Don’t Say Can’t | Dave's Place

My Second Shrink

I don’t remember what compelled me to see a therapist the second time, but I suspect it was the depression I felt while rejections came in on my second novel. It took me two years to write that book, riding to the library every morning on my bike, staying home on the days I typed up, and when my mentor Reynolds Price asked if I wanted to try his agent again—the woman who rejected my first novel—I said no. He knew another agent who was getting started and looking for fiction writers[1], so maybe I should try her. A few weeks later she called and said, “I really liked your book and I think I can sell it.” It was the first time anyone had said such a thing to me. I fell to my knees, I was so overcome.

I’d passed the age of thirty. I was publishing short pieces and reviews in a local magazine, and a one act play I’d written had been produced at Duke, but I was still working as a part-time library assistant. The friends I’d gone to high school with had collected their law and medical degrees and were entering into practice. I’d been writing fiction seriously for over ten years and had yet to publish a word. I was obsessed with publishing a novel. It was publish a novel or die. Nevertheless, when I met somebody new at a hippie potluck or something, I told them I worked at the Duke library. I didn’t say anything about being a writer. I wasn’t a writer until I published a novel.

The process in those days was agonizing. The same dog-eared manuscript went from one place to another; people might read them in days, or might take weeks or months. A letter from my agent was bad news; if there was ever good news it would be a phone call. I kept waiting for the phone to ring.

I’d started a new book without much conviction. I was floundering around.

The Pastoral Care Counselor I found was a woman, an attractive one, named Cheryl Smith. She was the wife of a Methodist minister a Methodist minister herself, but didn’t seem pious or moralistic. Part of my problem was sexual compulsion, and I described that to her in detail, all the way back to how much I masturbated as a boy. “It’s fascinating,” she said, at the end of that day. It was a cheap thrill to talk to her about such things, and she always seemed sympathetic. She admitted to a sexual spark between us—“You’re an attractive man, I’m an attractive woman”—but nothing was going to happen. No hugs at the end of a session, though I once tried.

After a year of rejections I was at a low point. I hadn’t encountered a lot of depression in my life, but this was depression. Very low energy, an iron ball in the pit of my stomach. My wife was happy with where we were living and our new life, my son was thriving, but I was waiting for my writing career to kick in. Then one day I got the phone call I was waiting for. An editor had read my book and liked it, but wanted to talk to me about some changes. She would call the next morning so we could talk.

The schmoozy talky woman on the phone the next morning just dripped of being a New York editor, the kind of person who could go to a three hour lunch, have a few wine spritzers, and talk the whole time. I assumed I was dealing with a commercial type editor. She was actually one of the most discerning readers I ever had.

My previous therapist had given me the idea for the book: I felt like a failure because I’d never played football in front of my father and shown him I was a man. He died six months too soon. I liked that idea for a book because I’d always loved sports, had read and written about them, and thought football could be the foreground—the hook that brought the reader into the book—with my father’s death in the background. I’d read Mark Harris’ baseball novels, loved the way he took a reader through an entire season, with the constant suspense of how it was going. The book would focus on my character’s senior year, a championship season, and would tell the story of how he got there in flashbacks. By the time I got to the championship game the reader would understand that, no matter what happened, it would be empty for my narrator. Even if he won, the right person wasn’t there to see it. The whole season had turned to ashes.

The editor saw things differently.

“The emotional heart of this book is the father son story,” she said. “That should be the foreground, the football story the background. The way you could do that is to tell the story chronologically instead of in flashbacks. That would make you face the important emotional moments that are missing in this version.”

Write the book over again? Write it chronologically? That wasn’t a revision; it was a whole new novel. It was no longer a sports book. It was just one more—as a friend of mine said—leukemia book.

I said I would think about it, but as soon as she suggested a complete rewrite I knew I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to publish that book. I wanted to publish this book. I checked with my agent and she agreed. “But I have to tell you,” she said, “I’m running out of places to send it. I’ve got one more. Then we might have to retire it.”

The next time I saw my counselor, I explained the situation as best I could. “She wants me to make this enormous change in the concept of the book, but I can’t do that.”

“You mean you won’t do it,” she said.

“I can’t do it.”

“You won’t. You don’t want to.”

“I can’t.” In a way it seemed like a semantic distinction, but it was an important one. “I conceived of this book years ago. I spent months deciding how I wanted to do it. This is the book I wanted to write. To make the changes she’s suggesting would violate my vision of the novel.”

“So you won’t do it. You don’t want to.”

“I can’t do it.”

She shook her head. “If you wrote that book, you could write this book.”

“It would violate my central idea. It would betray my vision of the book.”

“So you won’t do it. You’ve decided not to.”

Why was she being so stubborn about a distinction between words?

“I can’t do it. I can’t do that.”

She shook her head. I wouldn’t let go of that word.

“Maybe you won’t ever publish a novel,” she said. “Have you thought about that?”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s just not going to happen. It doesn’t happen for everyone. I have a friend who always wanted to be a concert pianist, and she spoke to me the other day with tears in her eyes. ‘I realize now that my dream is never going to happen.’”

I blew up. How the hell did she know anything about it? She didn’t know if I had writing talent. She hadn’t read one thing I’d written. A New York agent had liked this book the way it was, some of the editors who passed on it liked it in many ways, she hadn’t read the book, she wasn’t an editor or an agent, she probably didn’t even read good literature, she had no right to say such a thing.

She was completely calm as I spoke, didn’t blink an eye. “I’m sorry I upset you,” she said. “But what I’m saying is a fact. It might not happen.”

I stormed out of the room. I sure as hell didn’t want to hug her that day.

People talk about hitting bottom, and I was about there. My agent would send the novel one more place and they would pass on it and that would be it. My first two novels would have gone unpublished. I’d have to dream up another one. I was now 31 years old. And I was a part-time library clerk.

In those days I wrote five mornings a week but didn’t try to work on weekends. I was at home with my son while my wife was at work. But that Saturday morning he was watching cartoons as usual, and I went upstairs to sit and think, just look at my life. I wasn’t going to do any work.

Nobody had to know about this. It was just me.

I had an outline of the book as I’d written it. I decided to write an outline of the chronological book, and how that looked. A lot of the existing scenes fit right into it, but the football games would be too long and I would need to expand the flashbacks. The already-written scenes were crowded into the last two years; the first two years were pretty empty. I could see what those scenes would be. I’d use a lot of what I’d already done, but there was a lot left to do.

I could also see—though this was hard to admit—that though I still thought my version was good, this version would be better. Longer, fuller and better.[2] I just didn’t know if I could write it. All those new scenes. The editor was right. There was a lot of emotion in scenes I hadn’t written.

I could send in the outline, and see what she thought.

Just to drag the situation out forever and drive me to the edge of insanity, there was a long comedy of errors about my agent not getting back to me about the outline, me being too depressed to contact her, when I finally did she didn’t remember anything about an outline, and for a couple days she couldn’t find my manuscript. I had to do the outline all over again, three months after I originally had.

But within minutes of seeing it, the editor made an offer. I spent eight months doing the rewrite, the fastest I’d ever written anything in my life. I finished the book in April; it came out the following December.

The first person I took a copy to was Cheryl Smith.

[1] She did pretty well. Eventually she was the agent for Alice Munro, and attended the ceremony when she was awarded the Nobel Prize.

[2] My original manuscript had been 250 pages. This one came in at around 400.