NATHAN
What’s the worst that can happen? I might discover you can’t write.
I come back to one embarrassingly superficial thing; I told all my friends and family, when I left, that I was going off to write a novel. I’ve marched off to my room. And here I am, six years old, crouched on my pink organza bedspread and expecting ease. Expecting it to get done by magic, by montage. Wishing for a book of children’s poems I can steal an apple/dapple poem from; I’m crouched in a closet, hiding, too terrified to emerge. Not that anyone cares; nobody’ll miss me. This assignment was self-inflicted. But I can’t go back empty-handed. My one sentence is lonely, left hanging. It whispers another sentence in my ear, begging me to provide company.
JULIA
Work hard! Take chances! Be very bold!
Blink. I write the second sentence, and then I lose count. Blink. Four months later, I have a stack of three hundred and fifty pages and I can come out now, finally, into the light with a sense of having earned something. I’ve written my own apple/dapple poem. For the first time, I have done my job.
In 2000, the film Wonder Boys brings me terror and hope.109 The writer is back in his bathrobe, a pink chenille one at that. Grady Tripp is a one-hit wonder, a novelist famous for one novel, seven years ago, who is now stranded in academia and mired in a no-end-in-sight second novel (over 2,600 single-spaced pages, typed on a manual typewriter) in which his entire identity is invested; his wife has abandoned him, he’s sleeping with the Chancellor of his liberal arts college, he’s perpetually stubbled and stoned. It’s nice to see Michael Douglas playing authentically pouchy for a change, but I loathe the movie. It hurts to watch. The once-appealing-to-me archetype of the rumpled bathrobe — wearing writer-turned-Creative-Writing-professor has become too painfully relatable. Grady’s star student, James, is the cliché of the morose, freaky, suffering writing student (he recites movie-star-suicide facts and figures as a party trick and dismissively announces his brilliant story took him only an hour to write). Grady and James tell each other they’re special, that they’re unlike the rest of the other teachers/students, but they aren’t; they’re every annoying writer trope in the book. The movie spins off into self-consciously precious subplots about finding a stolen jacket once worn by Marilyn Monroe, and hiding a dead dog, and whether or not Grady’s editor is going to seduce the sensitive James and/or publish his manuscript — as usual, a movie about a writer can’t spend too much time showing us the writer writing, or trying to write, because, as I now know, more than thirty seconds of that is so fucking boring you’d want to throw up or yell Fire! in that crowded theatre. Although this cloying, self-conscious wackiness is almost worse.
The movie really hurts to watch, however, because I’ve become that trope. My first novel, A Child out of Alcatraz, was well received and did “nicely.” I did it, good, and now I’m supposed to do it again. The pride of that first completed, achieved, written book was short-lived; the moment I sat down to write again, I was back on the floor of my closet in a paralyzed crouch, trying to whip up another apple/dapple poem and knowing I couldn’t, I could never do that again, it was too impossibly hard. And that first book was so easy, I don’t even remember the labor of writing — perhaps someone else did creep in and write it while I slept, and any day, I’m going to be found out. Grady keeps assuring his editor that his second novel is almost done — his mantralike lament to all obstacles is “I’m trying to finish my novel!”—and I know that song, too. (Again, I can’t go into bookstores, the chastisement is back: See, all these people wrote their second books. .) I know the Grady who freezes up after that beautiful, painless first book and can’t seem to do it again; I know the Atlas-like weight of that second book on your shoulders, how it becomes a massive globe that cracks your spine, cripples you into a perpetual hunch. It’s hard to rest on laurels turned dry and crisp with age; one touch too many, and they turn to dust.
And I’m supposed to be an academic now, too, the teacher of creative writing students for whom I’m supposed to set an inspiring writerly example. I’ve sat in those endless fiction workshops and mediated student feedback and personalities and tried to sound knowledgeable about parallel or fragmented structures and narrative arc and the layers of character psychology and putting pressure on the language and unpacking the story and stressing the need for everyone present to be critical yet positive and constructive; I’ve gone to those interminable faculty cocktail parties and made my dinner of those toothpicked cubes of cheese. I know the outrage you feel when a young student goes all starry-eyed over your (old) book, then offers up a casual and cutting criticism of your current (lesser) work; I know the threat of reading a morose, freaky, suffering student’s work and knowing it’s superior to yours. I know the awe of watching their hard work, their uncynical investment, their fearless and unabashed commitment. My writerly problem isn’t Grady’s — he’s logorrheic in print, while I can’t seem to break one hundred pages of anything — but I identify way too much with the terrifying suspicion of being washed-up, of knowing it’s all over. And, while I tell myself that Grady is obviously in his late fifties (although I think Michael Douglas is trying to play forties), and I’m still much younger, this ultimately depresses me — if you’re washed up at fifty-five, it’s one thing, but if you’re washed-up at my age. . well, that means you have a good thirty or forty years of being washed-up lying ahead of you, a long, pathetic, winding road.
At one point a visiting Famous Writer booms to a packed auditorium:
FAMOUS WRITER
Everyone has a great idea. But how do you get from there to here? What is the bridge from the water’s edge of inspiration to the far shore of accomplishment? It is the faith that your story is worth telling. .
at which point Grady passes out. He’s lost the sustaining oxygen of faith, the ability to glean any nourishment from the air.
GRADY
Books. They don’t mean anything. Not to anybody. Not anymore.
He means they don’t mean anything to him, not anymore, and I’m feeling they don’t mean anything to me, either — it is all over. I can’t let the writing mean anything; it’s too crushing a weight. But we’re both lying; the books and the writing still mean everything to us, and we both know it’s too late. We’re both already crushed.
But there’s also (damn) hope. Grady winds up with the woman he loves, but that isn’t it. He gets past feeling threatened by his young student — he applauds wildly on hearing James’s manuscript will indeed be published, he paternally passes the Wonder Boy torch — but that isn’t it. And he’s over feeling he has nothing to offer as a teacher:
GRADY
Nobody teaches a writer anything. You tell them what you know, you tell them to find their own voice and stay with it, you tell the ones that have it to keep at it, you tell the ones that don’t have it to keep at it, too, because that’s the only way they’re going to get where they’re going. .
but that isn’t why.
There’s hope because late in the movie, the 2,611 in-progress pages of Grady’s second novel (the only copy he has) go flying to heaven, literally; they’re snatched up by a ruthless wind and scattered like the weightless leaves of paper they are. (I see Garp and Helen, running to catch those escaping, whirling pages.) I feel panic — this is the ultimate nightmare! The labor of seven years, all those exquisite words, all those perfect sentences, gone? Grab those pages, quick, don’t let them go! — but Grady just stands there; he just watches. He lets it all go; the burden is released, it floats away like end-of-the-day balloons.