on envy and art-making [recipe]

Generosity, Competition, and the Creative World

Redux:

This time last year, I was in a residency in Maine, where I was finishing a draft of my next book, On Permission. It was bitterly cold and icy, and so I spent much of my non-writing time — apart from a morning walk to Beauchamp Point every day — reading, and making notes in my journal about hierarchy, creative dominance and submission, and why dog-eat-dog competition has always stuck in my throat. My friend

Laura McKowen

recently wrote about this issue, and it struck me as being so very much on-topic right now. It is something that anyone who makes art in a public way at some point in their life wonders: why do we respond to competition the way we do? As a neurotic New Yorker, and although God knows I try, I am constitutionally incapable of abiding by Mel Robbins’ wise words: Let them. And then I think of something I heard Sharon Salzberg say at a three day silent retreat with Sylvia Boorstein a few years ago. Sharon’s story: she had been teaching at a different retreat, and talking about the weirdness of living in a dog-eat-dog world, and how it connects to the dharma, and issues of craving and desire (more about that form of craving, bhava tanha, here). A young woman got up to ask a question and said that she had always thought the expression was DOGGY DOG world, and so that’s how she decided to live her life, as opposed to one of bloodthirstiness.

Fast-forward a year from leaving the residency: I delivered the revised version of On Permission to my editor at the beginning of this week. Already, I can feel the air moving, so I thought I’d revisit these words I wrote last year about Bonnie Friedman’s great book, Writing Past Dark, and why it needs to be required reading for every creative trying to do their work, stay in their lane, and live in a doggy dog world.

---

Years ago, when I was living in Manhattan and working at HarperCollins, I was an editor on the paperback edition of one of the greatest books on the craft of writing that I think was ever written; I say this not because its author, Bonnie Friedman, became my friend (and for a long time, my mentor, along with the novelist Jenifer Levin), but because she spoke the unspeakable. In her book Writing Past Dark, she talked about the things that we all know to exist — they’re out there for every maker of art, every creative, even every business person — but dare not go near: issues of envy and fear in the creative’s life.

First edition, 1993

The editor who had acquired the hardcover — also now a dear friend, formerly my manager — once asked me when we were talking about Writing Past Dark whether or not I’d experienced these issues myself; my third memoir, Motherland, was just coming out, and I was facing the inevitable nerves, and the practical problems surrounding media and publication. (Could I drop, say, thirty pounds by pub date? Could I grow, say, six inches—vertically?) I told my friend what was happening — my book had been delivered early and another book on an almost identical subject was being published by another house, and their publisher was going to try and get their book out earlier, even just by a month or so, to get a jump on media.

For people who are not on the inside of the business, what this means is: if two similar books come out at the same time, media will usually only focus on one of them — there’s just so much time and media space allocated to each of the 750.9 million books sold, for example, in 2020 (I’m being sarcastic; most of those books won’t get a sliver of a sliver of media time) and generally the one with the more media savvy author wins. Connections help, a lot. Enigmatic beauty and mystery are also a very big plus. (I’m very sorry: I’d really like to say this is hyperbole, but alas: nope.) How it effects other authors — the ones who are called upon to support their colleagues’ new books with blurbs, panels, etc? Those authors often also have to choose: who will they throw their energies behind? Who will provide them with a silent little nudge of popularity-by-association? Someone I used to know, a new writer, was once outraged when I told them this fact, which was not meant as a dig or sour grapes; it’s just the truth. I’m one of those authors who has had the benefit of sitting on both sides of the table — I was an editor for the better part of two decades, with sixteen New York Times bestsellers to my name — and sadly, this is all fact. And when my own editors call to tell me that they decided to not be super-competitive with one of my titles, they almost always end the conversation with this line: You’re an editor….you know how this works.

SO: Getting back to the book — Writing Past Dark. My friend/former boss and I were talking about Bonnie’s book, and how she was speaking the unspeakable. How many of us buy a book and flip to the back flap to see the author photo? How many of us do this before we buy the book? How many people wince when a friend lands an essay in, say, The New Yorker, and takes just a split second too long to congratulate them? I once told a well-known writer that I’d just had an essay taken by a highly esteemed literary journal; I was thrilled, and grateful. She waited a beat, beamed, and said Oh honey, that’s where writers get published when they can’t get into The Paris Review. I realized that every single time something happened for me like this, their response was exactly the same. (Here’s a crumb; enjoy your supper.) This is scarcity mindset writ large: I have to take what is yours even if I myself don’t want it because less for you, more for me. (As my friend, the late writer David Rakoff would have said: You’re a writer? Don’t get too comfortable.)

I told my former boss about this conversation about my essay, and how my friend had responded. You should see how the poets treat each other, she said, laughing. I did not find it funny.

Writers — creatives as a whole — spend hours, days, weeks, years at work, producing the art that they are called to by forces that are often elusive. Every creative has work that they are haunted by, that will not leave them alone, that screams in their ear while they’re walking the dog or standing in the shower. In my next book — the one I’m working on now — I spend a fair amount of time unpacking the fact of what it means to be haunted by work to the degree that one can’t shake it, against all odds, especially if they do not have permission — cultural, familial, psychological, societal — perceived or not, to write it.

