Whatever I’ve become as an essayist, this collection bears the stamp of a writer who got her start in women’s magazines: it is full of example and advice. I will never be a war correspondent or an investigative reporter, but the tradition I come from is an honorable one, and, at times, daunting. Many of the essays I’m proudest of were made from the things that were at hand—writing and love, work and loss. I may have roamed in my fiction, but this work tends to reflect a life lived close to home.
Good as I was at keeping to my assigned word counts over the years, I have in some cases gone back and made these pieces longer. This is true most notably of “The Wall,” because there was so much more to tell than the Washington Post Magazine had room for, and because I no longer have to worry about how much space the art department is going to requisition. For the most part, though, I’ve left things alone. I have no desire to rewrite the past; in fact, for me the beauty of this book is how it keeps the past alive: here Rose is, a puppy again, and there is my grandmother. Karl and I are meeting for the first time and we are young with no idea of what’s ahead. If I’m lucky, someday in the future I’ll see what I’ve written here and think how young I still was and how much more there was ahead. Until then I’ll keep writing things down, both the things I make up and the things that have happened. It is the way I’ve learned to see my life.
How to Read a Christmas Story
I HAVE NEVER LIKED Christmas. In my family, there were happy Thanksgivings and tolerable Easters, but Christmas was a holiday we failed at with real vigor. I blame this on my parents’ divorce. I was nearly six when my mother and sister and I left our home and my father in Los Angeles. The man my mother had been seeing in Los Angeles had moved to Nashville, and so we moved to Nashville as well. A year or so later they were married. My stepfather’s four children still lived in Los Angeles with their mother. My stepfather’s children spent their Christmases on a plane so that they could open presents in the morning with their mother in California and then open a second set of presents at night with their father in Tennessee. Thinking about this now, I realize how impossibly young they were to make a trip like that alone—a stepbrother and stepsister slightly older than I, a stepsister and stepbrother slightly younger. We were strangers but we had the world in common: they had betrayed their mother by leaving her alone on Christmas Day, just as my sister and I betrayed our father by staying in Tennessee.
Lonely and spent, my stepsiblings fell apart soon after they arrived, fighting and weeping among themselves. That was when my stepfather, overwhelmed by the presence of his children, would take his cue to recount his own unhappy childhood. He had had the great misfortune to be born on Christmas Day, and so Christmas never came without the sad reminiscence of all the years he never got a birthday cake or a birthday present because his own parents hadn’t cared for him at all. He was a sentimental man, my stepfather, and easily moved himself to tears at this memory. Somewhere in all of this my mother, crushed by everything that had fallen to her, would begin to cry as she tried to settle the six small, miserable children who were now in her care.
I might have managed all of this had it not been for the Christmas phone call from my father. My father was largely stoic in the face of his circumstances—two young daughters relocated to Tennessee—but he wasn’t stoic where the holidays were concerned. His misery at our being so far away came through the phone and sat with us like a living thing while my sister and I, virtually incapable of stoicism, went down like a house of cards.
It wasn’t that everything about the holiday was bad. The school part of Christmas that the nuns were in charge of—the door-decorating contest, the advent calendar, and the Christmas pageant—packed in all the joy and anticipation the occasion was billed to have. When we went to the chapel and sang Rejoice! Rejoice! I felt it. I landed the role of the Archangel Gabriel two years running because my mother had made me such a transcendent pair of wings out of cardboard and gold foil wrapping paper. But by December 20, school had ended. There was no other option but to go home and wait it out.
No matter how the members of my reconfigured family suffered through Christmas year after year, all we ever thought to change were the details. There was the year we made our own ornaments, strung endless garlands of popcorn and cranberries and baked sugar cookies in the shape of stars to hang on the tree. We were living in the country then, and though it had taken us a week to make the decorations, the mice shut us down in a single night. There was the year we decided to exchange only homemade gifts. My stepfather gathered up his first wedding ring, his various class rings, and all the gold fillings he’d had taken from his teeth and had them melted down. Then he made wax casts of rings and pendants and earrings and had them cast. I still have a big, lumpy A that hangs off a chain. The other girls all had their ears pierced and so received post earrings—H for Heather, P for Patchett. There was the year my mother thought to move Christmas to early January so that we could celebrate the Feast of the Magi and my stepfather could finally have the 25th to himself, but even with the birthday cake and birthday hats none of us was fooled. That year when our father called, we said it was our stepfather’s birthday and that he should call again on the Feast of the Magi. He told us to put down the phone and go open our presents.
Because Christmas and presents are inseparable, I have never liked the presents either. Christmas was a bad day for expectations and heart’s desires. My father’s presents were always the saddest because they were so consistently wrong. He sent me clothes I never liked and dolls that were big and artistic and creepy. The year I very much wanted a pair of boot roller skates, he got me a pair in black. At recess, all the girls skated around the convent parking lot wearing white boot skates. I was disappointed to know that I would spend another year not skating, but more than that I was shaken by how little my father understood the circumstances of my life. On the phone I thanked him and said they were perfect. I never put the laces in.
