Читать книгу Rewrite Your Life - Jessica Lourey - Страница 7

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

—Emily Dickinson

On September 13, 2001, I stood in front of my multicultural lit class assigning a response essay. The class was small, five students, all enrolled in my Technical Communication program. Because I taught all but one of their courses, we'd become a sort of tribe. I remember being excited about the assignment. I don't remember what I was wearing. I do remember I was growing my hair out and that I was worried about the pregnancy weight I was putting on and whether or not something I'd elected to call “Bonus Lunch” was doing me any favors. I remember being tired. It was a Thursday.

The door opened, and the college's office administrator stepped into my classroom. It was a first. She was unable to meet my eyes.

“Can you please come to the Dean's office?”

“Yup.” I grabbed my briefcase. I knew I wasn't coming back.

# # #

Our final conversation thirty-six hours earlier had ended exactly like this:

HIM: You're beautiful.

ME: Silence.

HIM: I love you.

ME: I don't think that means the same thing to you as it does to me.

We'd been married for twenty-four days. I was three months pregnant. We'd timed it so that I could have the summer off after the baby was born, not expecting that we'd nail it on our first try. The University of Minnesota conference I'd been driving to that morning had been unexpectedly canceled as college campuses all over the country shut down. America was under attack, we were told.

I returned home to find something I hadn't expected to find.

# # #

There were two plainclothes detectives sitting in the Dean's office. They rose when we entered. The office administrator disappeared. I was with strangers.

“Is my daughter all right?” The question was a morbid courtesy in that overexposed moment, an invitation for the detectives to deliver good news before they leveled my world. My baby girl was three, and it was naptime in the day care across the street. I knew she was fine because I would have known if she wasn't.

I also knew that my husband had killed himself.

I had known I would be here, or somewhere like here, since the fist of blackbirds had dived at my car as I'd returned from the canceled U of M conference two days earlier. It was the blackbirds' warning that had forced me online to search his history, the coldness of their black bodies blocking out the sun that had warned me my life was never going to be the same again.

But I couldn't have known.

He was not depressed. He was a successful Department of Natural Resources ecologist with a family who loved him. Tall, dark-eyed, with a contagious smile and a meticulous work ethic, he baked pies for hospice care fundraisers and coached the local youth soccer league. We were newlyweds with a baby on the way. And so I took the chair the detectives offered, and I watched their faces, and I felt every corner of me shut down except my eyes and my ears. These organs became disconnected recording devices, and so while I can recall the entire conversation, it doesn't mean any more now than it did then. Just words.

“Do you know where your husband is?”

“Um, we had a fight two days ago. He drove to his old house, the one we have on the market? I haven't heard from him since.”

They exchanged glances. Their suits were immaculate. Both men looked like what I imagined New York detectives look like, polished as stones. The detective who drew the short straw adjusted his collar. “Your husband killed himself.”

I felt the baby kick, or did I just feel kicked? “When?”

“He was found today, by a coworker. There was a murder-suicide in the same DNR office two years ago, and they were worried for you and your daughter.”

“He killed himself today?”

“He was found today.”

This was important. If he killed himself immediately after our argument, that meant I'd been thinking about a dead man, emailing a corpse, for two days. But I already knew the truth of that, too.

His ghost had visited me the first night.

# # #

Mysteries involve murder. They can also include sex, humor, and intrigue, but if it's a grown-up mystery, readers are going to expect a body, preferably in Chapter 1. I knew this. Everybody knows this. Mysteries are also formulaic, another widely accepted belief.

What I didn't realize until my husband's suicide was that mysteries are also, at their simplest, about plumbing human motivation and creating closure. I found myself suddenly, urgently, needing both. A friend had lent me a Sue Grafton alphabet mystery a couple years earlier. I read it, and then I went to the library and checked out more. After I devoured all of them, I turned to Tony Hillerman. Then Janet Evanovich. William Kent Krueger. I was greedy, always a fast reader, stuffing one into my head, then another, and another.

Each novel pulled dark secrets into the light.

Each story ended with The Answers.

# # #

The United States is a pop psychology culture. We know the five stages of grief and that alcoholism is a disease, that communication is key, that men are from Mars and women from Venus. Here are things, however, that they don't tell you about suicide:

1 If you hear your husband's final words, and they come after he has made up his mind to end his life, you will forever be able to replay them in your head in Dolby surround sound. This is because there is an audible click that happens when a living man begins to speak as a dead man, and a dead man's voice is terrifying.

