How Deep This Grief

How Deep This Grief

I HAVE always found the idea of “self-expression” to be rather solipsistic, embarrassing even. It smacks of arrogance, this idea that I would have to express all the special wonder that exists inside me, and that people might want to listen. Maybe this comes from spending the majority of my life in the Midwest, the land of self-effacement. Maybe it comes from being raised, for the most part, by a single mother who, through my formative adolescent years, took care of three children and her aging father. When food or shelter isn’t a given, you tend to develop a quick eye-roll reflex when notions of individual creativity come up.

And yet from an early age I also felt the desire to write, to tell stories. It wasn’t until college that I began to figure out how to reconcile this seeming contradiction, when a writing teacher, the essayist Joe Bonomo, scrawled a quote from V. S. Naipaul on the board: “No one cares for your tragedy until you can sing about it.” This was a moment of revelation as huge as any I’d experienced in my then nascent writing life. The words on the blackboard transformed the idea of writing from self-expression into something I was much more comfortable with: a job.

A few years later, in graduate school, I had the pleasure and sometimes terror of studying for a semester with Frank Conroy, famed writer and infamous writing teacher. Frank’s instructional antics were legendary: tearing up student manuscripts in workshop, making people cry. By the time I took his class, he was nearing the end of his life, and it might have been that he’d lost some of the fire he’d had in his prime. He was still Frank, though, and he’d still go after a piece, sometimes directly and sometimes more slyly, lulling the nerve-racked writer into a false sense of literary success before going in for the kill.