Yes, the book is finally done. Well, “done,” anyway. The manuscript is a whole manuscript. Twelve (ack) chapters, 370 pages double-spaced. Four years. (?!) It still needs a little tweaking based on what my seven highly trusted first-readers have said, and I have to finish the source approvals and fact-checking, and have it lawyered, and, uh, get it published.
But all of that feels downhill from here. Because unlike a normal book manuscript, this one was actively battling me. Now I know I have won. I no longer have to say to my friends, “Either I will finish this book, or it will finish me.”
Ironically, although this book is at its core a vigorous defense of modernism—it is practically a gospel of modernism—in the last two or three years, the project turned into a distinctly postmodern experience: the text started to write me. I now think that was probably inevitable given the task as I laid it out for myself, but I have to say, it was a really disorienting experience. I didn’t especially enjoy living so many days when my friends would ask me whether what happened on the day before was going into the book. (As if it were up to me.)
I think it is because I no longer face that question that I feel really liberated. When I arrived at the office at about the point of being finished, our program admin took one look at me and said, “You look great!” The lines had lifted from my face. Or at least I was smiling one of those dumb-happy smiles. As with the moment just after passing my grad school qualifying exams when I realized I would never again have to take a test, I feel fairly certain right now that I will never again have to live a book I’m writing. I am certain I will write first-person work again (like now, for instance), but I am equally certain I will never again try to write a meta-book about the work I’m doing while I’m doing the work. At least not while raising a child, too.
When I realized, on Wednesday, February 15, that I really would be done with it by about the next day, I sent a note to a bunch of my friends asking them to join me for an impromptu “the damned book is done” party two days later. Delightfully, nearly all came. I spent the whole day that Friday just shopping and cooking and cleaning, and somehow by 6 pm, when the party was due to start, I had everything pretty much ready. And as I had promised in the invitation, I was completely blotto by about 7 pm. I can’t actually remember how much I drank, but I do remember at one point having a glass of champaign from Elias in my left hand and a Pimm’s-based cocktail from Ruth in my right. I also remember slapping Nigel around while jumping up and down in excitement. (Sorry, Nigel.)
By 9 pm, I was dead asleep in my bed. The mate kept the party going without me, and then stayed up late to clean up. (What a guy.) I woke back up around 1 a.m. with a dreadful buzz to find him just finishing up. He told me I’d missed our friend Kevin showing up just late enough to discover that the hostess had gone to bed. (He’d brought me a beautiful bouquet of tulips, too.)
The next morning, our eleven-year-old son said, “So this is what a hangover looks like.” It was the first hangover he’d seen I guess, and it was a misleading one: he must now think people smile all the way through hangovers.
Of course, the life that is the book didn’t actually end on Wednesday, February 15, 2012. Wouldn’t you know it, the very next day, i.e., the day before the party, I figured out something that then had to be added to the book. Forgive me for not going into it here, but it would take too long to explain. Basically it involves a crushing moment at the end of Chapter 10, a moment I had thought had had its basis in an unfortunate coincidence. But then I figured out, from FOIA and time-lining and such, that it wasn’t a coincidence after all. It was a collusion—probably an innocent one where certain people were concerned, but I suspect a purposeful collusion where others were. In any case, suddenly a whole part of the story made sense where it hadn’t really made sense before. So on the day between the party invitation and the party, I hastily added a discussion of that to the conclusion (Chapter 12).
And then at the party, I told people who would know what I was talking about what I had found, and they were as amazed as me. One of them said, “How is it you stumble on these things?!” and in my drunken state I said, “I know, I’m like a fuckin’ Nancy Drew falling over the bodies!”
The next day, I asked the mate to explain it to me: why do I keep stumbling over bodies?
He answered me roughly this: “You run in fields where most people are not historians. So in those areas, you have a tremendous advantage, simply because you are thinking in a way they are not. As an historian, you’re thinking in terms of actors and dates and very specific details. You’re trying to figure out the story very precisely. And when you’re hanging out with physicians or philosophers or anthropologists who simply aren’t thinking the way you historians think, you find inevitably stuff they have not found and will not ever find without an historian.” He said it’s like how the public health epidemiologist will find what the separated local doctors cannot, just by virtue of a different methodology.
Makes sense. (And makes me love history even more.)
