01.09.07
The Book Breakup
Ever since I started writing books I have been irritated, sometimes beyond all reasonable proportion, by the tendency to refer to the slump many writers go through after they finish a large project, for example a book, as “post-partum depression.”
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why the connection is drawn. Both pregnancy and book-writing are largely solitary processes that take a fairly sizeable length of time (though many books need to be baked for considerably longer than the average baby). Both pregnancy and book-writing are fated to end in the act of delivery that takes the more or less internal creation and brings it outward to the world, or at least to the editor, and hopefully thence to the world.
But in addition to the obvious issue of hormonal swing — and we should probably all be thankful, all things considered, that writers don’t also have to contend with the enormous hormone shifts that post-partum mothers do — there are a number of other reasons that I think characterizing post-writing-project slumps to post-partum depression is inaccurate, unhelpful, and frankly misapprehends what’s going on.
Consider this: there is an immediate, necessary, and consuming relationship between a mother and an infant that begins as soon as the baby is born. It is social, emotional, and physical, and it is, by comparison to the relatively passive and unilateral process of gestating a pregnancy, an enormously complicated series of interactions with another (somewhat inchoate but less so all the time) human being with its own opinions, needs, and desires. A new mother, unless she puts her infant up for adoption, lives with the end result of her pregnancy as not just some artifact of a lengthy process of creation, but as its own kicking, screaming, eating, pooping, needing independent self.
A book, in many ways, reverses both the sequence and the dynamic. A writer engages in an extremely active process of building a book, consciously creating it, shaping it, figuring it out, researching it, wrestling with its difficulties, coaxing it to do what the writer wants. It takes on a life of its own, existing as an entity in the writer’s mind and his or her life, a thing to which the writer devotes a great deal of time and energy on a daily basis, time and energy which can’t be used for other things. Just as rearing a small infant is not easily compatible with, say, the demands of any job that requires that one’s attention and physical presence be primarily focused on job tasks for lengthy periods of time, writing is also not compatible with those kinds of jobs. It is possible to think about writing here and there while one gets through one’s daily round of being, say, a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, and maybe it is even possible to do a little writing in the interstices of those jobs.
But it is not possible to write throughout the time that one does those kinds of work. The tasks are incompatible. The writing demands its own share of your time, your focus, your brain, your hands, during which you may also be, perhaps, cooking (in the oven or crockpot), doing laundry (in the machine), or some other automated task, but nothing to which you have to be paying attention. In point of fact, writing is also not very compatible with caring for small infants. Unless, of course, the infant in question happens to be asleep, in which case write like the wind, my darlings — I do know women who’ve written entire books or dissertations during the intervals that their infants were napping, so it is clear that writing and infant care can be combined, but sequentially, not simultaneously.
By contrast, it is quite possible to be pregnant whilst being a nurse or a line cook or a telephone receptionist, or a writer for that matter, because pregnancy doesn’t require too much of one’s conscious involvement for creation to happen. Pregnancies are rather inexorably biological, and in some ways they are something that happens to people, not something that people do. A pregnancy will, if all goes well, simply do its thing without the mother-to-be having to lift a finger to steer — indeed she cannot lift a finger to steer, the rudder that steers the process is not available to her, and if all does not go well she still can’t really do anything about it of her own self, and certainly not through mental effort alone. I mean, if you want to, you may stop writing a book one afternoon and simply quit in mid-sentence of your own volition and without having to involve anybody else at all, the thought and the deed perhaps even instantaneous. Just you try that with a pregnancy.
So no, books are not pregnancies and pregnancies are not books. Books are much more like intensely high-maintenance love affairs, or perhaps even dysfunctional marriages, than they are like pregnancies. Books exist, necessarily, on your level: they must, since they are the products of your intellect. They are highly (!) verbal, and cannot exist without communication. They in fact consist entirely of communication, and thus of choices of how to communicate and what to communicate and why. They have the extraordinary ability to poke you right in your most sensitive and least well-calibrated buttons, and to make you all but turn yourself inside out doing whatever you can possibly think of to do to get them to work with you and say or do the right thing. They sometimes stalk you and pester you, but more often you have to be the one in pursuit with coaxing and pleading and confrontations and dinner reservations and flowers and simple bullheaded consistent showing up on the doorstep hat in hand and willing to talk it all out, if you want the relationship to continue to exist at all.
If you’re lucky, this relationship will flourish to the extent that the book will get written, and then revised. Some people have a really difficult time letting go of books when they’ve finally managed to suss out the requirements of the relationship enough to get to that point. Some people revise for as long as humanly possible, smoothing the rough edges where the difficulty of the relationship shows, until they’ve rubbed all the nap from the velvet as it were. But most of us, and particularly those of us who are obliged to turn over our books to agents and editors in order to earn what passes for a living, do all this courting and seducing and explaining and pursuing and explaining and explaining and explaining only to get the book to the point where it is not perhaps Completely and Definitively Done but sufficiently done… and then it’s over.
It’s over. Printed out, shoved in a box, sent off to New York City with a few drops of bourbon sprinkled over it and a whispered “write if you get work, little book!” or whatever ritual of parting one prefers. Perhaps just e-mailed, these days. If one is fortunate, one gets notified when it shows up.
And then there’s silence. The space where there has for months, maybe even years, been this constant flow of verbiage, this incessant back-and-forth of ideas, this continual emotional and intellectual exchange has not merely gone empty, the space itself has ceased to be. It’s in a box in New York City. You can’t dip your foot in the same river twice and you can’t write the same book twice either. Even if you try.
It’s gone, daddy, gone.
That’s the nature of the post-book slump, or depression, or ennui, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not birth, it’s a breakup, the kind where the bed’s too damn big and the afternoon is too quiet and you go out for a walk and something scary or funny or just plain strange happens and before you know it you’ve gotten out your cellphone and started to dial and then taken a deep breath and hit the little red “hang up” button instead because that’s not the person you call to tell about that stuff, any more.
And you know you’ll see them later. You’ll have to make arrangements to have brunch sometime, so you can trade plastic grocery bags of borrowed books and forgotten sweaters and say embarrassing things like “I, um, threw out your toothbrush” and “I got mocha latte all over your David Bowie CD but I washed it off and it still plays okay” and “I’m sorry I said that thing about your brother.”
Eventually you’ll see them out somewhere, all dressed up and looking sharp and sexy in some bookstore-cafe, and you’ll say hi and you’ll hug and you’ll feel their familiar shape in your hands but there’s all that distance now and don’t you see? It can never be the same again. Never the way it was when they were yours. And sometimes that means you’ll see them more clearly, and be embarrassed by the way they talk or the fact that they never seem to realize when their panty lines are showing, stuff that never bothered you before but now you wonder how you could ever have missed it. But you’ll still miss them, and the way it was then, before things changed.
Unless. Unless they’re the Evil Ex and you couldn’t get rid of them fast enough because they were, quite simply, that evil. But these are thankfully rare.
Still very unlike babies, though.