What Took Me So Long

I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was 10 or so, when I was a devourer of Nancy Drew mysteries – under the covers, with flashlights, long after lights out on overnights with another avid reader friend. Like Carolyn Keene did, I wanted to churn out volume after volume and be adored by readers.

I began writing short stories in college and was encouraged by a graduate student who led my discussion section for a large Russian literature survey course and reminded me of a character out of Dostoevsky. The first day of class, the graduate student, with ample, disheveled, dark hair presented as confused about how to introduce herself and declaimed at length on the source of her multiply-hyphenated name (in 1970)! A few years after graduation, I decided that the way to support my writing career was to be a journalist, à la Dickens or Dostoevsky. I did become a journalist, but the struggles of making it as a reporter relegated my writing to on-again, off-again participation in adult ed writing workshops.

In the mid-1980s, some workshop colleagues suggested a bunch of stories I’d written about my older brother, who’d run away from home, overdosed on psychedelics in Haight-Ashbury and then bounced from one mental institution to another, leant themselves to a novel. About the same time, I decided my brother was never going to be “normal” again so I wanted to capture, in writing, who he’d been before he became unhinged – the brother I admired and emulated for his overall smarts, studying Russian in high school, reading Marx and espousing socialism, being naturally athletic and playing a sweet clarinet. (He could also beat me up.) I decided the way to capture that early incarnation was to interview people who knew him in the “before” times. I did, and they all wanted to talk about how they’d seen the early indicators of his psychosis. I wrote it all up and an editor friend, sometime early in the 1990s said, “make it fiction.”

Thus ensued 25 years of trying to write my first novel. It had possibilities – an eminent figure in the publishing world, after acquiescing to reading my first chapter, asked to read the whole thing, then gave me the names of prominent agents to send it to. Sometime in the mid-2010s, I decided I didn’t know how to fix the flaws the agents encountered, and I set it aside.

I then embarked on my second novel, which all along I’d suspected should have been my first, a notion reinforced by a workshop leader who commented one day that writers often find that the second work they attempt is the one they should have done initially. That second novel is “A Wicked Grasp.”