Hi y’all,
I’m getting excited for the solstice and the gentle turning inward this season brings for me nowadays. Reading and daydreaming more, pouring hot water over rosemary sprigs for tea, watching the birds at the feeders, pondering bare branches of trees across the way, putting my phone in the next room more often while I sit with the blank page—these are my goals. It’s been an exciting year for me, but I need to ground myself more fully in my work and my intentions for it. I need to let Ancestor Trouble, the work of my mind and heart for so many years, make its own way in the world.
Over the decades I’ve reached an understanding and acceptance of the kind of writer I am. I remember endlessly laboring in my twenties and thirties to contort my prose into something more complex, more tragic or (for some reason?) dour, and I would never do that now. But I realized recently that I still had a subconscious prescription for myself that isn’t going to work. It went like this: with Ancestor Trouble, I exorcised many difficult parts of my life that I needed to write about as fact. Having gotten done that, I could proceed entirely in the realm of the imagination. I would write a novel and be wholly satisfied writing fiction. I would not need to write about myself anymore, at least not anytime soon.
Sigh. Friends, I’m having some genre confusion. I do want and intend to write the novel I’m working on. But I can’t deny the concurrent pull toward writing about my own life. My relationship with my mom has been tougher since her health ordeal over the summer, and even as I’ve been writing fiction I’ve found myself writing autobiographically in my head. I’ve realized, as I apparently have to keep realizing, that all the years I spent blogging about my life online were not accidental. There’s a part of me that needs some form of memoir to sort my stuff out. By explaining things to an imaginary reader, I explain them to myself, maybe that’s it. I know enough about psychology and psychiatry to have some theories about why this is the case, but ultimately it doesn’t matter why. It matters that it is.
I was telling my friend Carrie during our writing check-in recently that it’s hard to know whether I’m avoiding the novel by writing memoir in my head or I’m just trying to be a novelist when I’m really meant to write nonfiction. But I know it’s not so binary. I guess the most generous-to-myself way of looking at it is that I want to do both, and that my day job — which requires a different kind of writing — adds an additional layer of difficulty on the already complex dance of maintaining multiple creative projects at the same time. These competing impulses and ideas are part of the reason I need to sit quietly, turn inward, and see what comes forward right now.
I’ve been taking a novel writing class with another wonderful Cari — the novelist Cari Luna. I signed up spontaneously, realizing that I needed to have regular deadlines and accountability in the midst of balancing my job and remaining Ancestor Trouble duties. Cari cultivates a steady, nurturing, generative environment, and she mentioned in our first class that her mentor, Michael Cunningham, said that writers tend to fall into two camps: ecstatics and farmers. Both approaches are valid, Cari was careful to say, just as he evidently does, but it’s easier to finish a book if you’re a farmer.
I tend to tip into ecstatic territory and let my ideas gather and drift. But I was a farmer while I worked on Ancestor Trouble and I need to get back to that place now, even though I’m unsure which project I’ll end up diving most deeply into first.
My year in reading
If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you may already have picked up some of the books I mentioned in my year in reading piece for The Millions, either because I’ve talked about them here or because they connect to our shared preoccupations. Here’s the preamble:
My first book, Ancestor Trouble, came out this year, and I remain as engaged with the concerns that preoccupied me while writing it as I was before it was published. All my life I’ve been drawn to stories and ponderings on the corrosive effects of family secrets, about recurring tendencies, wounds, and harms in individual families, and the reverberations of all this in the larger world. I wrote about these questions on my blog back in the aughts, sometimes in personal posts but also in broader ones about books and art and politics. So I’m encouraged by our national preoccupation with ideas of intergenerational trauma. I hope we’ll increasingly recognize the ways that those ideas so naturally complement our closer attention to the history of oppressive cultural systems (and the complicity of some of our ancestors in their construction). I’m also energized by deepening understandings of kinship that include our beyond-human relations, that extend to the earth itself and are informed by spiritual traditions and practices that endured despite the individualistic emphasis of Anglo-European modernity. At the same time, I sense an emerging critical frustration around stories that excavate these questions. (Parul Seghal’s “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” comes to mind.) And sure, there will always be facile variations of any kind of story, any form of investigation. But I’d argue that these questions are valuable and eternal and that their suppression through the Enlightenment’s centering of the individual has been both toxic for the world at large and a tragedy for humanity.
I read too many good books to list in full here, so I’ll focus on the ones I love that, to me at least, touch on these themes in some way.
Read the rest over at The Millions, if you’d like. And I’ve mentioned this book here before, but I tore through Ada Ferrer's excellent Cuba: An American History at the end of last year. I'd read a precursor personal essay in The New Yorker that gutted me, so I set aside time to sit with and savor the book and am so glad I did, though I also wish I'd thought to include it in my Millions write-up. I'm incredibly honored by Ferrer's kind words for Ancestor Trouble in the WSJ over the weekend — she called it “a fascinating and wide-ranging meditation on how and why the stories of our own dead matter” — alongside her praise for Tiya Miles’s beautiful All That She Carried (another book I’ve praised here) and Javier Zamora’s Solito, which I need to read.
2022 best book mentions
Ancestor Trouble was named a best book of 2022 by the The New Yorker, NPR, The Washington Post, Time, The Boston Globe, Esquire, Garden & Gun, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Chicago Tribune (by John Warner of
). I am amazed and incredibly thankful.Solstice event, and holidays of yore
I’ll be marking the solstice — tomorrow, Wednesday, December 21! — with an Instagram Live conversation with writer and teacher Lisa Weinert of Narrative Healing, at noon.
I’m wishing comfort and joy to all y’all this season. If the holidays are tough for you, I’m sending wishes for peace. And if you’re feeling alone in family difficulties, you might enjoy my old essay, “Cleaning Up on Christmas,” about the time I stayed with my father, so he wouldn’t be alone on Christmas Day, and ended up alone in his house, cleaning. That was the year before the particularly disastrous Christmas Eve I write about toward the end of Ancestor Trouble, which was the last time I visited him.
I’ll leave you with Annie Lennox’s delightfully pagan “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” The original dates to the 1500s and the meaning is more accurately conveyed by “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” and not “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen.” Little did you know we would be ending the newsletter year with grammar nerdery!
Loved reading about your genre quandary, Maud. I’ve been in this mire my whole life. When I studied creative writing in the mid 70s, then a new program, there was not even a category for a memoir. It was fiction, poetry, or nonfiction and that was it. Fiction got all the respect, my writing dismissed as being “too personal.”
And I adored this Annie Lennox video! So exciting! She is being the Queen of the Revels. If you’ve never seen a Christmas Revels, now often re-dubbed Midwinter Revels, it is a unique and wonderful celebration in which I’ve participated for 30 years. I’ve reviewed many of the California Revels shows on my website, and there are several troupes around the country.
Boy, do I understand your conflicts between writing fiction and nonfiction! My solution for most of 2022 was not to write at all. I am not proud of that now but I did read more books than ever and as of today, I am actually just a tad burnt out on reading and feeling ready to write again starting on 1/1 2023. Going to your Millions piece now.