Books May Close, But Our Stories Never End
By: Martha Manning
Tags: Depression, Writing, Miscarriage, Creativity, Life Lessons

This week I got to touch the sun. I published a 3000 word feature — a memoir — in a national psychotherapy magazine I admire. From the publication of my first book, to an Op — Ed in the Washington Post, to a brief anecdote, my response is always the same. I feel like Jo March when she finally published ‘Little Women.’ Each piece is a dream on paper. I rub my hands over it, I catch my breath, and immediately, I start worrying that I’ll never publish again. This has been going on for 30 years. Once my dearest wish for publication comes to be, I become more protective of my dreams, not less. Some of it comes from the fact that most of my writing is about me and I’m not that interesting. The other is an instant fear about money —how long can I stretch until the next piece of magic?

A new piece and old feelings

I am proud of the piece I just wrote and happy about the cash. Yet, I am being shadowed by a soft sorrow that is so old, but newly immediate, and insistent of my attention. It reminds me that our emotions live well beyond the ink in our words, after they are printed, sold, celebrated and shelved. Our lives have a momentum that our writing does not. Most of what we’ve written about ourselves screams for an epilogue after even a short time. With so much time between when I experienced the events in the story, and when I actually wrote about it, I never considered the fact that my intervening life would have re-shaped the way I felt.

The article I wrote was about my first miscarriage — 34 years ago. It spanned the arc from conception, to the pregnancy, to the loss, all the way to the baby’s due date. It was a portrait of my husband, my ambivalent seven-year-old daughter and me. It was also an account of the wrenching experience of a loss, so private and devastating, that at the time was given little support, probably because nothing visible, or “finished,” had value.

In general, I tend to look at life as a shotgun marriage of sorrow and humor. I write like that too. Years ago a friend had a W.B. Yeats quote printed and framed for me

“Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.”

The same friend, gave me a quote from Paul Simon, many years later: ‘Still crazy after all these years.’ But that’s another story…

Why do we write about ourselves?

Why did I choose to write that piece after all these years? Why am I so sad? The shrink in me just can’t let it go. So much had changed. I lost several more pregnancies after that first one, leaving me as the oldest of six children, to the mother of only one. But what a treasure! This smart beauty, with the feisty, funny self at age seven, has remained essentially unchanged. She recently followed true love to Sweden and I suspect she will be back, but only for visits.

Perhaps it is the loneliness we all carry right now in the face of this unforgiving virus. Or the illnesses that have stalked me during this time. (I mean, who gets gout one week, and shingles the next?)

Or perhaps it was that the husband in my miscarriage story abandoned me two years ago to a solitary existence as I was substituted by someone else. For the first time in my 67 years, I live alone. The psychologist in me knows that I am finally allowing myself to envision the countless alternative endings to my story. I just wasn’t prepared for the persistence of yearning that comes with it.

A book vs. a life

In the nights when sleep eludes me, I am haunted by how much we reify our written expressions. Then we share them with other people who accept them as static pieces of truth or comfort that continue to exist, encased in heavy cardboard, beautiful photographs and sturdy card stock.

What is not added or written, is the melancholic wisdom about what happens after we carve out our lives, and serve them up as offerings that have beginnings, middles and ends. I have to remind myself that the story persists much longer than the book. Convinced that my miscarriage was a one shot deal, I emerged from that suffering with a sense that it was “ all over.” I had just completed a full circuit and the experience was finished, done, and ready for recounting to hundreds or thousands of people who cried and confessed how helpful it was to them.

But they were telling the writer, not the mother who had changed. The woman whose second and third lost pregnancies diminished her arrogance about survival. That woman who now knew that there is no recipe for suffering. Through the lens of time, the reality we commit to paper and share with others is another self, a different person than the one that your readers want you to be now. When you’re sharing about loss, grief, healing, achieving and backsliding, and just getting the hell through life, readers would prefer the Mount Rushmore of the writing “you”— sturdy, impressive, and immutable.