The Writing Life Page 4

  I lived in a world where alcohol was served at every meeting and function and anyone over sixteen was allowed, even expected, to drink.

  I always got drunk if I had anything to drink. From the first whiskey I was given, on a New Year’s Eve by the junior high school basketball coach, to the last terrible night when I fell down a flight of stairs and had a brain concussion, if I drank alcohol I ended up drunk.

  During those twenty-four years I tried to quit but I didn’t know how because I didn’t understand what was wrong with me and my guilt over my behavior was so severe I couldn’t bear to face what little information I had.

  I remember seeing an article in a woman’s magazine called “How to Tell if You Are an Alcoholic.” The article was advertised on the cover and I bought the magazine and ran home to read the article. It was a test. There were ten questions and if you answered yes to more than six you were an alcoholic. I think I answered yes to most of them. I hid the magazine but I couldn’t stop thinking about the questions.

  I was two people when I was a drunk. On the outside I was energetic, bright, optimistic, attractive. On the inside I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I couldn’t understand why everything I did turned to dust, why my marriages didn’t last, why I couldn’t achieve my goals, why years were going by and my talents were being wasted. My grandfather said he would rather a child of his be dead than be a drunk. Many times I wanted to be dead during the years when I was a drunk. I could not understand why it kept happening. Why time after time I would set out to have two drinks and end up sleeping God knows where, having lost my car keys, my shoes, my sanity, my health.

  My strong constitution and good immune system were my enemies during those years. So was Dexedrine after a physician prescribed it for me during a pregnancy, a common practice during the 1950s. It became harder and harder to obtain as the years went by but I could occasionally get a physician to give me a prescription for a few of them. If I had a hangover I could take two aspirins and a Dexedrine and be as good as new by afternoon.

  I did not know what was wrong with me. I did not know that I was an alcoholic. I did not know that what I was doing confused and harmed my children and set them a terrible example.

  I thought it was lack of WILL POWER that made me get drunk. I thought it was a CHARACTER FLAW. I knew nothing about blood sugar or insulin or how alcohol makes a person drunk. I didn’t know what alcohol is. It is highly concentrated sugar. Like all sugar it is highly addictive. Alcohol destroys the brain’s ability to have pleasure in other things. It is like swallowing razor blades. It is like battery acid. It turns into formaldehyde and formic acid in the brain. Formic acid is the stuff of bee stings.

  Finally, when I was in my late thirties, I was saved from my addiction. I was saved by knowledge and information and by the help of two great psychiatrists, a behaviorist and a psychotherapist.

  It was the turning point in my life. I was living in New Orleans at the time, across the street from Tulane University. On the morning that the good, sober, happy part of my life began I was out running on the Tulane track with my best friend. It was a lovely spring morning, cool for New Orleans, and perfect for running, but I was in a bad mood and feeling guilty. The night before I had barged into my friend’s house while she was having a date with a gorgeous French rugby player. I had been drunk when I arrived and after I got there I got drunker.

  I don’t know why she even came out to the track to meet me the next morning but she did. After we had run about three laps she brought it up. “I don’t want you to come over anymore when you’re drinking,” she said.

  “I know,” I answered. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Maybe you need to see a psychiatrist,” she suggested. “Diana is seeing one who got her to stop.” Diana was a beautiful friend who had been queen of Mardi Gras. Queen of Rex. A very big deal in New Orleans.

  “Maybe I will,” I answered. “What’s his name?”

  “His name is Chet Scrignar,” she answered. “He’s a behaviorist. Diana’s crazy about him. She says he’s really helped her.”

  I went home from the track and looked up the phone number and called it. I had not let the thought of a psychiatrist enter my mind since an experience I had five years before. A doctor in Jackson, Mississippi, had given me Antabuse without explaining clearly its dangers. I drank while taking it and almost died from the reaction. But the incident at my friend’s house with the French rugby player was really bad. It was the last straw in a series of drunken embarrassments. I had to do something and I knew it.

  Dr. Scrignar answered the phone himself. He was very nice and I felt better just making an appointment with him. I may even have told him about my prior experience with Antabuse. Anyway, I made an appointment for the next afternoon.

  Dr. Scrignar was a behaviorist who had once been a psychotherapist but had quit because he couldn’t stand the slowness of the “talking cure.” He had been a track star at a midwestern college and gone to medical school to become a surgeon. When he lost his sight due to a detached retina he went into psychotherapy but it was not a good fit for his personality so he switched to behaviorism.

  He was great with addictions. He attacked the problem of my drinking with every tool in his kit. He put me on Antabuse, he hypnotized me, he bribed me with occasional small prescriptions for Dexedrine, he begged me, he charmed me, he took me for walks on cobblestones to show me how he had overcome his blindness, he marched me down to the Tulane University School of Medicine and made me look at slides of diseased livers. Most of all he taught me that alcoholism is a disease. He taught me about blood sugar and insulin and why I couldn’t stop once I started drinking.