Then one year my father called me late on Christmas Eve. This was unusual, because my father’s time to call was after he went to Mass on Christmas morning. In my memory I was already in bed, although it seems more likely that I went to my mother’s room and lay down on her bed to talk since that was where the phone was. I will say that I was twelve but in truth I have no idea how old I was. I was a child. My father called because he wanted to read me a short story that was in the newspaper. My father’s newspaper has always been the Los Angeles Times.
If I was twelve that Christmas Eve, I already knew I wanted to be a writer. That knowledge goes back as early as six, as early as the start of school and maybe even before that. I may at times forget the details of my life but I remember the stories I read. Plots, characters, entire passages of dialogue are stenciled on my brain. They are softened now but for the most part legible. Authors—poor authors!—are gone completely. It was much, much later that I took any notice of who was doing the writing.
I am certain this is the only time my father, or anyone else for that matter, ever read me a story over the phone. I closed my eyes in order to give myself over completely to the pleasures of listening, the phone against my ear like a conch shell. The narrator of the story was a grown woman who was remembering a Christmas Eve in her childhood. She had grown up in a Catholic orphanage and every year each of the girls received a single, disappointing gift that had come to them by way of charity. The gifts were given out in a random sort of lottery and for years the heroine had received a pair of gloves or a package of underwear, some article of necessity that might have been appreciated had it not been masquerading as a Christmas present. But on this particular night her luck changed dramatically. She received a tin box of colored drawing pencils that she had desperately wanted. The narrator planned to be an artist and so not only was the gift delightful, it was actually her only shot at having a future. She both loved the pencils and needed them, and she took them to bed with her in a cold room with a good blanket where she slep
t with the other girls, and she was happy.
Christmas morning in this story came early. The nuns woke the girls up before it was light and told them that during the night a large group of gypsies had come to sleep in the field on the other side of the woods from the orphanage. The gypsy children had no presents at all, and no breakfast, and so the nuns told the girls that they should think about giving up their gifts to the poor children.
This is the only detail of the story that I puzzle over: Did the nuns tell the girls they had to give up their presents or did they suggest the idea and leave it up to them? Morally, of course, it’s more interesting to give the girls the choice, but I’m certain the nuns where I went to school would have made us give the presents up.
Bundled in their coats and scarves, the girls went through the woods towards the gypsy camp in the darkness, carrying not only their presents but their breakfasts. The gypsy children were poor and thin and shivering in the cold, and the narrator was beautifully brave as she gave her colored pencil set to one of the little gypsy girls. She was glad to do it, because at that moment she recognized all that she had—a place to sleep, food, an education, nuns to look after her. She knew how lucky she was to be the girl who had something as extraordinary as colored pencils to give away. They walked back to the orphanage as the sun was coming up and it seems to me that there was singing, by the nuns or the orphans or the gypsies, though the singing may be my own embellishment, so great was my happiness by the time my father drew the story to a close.
Though there was no talk of it during this particular phone conversation, my father wanted me to be a dental hygienist. Unlike my sister, I wasn’t shooting the lights out in school, and he thought it was essential that I have a practical skill to fall back on. A career in writing seemed about as likely to him as the chances of my inheriting Disneyland. My father thought I should be realistic.
But my father was a great reader who had a real appreciation for stories. He wouldn’t have read me a bad short story no matter how moral it was, and I’m certain that he read me this one as much for its simple and lovely construction as for its messages—there’s always someone who’s worse off than you; it is better to give than to receive; and, most of all, listen to the nuns, who are bound to steer you towards your best self.
And I got all of that, but in the kind of explosion of understanding that sometimes happens in childhood, I got more and more. My father loved to cut the newspaper apart and mail his favorite articles to my sister and me, and even now it strikes me as tender that he called to read this one to me over the phone. There was no gift that could have made me feel my father really knew me the way that story did. I loved the bright portrait of Catholicism at its best: as much as I wanted to be a writer when I was a child, I also wanted to be a shining example of my faith, which meant that I wanted the nuns and the other children in my school to be dazzled by my selflessness and piety while I, in my transcendent goodness, never noticed them noticing me. Oh, what I wouldn’t have given to be that orphaned narrator! Wouldn’t it be so much better to be an orphan, not to feel that you were letting one parent down by being with the other parent on Christmas? But children don’t get to pick their hardships. I would have to make do with having too many parents and too many siblings instead of not having enough. I wanted the chance to receive something as wonderful as those colored pencils and then have the opportunity to give them away, but I had no idea where to find gypsies on Christmas Eve in Nashville. It never occurred to me to look in the living room, where my four dark-eyed stepsiblings sat amid the piles of spent wrapping paper, no doubt disheartened by the practical gifts that proved to them how little they were known.
