WRITING
(Not) Writing the Dead: Notes on a NovelCHICAGO 24 April 2009 |
|
I recently completed a draft of a novel called A Life in Men, about the final decade-plus in the life of a woman traveler with Cystic Fibrosis. Every chapter takes place in a different country, and the novel’s chronology (though not linear) spans roughly the time between the Lockerbie Disaster and 9/11. Like everything I write, it is scary long (559 pages) and now sitting with both my writing group and my agent, in an attempt to get someone to tell me how to scale it down to normal size.
Also like everything I write (and probably everything everyone writes), the novel was an exorcism of sorts. An exorcism 10 years in the making, and ultimately failed.
In 1998, my ex-friend Sarah died while in Jordan, living among the Bedouins and pursuing her PhD in Cultural Anthropology. Sarah had Cystic Fibrosis, though she didn’t technically die of it: she died of spinal meningitis, which is a much faster death, albeit one very probably also brought on by the compromised immune system that 30 years of being medicated for CF can bring on.
I call Sarah my ex-friend because, at the time of her death, we were not in touch and had not seen one another in 5 years. We had not had a falling out or anything. We were just young, and both of us constantly in transit. We met in 1989 when we lived together in London while studying abroad, and while we were in London we were very close, partying together, cooking together, traveling together, and of course talking about men together. But it was a friendship that turned out to be based largely on circumstance, and after we both left London we saw one another and spoke only two more times before her death. The last time I saw her, in Boston in 1994, she was as beautiful as ever, with long unruly blond hair and her fingers full of chunky silver rings. She was still brash and irreverent and had a magnetism that was almost unnerving. However, she was very different in some ways than the 20 year old girl I’d known 5 years prior. Most notably, she talked about being sick much more openly. While the London-Sarah had never hidden her condition (it’s pretty hard to hide CF, particularly because you have to do time-consuming chest physiotherapies a few times a day, plus take enzymes before every meal, and . . . well . . . you cough a hell of a lot), to say she was glib about it would be an understatement. But in Boston in 1994, she told me she had recently started seeing a therapist to talk about her impending mortality. She had recently developed diabetes, which is not uncommon in late-stage CF, and was very careful about what we would be eating that night. She seemed more introspective, more serious, and hungry to talk about the truth of her experiences.
The London-Sarah had, by contrast, been mainly dismissive of her experiences. I remember going to Scotland for the weekend together once and that she forgot her enzymes back in London, and the utter lack of concern she exhibited over the fact that she was, effectively, not going to be able to eat for the entire weekend because she could not digest her food. (I remember it didn’t stop her drinking, and am still not sure how that worked.) Ironically our friend Aimee, also traveling with us, lost her contact lenses on the trip and that turned out to be a much bigger catastrophe as Aimee (who was stunning and looked like a model) was virtually blind without her contacts. Sarah and I called her “Helen” all weekend (in a hysterical drawl: Hel-en!) for Helen Keller, and led her around by the arm, and when we met guys at the pubs we would have to tell Aimee whether or not they were cute enough to consider kissing because she couldn’t see them right in front of her face. We went to the sea and led Aimee around the jagged rocky shoreline, somehow managing not to kill her in the process, and took photos of ourselves in our windswept coats, hair whipping our faces. If Sarah was hungry, or felt ill, she never mentioned it.
She used to drink carbonated soda to loosen her mucus, and some asshole in our flat was always taking it out of the fridge and drinking it before she could get to it, and the only time I ever saw her upset was when she had gone to get a soda and found them all gone for the dozenth time, and she started to cry because she had told our flatmates why she needed the soda but apparently the soda-thief didn’t give a shit: because she looked perfectly healthy and acted, other than the coughing and the constant carrying around of her inhaler, which she was always shaking manically with her skinny wrist flopping back-and-forth, perfectly healthy, and probably the soda-thief thought she was just being a drama queen.
I remember that she used to do her chest PTs in the sitting room of the flat, which was so ugly we had dubbed it “Pastor’s Office” for its hideous 1970s decor. She would go in there and close the door and we would hear her cough, but she never discussed it or told us specifically why she did this at regular intervals or what it entailed. I found all that out later, only when I met a woman whose daughter has CF, and then more still when researching for my novel.
She had photographs from Vogue and Elle all over the wall of her bedroom in London, which she shared with Aimee and another girl neither of them liked. The photographs were all of women–models; she was sort of obsessed with models, though she didn’t have the personal style or comportment of one. Her style was more bohemian. We shared ripped jeans (she liked to wear a particular pair I’d gotten off a male friend, Nick) and were the only girls in the flat who read books by John Updike that were not assigned for class. I kept a quote book, and Sarah was often quotable–was, in fact, probably the funniest woman I have ever met. She had a throaty voice and an Arlington accent and dissected her lovers with a bluntness rare in a girl that age, though my favorite quote of hers in the quote book was not a joke but this: There are only two things that are important in life. You have to be honest, and you have to be really mellow about harsh things.
I believe she lived up to both of these imperatives.
After Sarah’s death, which I was told about by Aimee, I wrote a letter to her mother. I had started to publish some of my writing, and I was editing a literary magazine and pursuing a PhD, and I had gotten it into my head (not a bad idea, really, though probably a tactless one) that I would like to write Sarah’s biography. I had some of the poems Sarah had written over the years, and I knew she wrote letters to some friends and kept a journal, and I thought her story–the way she had continued to travel and live hard despite her illness, and had exceeded the life expectancy of someone born in 1968 with CF by nearly a decade despite all the risks she’d taken–would be inspiring to people. As, I’m sure, it would have been.
