Rebecca in 2013

Rebecca Makkai has many claims to fame. First of all, her sense of humor. Outstanding. Second, she’s had 4 short stories anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. FOUR. In  2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Third, The Great Believers. If you haven’t read it, put it at the top of your list. It was my favorite book of 2018. For months after I finished it, I missed Yale and Fiona. Here’s one of the reasons I love Fiona:

“That a French cafe would have Wi-Fi seemed wrong. In her mind, Paris was always 1920. It was always Aunt Nora’s Paris, all tragic love and tubercular artists.”

And there’s this. The Great Believers was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a Finalist for the National Book Award, the Winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Winner of the LA Times Book Prize, the Winner of the Stonewall Award, and a New York Times Ten Best Books of 2018.

I met Rebecca at Ragdale back in 2012, and I always enjoy running into her at AWP. This fall she will be teaching at the Writing by Writers Tomales Bay workshop. As of last night, there were still a couple of spots left in her class!

For more about Rebecca: the next writer in the series: november 1, 2013.

For more from Rebecca: How We Spend Our Days: Rebecca Makkai.

Rebecca is a bright light in the world, and I’m happy to know her. I’m grateful for her words and for her support of mine.

A

I’m writing this from Ragdale, the bucolic artists’ residency in Lake Forest, Illinois. I’m not writing about Ragdale, though, but about a day two weeks ago—and about why I need to be at Ragdale right now. Why, without one or two colony visits a year, I’d have no writing career at all.

The day starts with my daughters, newly three and six, screaming about a balloon they’ve both laid claim to. My husband has fed them breakfast, and as I emerge from the shower, he drops them in our room so he can head to work. They decide they want to “do the twist” on the bedroom rug, as they did yesterday. The problem: yesterday I sang them the Sam Cooke song about the twist—but now, as I search the closet for something to teach in, all I can remember is “Let’s Do the Twist” and “Let’s Twist Again,” neither of which is right, I know. And my kids know it too. I manage to dress and locate a Sam Cooke CD and load the girls into the car. We find the song (“Twistin’ the Night Away”—of course!) and I get a moment’s peace.

I have seventy things to do, but one overrides them all: the copyedits of my new novel are due in three days. This is my last chance to incorporate any changes (beyond fixing typos) into the manuscript. I need to go over it with a fine-tooth comb and even change a last few major things for my editor. The novel is ninety thousand words long. I’m on page twelve. That’s twelve, as in one ten and two units. As in, three hundred pages away from the end.

But right now I have just enough time before class to grab a coffee and do the class reading for Monday so I don’t have to worry about it over the weekend. After I drop the girls at school, I spend a half hour perched in Starbucks, reading Louise Erdrich’s amazing story “The Years of My Birth” and eavesdropping on the rich people who have some kind of daily three-hour coffee club. I’m obsessed with this group in a writerly way, especially with how the women (all young and beautiful) fawn over the men (all older and not so beautiful). I’ll write about them one of these days.

I teach class—undergrads, intro. We’re moving from poetry to fiction, defining prose (I have a weirdly hard time defining prose, which might speak to my mental state), and today I’m being observed by my department head. I’m an adjunct—this is the only class I teach—and I do want to be asked back.  After class, he chats with me. The class went well, but I need to put my students on the spot more.  It’s true. I tend to want to rescue them from flailing.

At 11:30 I get my three-year-old and head home. After lunch, two high school students come to interview her for their child psychology class. We live on the campus of the boarding school where my husband teaches, and although the timing isn’t great (I’m still on page twelve. Twelve!) I love that my daughters are growing up surrounded by intelligent and diverse students. Their project is on gender, but I don’t think they’re getting the answers they expected. (My daughter answers that her best friend is named Gino, she wants to be a bumblebee for Halloween, her favorite book is Curious George.)

My daughter naps after this, but before I can edit I have to send in a report on a student I’m concerned about and help promote something I’ve written for the Ploughshares blog. Finally I sit with my manuscript and a massage pillow and a cup of decaf. I’ve been off caffeine for three weeks now, because it was messing with my heart. I miss it dearly. In half an hour, I edit eight pages.

I spend the next two hours changing a poopy diaper, getting my older daughter from school, and peeling potatoes with the girls. My husband comes home (marry a teacher, people—they get home at 4:00!) and I take off running—literally, running—to my car.