2 The police officer working the case will mean well, but he still has to ask you if you want to take home the gun your husband shot himself with. If the officer is also new to the force, he may wonder aloud, with a mixture of awe and revulsion, how a person could choose a muzzle-loading rifle to do the deed. Finally, if he is both new to the force and young, he may hand you your husband's glasses without noticing that they have tiny fragments of gray and red matter on them.

3 The phlebotomist taking your blood may not consider what brought you into her lab or guess that after six agonizing weeks, you've finally decided to remove your wedding ring. She will only see a pregnant, single woman getting an HIV test, and you will disgust her.

4 Trying to get a handle on grief without answers is like trying to snap a photograph of the whole world while you're standing on it.

# # #

Three months after Jay shot himself, I was heading to the basement to do laundry. I stepped off the bottom step into a puddle of dog pee, slipped, and landed on my back without any mediating flailing, just smack, ridiculously pregnant lady flat on the linoleum-covered cement, soaking up cold urine and staring at the ceiling. Maybe my head hit first because I couldn't decide what to do next. In fact, I remember feeling profoundly relaxed, removed from everything, just right, oh, yes, I could stay here forever.

Zoë skipped out of her playroom. Using a beautiful logic unique to three-year-olds (Mommy is playing lay down!), she was delighted rather than alarmed to find me sprawled out. She plopped down cross-legged near my head and wiggled her body underneath me. Now the dog pee was dripping from my hair onto her lap.

“We'll be okay, Mommy.”

I'm not sure to this day what she meant by that. Probably she was only repeating what I said to her daily as a sort of prophylactic wish. She began to pet my head like I did for her when she was sick. As she stroked my pee hair, she hummed a song, equal parts “Happy Birthday” and “Frère Jacques.” The dog padded downstairs and curled next to me.

The three of us stayed like that until I remembered how to move.

We'll be okay, Mommy.

# # #

I'd read twenty mysteries before I finally decided to write one. My belly was swollen. I could go an hour at a time without thinking of him. My brain and heart were starved. I lived at the end of a lonely country road that the plows visited last, and I saw how people were looking at me.

Pregnant. Husband killed himself. Out there alone with a three-year-old, forty miles from the nearest hospital.

People wanted to help. They worried about me. I still carry that with me, all their worry, all the pain they tried to haul for me so I wouldn't have to heft it alone. Not just my friends and family, but strangers reached out to hold me up, and they didn't stop even after the funeral. Grief is selfish, though, and so I could only watch and keep turning inward.

Writing a novel saved me.

# # #

Here's how May Day, the first mystery I wrote, begins:

I tried not to dwell on the fact that the only decent man in town had stood me up. Actually, he may have been the only literate, single man in a seventy-mile radius who was attracted to me and attractive. The warm buzz that was still between my legs tried to convince the dull murmur in my head that it was just a misunderstanding. To distract myself from thoughts of Jeff's laugh, mouth, and hands, I downed a couple aspirin for my potato chip hangover and began the one job I truly enjoyed at the library: putting away the books.

I glanced at the spines of the hardcovers in my hands and strolled over to the Pl-Sca aisle, thinking the only thing I really didn't like about the job was picking magazine inserts off the floor. Certainly the reader saw them fall, but without fail, gravity was too intense to allow retrieval except by a trained library staff member. I bet I found three a day. But as I teetered down the carpeted aisle in my flowered heels, I discovered a new thing not to like: there was a guy lying on the tight-weave Berber with his legs lockstep straight, his arms crossed over his chest, and a reference book opened on his face. He was wearing a familiar blue-checked shirt, and if he was who I thought he was, I knew him intimately. A sour citrus taste rose at the back of my throat. Alone, the library aisle wasn't strange; alone, the man wasn't strange. Together, they made my heart slam through my knees. I prodded his crossed legs with my foot and felt no warmth and no give.

My eyes scoured the library in a calm panic, and I was aware of my neck creaking on its hinges. I could smell only books and stillness, tinged with a faint coppery odor. Everything was in order except the dead man laid out neatly on the carpeting, wearing the same flannel I had seen him in two days earlier. I wondered chaotically if dead people could lie, if they still got to use verbs after they were gone, and if maybe this was the best excuse ever for missing a date. Then I had a full-body ice wash, five years all over again, a nightmare pinning me to my bed as I silently mouthed the word “mom.”

Had proximity to me killed him?

# # #

Six months after Jay's suicide, I called my mom and asked if she'd stay overnight at my house. She had driven the two hours one way to sleep over every Monday since his death, but this was a Thursday. My dad visited when I asked, was over regularly to repaint walls and fix leaks, but he preferred his own bed and had never slept in my house. He asked if he could come with mom that day, though. I said sure, I needed him to help carry some wood for the woodstove.

