One Round of Self-Doubt

Recently I have been looking at my growing pile of rejection letters and thinking perhaps I have better ways to spend my time; maybe I should concentrate instead on contributing more financially to our family, on spending more quality time with my kids, or on studying Japanese. Maybe everyone around me cringes when I talk with childish self-indulgence about trying to write, to be a writer.

.......Then I ran across this, from a well-known essay by short story writer Kathryn Chetkovich on being the girlfriend of Jonathan Franzen.

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"It’s not as though anyone thinks that being a good writer makes you a good person. But it helps. (Isn’t this perhaps one reason why women, as a whole, are more apt than men to see writing and reading as therapeutic acts? All that private time spent rendering and transforming personal experience on paper is easier to justify if the writer – and, ideally, the reader – is healed in the process). If you’re truly talented, then your work becomes your way of doing good in the world; if you’re not, it’s a self-indulgence, even an embarrassment.

But how do you know you’re good, if not by comparing yourself favorably to others (an essentially ungood activity)? And how many women are comfortable doing that?"

Kathryn Chetkovich, from “Envy”, in Granta, Summer 2003 issue

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The other voice in my head says, "No one will take your writing seriously unless/until you do," but how can I take my writing seriously when no one else does? (Okay, not no one else, but no one in publishing). Round and round I go.

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Now it occurs to me that this post is related to the post I wrote yesterday, about whether to write or not what conflicts with actual family history, embedding those invented facts within that history and willfully failing to make a distinction.

It occurs to me now that a good writer should write whatever is necessary, actual facts be damned, whereas a good woman (and to a lesser extent, a good person, gender unspecified, and in both these cases I mean a culturally-defined good woman/person) should not write what might be unsettling or uncomfortable or disturbing for her family. I can't be both a good writer and a good woman/person. Shall is shoot for the lower target, or the higher? Should I give up on both?

Or, even more accurately, I can't be both a good daughter and a good writer.