My grandmother and I used to talk every Saturday. She lived on her own, in her own house until she was 94 years old. She was a feisty old broad, and the impetus for my book.
We would often talk about books, but our tastes were different, so I would sometimes buy a cozy mystery just so I could send it to her and we could discuss it. She lived during the Great Depression and thought it wasteful if a book wasn’t passed around. I sent her Harry Potter, thinking maybe something about that would catch her interest, but found out she passed it along to my cousin. I sent her a well-worn and well-loved copy of Love in the Time of Cholera but the time for that type of reading was past. Her eyes were going after a couple of strokes, she was losing the center vision although she could read the periphery if the print wasn’t too small. I couldn’t imagine a fate such as that for a reader like her and sent her a magnifying glass. She turned her interest to another of her loves, old movies.
As her memory was going, and our mode of communication, that of books, dwindling I started an idea for a book, one that I had, one that had something. I started to write. One Saturday, shortly before she was moved to a nursing home, I told her I was writing a book. I waited for something, a faint encouragement, a belief that she knew I could do it all along. I’m uncertain what family I thought I belonged to, but thinking back on that is comical. My family is a family who loves each other and has no way to communicate. We communicate with humor and sarcasm and it’s usually at your expense so from a very young age you learn how to take it, and how not to put yourself out there for the taking. We talk around things, nothing is ever direct, and you look elsewhere for support, for encouragement, for that type of thing. I never knew other families were different than mine, but that’s another story.
I told her about the book and she said, “Huh.”
“What?”
“I didn’t know you wrote.” There was silence on my end. She wasn’t trying to be hurtful, just honest, from a family of people who never tried to be hurtful.
“Well sure.”
“Well good for you then.”
“What?” I said, knowing better than to push an honest person who is pausing to be polite. When someone in my family pauses, it’s best to let it drop.
“It’s just that writers, people I think of as writers don’t just start writing. They have to write. They’ve always written. They can’t not write.”
“Well, we’ll see. It’s just something I’m playing around with.”
I don’t think people should take themselves seriously, just the writing. And in one fell swoop, I had taken the one thing that I had always protected and kept from my family, and downplayed it because it hurt too much to try and take it seriously.
I had always wanted to get back to that conversation, but she wasn’t long in the nursing home, and really what else was there to say? I still think about that though, quite a bit, the idea that if you are to write, you do it because you have to, the idea of the obsessive compulsive writer.
What say you, is it something you do because you have to? Or is it something that drives you quietly, that you work really hard to try and get right failing all the while?
I miss her.
I understand this. I was an actor for most of my life. When people asked me what I did for a living I would tell them, “I’m a waitress.” I didn’t feel pride in what I did because I wasn’t making a living at it. It used to drive my husband mad.
I write because it makes me feel good, because it helps me to sort out my feelings, because it beats beating others up, because it’s hard and I like hard, because sometimes it feels like the way I see the world helps others to see theirs, and because it’s the first thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning but mostly I write because I want to be heard.
“Because it’s hard and I like hard”. That’s it exactly.
I love that it made your husband angry. Our partners can be so much better to us than we are to ourselves.
Just popped back to the beginning of Lyra’s blog to see if she mentions what her book is about.
I can’t imagine talking about writing with anyone in my extended family, or even my friends and acquaintances.
I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, when I write, my brain functions differently than it does when I am talking, listening, reading, driving, or even just staring slack-jawed into space. Something about clicking the keyboard forces me to move beyond mere coherence* and actually concentrate on whatever it is that I’m trying to say.
The next question that I would ask myself, if I were here, is why do I feel the need to say anything at all?
Hmmm…. That’s kind of a personal question, don’t-cha think?
* Sadly, as this comment of mine illustrates, my writing efforts frequently fail to get me very far beyond my stated destination. Oh well, mustn’t grumble.
No, no mention of the book. I wrote a post alluding to why, check the archives for one about a Blimp.
Why the need to say anything at all…maybe because you want to? Maybe you need to? Maybe because what you have to say is worth value, just not the value we’ve been conditioned to believe in.
It has value. Now, write it.
Lyra, are you one of my long lost cousins? My family also talks around things, the underlying vibe being that it’s better to side-swipe than to hit each other head-on. We are one hurtful bunch.
As to your question, I didn’t start writing until I was in my 30′s. That’s not to say my mind wasn’t ‘writing’ all along. It was. I think in story form. I just never felt like I could write anything worth reading, never figured anyone would take me (it) seriously.
“Better to side-swipe…”, I think we must be related. The good side it hones your humor, the bad side…well, I probably don’t need to tell you. There are many.
I still do this. I make excuses when someone asks me what I do. I hem and haw and come up with clever ditties like “When I’m getting paid, I’m an event planner, but when I’m broke, I’m a writer.” Saying the words “I’m a writer” are so painful to me, like saying “I love myself”, a risible statement – just opening the door for someone to mock me. My ego is pretty fragile when it comes to writing and I find that the only remedy is to shine a light on it and stare at the fear, eye to eye, until it blinks.
Love your name, by the way. My youngest daughter is named Lyra but we pronounce it like Lyra in the Philip Pullman books.
It’s the clever that eats us away isn’t it? To say it before someone else has the clever backhanded remark. How old does one have to be to just stop doing that…I’ll get back to you when I figure it out.
I believe in the books, Lyra is pronounced like the harp, yes? Lie-ra?
I was named after my grandmother, Leara, and my parents threw the Y in, so that for the rest of my life I’d say, “like Italian money”, “like the jet”, “like the King”. Sad how many people just don’t get the King Lear reference.