Anne Lamott has an on-line diary and someone sent me the link to this entry in which she talks about the lies told at writer’s conferences. Summarizing loses all the sweet silly sincere Anne flavor, but pretty much she says conferences tell lies to unpublished writers. The attending agents and editors only pretend to want to look at the attendees’ work. Lamott believes writers conferences are shams that set up false hopes about getting published. The truth, Anne says, is that only one percent of the writers who attend these conferences will actually BE published someday. And that, she goes on to say, is when the trouble starts. Some of the most degraded people she knows are writers who have gotten published and then only sold a few books. There’s more. Go read.
Natalie Goldberg has a new book out. I bought The Great Failure yesterday and read it all in one sitting. It’s a strange book, about the ways her father and her spiritual teacher both disappointed her. I say strange because I really didn’t know why she had to write this one. I’m glad she did, glad to read anything she writes, because her prose is so illuminating. She has a way of seeing the world and getting it down on the page that attracts me and holds me captive, even while I’m pondering the wisdom of her sharing this subject matter.
To synopsize (and don’t read this if you don’t like spoilers) Goldberg’s father didn’t respect her boundaries as a young person. She grew up always worried that he’d suddenly open a door and see her naked. He never touched her inappropriately, but he said things that made her cringe and never knocked on her door before entering. She vividly recalls having to grab towels and cover herself from his leering eyes. Years later, after her teacher died, she decided to confront her parents with this stuff and she did so by letter. She would not talk to her father on the phone, but only through the mail. This lasted for several years, and then she relented finally when it became clear that he would never apologize and in fact said he didn’t know what she was talking about. Ditto her mother. Her mother’s crimes mainly consisted of not paying attention, sort of a benign neglect.
That was part of the book, the other part was finding out her spiritual teacher, a Zen roshi, had carried on affairs with students. Natalie felt seriously betrayed by this knowledge and I think the book must be her attempt to come to terms with these betrayals by important male figures in her life. My problem with the subject is not really so much that she chose to publish these private things, but that I didn’t think the whole thing with Roshi warrented the grief she went through about it. He was human. Aren’t we all?
As for her father, well, I don’t think there was enough there for her to get so worked up about. But then, I’m not the confrontational type, and would never think of calling my parents and other family members on the horrors they inflicted on me in my younger years. Let alone write a book about it. I’m torn between admiring her courage and thinking she went totally overboard. But hey, it’s her life, her decisions. And after all, both her father and Roshi are dead, so the book can’t hurt them. Her mother and Roshi’s wife are both still alive, however. And I’m glad I read this one, because Goldberg’s writing, if not her issues, compel me like few other memorists.
Finally, these two women writers and their most recent musings have affected me and how I think about my own writing. I agree with Lamott about how writing is about the process, not publication. And I feel ready to find joy in that alone and let go of the whole “I have to be published” thing. I realized after reading Anne’s words that the biggest reason I want to be published now has nothing to do with my own desire to see my words in print. It’s more about turning this solitary, strange act into a currency my husband can understand: cash.
And having just dissed Goldberg for revealing her deep secrets, here I am telling the internet that my husband respects money more than art.