Her mother, however, was not for the idea. And so the matter was put from my mind. For years.
When I finally decided to fictionalize Sarah’s situation–a woman traveler with her particular disease–I knew that in order to find my own creative freedom and inspiration, as well as to be ethical towards her family, I would have to change almost everything so that the protagonist of the novel was not “Sarah” but her own person. Where Sarah was a WASPy girl, my protagonist was Jewish. Sarah was not adopted but my protagonist was. The countries in my novel are places I have been, not the places Sarah spent time (excepting London, where I spent much more time than she did.) The plotline–even including that of the course of her CF, which for my character was diagnosed later in life due to pancreatic sufficiency (which is rare in CF and which Sarah did not have)–is radically different. In truth, a lot of the factual details of the novel are based not only on my own life but on another friend entirely whom Sarah never even met, and who is still very much alive, despite two bouts with cancer in her adolescence. In the end, I managed to fictionalize the woman who inspired A Life in Men so damn well that Sarah almost feels lost amidst its pages. Even the few details that are true of her–the wild blond hair and the silver thumb ring, for example, are actually details that she and I had in common, and that don’t seem to belong to her alone.
Mission accomplished.
And yet . . .
I don’t know that I will ever be able to articulate precisely why this particular woman held such a grip on my imagination as to inspire a novel–why despite having seen her only twice in the 9 years before her death, I would write her mother, a woman I had never even met, offering to write her biography. I don’t know why, having fictionalized her so thoroughly and so well that A Life in Men became fully its own entity–fully mine and not “hers”–I have failed, in some way, to exorcise Sarah’s ghost.
I could say it was her irreverence, her wit, her almost scary courage.
I could say it was the way she fell in love faster than any woman of her intellect I had ever met before or have met since. The way that sex and love for her were similar to travel and similar to illness: that she was hungry to experience as much as possible, as hard as possible, in whatever time she had left. And that I, who was cynical and emotionally cautious (if equally promiscuous) and often suspicious with men envied her that, and marveled at the way what “should” (by all laws of nature; by all laws of gender and youth) have been a walking disaster, Sarah being reduced to road kill, actually worked for her–that the men she loved seemed to recognize her intensity, her rarity, and love her back.
Of course in truth that didn’t hold. The man she loved in London–who used to call her “Cystic” instead of honey or baby (perhaps the one factual thing about Sarah to make it into my novel, though under different circumstances) stayed with her for years but eventually left her, moving back to London from their home in DC and telling her, “I don’t think we should stay in touch.” Aimee and I marveled at this on the phone–at his audacity in wasting the time of a woman who had no time to waste–of wasting years of her life that way. I think in retrospect that perhaps we got it wrong. Though I never really liked her lover, I think Sarah may have loved him precisely because of the way he did not treat her with kid gloves–of the way he did not give her special consideration as a terminally ill damsel, but rather believed her tough. I know their break-up devastated her, but I also know she did love again, that she was not destroyed or numbed by the loss, and that she continued to make impulsive, impetuous and perhaps ill-advised choices in love that mystified her friends. That she never stopped following her heart.
Later, I would for a period of a few years become ill myself, and though what happened to me couldn’t be compared to a life-shortening illness, I would learn how imperative it is, in a time of pain and struggle and ill health, to have people in your life who refuse to treat you gently. How being treated too gently is what, in the end, could almost kill you.
And all of this–these themes, these ideas–are what the novel is about. But if Sarah’s ghost dwells on the pages at all, it is so elusively that I cannot hold on to her any better than I bothered to do in my own healthy-and-glib youth. She evaporates like smoke. Like my life, my novel became “about me,” not her–as, I suppose, it should be.
So here is just a small taste of her, here.
|
||
Related Posts |
I had a friend in junior high who had CF. My dad was her doctor, and he introduced us because she was sick so much that she missed a lot of school and wasn’t able to make many friends. He seemed to think I needed to meet someone like her and that she needed a friend, so he arranged for us to visit once or twice. This was in 6th or 7th grade, and after we met, she wrote me a really friendly note saying how she’d had so much fun together. She signed it “BFF,” which I took as a highly undeserved compliment. I kept meaning to invite her over again, but I kept forgetting. I wanted to see a movie with her or something. But then she just died. It was strange. I hadn’t been close to her, but I felt awful for not remembering to call and hang out. I went to her funeral with my mom. I cried, of course. But a month or more later, I remember asking my dad, “Do you think Jennifer would like to see a movie this weekend?” And he had to remind me that she died. I’ve always felt rather guilty about that …
Gina, I am so glad you wrote this piece. Thank you!
Thanks, Mary. This is actually such a useful story for me to hear, oddly less as someone who had an adult friend die of CF and more as the mom of two almost-10-year-old girls. It’s a really vivid reminder of how the young handle (or fail to handle) death and the weight of obligation and harsh things: the intensity of their emotions, but the transience of them. Obviously you were only a child yourself. It’s poignant how lonely, in a way, your friend with CF was, and how true this is of sick people in general. Illness is about the loneliest thing going. Your father was wise to hook Jennifer up with you. Even if it wasn’t a “daily” thing, it obviously meant a lot to her.