  Every culture has made intoxicating drinks and developed complicated and sometimes beautiful rituals for imbibing them. Every culture has had its victims of these rituals.

  I am one of those victims because I am hypersensitive to sugar. When I eat sugar in any form, before we even get to the highly concentrated sugar that is alcohol, my blood sugar levels rise dramatically and insulin has to rush in and get rid of the sugar. My insulin is so good at this that it gets rid of all the sugar in my blood and I am savagely hungry for more of the source of the sugar. Plus all the craziness that goes on in my brain when I drink. A few times since I quit drinking I have tried to have one glass of wine to see if I can. I can usually have one glass of wine that night but within the next few days I will try it again and that time I will get drunk. This scares me absolutely to death and I either take Antabuse for a week or two or sit in zazen for hours or go back into psychotherapy.

  The effect that alcohol has on me is dramatic. Perhaps I am the canary in the coal mine. But all alcoholics share the sugar sensitive tendency that I have described. If you have ever gotten drunk when you didn’t want to you are an alcoholic and you need to seek counseling and learn about the chemistry of addiction.

  There is a rush of pleasure when the effects of alcohol first reach the brain, a silly dizzying pleasure as the higher reasoning powers let go and the superego disappears. I love that feeling and I have found a lot of ways to reproduce it in a sober life. You don’t get the instantaneous rush of joy but you don’t end up with a hangover, depression, and guilt either.

  Once when I was drinking I went down to Ochsner’s Clinic and had a terrible six-hour operation to undo a tubal ligation because I had told my husband that the reason I drank was that I wanted to have a child for him. After I said it I had to prove it by having this terrible, unsuccessful surgery.

  Once I went down to the French Quarter in New Orleans and tried to get the whores in a whorehouse to come home and live in our house and stop being whores.

  I should make a list of things I did when I was drinking that no one would believe anyone would do, much less a nice girl from a nice family who had been educated in good schools and raised by sober parents.

  The things you don’t know can kill you. I can write this because I know I am a well-meaning person. I
was doing the best I could given the information I had at the time. Thank God my best friend was strong enough to tell me I had to quit. Thank God I listened to her.

  It was spring when I began to work with Dr. Scrignar. I had to learn many things and unlearn many others. At first I kept on going to the endless round of parties that are the life of uptown New Orleans society. Finally I stopped going to the parties. I was finding other things to do. I began running six miles every morning in Audubon Park, I played tennis, I sat in zazen, I practiced yoga. I read and read and read. I began to write seriously for the first time in seven years.

  I was waking up. I was freeing myself from the burden of guilt that people who drink too much carry with them all the time.

  I kept on working with Chet Scrignar for several years. After that I went into psychotherapy with a Freudian who helped me understand the psychological causes of my addiction. This work freed me to become a real writer, with the strength to face the truth and to write freely and truly about the world I saw around me.

  I am one of the lucky ones. I got help and I got well. “Thank God for Chet Scrignar and what he did for you,” my Freudian said to me many times. Amen to that.

  SEPTEMBER 2002

  Part Two: Writing

  How I Wrote a Book of Short Stories in Three Months

  I WROTE MOST OF THEM in three months. I wrote the first two stories laboriously over a period of six or seven months.

  The book is called In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. It is one hundred and sixty-seven pages long. It has been published three times and is still in print. It has sold six or seven hundred thousand copies and is the bedrock of my reputation as a short-story writer.

  The opening lines of the book are: “Tom and Letty Wilson were rich in everything. They were rich in friends because Tom was a vice-president of the Whitney Bank of New Orleans and liked doing business with his friends, and because Letty was vice-president of the Junior League of New Orleans and had her picture in the paper every year at the Symphony ball.

  “The Wilsons were rich in knowing exactly who they were because every year from Epiphany to Fat Tuesday they flew the beautiful green and gold and purple flag outside their house that meant that Letty had been queen of Mardi Gras the year she was a debutante. Not that Letty was foolish enough to take the flag seriously …”

  The book ends with these lines: “Later, the ladies went into the house to make a cold supper for anyone who felt like eating and Matille walked down to the bayou and stood for a long time staring down into the water, feeling strangely elated, as though this were some marvelous joke Shelby had dreamed up.

  “She stared down into the tree roots, deep down into the muddy water, down to the place where Shelby’s pearl waited, grew and moved inside the soft, watery flesh of its mother, luminous and perfect and alive, as cold as the moon in the winter sky.”

  In between those two quotations are one hundred and sixty-seven pages of the best writing I have ever done, before or since. The muse was with me all the time while I wrote In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. I had been writing poetry, seriously and constantly, for six years. I had published a lot of it and I had learned how to polish and edit poetry until it shone like a mirror. Now I turned those skills to the task of writing short fiction.

  A teacher at the university where I now teach taught me how to write a short story. I took his class for two months while I wrote the first story in In the Land of Dreamy Dreams. Then I went home to New Orleans and wrote the rest of the book. I wrote it in a fever. Writing short fiction seemed “as easy as walking down a tree-lined street” compared to writing poetry. All my poetic skills were still very sharp, I suppose, but it was more than that. I was in one of the spells that artists all know can happen. I knew what I wanted to write about and I just sat down and wrote it.

