touch someone in a way that is personally magical to them.
How do you deal with the doubts which, though you’ve made light of them to some extent, are clearly real?
There is a wonderful quote by Vincent Van Gogh. “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.” I’m a great believer in the power of quotes. Generally speaking, they came from someone to whom they made a great deal of sense based on a very personal experience. I’m pretty sure that Vincent came up with this one having come out the other side of some creative block, and not from a random intellectual ray of sunshine. And I’m certainly not naïve enough to believe that all other writers, great, good, mediocre, and all out bad, have avoided such doubt. It is part of the creative process. If it was easy, everyone would do it, and there would be nothing special about it.
So what is your story, Karen? What is the book about?
It attempts to rewrite the myth of the middle aged women.
Why rewrite it? Hasn’t it been done? Aren’t there enough stories about middle aged women and their journeys?
Perhaps there are never enough. What I can tell you is that the life I am living is not the life that my mother lived, or my grandmother, or any of the women in my genealogy. I married for the first time @ the age of 34, had my one perfect child, now ten, at the age of 39, and am 12 years into a career and profession that explodes from me with a passion I find impossible to temper. And I am about to turn 50 years old. So while I relish the life I have just described, I also have a very visceral and consuming desire to upend it and do something entirely different. Physiologically and psychically, I am an empty-nester, prepared to embark upon the next stage of my life. This conflict managed to bring me to a complete halt in my life. Not knowing how to proceed managed to undermine all that I had built, beginning a slow, downward spiral in my personal and professional life. You see, there was no benchmark, no story to look to. There are no myths for my middle age. And here I again cite Joseph Campbell, who suggested that there comes a time when the current myths are no longer relevant, and it’s time to write new ones.
So are you hoping that writing this book serves as a kind of healing for you, a catharsis?
Well, in fact the writing of it WILL be. The act of writing is itself cathartic. So in that sense, it doesn’t matter if it sells. It doesn’t matter what ANYONE thinks about it. It matters only that I write it. That I put my story on paper so that it no longer threatens to explode me into a million pieces. Beyond that, I am hoping with all my heart that it speaks to other women who find themselves on a similar path. It’s kind of the ultimate attempt to create a community around this. If I can start the dialogue, then other women can continue it. This is how new myths get written. Someone has to start them, and I got tapped for this one.
Can you share one or two of the specifics of this new myth of middle age?
Sure. I’ll start with the belief that middle age signals a slowing down. People these days joke that 50 is the new 30, 60 the new 40, and so on. Well, with 100 years now a conceivable lifespan, middle age is truly just a range of numbers somewhere in the middle of one to one hundred. And I can tell you absolutely that, while there are days that I’m frankly too tired to move, I am constantly amazed when I look in the mirror and see a 49 year old face staring back. This is NOT what I imagined 50 to be. Other than a handful of aches and pains and of course a wealth of brilliance borne by experience, I don’t feel any different than I did at 30. Then there is the belief that once a woman becomes a mother, all of her deepest desires and wishes must be put on hold until the children have gone off to college. Well, says who? Who says that I can’t move myself and my family somewhere that I consider healthier, or more peaceful? Who determined forever that taking your child out of one neighborhood and school to another is a violent act against humanity? This is no longer a relevant constraint, in a lifespan of a hundred years that is lived on a flattened globe of time, culture, and diversity.
Those are great examples, actually. I think I’m beginning to understand what you mean by the need for a new myth. I have one final question for you. Is yours a fiction or non-fiction story?
It is absolutely non-fiction. Because what I know is what I’ve lived, seen, experienced, and internalized, this is what I can write. I will share my journey, and hope that women can relate to moments of it, and use it to either accept their own middle age, or as a springboard to rewrite their own story. Or perhaps just have a good chuckle at it all. J
