thou editors at Shtetl Fabulous who’ve rejected every single one of my retarded, inconsequential stories, fuck my nutbag fiancé, fuck my sadly lacking family, fuck, even, finally, Andy, my goyische, alcoholic favorite. Fuck the provincial, unimaginative Jews who made both our lives living hell for so long. Fuck cancer! Fuck the capitalist pigs who locked a hundred and fifty teenage girls into that fucking factory! Fuck the unions for not mobilizing until after the fact. Fuck death!
Listen. Portnoy had it right. What do you have to show for yourself, you stubborn misanthropic fucking codger? Children should be playing on this earth who look like you! Children should be playing on this earth who look like a lot of people, asshole, and life isn’t the least bit fair. So do your part to make good on your existence while you still have the chance.
Because it’s not too late. It’s not at all too late! Until they put you into the ground you still have the chance to make something real, something alive, something no one can burn up: not in a stack of dried-out paper and ink, not in a grimy locked factory, and not even in a motherfucking gas chamber, you shriveled dickhead. Why would you pass that opportunity up?
A week after the Alana Orenstein bombshell — a week during which I did very little other than watch television, read Star magazine, smoke pot, eat candy, and sleep — I had the following dream: I was eight months pregnant, hugely with child, visiting a midwife for a checkup. The midwife, in full white-lab-coat regalia, turned out to be none other than Lorrie Moore, whose story “How to Be a Writer” (from Self-Help, 1985) made, at fourteen when first I read it, a writer out of me.
“Lorrie Moore!” I exclaimed. “Oh my God! I love you!” She was inspecting my chart and seemed unimpressed by my recognition of her. Then I had a thought, realizing that Birds of America came out almost six years ago. “Do you still write?” I asked. She looked up at me with those sweet sad eyes of hers.
“Nah,” she said. “Not really. I mostly do this now.” Then she went back to my chart before the obligatory, not (in dreamland) entirely unpleasant pelvic exam. (I have gone resolutely against the dictum of “write a dream, lose a reader” in this instance because [a] this dream really did occur! Truly! And [b] it’s extraordinarily, perfectly telling, and I am just not writer enough to resist that. If you’d been born to ever-so-slightly different first-generation American Jews and raised on Long Island you’d be Billy Joel, okay dude? So don’t be so goddamn hard on everyone.)
In the dream I left the appointment buoyed, as happy as I’ve ever been consciously, but as I walked (bouncing more than walking, on soft, rubbery earth) I began to hear the ending of that famous Strauss piece (you know the one—Also Sprach Zarathustra, it’s called, relegated now by Stanley Kubrick to ubiquitous diaper commercials and the like?). It was the ending, with its mournful group call and response: violins, harp, oboes, and flutes versus trombones, cellos, and contrabasses, which sounded to me as it grew louder and louder more and more like a Please? answered by No followed by another beseeching Please? and another resonant No and then yet another Please? until finally there are those three unassailable ending bass answers: No, No, No. It was my alarm clock, set to classical radio, awakening me. And as I came fully into consciousness I was aware only of those last three Nos, putting an end to my dreams, to my hopes, to that unconscious joy, evocative of the loss of everything I’ve ever sought: the novel, the marriage, the boyfriend at summer camp. And this too, probably. I’m not stupid. At most, maybe I’ll twist things around and have a funny metastory with which to close out my collection, if it ever finds a home. And someday maybe I’ll have some other man’s baby, give her some thoughtlessly co-opted, vaguely ethnic, trendy name, write book reviews for my local Jewish weekly, lie awake at night marveling at the stultifying limitations of my life.
Kinky Friedman never had any kids. Maybe I’ll write to him.
Fine. I’ll just tear a page from the Roth playbook and simply turn this letter into a kind of postmodern “story” (and I’ll even leave this part in to further confuse and complicate, to experiment with implicating myself, the “Elisa Albert” alter-ego, in all these ways you yourself are so adept with, see how it feels, how you must feel, when people assume fact is fiction and fiction fact, when people read your writing and assume they know you. Am I guilty of that, too? I suppose I am, and I’m sorry, Philip. It’s just that I love you). I’ll write it to Nathan Zuckerman from Audrey Rubens.
In an interview I read somewhere once, you speak of writing and publishing fiction as akin to packing a suitcase and then leaving it in the middle of the street, powerless to control its fate, its safety, its order, its intention, its meaning. And that’s what this is. That’s what any human interaction is, isn’t it? “People are infallible,” you wrote in American Pastoral. “They pick up on what you want and then they don’t give it to you.” (p. 278). Isn’t that just what you meant? Anytime you seek connection, want something, make an attempt to explain yourself? A suitcase left in a bus station. So it is. I am the fiction; the suitcase is myself.
Yours,
Elisa
P.S. I’m enclosing a photo, because you’re not necessarily known for your appreciation of inner beauty. I’m well aware that I might not be your “type,” but aside from the occasional stray nipple hair, I am, I assure you, fairly okay. Points for youth?
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to:
My fantastic Writers House agents, Jennifer Lyons and Simon Lipskar, with the invaluable assistance of Daniel Lazar, Nikki Furrer, and Rowan Riley.
My utterly delightful, even-handed, perceptive, and beauteous editor Maris Kreizman (RPC ’00, represent!), without whom all of these characters would be forlornly muttering their collective way to adverb hell.
Martha Levin, Dominick Anfuso, Jennifer Weidman, Susan H. Llewellyn, and everyone at Free Press, for their dedication to this book and their unwavering support of its author.
Binnie Kirshenbaum: superlative teacher, generous den mother, and dear friend.
Jayne Anne Phillips, David Gates, Lorrie Moore, Sam Lipsyte, Mary Campbell, and Mark Slouka, for their example, crucial encouragement, and helpful suggestions.
Jonny Segura, Thaddeus Bower, Robin Kirman, Nellie Hermann, Johanna Lane, Andrew Newberg, Chris Warner, Heather Samples, and all of my excellent colleagues at Columbia, for camaraderie, line edits, and beyond.
Abigail Judge, much-beloved nemesis.
Joel Farkas, regardless and forever.
Susan Schaefer Albert, Heidi Factor Anderson, Amnon Adrabi, and Bill Schaefer, for bettering a complicated family.
Irwin Hearst, for being here, and Helen Seltzer Bilski Albert, Beatrice Levinson Hearst, Frank Albert, and Harry Bilski, for having been.
The memory of David Lawrence Albert.
Good eggs near and far, for knowing exactly who they are and for the priceless gift of their love and belief in me.