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Humiliation, Mon Amour

The woman at the counter in Barnes & Noble had silver hair in a bun and a smile like breakfast. I was with a friend, for whom I was buying a copy of my latest book. I do this often—buy my own books for friends, then wonder why I’m broke. “May I take a moment to sign it?” I asked the smiling woman. “Did you write it?” she asked. “No,” I said. “I just like signing books.” Unmoved, she asked, “Is this your first book?” I shook my head no, and continued inscribing. “It must be fun to write books,” she said. “Superfun,” I said.

On the sidewalk, my dismayed friend said, “A bookstore! At least you’d think they would know your name in a bookstore!” I told her not to be surprised. I wasn’t. I might have been surprised had I entered Barnes & Noble expecting the salespeople to drop their books like dishes, shriek my name, and rush toward me tossing confetti. But experience has taught me that hardly anyone in or out of a bookstore will know who I am, or care. I have learned to live fairly comfortably with my writer’s humiliation, and have worn it like a second skin over my original thinner one. After all, humiliations are suffered by most writers most of the time. And—to express a thought about life in the real world, for once—a writer’s humiliations are chicken feed as compared with those endured by people who work for a living and are grateful simply to make it home at night. Writers are already home.

Naturally, some stinging recollections rise out of the past from time to time, such as that evening at a book fair in Providence, Rhode Island, when I stood beneath a golden banner with my name in red lettering, misspelled. It would have bothered me less had the banner not been provided by my publisher. And that evening in Washington, DC, when I was seated at a table bearing a tall stack of my latest book while a dozen non-buyers ambled past, paused, picked a book from the stack, opened it, read a clause or two, and returned it to the stack. (Truth be told, there have been several such incidents.) And that afternoon in Miami, when I appeared for an interview specifically requested by a local radio station, and the interviewer began, “Who are you?”

Rodney Dangerfield: “Every time I get in an elevator, the operator says the same thing to me. ‘Basement?’”

Not all humiliations experienced by writers are as in-your-face as the above. A novelist friend describes summer workshops, where writers often squirm in the light of excessive adoration, as petting zoos. And there is the peculiar form of degradation offered by Q-and-A sessions after a reading. The first time I appeared at the 92nd Street Y, a man raised his hand when I had finished what I thought was a moving and sensitive presentation, to ask, “Are you related to Yossele Rosenblatt, the great Ukrainian cantor?” I said I wasn’t sure, but probably not. “Oh! Such a voice!” the man went on. I scanned the crowd, hoping for a change of topic. My book, for example. But no further questions were forthcoming. After a minute, the first man spoke up again. “You don’t look a thing like him,” he said.

The most disheartening readings usually occur in bookstores, where throngs often swell to three or four people, at least one of whom has shown up to take a nap, and another who has misread the store schedule and come to the wrong reading. In Boston, a woman approached me after the Q and A, her face tense with anguish and disappointment. “I thought you were going to be Alice McDermott,” she said. “So did I,” I said. Of course, you can always pack the house with your sister and her friends and theirs, but that sort of crookedness only exposes you to family ridicule, which is far more gleeful and long-lasting than humiliation inflicted by strangers.

But back to the sidewalk in front of Barnes & Noble, where I had evidenced such maturity and equanimity. That reaction was in fact hard-earned. It took years for me to learn not to take a writer’s neglect or ill treatment personally, and years after that to actually embrace humiliation and make some use of it. At one New York book event, I was seated at yet another table (they always place us behind tables, like prisoners on visiting days), in a cavernous room, for the hypothetical purpose of greeting and chatting with my many fans. There were none. A few feet away, however, at his own table, sat Chris Matthews, the news anchor, who had just written a book of his own and was welcoming a line of devotees that, as far as I could determine, had started out in China. Initially resentful, I refused to look over at Matthews, who extended nothing but bonhomie to me, smiling and nodding graciously. Then, slowly and meekly, I smiled back. I had realized something. By assuming the mantle as well as the burden of his fame, Matthews inadvertently was doing me a great service. I regarded him as a reverse Jesus, who lived that I might die of embarrassment, but of nothing more serious.

My awakening offered more still. It is much better for a writer to be underrecognized than over, in terms of keeping one’s head down, like the proverbial Japanese nail, so that one might observe the world unhammered and unimpeded. Abjure fame and avoid obscurity. But between those extremes lies the perch where a writer occasionally might do some good work. There’s a Jack Butler Yeats painting I love, showing a wild celebration of St. John’s Eve in western Ireland, with Yeats and J. M. Synge standing in the background, watching and looking small and out of the picture. Yet it was they who created the picture, and a good deal more. Writer, love thine enemy. That’s what I say.

I have a book coming out next year, about love. Romantic love, parental love, love of friends, of nature, of writing, of love itself. I did not include my love of humiliation, because it’s too weird. A love like that ought to be kept under wraps, lest it get too widely known and invite the slings of more humiliators than one can handle. Besides, I would hardly be the first man in the thrall of a lover who treats him like dirt. Yet I might be the least.

{ essay in The New York Times Book Review }