In praise of not being published young
With special guests cacao nibs, the Greeks (modern, not ancient), and Yogi Berra
I’m the kind of person who can’t believe it when people love something I’ve written or drawn, and this can be a tedious quality. Or I find it tedious in others; in me, it’s a distraction, like, Yes, yes, but what’s the thing that’s going to get me killed?
When I was 11, I decided to survey all my friends about my worst qualities. I was very serious about it. I sat down at the phone with a pencil and piece of paper and listed 4 girls and 1 boy, all of whom I’d been tight with from since 1st grade. I had recently moved away when my parents divorced. I’d chosen to live with my dad in another state, but after several months, he changed his mind, so I went to live with my mom (who was super not into me and my bad attitude) and my little brother, and we became a miserable, rabid pack of screaming, hair-pulling, getting-the-cops-called-on-us raccoons. I needed to stay in the orbit of the only reliable family I’d truly had — those little friends of half of my life. I wanted to ensure I’d keep getting invited to birthday sleepovers and family vacations, etc., even if I didn’t go to school with them anymore. So I dialed my best friend and asked her to name some things she didn’t like about me.
“Well, for starters,” she said quickly, “you complain too much.”
“Well, YOU try living my life!” I shouted into the phone. I didn’t call anyone else.
Since then, I just quietly assume what people hate about me, thus savings me from the humiliation of having it confirmed.
I root for underdogs. It’s a thing I love about my husband, too. He roots for the Mets so hard that if they start losing, he actually stops watching. Like, he just wants them to do well, even more than he wants to be entertained.
Recently, thanks to something that popped into my Substack Notes algo, I discovered Nancy Lemann. She published a novel, Lives of the Saints in her late 20s, and was uncomfortable with the attention, and her work continued to be “quiet” and strange and defy easy description, and now she’s back with a novel at 70 and, I gather, wary of the attention. When I was in my late 20s, I suddenly and urgently NEEDED to be published and went into lifelong debt to get an MFA, thinking that I’d graduate with a full draft of my memoir about a very traumatic thing that had JUST HAPPENED 30 SECONDS AGO and that it would take publishing by storm and Joan Didion would invite me for luncheon.
Never mind that I wasn’t remotely ready to write the book. I aggressively processed what went down, thinking I was this incredible artgeniuspoetrywarrior when really I was a 28-year-old codependent quivering with such evident PTSD that a fellow server at the restaurant I worked at was like, "Do you know what a ‘bottom-line behavior’ is?”
But if I HAD scratched out and published a book then, I think I would have imploded from the public attention. The first negative review of my book on Amazon (back then we called it Amazon.com) or, god forbid, the Times, would have smooshed me to death.
It took until I was 44 to truly be ready to write the book, and it’s taken me 5 more years to punch and kick my way through it, revise it, revise it again. Between 28 and 49, we had the trial, I got sober from love addiction (yesh?), fell in love (see: yesh?) and got married, moved to New York, had a nervous breakdown, got a big-people job, left the big-people job, moved back to Southern California, went ack! and left Southern California, got published a few times in places I used to dream about, and the guy got paroled and I changed how I felt about THAT four or five times…
Somewhere in all the warp and weft, I became more myself, and now I have what I always craved — what Bob Dylan said: I will know my song well before I start singing.
Still, few pills are bitterer than “it takes as long as it takes.”
Anyway, welcome back to whatever this is, Nancy. I’m excited to discover your voice, from 28 to 70.
In Greece, if you luck out, they might say “epiase lavraki” which literally means “you’ve caught a sea bass!”
That’s because sea bass in the Mediterranean have been over-fished and are therefore rare. Hi ho.
Speaking of things so good that they make me want to grab strangers by the lapels and scream, have any of you watched Adult Swim’s Ha Ha, You Clowns on HBO? Each episode is 12 minutes and you either get it or you don’t. Me, I really needed to see 3 beefy young men so full of goofy, innocent kindness that they transform situations and people around them like a sweetness ray. At the heart of it is a recently dead mother, and these boys care for each other and their grieving dad. And it’s funny and unhinged and weird and I don’t know a single person who has watched it, and yet everyone has.
That reminds me of something Yogi Berra once famously said about a restaurant: Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.
Ha Ha’s creator Joe Cappa has an amazing Instagram and it gives me the same giddy, perverted sense I had when I was 19 and wanted to be an actor and all my friends were directors and jugglers and puppeteers and musicians and we were high all the time and had the best ideas but forgot them all the next morning.
Joe Cappa and Nancy Lemann. I wonder what each of them thinks about their own work while they are making it — I don’t mean what they might articulate in an interview. I mean the worries that slip like stealthy, silvery fish through one’s nerve. I am not a painter, Michelangelo famously said, while painting the Sistine Chapel.
I hope cacao nibs will help. I’ve been putting them on my breakfast for 3 or 4 days and I swear they give me energy and clarity and confidence. I am not working for Big Cacao and still I want to fill a trench coat with baggies full of the stuff and walk through campus. Doses, doses, the dealers would mutter, at San Francisco State. Do they still do that? Anyway, I’m telling all my middle-aged friends to try 1-2 tsp on your chia pudding or cereal or whatever floats your boat.
Man, am I glad to be myself. I’m grateful I didn’t stop complaining. I’m grateful I clowned around and contorted to make myself lovable. I’m grateful I can do, like, 11 things pretty well and nothing spectacularly. I’m grateful I didn’t get published at 28 or even 36 or 40. There is something those people were sprinkling on their breakfasts from an early age — adult parents, an invested writing teacher, money, a certain enzyme? — and I didn’t have that thing, whatever it was, and it used to make me sad and bitter, but not much anymore, because who has that kind of time?
And now if I fail, at least it won’t be because I tried to sound like other people.
Too long have I spent looking at everyone else’s sardines, embarrassed by the strange fish in my hands.