How I Became a Writer

I am supposed to be writing. The time has come to tell the story of this terrible thing that happened when I was young. I’ve pulled out all the tricks in the book: washing the dishes, paying bills, tending to all the urgent things that tug at us day in and day out. Between tasks I sit at the desk. I putter and prevaricate. My brain watches itself toss the thought-ball back and forth: I can’t do this. Yes, I can, and I must. Who will tell this story if I don’t? The world doesn’t need another story of grief and loss and ordinary people struggling through their guilt, shame, regret. Does it matter what the world needs, my ping-pong brain asks. No, the side that’s on MY side answers. I need this. I’m doing it for me, not anyone else. An exercise in excavation, truth-telling, fact-finding, standing in the fire and feeling the burn at last. Taking pictures of, documenting, putting words to, the burn. Saying how it felt as the world imploded and the truth rushed into my fuzzy, self-guarding innocence: We die. We die. We are born to die.

Do most seventeen-year-olds know this? Do they understand already the cost of love? If you love someone, anyone—parent, sister, child, mate, friend—you have to be prepared for a knife to go into your heart and stay there forever. Death will come. All that raw, beautiful life you see in the face of your beloved will be stilled. It will turn bluish and cool, then cold. Or, in my brother’s case, burn and blister away. Did my friends know this? Did it ever cross their minds as they worried about their acne and their grades and which college they’d get into and whether their best friend was secretly sleeping with their boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.? Was I the only one afflicted by this preposterous ignorance? I had no idea that we died. It’s such an abstract concept, and the ego is so armored against acknowledging the inevitability of its own demise. Perhaps I wasn’t the only innocent. I can only know my own experience. When death came to us—when it broke the magic circle of my insular, preternaturally charmed family—when it came for my beautiful, adored, surely at least half-immortal brother—weren’t some of the minor Greek gods half-mortal, half-divine?—when it came for him—death, which had been an abstraction like the cool, spare, white-on-white constructions of Malevich, bloomed blood red and violent, grotesque as twisted metal and burned flesh, a new, monstrous and fascinating creature fully formed and suddenly taking up all the space in my brain, my eyes and heart.

How I coped: I got a job that fall, in a little sandwich shop in Brookline, and lived in a communal house with my sister and four or five of her friends, all students at various colleges in Boston. It was 1971. I spent half a year saving my pennies and plotting a kind of pilgrimage. I would follow my brother’s faintly glowing footsteps, his bread crumb trail. A tramp steamer was out of reach, but I would travel, alone if possible, seeking to experience some of the things he told me about in his letters and visits home. I would hitchhike across Europe and England, encounter Art with a capital A. I would stand in the entrance of the Louvre, transfixed by Winged Mercury. I would stare at the Mona Lisa in wonder. I would experience, with no filters, the art and architecture that he loved. I was unschooled in the traditional sense, but I had been inhaling literature and art since the age of thirteen, when a thick, red, leather-bound, gold-embossed copy of Anna Karenina leaped off a library shelf into my hands, as if pushed by an invisible ally, and I opened it and fell in. I wanted to stand in front of paintings, sculptures, objects I had never heard of and just drink them in, without curator’s notes or explication. I wanted to meet the world with my bare skin, my untutored brain. I wanted as much unmediated experience as I could get. It was a hunger, a ravening. I was driven by it to take idiotic risks. Like getting into a truck somewhere south of Madrid despite the driver smelling of alcohol because there hadn’t been a car for hours and we would be stranded for the night if we didn’t hop in. I had paired up with a French Canadian girl I met in a Paris hostel because she had French and I had a little Spanish, we were both on our own and compatible enough. So we hopped in that truck. And held on for a wild, careening ride through mountain passes. Then there were the other kinds of passes. We had to fend those off with discouraging regularity. We both took to carrying hunting knives displayed conspicuously at our belts. Two young women—girls, really—we were both just 18, hitchhiking through France and Spain in 1972. When I think about it now, it takes my breath away, the chances we took, the things that could have gone terribly wrong but didn’t.

I would make my way to Stonehenge the night before Easter, sleeping at a nearby hostel and getting up before dawn to walk out to the stones, unprotected then by any fence, just in time to see the sun send its dagger of light right into the very heart of the circle.

I would throw myself into the world, alone, skinless, naked. I would write about it

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