Remember last month when I mentioned that a conversation prompt over a meal with my colleagues left me drawing a blank? Well, reader, I am here to inform you that it happened again. As I sat around eating (surprisingly delicious) gluten-free pizza with my colleagues, someone asked each of us to go around the table and name our favorite novel. Do you ever have those dreams where you show up to class and realize that you forgot to do your homework, and you don’t even know why you’re having this dream because it has been 25 years since you had a book report due? Even though the real-life stakes could not have been lower, that is how it felt.
I don’t have a favorite novel, a favorite song, or a favorite color. Indecisiveness is not the problem. What I want and when I want it is so dependent on context and mood. Am I reading in public or at home? Am I on vacation? Is it bedtime or midday? Choosing one book for all of those variables feels impossible.
Luckily, the table moved on quickly to the next question. “What are we reading right now?” I was relieved to have an answer and a safe-for-work answer at that. After I told the group that I was reading The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, my boss looked it up on his phone and was pleased to see that it made Obama’s list of favorite books in 2020. When someone unfamiliar with the book asked me for a plot summary, I was relieved that they hadn’t asked me while I was reading some of the other titles on my recently read list.
I read all the time as a kid, but few of those stories stayed with me over the years. I know I had a copy of Little Women that I’m pretty sure I read. I remember liking the intricate puzzle vibes of The Westing Game, but I don’t remember anything about the plot. The Call of the Wild-themed episode of Northern Exposure is more memorable to me than the book.
I remember taking sides in no-stakes matchups between authors and series. I was all in on Beverly Cleary, which meant Judy Blume was not for me. The Sweet Valley Twins were in constant rotation, which for some reason meant I was not a devotee of The Babysitter’s Club. Novels are exclusively entertainment for me, not where I learn about myself and how to be a person in the world.
When I think of my frequent and regular trips to Borders and Barnes and Noble as a teen, I was there to get magazines, not books. I looked to YM and Seventeen for guidance on how to perform femininity until I graduated from Sassy for instructions on a more progressive approach to girlhood. When I was in my twenties and newly engaged, I depended on Real Simple and Martha Stewart Living for tips on how to establish a home as a modern wife who also had a lot of other hats to wear when I was not there. As much as I enjoy novels, what tends to leave a lasting mark on me are long-form journalism and narrative nonfiction. Sometimes I will even read a novel and think to myself, “I wish it had been an essay instead.”
That was the response when I read Fleishman Is in Trouble a few years ago. It is a great book, but I wished Taffy Brodesser-Akner had spared us so much of the journey around the city inside the head of Toby the divorcée as he tried to figure out how to be single amid the disappearance of his ex-wife. I would have much preferred to read a long-form essay from her on women’s relationship to ambition.
You may be asking yourself, “Hey, That Woman, why are you writing a novel if you are so ambivalent about the form?”
This might be a good time to mention that it has been at least six months since the last time I worked on it. A combination of life-altering challenges both personal and global have conspired to rob me of my fiction-writing mojo. The real question is whether this is writer’s block or a turning point in my creative identity.
I recently read this interview with Lyz Lenz where she describes what her advisor said to her while she was in her MFA program:
I remember him looking at one of my stories. I would have this problem where it just didn’t feel right. Like I did everything perfectly, but there was something missing. And he looks at me — he just had this deep voice — and he goes, you know why you write fiction? And I was like, I don't know, because I like it? He goes, No. Because you're too afraid to tell the truth. He's like, learn how to tell the truth, and then you're going to fix your writing.
Did I start a novel so that I could hide behind fictional characters instead of tackling the themes that I wanted to write about while keeping myself on the page?
Last summer while working on my novel, I was asked to describe the point of my story. They wanted to know what I was trying to say with this work. That question was even more paralyzing than the favorite novel discourse. I’m not going to share the answer that I provided back then because I know now that it wasn’t the truth. The real answer is that the story of Zara and Felix was a way for me to write about what it is like to experience rejection, betrayal, and feelings of not belonging, yet still find a way to be vulnerable enough to love and be loved.
Will I write that story and keep myself in it? Will I end my hiatus and finish Zara and Felix’s tale? Or will I do both?
All the rest…
Kacey Musgraves is releasing her next album in March, two weeks before Beyoncé drops the country chapter of Renaissance. Do we think these Texas girlies have a collab up their sequined sleeves?
I may have already recommended this conversation between Sam Sanders and Tressie McMillan Cottom on the racialization of country music. I am sharing it again because it is one of my favorite conversations. Also as a balm against all of the wrong opinions about the genre that are inevitably ahead of us once Beyonce’s album is out in the world.
I think so many of us do this—use fiction writing as a cover, at least I do. It's a way to poke at all the tender parts that I'm too afraid to poke at in my real life. I do love you how describe the point of your story. (I also love Zara and Felix so much.)