December 2017: On Endings
A few years ago a friend posted an interview with Jo Ann Beard. It was about her novel In Zanesville, and had a question about the last sentence in the book. How had she come up with it? Jo Ann Beard shared that she had the hardest time finishing the novel. For a year she'd tell people that she was almost finished, but then would panic. One night she had a dinner party and began to freak out, saying to her partner, "How can I have people over when I need to be finishing this fucking book?" Her partner Scott magically told her his two favorite words, and those words were the missing puzzle piece. Those words were the ending.
This anecdote gave me so much hope and glee. Part of what has eluded me about finishing the memoir I've been writing for so many years is the ending. You would think that when writing a story from your own life the ending would come easily. Alas. I thought it was done, I thought I'd found a natural and emotional stopping point, but the first time my agent read the manuscript she wrote on the last page, "Where's the rest?" I began trying to shoehorn an ending in, grasping at sentimental summary of those years in my life, fast forwarding to my mother's retirement party, trying to weave in the meta-perspective of trying to write the ending (disaster). And during it all, friends would ask me how the book was going, and I would splutter with anxiety, looking like cartoon Cathy in so many panels ("Ack!"). I often filled my home with friends and then later ranted that I had to finish this fucking book. What was I doing making waffles for dozens of friends? I was a writer.
While getting into bed one night, I asked Emily for her favorite words. This would work. The Jo Ann Beard ending charm would work for me too.
Emily was thoughtful for a moment. "Cerulean," she said.
I was screwed.
I've seen writers recently summing up their writing accomplishments for 2017, listing their publications, their word counts, their book deals, their victories. The scale of my writing accomplishments this year is so much different: there are the journals I filled (what joy it is to complete a journal and add it to my shelf), stories I started, endings I tried. There are moments where people asked me what I do and I didn't flinch to tell them that I'm a writer, despite the constant tug of all the other things I do as well. The greatest revelation this year came to me in a workshop in Aspen, where I had a fellowship to attend an intimate writing workshop in a stunning June landscape with a bunch of writers who were total gems. Each workshop took place in a small living room of a condo at a resort, and I always sat on the couch and had a view of the instructor in her arm chair, framed by sliding glass doors, the tops of pine trees, the mountains. When it was my turn to have my story workshopped, I gave them a piece of the memoir, carefully selected. It was something from the middle, something that I hoped would lead me to my ending.
Where are you? They asked. There were the others on the page, the kids and characters who populated that time in my life. There was the school and the arc of drama. But I'd written myself out of it. It was like telling someone a story while also holding your breath. The story was mine, but I was missing.
It was just this week that my life settled in a way where I could pick up the notes from the summer, set aside my ego that says I should've been writing all along, that real writers would never abandon a book for so many months. I cracked open the pages marked in my own handwriting. The hardest part of writing for me is not the starting but the finishing. I avoid endings because when something ends the next step is to let others in. It's definitive. The year winds to a close and I start to feel the anxiety of something ending, something to be measured, to be quantified. Instead, I come to December for its beginning. I take the notes of what I started and I trust--I trust--that the ending will come.
xo,
c