Becoming a Mother-Writer
MOST of us, at some point in our writerly lives, have read with hunger the canon of books on writing, meaning how-to books about the process of becoming a writer penned by the Great Authors, white and/or male. Stephen King’s On Writing, Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running are a few that come to mind. This canon urges the aspiring writer to develop a writing discipline, to hone the tools in one’s toolbox—a classic male metaphor for craft—and to use both sides of one’s mind, unconscious and conscious, in the process of creation. Writers in this canon often confess that they write because they want to write, but they rarely mention the conditions of possibility that allow them to write. In other words, for these writers, desire and agency in becoming a writer are seldom, if ever, mediated by factors of race, class, caste, gender, ableism, or, in general, one’s position within the larger forces of history.
Once, I loved the how-to canon, and even today I see it offering valuable advice for aspiring writers. Although now that I’m forty-three, an American citizen who grew up in the so-called third world, a brown “emerging” writer who has been writing and publishing for a decade and half, releasing a debut novel at “too late an age” and celebrating my three-year-old’s progress with potty training within a global pandemic, the canon often reads to me like a training manual dropped from Mars. Or, to use a homegrown analogy, the canon reads like a rhetoric of the American dream, promising citizenship within the ivory tower of Literature to anyone who will work hard and master the rules of the game, aka craft.
I’m hardly the only one who finds that the canon upholds a myth of meritocracy and universalism. In recent years, other mother-writers, predominantly white, have exposed what truly allows the Great Male Authors, with or without children, to succeed professionally. For instance, in her piece for Literary Hub “The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer,” Olivia Campbell talks about J. D. Salinger, “who built a cabin in the woods a quarter mile from his house to have a quiet place to work away from his family.” She adds: “The problem is that Salinger used, bringing him sandwiches so he didn’t starve.”