He added, “You’ve also always had a nose for the hot topics, and you don’t just write a short piece on them and move on. You obsess and obsess and spend a year at a time on projects other people might give a month to, because where other people might be scared off, you kind of like the heat. Or they just don’t want to stick with a project as long as you like to stick.”
Thanks to this conversation, and the hangover that robbed me of decent sleep for a second night, I ended up having one of my Terribly Transparent Dreams that night. I dreamed that I realized I had a superpower, and it was such a totally stupid one: I had super grip in my right hand (my writing hand).
In the dream, I was thinking, “This is so useless—all I can do is take a rock and crush it into dust. I can’t even climb well with this, because I have only unilateral super grip.” There were people around me who could jump a hundred feet and people who could fly. I wanted that kind of superpower. I had this sense of being a bit of a joke.
It was of course a joke, that dream; I laughed at it when I woke up. And all my friends to whom I have told this dream (namely the ones who would get why this “superpower” was funny) have laughed, too. But one—an historically-inclined philosopher—also said, “Yes, that’s history—unilateral super grip.” A limited, but quite special, ability.
People have asked me to show them the table of contents of the manuscript, but as the titles are poetic rather than descriptive, the table of contents would tell them nothing, except maybe that some chapters are longer than others. I am tempted instead to tell them which song underlay which chapter.
Sometimes I didn’t realize until after a chapter was done which song had been that chapter’s, but sometimes I knew a chapter’s theme song as I was writing it. Chapter 11 is even titled the name of its theme song. I had a playlist made up of 12 copies of only that song, which I played nonstop for 3 days while I let my muse Pixie birth that chapter’s pages. (She sometimes insists on obsessive behavioral adherence that way. It gets so boring, but her rituals of attachment do work.)
A writer for The Atlantic asked me ten questions on my work just as I was struggling with Chapter 8. In the email interview, she asked me a question that I take is standard for her “10 questions” column: what song is stuck in your head? I told her: Ingrid Michaelson’s “So Long.” I took the lyrics as me singing to my book:
You’ve made me into someone
who should not hold a loaded gun
and now you sit upon my chest
knock out my wind
knock out my best.
So, so long to no disasters
and mornings, too
and so long to ever-afters
so long to you.
I am soft for only you.
Impale me with your tongue its true.
And slices of me piled sky high
the same old me to the naked eye.
But I can’t find myself tonight.
So, so long to no disasters
and mornings, too
and so long to ever-afters
so long to you.
Not so easy “so long”; Chapter 8 turned out to be a chapter that broke all records, ultimately going through 53 versions, even causing a marital editing spat. It’s the chapter that makes the pivot in the book, so it was really, really tricky. Eventually I conquered it because I specifically realized that, in spite of “So Long,” I couldn’t say good-bye to the book (yet), and instead needed to say hello. And that’s what the chapter finally did: said a direct “hello” to the book, and let it drive me on longer than (until then) I’d been willing to be driven.
Just a week or so ago, one of my very good friends sent me the song for Chapter 10 after she read it. It’s exactly Chapter 10’s song. It’s a heavy metal remake of a rock tune, with my dear friend on the guitar ripping into the melody amazingly. What’s really astonishing is that this version of the song was made specifically in response to her reading the manuscript; she told me that right after she had been hit with the content of 10—hit so hard with 10—she specifically called the band together and told them she needed to record this. Then she sent it to me. She got the song just so damned right—so damned right that I rather feel as if she had actually managed to record the theme song for the whole book.
Maybe after the book is out, I can put that up. And people who know how writing text is writing music will understand.
For now, I find myself grateful to the book, although vastly more grateful to the people who have seen me through it. I can’t begin to explain all the things they have taught me, sometimes simply by hanging on, by continuing to live, to see clearly, to make old and new mistakes. Stupid shit continues to happen around me. In terms of what I could document along the themes of the book, the book could go on forever. But instead of feeling like I have to record it all, the book has given me the big picture. And so I no longer feel like every little thing must be attended to. I no longer feel like the book is writing me. Sometimes it makes sense to just attend to the whole.
So I’ve been painting little g-scale buildings, to go in our garden train set-up this summer. And feeling grateful at the end of this long shitstorm to find so much love written down in my heart. I don’t mind anymore.