I could go to the library, but there’s a guy there who picks his nose and a businessman who loudly chews gum, and at this hour the place will be filled with tutors. So I head to the wine bar, where I discover no free table. I stand there vulturing for ten minutes before a woman glares at me and leaves. Finally, I have my wine and some crackers and my pen, and about three hours before my fatigue will catch up with me. I edit at eighty miles an hour, thinking that if I had more time, I’d make the one edit that would change a bad review into a good review, the one edit that would elevate the book or win me a prize or save me from embarrassment.  I’ll never find out. And I can’t put that disclaimer in the back of the book: “It would’ve been better if it weren’t for the poopy diaper.”

Fast forward ten days: Although I miss my kids, I’m in a beautiful room at Ragdale, overlooking a prairie. My edits are done—I could’ve used this residency two weeks ago, but maybe that’s for the best. Now I have three weeks of time to write, to think, to get a full night’s sleep.

It’s going to be amazing.

I have no idea what to do with myself.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• The Virgins, by Pamela Erens. I didn’t choose it—I was asked to blurb it. When you agree to something like that, you always try to stay noncommittal, in case it doesn’t quite capture you, or in case your own projects demand your time. This is a brilliant book, though, intense and haunting and sexual and lyrical and important. I dropped everything and read it. I played hooky and finished it on a cold day at the Lake Michigan beach.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• Vitamin B. No kidding. Large doses of Vitamin B. It gets you alert and focused, and you’re able to keep the details of your project in your mind without losing sight of the whole. It increases your IQ by about twenty points.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• I can’t sit normally in a chair. Right now, my legs are folded up so my knees are right under my chin. This is my most human way of sitting. Most of my seated postures are a bit more simian. Basically, on any given day if you snapped a picture of me writing, I’d look like someone who got struck by lightning while doing yoga.

By REBECCA MAKKAI

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— Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month, a guest writer shares how he or she spends the day.

November 1, 2013: Rebecca Makkai

It was last November 1st that Rebecca and I first met–at Ragdale. I didn’t realize then that I had already loved one of her stories. How perfect that she’s writing the How We Spend Our Days essay for this November 1.

The story I had read was from The Best American Short Stories 2008. When I read this entire volume, I starred three, and one of them was “The Worst You Ever Feel.” Here’s its first lovely paragraph:

When the nine-fingered violinist finally began playing, Aaron hid high up on the wooden staircase, as far above the party as the ghosts. The exact, oak-floored enter of the universe. He was a spider reigning high above the web of oriental rug, that bursting star of red and black and gold, and from his limbs stretched forty-three invisible fibers, winding light and sticky around the forty guests, around his parents, around Radelescu the violinist. There were thinner strands too, between people who had a history of love or hate, and all three ghosts were tied to Radelescu, to his arcing bow. But Aaron held the thickest strings, and when he thought, Breathe, all the people breathed.

In “The Worst You Ever Feel,” in addition to the language and the many-layered story, the numbers shine: nine-fingered, forty-three fibers, forty guests, three ghosts, six best things, seventh day, five times Aaron knew for certain he had been right, those ten days, twenty years, two things.

I’ve been collecting lists in stories and novels for three years. Here’s one from this story:

The six best things about parties were: (1) Having so many people to watch. (2) The job of opening the door for guests, and waiting for the curbs to fill with parked cars so yours was the house everyone passed and said, “Oh, they must be having a party tonight! (3) Pastries. (4) The people who brought chocolates. (5) Watching people get drunk. (6) The music.

Amazingly, Rebecca has a story in The Best American Stories 2009…

AND 2010…

AND 2011.

And she has a fun novel, The Borrower, (which also uses lists) about a children’s librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, and the little boy Ian who loves to read. Here’s a description of Lucy, the librarian:

I hated that I’d started to look like a librarian. This wasn’t right. In college, I’d smoked things. My first car had angry bumper stickers. I came from a long line of revolutionaries.

And here’s one of Ian’s reviews of a book on Native American myths and legends:

“They’re all about crows,” he said when he returned it. “My review is that this book is a little too crow-heavy.”

Rebecca’s essay, Mapping a Novel, in The Wall Street Journal, describes something I always do with my novels–draw a floor plan of the house/apartment so I know my main character can slide down the hallway in her socks, catching herself on the bedroom doorjamb, or that from the kitchen, a character can watch her husband come in the front door.

And don’t miss Rebecca’s recent essay at Ploughshares Literary Journal online–Write As If.

Write as if you knew what you were doing.

Rebecca is currently working on a new novel–The Hundred-Year House–about a haunted house and a haunted family, AND the story is told in reverse.

Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how REBECCA MAKKAI spends her days.