  As I finished the stories I would mail them one by one to Bill Harrison, the teacher who had helped me, and he generously read them and made suggestions. Sometime in the fall he called and told me he wanted to send the book to his agent, but I said, no, I didn’t want any strangers in New York City judging my work. “Then let me give it to Miller Williams,” he suggested. “He is the editor of the new University of Arkansas Press. He’s looking for a book of fiction to be the lead piece for the press.”

  “All right,” I said. “I know and trust Miller. I’ll send you a manuscript and you can show it to him.”

  I mailed off all the stories I had finished and forgot about it.

  Four days before Christmas I was standing in my kitchen with my newly pregnant daughter-in-law and my woman divorce lawyer and Bill called to say Miller wanted very much to publish my book of stories.

  Nine months later the baby was born and the book was published. It sold ten thousand copies the first week, a really unusual thing for a book published by a university press. They printed it six or seven times. The Washington Post gave it a rave review which came out on the day I was doing my first book signing for the book. The party was at Hays and Sanders Bookshop, owned by two of my friends, a poet and a man who is now my colleague in the writing program.

  Someone brought the review to the party and showed it to everyone.

  I had become a successful, lauded writer. I can’t remember much about those years, except the excitement and joy of having fulfilled my childhood dream of becoming a writer, of being part of the world of books.

  I am still in awe of those fortunate events, and still love and cherish all the people who helped me along the way.

  A month later an agent in New York City named Don Congdon called and asked to represent me. He said an editor at Little, Brown wanted to give me a contract to write a novel and another book of short stories. He said several editors wanted to give me contracts for books but that the most eager one was Roger Donald. “Sure,” I said. “I’d love an agent and I’d really like to have a contract and some money.”

  A few weeks later I flew to New York and met both Don Congdon and Roger Donald. Now I was not only a writer, I was a writer with money and a contract for a book.

  I didn’t believe much of this. I just liked the excitement and I liked having new friends. Don Congdon is still my agent and Roger Donald was my editor until he retired. Even after he retired he edited two of my books. I’m a small-town girl. I don’t table-hop where my life and friendships are concerned.

  What else? A really, really good time was had by all.

  FEBRUARY 2002

  Living in New York City

  “MY ONLY ADVANTAGE as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” Every time I have been interviewed I have thought about that quotation from Joan Didion. I did not always think of it immediately and several times I didn’t think of it in time to save myself from being misquoted and misunderstood but always in the end I remembered it and drew back from the spin and prevarication that constitutes public discourse in this era of our discontent.

  You can’t tell reporters anything because they will pick out part of it and use it to tell the story they have decided to tell. They are always looking for their story.

  In the 1980s I became quasi-famous in the United States and it was the strangest and most annoying thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I had set out to be a poet; my ambition was to write one poem that would stay in the canon for a hundred years and give hope and joy to people when I was dead. Then I started writing fiction and people started paying me for doing it and then I made the mistake of agreeing to be on National Public Radio once a week and bare my soul to the left wing of the American public. This was strange enough since I have always been a conservative, except for the times when I knew a candidate well and worked for him because I wanted to say I knew a governor or a senator or the president of the United States. My main thought after those campaigns
were over was that I wished I had my money back.

  But I was going to tell you about how I sold out in New York City and agreed to let Newsweek and People magazine interview me. I had won the National Book Award for Fiction the week before and was going around telling myself I was exceptional and trying to pretend to be an award-winning author. I wasn’t sure whether to call myself an author or a writer. I had set out to call myself a poet and didn’t know what to do with my new calling and status.

  I was living in New York City for the winter, in an overstuffed apartment I had sublet from a wealthy, aging couple from Mississippi I had been introduced to by an actress from Jackson, Mississippi. The apartment was on Second Street between Madison and Park avenues and had a doorman, so I felt like I could sleep safely, but it was filled to the brink with antique furniture and silver and china and old, dusty paintings. It was cleaned twice a week by an aging Scot who had been using the same pile of dust cloths for at least ten years and whose idea of mopping the floors was to add some oil to the dust mop and shine them up.

  I fired her after the second visit and moved half of the furniture into the spare bedroom and tried to clear a place where I could work. I got out the ancient vacuum sweeper and used it for several hours until it broke. I hauled it down the street and left it to be repaired at a shop whose name I found on a list in an address book. Then I bought a new vacuum sweeper, hauled it into the apartment and began to clean. I took down the old dusty paintings and put them in the room with the furniture. I stuck posters from the Van Gogh exhibition on the walls with pushpins and decided I could live until spring if only I could get rid of the closet full of dust cloths and oily floor mops. I can’t remember whether I threw them away and replaced them with new ones or not. I know when the owners returned they complained that some of their things were missing, and since, besides the vacuum sweeper, I didn’t get rid of anything else I suppose I did throw them away.