If it was true that I didn’t know much about the people who spent Christmas in my house, I had a remarkable grasp of the inner workings of that short story. The narrator presented that Christmas as a memory, looking back from the safe perch of adulthood, so that I would know from the very start she had survived. Even as I wanted to be the heroine of that story, I understood how much better it was to have her be a Catholic orphan instead of a Catholic girl like me. In terms of plot, there is nothing interesting about a middle-class child giving colored pencils to the poor, but it moved me to tears to see an orphan give her present away. The poverty of the narrator was striking until one considered the poverty of the gypsies; it seemed sad to get only one Christmas present until you found someone who had no present at all; these were the wheels that moved the story along. All the while I understood it was fiction. I knew the narrator was a made-up person. The author very likely had never been to an orphanage before. I understood this not because there was anything shoddy about the work, but because I was concentrating very hard on what it meant to write at that time in my life. Writers need not be confined by their own dull lives and petty Christmas sadness. They could cut new stories out of whole cloth, stories that did not reflect their own experiences but spoke instead to the depth of their emotions. In short, this was something I could do.
The first completely happy Christmas I remember came when I was twenty-two. I was in graduate school in Iowa City and Jack Leggett, who was then the director of the program, asked me to house-sit for him over the holidays. His house was big and old and beautiful and freezing cold. There were cross-country skis propped up beside the back door and an endless number of hardback books I’d never read and an enormous fireplace in the kitchen that required my constant attention. My father in California was happily remarried by then, and my mother and stepfather were nearly divorced. My sister and my stepsiblings had begun to scatter, looking around for a better version of the holiday for themselves. In Iowa I was alone, knitting and reading. Every hour I spent without a gift or decorated tree restored me, and in the peace of falling snow and isolation I let go of Christmas past. I let go of everything except the story of the orphan and her colored pencils, which, sitting in Jack’s kitchen, I told myself again, as I had done on all the Christmases before, as I would continue to do on all the Christmases in the future. It was the shining star, the one thing I wanted to keep. The story is the best gift I have no record of.
(Washington Post Magazine, December 2009)
The Getaway Car
A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life
I WAS ALWAYS GOING to be a writer. I’ve known this for as long as I’ve known anything. It was an accepted fact in my family by the time I had entered the first grade, which makes no sense, as I was late to both read and write. In fact, I was a terrible student when I was young. I’ve always believed the reason I was passed from grade to grade was that I could put together some raw version of a story or poem, even if all of the words were misspelled and half of them were written backwards. Like a cave child scratching pictures on the wall of bison and fire and dancing, I showed an early knack for content. Only writing kept me from being swept into the dust heap of third grade, and for this reason I not only loved writing, I felt a strong sense of loyalty to it. I may have been shaky about tying my shoes or telling time, but I was sure about my career, and I consider this certainty the greatest gift of my life. I can’t explain where the knowledge came from, only that I hung on to it and never let go. Knowing that I wanted to write made my existence feel purposeful and gave me a sense of priorities as I was growing up. Did I want to get a big job and make a lot of money? No, I wanted to be a writer, and writers were poor. Did I want to get married, have children, live in a nice house? No again; by the time I was in middle school I’d figured out that a low overhead and few dependents would increase my time to work. While I thought I might publish something someday, I was sure that very few people, and maybe no one at all, would read what I wrote. By ninth grade I was drawing from the Kafka model: obscurity during life with the chance of being discovered after death. Young as I was when I made this commitment, it wasn’t quite as morbid as it sounds—so many of the writers we studied in school were unknown in their lifetimes (or, better still, scorned and dismissed) that I naturall
y assumed this to be the preferable scenario. It was also in keeping with my Catholic education, which stressed the importance of modesty and humility. I did not daydream of royalty checks, movie deals, or foreign rights. Success never figured into my picture. The life I would have would be straight out of La Bohème (having never heard of La Bohème): I would be poor, obscure, alone, possibly in Paris. The one thing I allowed myself was the certainty of future happiness. Even though the history of literature was filled with alcoholics, insane asylums, and shotguns, I could not imagine that I would be miserable if I received the only thing I wanted.
It turns out that I was right about some of the details of my future and wrong about others, which is fitting, given the fact I was making it all up. No writers came to St. Bernard’s Academy for Catholic girls on Career Day, and so I marched towards the vision in my head without guidance or practical advice. This is where it got me.
I am now a veritable clearinghouse of practical advice, and since I have neither children nor students, I mostly dispense it in talks or short articles. There is a great appeal in the thought of consolidating the bulk of what I know about the work I do in one place, so that when someone asks me for advice I can say, Look, it’s here, I wrote it all down. Every writer approaches writing in a different way, and while some of those ways may be more straightforward than others, very few can be dismissed as categorically wrong. There are people who write in order to find out where the story goes. They never talk about what they’re working on. They say if they knew the ending of the book there would be no point in writing it, that the story would then be dead to them. And they’re right. There are also people, and I am one of them, who map out everything in advance. (John Irving, for example, can’t start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence.) And we are also right. There are a couple of habits I have acquired through years of trial and error that I would recommend emulating, but either you will or you won’t. This isn’t an instruction booklet. This is an account of what I did and what has worked for me, and now that that’s been said, I will resist the temptation to open every paragraph with the phrase “It’s been my experience . . .” That’s what this is: my experience.