Family Business
I grew up with the strange idea that a writer was a normal
thing to be. My mother, Linda Pastan, was a writer. She wrote
poetry at her IBM Selectric when I was at school. Then, when
I came home, she gave me a snack and made dinner. I think
I was a little jealous of her work, of the times she couldn’t
tear herself away from the typewriter, or when I got up early
and found her already there, a pale ghost haunting the study
in her bathrobe before dawn. What magic force held her there,
listening to voices I couldn’t hear?
Still, I heard a few distant, fragmentary voices of my own.
I wrote poems when I was six, short stories at eleven. One
thing my mother’s writing—and her success in writing—gave
me was confidence. Writing didn’t look all that hard
to me. It had to be easier than sewing, for instance, or playing
basketball, just two of the things neither my mother nor I
could do. She wrote wonderful poems (I memorized them, sometimes),
published books, won prizes, and who was she? Only my mother.
Surely I could do the same, or why not better? In my mind
I saw the shelf of novels I would write, blushed modestly
at the glowing reviews. So, then, when I did have some early
success (I published my first story in The Georgia Review
when I was nineteen), I took it in stride, as though
I’d gotten a good grade on a easy test. (How I wish
I could get into The Georgia Review now!)
“Rachel,” my mother said. “I don’t
think you understand what a big deal this is!"
She was right about that. Indeed it took me a long time to
understand what a difficult career I had chosen. Over thirteen
years, between the ages of 25 and 37, I wrote three novels
and a short story collection and couldn’t get any of
them published. I got harder on myself, both in the bad way
(depression) and the good way (revision).
“Rachel,” my mother said, “you’ll
get a book published. Haven’t I told you it’s
about talent and persistence, but also luck?”
When it finally happened, it happened like this:
I wrote a fourth novel—different, I was certain, from
the other three. Better, and more likeable besides. I sent
it to my agent, and she called me to say she was sorry. “I’m
sorry,” she said, “but no one’s going to
be interested in this book.”
I put the manuscript away. I was done with writing, I thought.
I would work in the garden, play with the children. Maybe
get a real job.
“Rachel,” my mother said (her patience, perhaps,
wearing thin, but in a different way from mine), “don’t
be ridiculous! My friend knows an agent she thinks will love
your book.”
Again, she was right.
Since my novel has been published, I’m more conscious
of feeling like the heir of a self-made industrialist, the
one who inherits the paper mill or the piano factory, and
runs the business ably enough. But the heir knows—everybody
knows—that there wouldn’t have been any business
to run in the first place if it weren’t for the parent,
hearing voices in the dark hours of the morning. Blazing the
way.
