All problems with writing and performing come from fear. Fear of exposure, fear of weakness, fear of lack of talent, fear of looking like a fool for trying, for even thinking you could write in the first place. It’s all fear. If we didn’t have fear, imagine the creativity in the world. Fear holds us back every step of the way.
Writers & Lovers
Books about the process of writing are so interesting to me (as someone who wants to write a novel but has a million and one reasons why I’d never be able to do it), and Writers & Lovers so perfectly captures the struggle of writing: how hard it can be one day to drag up the words from your soul and how they can flow through you the next. Only for you to then be crippled with self-doubt that every word you have written is rubbish, of course.
The hardest thing about writing is getting in every day, breaking through the membrane. The second-hardest thing is getting out. Sometimes I sink down too deep and come up too fast. Afterward I feel wide open and skinless. The whole world feels moist and pliable. When I get up from the desk I straighten the edges of everything. The rug needs to be perfectly aligned with the floorboards. My toothbrush needs to be perpendicular to the edge of the shelf. Clothing cannot be left inside out. My mother’s sapphire ring needs to be centred on my finger.
Writers & Lovers
The story is about Casey who is, by day (and evening) a waitress, but all she wants in life is to be a writer. She struggles putting pen to paper because she feels like a failure, an imposter, a fraud. For Casey, summoning up her writing it’s a kind of painful ecstasy.
The blurbs on the book cover, from the Sunday Times for example, describe the book as “extremely funny” but I disagree – it’s painful to read and made my nervous system jangle. Casey’s descriptions of anxiety and panic, feeling like bees under her skin, and her observations of just how hard life can be, are so brutally honest:
All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams…
I can’t go inside until I slow down. My heart and mind feel like they are in a race to the death. I watch my breath. I squeeze my muscles one by one…
I go inside and lie on my futon and wait to explode.
Writers & Lovers
In fact, I would tear up the blurb on the book (apart from the review from the Guardian which describes it as “a kind of gorgeous agony” which I wholeheartedly agree with). But the others, which make it sound like a cheeky little comedy about a woman falling in and out of love with two men and who also happens to be writing a book, don’t do it justice.
Writers & Lovers is about what it takes to write a book, the fear that drives an author and lives in every sentence. It’s about a young woman trying to find her place in the world, about overcoming the shit that life has tried to drag her down with. It’s about creativity being stifled by the need to pay the bills. It’s about talent and dedication, and passion for the art of story-telling. Maybe I took the book too seriously. As someone who often feels like a fraud admitting they want to be a writer, I didn’t see it as hilarious but as an accurate reflection of how hard it is to be creative in a world where so much pressure is put on how much you get paid.
That might all be a bit over zealous. There are a few comic moments. At one point, for example, Casey leaves her manuscript at a friend’s to read and she worries it might be picked up by a neighbour who will read it and then publish it to great success under their name. She imagines she having to go to court with her scraps of notes to win her book back. I’ve definitely thought this when emailing bits of writing to friends – what if it gets lost on the internet and someone else passes it off as their own.
And there happens to be male love interests in the book too: Oscar and Silas. One is a famous author and the other is trying to become one. I loved all the comments in the book about writers and how they present themselves. There is a scene where Casey it is at a party at her friend’s house and a recently published author called Eva is there. Casey comments how Eva seems to have changed since her book was published:
I met Eva six years ago, when she was working on the collection. They aren’t stories, she told me, they’re hard little polyps I’m training to remove from my brain. She was sort of ablaze with a lot of nervous energy then. All the stuffing seems to have gone out of her since. She looks embarrassed, sitting on that stool, to be who she is now.
Writers & Lovers
Casey has also recently lost her mother who went on a holiday to Chile and died while she was there. Memories of her mother intermingle in the story as little things pop up and remind Casey of her; “My mother used to bring me here when I was little,” she comments at one point, “She’d let me borrow a hard leather purse from her closet, and I’d wear it the way she wore hers.’ I tuck a pretend purse under my arm.” Or when she is playing the card game crazy eights with Oscar’s children, who have also lost their mum, she quietly remembers “my mother taught it to me when I had chicken pox in kindergarten. I made her play for days.” These surprise moments of grief which are constant reminders of her loss pepper throughout the book.
I was reading my mum’s copy of the book. It was a story that has she said she’d loved. When it came to an end, she told me as she passed it on, she had been left wanting to know more as she had grown so fond of the characters and she genuinely cared about them. As I was reading the book, I was aware of the spine that had been bent and broken, the way my mum does when she is reading, the way I’ve noticed I’ve also started to do too.
There were moments in the novel when I really did wonder how Casey was going to be ok: the horrible job as a waitress with the rotten men, the shed she lives in that smells of mould and soil, the struggles of writing. But there was so much resilience in Casey (as I think there is in a lot of artists I admire), and that internal deep-driven need to create that kept me turning the pages. I highly recommend this book to any writer or anyone interested in the process of writing, as well as anyone who just enjoys a well told story of modern life and the struggle to be creative.
Luggage & Scribble 