Anxiety (aka Unnamed Devil Disorder)

At a recent reading hosted by The Bookshelf in Guelph, I was asked about the unspecified mental illness in Every Time We Say Goodbye. The characters in my novel cannot name their illnesses. Unnamed, an illness can be anything; unspoken, it often becomes the worst thing possible.

For example.  

When I was 18, I went on a religious retreat with forty other high school students and met the devil. For six months after, I was unable to sleep except in brief snatches; during the day I was shaken by strange surges, haunted by evil grinning thoughts, and clamped in an iron vice of dread.

The retreat was held in an office building. We went in on a Friday afternoon to find all the windows and clocks covered, and were immediately asked to surrender our watches. “Don’t anticipate,” we were told. “Participate.” Soon, we weren’t sure if it was day or night. (Later I would learn that this, along with sleep deprivation and hunger, is a common technique in cult programming. The body becomes disoriented and the mind follows.)

At some point during our clockless retreat, we were told to lie on mats in a dark room and empty our minds. I did, and into my emptied mind came an unspeakable dread. It was more terrifying than anything I’d ever felt, so I gave it the name of the worst thing I knew. I fixed my eyes on the low-lit crucifix on the wall and recited silent Hail Marys. Eventually, the devil retreated, but I was deeply shaken. If I wasn’t safe surrounded by crucifixes in the Catholic Information Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, I wasn’t safe anywhere.

The retreat ended, and I went home. I was in bed the next time the devil appeared, rippling out of the radio (probably on a Jimmy Page riff). I leaped out of bed, turned off the radio, and prayed like mad. Around four in the morning, I fell asleep. Two hours later, I got up for school.

This became a nightly pattern: terror and dread in sweat-soaked sheets, followed by fragmented sleep. Strangest of all, I told no one. I was afraid that if I told my grandparents, they would take me to a priest, thus confirming my deepest fears. And there was just no way to drop it into a conversation at school (oh yeah, and guess what else? Satan is trying to possess me, so if my head starts turning around, like 360 degrees, that's what's up with that).

One night, I woke up with tremors running through my hands and arms. Was I dying? I stumbled to my grandparents’ room. “Grandma,” I said. “My hands are shaking.”

She said, “It’s nerves.”

Nerves. Huh. Not a supernatural evil trying to get in, but a terrible pain trying to get out. The shaking subsided, and I went back to bed.

A few months later, in university, a description of an anxiety attack in my psych textbook confirmed my grandmother’s diagnosis.

Still, it took a long time to get help, partly because I'd learned as a child that the adults who were supposed to be caring for me were so caught up in their own traumas, they couldn’t be relied on. Also, I didn’t know where to get help, and it would be years before you could Google “heart racing” and “feel like I’m dying” and be led to an anxiety disorder website. But mostly, I thought I could banish my affliction by ignoring it. It took a long time to learn we only cure our ailments by calling them out.

Five Times a Day

In her beautiful memoir, Married to Bhutan, which I read yesterday in virtually one sitting, Linda Leaming mentions a Buddhist practice in which a person thinks about death five times a day. This made me wonder: Why five? Is that a lot? What kind of day do you have if you wake up and tell yourself, Today I’m going to think about death five times?

I decide to try it.

Thought # 1 (leaving for the gym): What if this is the last time I leave the house? People will say, “She was just on her way to the gym. She never even saw it coming.” (Ha! Little would they know....)

Thought # 2 (in spin class, pedalling as hard as I can): The instructor tells us to pedal harder, and in my mind, I pound the bike and say, “I’m dyin’ here.”  Does that count?

Thought # 3 (walking home from the grocery store in the rain, noticing tightly furled buds): I wish I could slow spring down.  “A peach blossom is beautiful...because it is temporary,” says the monk at the end of the Bhutanese film Travellers and Magicians. Yes, yes, I know! But if only it could be temporary a little longer.

Thought # 4 (staring at an empty Word document): Death is the blank page on which life writes.

Thought #5 (remembering Rome): It's so weird that my very Catholic mother doesn't believe in an afterlife.  We were standing in front of an Inferno-esque fresco when she mentioned, oh so casually, that she did not believe in heaven or hell. I was shocked. Can you be a Catholic and not believe in life after death? Isn’t the afterlife kind of the whole point? Also, if she didn’t believe in an afterlife, why was she dragging me into every church in the city? I asked what she thought awaited us after death. She said, “Nothing. I believe we live on through our genes, in our children.” I said, “Then can we go back to that restaurant near the place we bought the leather sandals?”