My water broke that night, with my parents sleeping upstairs in the spare bedroom and my daughter tucked safely in her room. I wasn't yet having contractions, but I rang the hospital to let them know that I'd be arriving soon. I'd called the hospital at least three times before to make advance arrangements for my daughter's birth and then my son's. Each time, different people, always female, answered the same impersonal way: “Douglas County Hospital, how may I direct your call?”

This time, the person on the other end of the line was a man. “This is Jay. How can I help you?”

Jay. My husband's name. I gripped the phone.

“Hello? Is someone there?”

“I'm having a baby.” It came out a whisper.

“Fantastic!” He sounded so excited that I surprised myself by smiling. “Has your water broken?”

“Just now.”

“First baby?”

“Second.”

“Why don't you come in now? We'll take care of you.”

My dad stayed with my daughter so she could sleep through the night. My mom drove me to Alexandria, steering her Ford Taurus between a moonscape of snowdrifts and the kind of cold that freezes the wet of your eyes. When we arrived, Jay took care of everything, just as he'd promised. My son, Xander, was born healthy and looking exactly like his dad. I had planned a big-sister party at the hospital, so Zoë arrived to balloons, presents, and cake, all for her. She surveyed the bounty and declared that having a little brother wasn't half bad.

# # #

I've never written about the facts of my husband's suicide before the words that you just read, but if you know my story, you can find it in every novel I write. My anxieties work themselves out in each book. I still hear his voice, I still fear the betrayal and loss that are around every corner, but I get to write the story, and at the end, the mystery is always solved. This is a slant way to deal with loss, but it's the only way I can do it. Only fiction offers me the truth.

What I have come to call “rewriting my life” didn't provide a clear, straight path from trauma to vibrant mental health and a two-book publishing contract. I was no pretty flower busting out of the crack in the pavement against all odds. The process was and continues to be a messy, three-steps-forward, two-and-a-half-steps-back kind of deal. But Jay's suicide put me at a crossroads where I could choose one of two life paths, drinking or writing, and I chose writing, thank god. Turns out rewriting your life works better than gin, which can only offer you empty calories and a holy calling to watch the entire season of Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska. (I researched it so you don't have to.) Crafting a novel, on the other hand, spins your pain, shame, and joy into gold, emotionally and literally.

I know you either are playing with the idea of writing a novel, or have already written one and want to take your fiction writing to the next level; otherwise, you wouldn't be reading this book. You're in good company. According to a study conducted by the Jenkins Group, 81 percent of Americans believe they have a book in them, and 27 percent of those want that book to be fiction. That's over seventy million people who want to write a great novel but aren't sure how. Rewrite Your Life walks you through the process of transforming what you know—your life experiences—into a powerful work of fiction, and subsequently transforming yourself.

I do have a request, though. As you read Rewrite Your Life, please don't equate the process of turning your life challenges into a novel with trying out for the Trauma Olympics. You don't win the gold the more pain you've experienced, though I think we all sometimes secretly believe that.

Pain is pain. Bad is bad; good is better.

Seriously, sometimes I'm sad or angry for no discernible reason. It counts.

If you still believe you need a pass to enter the writing club, I offer you this: transgenerational epigenetics strongly suggests that a sense of trauma can be passed down to you from your ancestors up to four generations back. That means if Great-Grandma Esther had a rough time of it, you can feel emotionally sapped even if your life is relatively good.

Besides, we all have different definitions of a “challenging experience.” The point is to learn how to recycle your facts into fiction so you can experience the personal transformation that comes with rewriting your life. The novel you will craft will function as both your lighthouse and the Viking funeral boat upon which you get to burn your garbage once and for all.

An added bonus? At the end of this adventure, you will have a powerful novel inspired by your life, cooked of the same ingredients but wholly different.

By the way, while the instructions in this book work equally well for short stories, I consistently use the term “novel,” because writing short stories has always reminded me of carving Mona Lisa on a grain of rice. If short stories speak to you more kindly than they do me, simply replace “novel” with “short story” in everything you read from this point forward. Rewrite Your Life offers you a road map for using your own life experiences, however fresh or ancient, deep or temporary, painful or proud they are, to craft a lush, powerful piece of fiction, regardless of that fiction's length.

One more thing. You don't need to be a gifted writer to rewrite your life. If you have something to write with or on, you're golden. I guarantee you're going to surprise yourself with what you create, on paper, inside yourself, and in the world.

So come on. Pack what you need. We're in this together.