This was the brief talk I gave before my interview with Sarah Lester at the Maplewood Literary Award event on March 24th, 2018.  It’s adapted from an earlier blog on writing in 9/12.

I should like to tell a story.  It is a story of failure and motherhood.  It is a story of post- 9/11, what I call 9/12.  And it is ultimately a story of rebuilding one’s self, of home and community.  Because the career I’ve had for the last sixteen years is intricately connected to our decision to move to Maplewood.

We were living on the Upper West Side in an apartment.  My ‘office,’ such as it was, consisted of a corner of a room, next to a swinging door into the kitchen, walled off with a Japanese screen from my son’s nursery area.  My husband wrote on a thin little table in a corner of the bedroom.  Our books teemed everywhere.  There wasn’t much light in the apartment.  This was not sustainable.

But it was not sustainable for another reason.  I had, in all honesty, lost my way as a writer.  I had always been a fierce and disciplined writer, driven in some ways by guilt—the child of an immigrant, of hardworking teachers, I felt that if this was my job, I had to attack it like a job.  I led a pretty monastic life, keeping my expenses low, my apartments small to make this vocation work.

And I did continue to write after I became a mother—a few weeks after my son Sasha was born I was in Bed Stuy, reporting on teenagers with AIDs.  But just like the gray atmosphere of our apartment, there was a smudged quality to my vision, a sense of not being able to blend motherhood, the pressures and anxieties of making a living, and the act of writing.  Even I—quite stubborn—was having a hard time of it.  I felt like a graduate student peering into grown up lives, but somehow I could not figure out how to be and writer have that grown up life.

Worse, even after publishing two literary novels and a nonfiction book, I could not sell my third novel.  I pause on this for a moment because we so often focus on success of an author’s life.  But as every writer knows, particularly in the punishing environment of publishing, behind that gleaming surface, there is so much rejection and sense of failure and uncertainty and tossed out projects.  And often for no good reason, just bad luck or bad timing.  I was amazed to learn the other night at the Montclair Literary Festival that Tom Perrotta’s novel, “Election,” was actually sitting in a drawer, unpublished, when it was discovered for a movie.

For me, at this time, I had written a novel in a somber mood, in the wake of an ectopic pregnancy that had sent me into life-saving surgery.  I woke up a week later in bed, loopy on painkillers, with an image of an elderly Bengali woman, the wife of a photographer, walking the amber-lit streets of the UPW.  That novel, too quiet, too submerged, still waits in my drawer.  I tried a few other projects but nothing quite held.

Here is the other significant part of our move: 9/11.  Or rather, I should say, 9/12.  The day after.  The decades after.

They are connected. Continue reading