Thought # 6 (leaving to do a reading in Hamilton): What if this is the last time I leave the house?  OK, when you start to repeat yourself, it’s time to stop. Plus, I’ve done the required five.

Thought #7 (driving past a cemetery. A very big cemetery): “I had not thought death had undone so many.” Enough with the death thoughts already!

Thought #8 (on the way home from the reading): I talk with author Cynthia Holz about Buddhism, end of life care, the end of a life, the moment of death. Rain falls in the streets of the dark city. I am so absorbed in my life at the moment, I forget I am supposed to be thinking about death, even though we have been talking about it the whole way home.   

Cosmogony, for Writers and Word Nerds

Just read this in Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence:

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

-- Kenneth Koch, "Permanently"

Parents

The publication of Every Time We Say Goodbye has not been easy for my parents, given that I borrowed (stole) parts of their histories and reshaped (hammered and chipped, chopped and screwed) them to fit into a novel. In my anxiety over how they might feel after reading my book, I wrote imaginary blurbs from both of them:

“Well, it’s a very nice book, but I don’t know why she couldn’t write about vampires. They're very popular. And she’d make more money too!” – The Author’s Mother

“I swear I didn’t know the car was stolen.” The Author’s Father

My parents split up when I was two. I’m now 46 and can only remember seeing them in the same room on a handful of occasions (funeral, graduation, my first book launch). Even when they are in the same room, they don’t really talk (for personal reasons which cannot be explored in this public forum, and besides I already wrote a novel about it).

So estranged are they that it was a shock for my son to realize their connection. “Wait a minute,” he said when he was about six. “Grandma Judy and Grandpa Jimmy used to be...married?”

And so I was delighted when they seemed to enter into a playful rivalry over book sales at two readings in their respective cities.

In the Soo, my mother mailed out postcards of the book cover, called friends, family, and absolute strangers, and liaised with staff at the public library, where the reading was being held.

In Toronto, my father emailed invitations, called friends, printed up postcards of the book cover, and worked with staff at Ben McNally’s bookstore, where the event was being held.

At the Soo reading, the room was packed; the novel sold out and the booksellers had to resort to selling copies of my Bhutan memoir.  In Toronto, the room was packed, and people bought both the novel and the memoir. At the end of the evening, my father tallied up the numbers: he was up by one book. But when I conveyed this fact to my mother, she said I’d miscounted. "Congratulate your father on his success," she said, "but I won by ten books." 

No, it's not time to cue the Reconciliation Score, but in my family, that counts as conversation.

At least they'll have something to talk about at the next launch.

Keep Talking!

Today a very irritating review of my novel claimed that I believe all children should be raised by their biological parents.

Considering that I was raised by two people who were in no way biologically related to me, I can say I wholeheartedly believe no such thing.

Here's what I do believe: children long for their parents, and in their absence, create fantasies of belonging and identity and perfect love. It’s the same kind of longing that happens when the person you're in love with suddenly dumps you. You're sure there has been some mistake. You hope against all odds and fervent declarations to the contrary that the person will come back and want you and love you again. But your longing doesn't mean the relationship was working or right or good for you. In the same way, a child's longing for her biological parents doesn't mean those parents should be or could be raising her.

One of my characters is adopted. His adoptive parents clearly love him and are very good caregivers. What derails him is not the fact of his adoption, but how this fact has been hidden from him, and how, when he finds out at age 14, his adoptive parents are utterly unable to discuss the matter with him. This part of the novel is set in the 1950s, when adoption was a matter of secrecy. It was a matter of shame for the mother who had “got into trouble,” and a matter of dark speculation for gossipy neighbours who nodded knowingly at each other and muttered about what was bred in the bone.  My character senses this, and in the silence, he imagines the worst. He doesn’t turn out the way he does simply because he was raised by two people who have no genetic connection to him.

The parents in my novel lack balance: the ones who effortlessly pour out their love and physical affection are poor providers, while the competent providers can’t say “I love you and I'm glad I have you.”  Some parents are unreliable and missing in action; others are overly rigid and all-too-present. If only they could be blended into one perfect parent! Or, more realistically,  since they're all part of the same family, if only they would stay in touch and keep talking, they could make up for each other's shortcomings.

Every Time We Say Goodbye is not about how all biological parents should raise their own children, but how the deep imperfections and imbalances in families can be overcome if everyone stays connected and keeps talking.

Should Writers Read Reviews of their Work?