After three memoirs and another book-in-progress as we speak, I still do it: late at night, when I can’t sleep, I skulk down the hallway and into my office and open up a desktop file containing a story that spilled out of me one night after work in 1996. That evening, I walked into my little Manhattan studio apartment, dropped my bag, fed my cats, and sat down at the computer without even taking my coat off. By midnight — I had forgotten to eat, although I’m certain I brought a bottle of wine over to my desk to grease the skids — I had written the first draft of a twenty-page story about two mid-century suburban New York couples, close friends, each with a young child, one of whom is paraplegic from birth, and how, in plain sight, one of the husbands — a handsome, well-respected teacher, a combat veteran — is sleeping with both his friend’s wife and his friend’s young daughter. On a long, middle-of-the-night drive home to New York from Florida, one of the wives sets their car on fire, with them in it. We never learn if it is intentional. We never learn if they survive. The late Sixties. People are dying in Watts and Vietnam and Chicago. The world is burning; the world rolls forward. Ordinary days pass. A microcosm.

Two couples. This is their normal. The story is about choosing not to look at what is right in front of you, and the devastation that follows.

The story was rejected everywhere, and somewhere around 2000, I stopped submitting it. I have a folder-full of Thanks, not right for us, please send more. And yet: it haunts me. It won’t leave me alone. I’m almost thirty years older than I was when I wrote it. Somewhere around the beginning of the second Bush presidency, a filmmaker reached out to me about it. Will it ever see publication? Will it ever see the screen? No idea. But that’s not the point.

I once delivered a lecture to a packed audience of new writers at a well-known arts center; one of the other teachers asked to read my notes because she was so taken by my talk. I thought nothing of it; I gave them to her and discovered, lo and behold, that six months later, she was teaching my workshop in another program. The point is this: all of these things that Bonnie Friedman talks about in Writing Past Dark point to a singular problem — envy, fear, distraction, arrogance, competition to the degree that people will move mountains to trip each other up so that they can get ahead result in one thing: attention taken away from the work itself. The craft of the work. The work of the work. The fact of the work. The beauty and clarity of the work. The work you are meant to create, that haunts you, that belongs to you and absolutely no one else but you.

Envy is a con man, a tugger at your sleeve, a knocker at your door. Let me in for just a moment, it says, for just one moment of your time. It claims to tell the truth; it craves attention. The more you listen to it, the more you believe what it says. The more thoroughly you believe, the more you think you must listen. You must get the info on who is out there, how young the competition is, where they’ve been reviewed, what they’ve won, and what that means about you. The antidote to envy is one’s own work. Always one’s own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. - Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark

If you are a creative who is at this moment thinking about who is doing what and where and why and for whom, stop: go back to work. And if someone in your creative world needs your help, give it to them. Be generous, and always, always, be wise.

---

RECIPE

Macaroni and Cheese

It’s arguably a little weird to follow an essay about writing and the creative life with a recipe for macaroni and cheese. BUT: this is the sort of conversation that renders me in need of comfort, and so, here we are — macaroni and cheese, made for me last night by my wife after I spent a day teaching and writing about issues of creative ownership, moral hazards, and the process of writing as the art itself.

Adapted from The Mac + Cheese Cookbook

Serves 4ish

Bechamel

3 cups whole milk

1/2 cup unsalted butter

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons kosher salt OR

1 teaspoon table salt

Heat the milk in a pot over medium heat until it just starts to bubble, but is not boiling, 3 to 4 minutes. Remove from heat.

Heat the butter over medium heat in a separate, heavy-bottomed pot. When the butter has just melted, add the flour and whisk constantly until the mixture turns light brown, about 3 minutes Remove from the heat.

Slowly pour the warm milk, about 1 cup at a time, into the butter-flour mixture, whisking constantly. It will be very thick when you first add the milk, and thinner as you slowly pour in the 3 cups.

Once all the milk has been added, set the pot back over medium-high heat, and continue to whisk constantly. In the next 2 to 3 minutes the sauce should come together and become silky and thick. Add the salt.

Mac and Cheese

1/2 pound dried elbow pasta

2 cups bechamel

1-1/2 cups grated extra sharp Cheddar cheese

1/4 cup grated Gruyere

1/2 cup grated Pecorino Romano

Panko breadcrumbs, for topping

Cook the pasta in salted boiling water until a little less than al dente. Drain, rinse the pasta with cold water, and drain it again.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Add the sauce and the cheeses to a large, heavy-bottomed pot and cook over medium heat. Stir until the cheese is barely melted, about 3 minutes. Slowly add the cooked pasta, give it a stir, and continue cooking while stirring continuously, until the pasta is hot and steaming, another 5 minutes.

Pour into a lightly greased baking dish, sprinkle with panko breadcrumbs, and pop into the oven for another 10-15 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy.

Spoon into bowls, and serve immediately.