At a reading in early March, Timothy Taylor (The Blue Light Project) was telling me about Mavis Gallant’s practice of never reading reviews of her own work. Her argument, it seems, was that if you are going to put stock in reviews and allow yourself to be elated by the positive ones, you have to also take to heart the negative ones. The thing to do is not read any.

Easier said than done, especially in the Google Age.  

But negative and positive aren't the same as good and bad. Bad: the Foamy Piece (works itself into a lather of praise without really considering the text). Also bad: the Review Formerly Known as Plot Summary. Good: the judicious, thoughtful, well-written critique, whether or not you agree with it.

Still, it’s not easy to read a negative review of your work. What if it clobbers you over the head? Knocks the pen out of your hand and pokes you in the eye with it? It's hard to write with a pen in your eye.

An editor suggested reading only reviews selected by my publicist, but added, glumly, that some helpful friend or family member would be sure to draw my attention to any negative review I missed.  Another friend suggested reading every review and posting them all to Facebook.

I came home thinking about praise and criticism and the Buddhist practice of equanimity. What good does Buddhist practice do if you don’t actually...practice it? So I decided to ride the waves: read all reviews and attempt equanimity.

 Last week, a mixed review of Every Time We Say Goodbye appeared in the National Post:  http://arts.nationalpost.com/2011/03/11/book-review-every-time-we-say-goodbye-by-jamie-zeppa/ .

Following my "Ride the Waves" policy, I immediately posted it on Facebook. Within three minutes, a colleague began to read the negative lines out loud to me.  When I said the review was very well-written and balanced (i.e. the reviewer had also praised the book), my helpful colleague informed me of a study showing how, when bad news is sugar-coated with good news, people miss the bad news. 

It was a good moment to practice equanimity.  And I'm sure there are plenty more opportunities ahead. 

20 Questions by Knopf Canada, 20 Answers by Me

20 Writerly Questions ( from http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307399472&view=auqa )

1. How would you summarize your new book in one sentence?
Members of the Turner family in Sault Ste. Marie manage to connect to each other through three generations of secrets, silences and disappearing acts.

2. How long did it take you to write this book?
It was written in fits and starts (more fits than starts) over eight years.

3. How did you choose your characters’ names?
I googled popular names by decade, looking for ones that sounded like my characters. In the beginning, everyone’s name started with a D, which made all my early readers crazy.

4. How many drafts did you go through?
I completely rewrote two sections at least twice, but because all writing feels like rewriting to me, I don’t have a clear sense of distinct drafts, just countless changes.

5. Who was the first person to read your manuscript?
My dearest friend Susan Terrill.

6. If your book were to become a movie, who would you like to see star in it?
The entire cast of Mad Men. (I’d write extra parts for them!)

7. What’s your favourite city in the world?
Rome. 

8. Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes, from around grade 5, when I read Harriet the Spy.

9. What was your very first story about? When did you write it?
My earliest stories were for kindergarten Show and Tell. They featured the daring exploits of my brother Jason (one day he ate a brick, another day a dress.) I may have neglected to mention that they were works of fiction.

10. What was your favourite book as a kid?
Harriet the Spy and The World’s Best Fairy Tales.

11. If you could be any character from any book, who would you be?
Smilla from Smilla’s Sense of Snow.

12. If there was one book you wish you had written what would it be?
I wish I had the brain that wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude.

13. If you could talk to any writer living or dead who would it be, and what would you ask?
I’d like to ask the geniuses in the Writers’ Room of The Simpsons to marry me. “John? Al? George? Anyone?” 

14. How do you organize your library?
By genre: Non-fiction, poetry, favourite novels, Bhutan.

15. What’s on your nightstand right now?
Buddhism Without Beliefs (which is always on my nightstand) and The Solitude of Prime Numbers.

16. Where is your favorite place to write?
Near an open window, in the utter absence of leaf-blowers and lawn mowers.

17. Do you have any writing rituals?
I go through the four stages of writing: procrastination, bargaining, pseudo-writing (“Making lists: 13 minutes. Researching cocktails from 1926: 28 minutes”), acceptance.

18. When do you write best, morning or night?
Morning.

19. What is the best gift someone could give a writer?
The Writer’s Ultimate Gift Basket would contain books, coupons for a maid service, good quality coffee, and sincere high praise.

20. What is the best advice someone could give a writer?
“Use a pencil.” I got this advice from Nino Ricci when I said I was having trouble with plot. His suggestion to write early drafts in longhand helped me to really think about the shape of the story (instead of merely polishing the sentences I already had).