I just realized tonight that part of what I'm feeling is grief and loss. Not depression, thank you very much all the same, but the "post-partum depression" diagnosis doesn't fit: depression is an entirely different critter. This is grief and loss, frequently mistaken for depression but not the same thing at all.
I'm grieving the loss of the book. Yes, I said loss. I'm done with the virginity book because I had to be done, it had to get done. But I'm not done in the elated "I'm finally finished, I conquered it!" way. I'm done in the "We have unfinished business but we had to part" way... the way when you know you can't solve everything so you just have to tie up as many loose ends as you can, say good bye, and make the best of it.
Part of it is that I still feel like I have things to say, and things left unsaid. As huge as the book is, I left so much on the cutting-room floor and left out so many discussions because they were too theoretical, too political, too tangential, too esoteric, too stupid. (Yes, I mean "too stupid" quite literally and no, I'm not being self-effacing, I'm talking about discussions about things like the modern folklore of the thirty-year-old virgin geek dweeb or what-have-you: after several hundred pages of talking about virginity across all manner of demographics and ages and sexes and so on, I am NOT sinking to the level required to give that particular disquisition and if the reader can't bloody well figure it out by then, well, it isn't because I haven't done my job.) Truly, I could fill another book with what I didn't put into this one.
Part of it is that I don't feel like I solved the problem I set out to solve. I realized about halfway through the book that I wasn't going to, that the core question of the book -- basically the question of why virginity matters so damn much and continues to matter so damn much -- was never going to be answered in a way that would really satisfy me, not by me and not by anybody else either. When I realized that at root what I was trying to answer was the question of why patriarchy works the way it does and why women have consistently participated in a system of quantifying their own bodies and sexualities that ultimately serves patriarchal ends, I knew it was just going to be turtles all the way down and there was nothing for it.
Note that I don't for a moment think that this will be a big problem for readers. I don't propose anywhere in the book that I have The One True Answer And Unified Field Theory to the virginity question. In fact I spend quite a bit of time and effort on making it patently clear that I don't and nobody else does either, nor have they ever, and anyone who says they know is either lying, hasn't done enough reading, or both. But it's going to continue to be a nagging question to me, precisely because I have invested so much in trying to answer it and for so long.
And then there's the purely procedural aspect of the grief. Those who haven't written books often imagine that there's a sort of "and they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after" when a book is turned in to the publisher. Really what it feels like is a lot like you've pushed and struggled and fought and worked and sweated and cared so much for so long and then you take what comes out of it and you put it in a box and you send it off... and there is a long, deafening silence.
It isn't a stony cold refusing silence. It's just silence. It's the silence of your book going off to enter the production cycle where it is one of a number of books, where it has to sit and take its turn in the queue for the agent and editor to read it and get back to you about what they want changed and how, for the managing editor to take a look at it and then (if you're lucky and you have the kind of ME who does this) confer with you about captioning and illustration and below-the-line formatting, for the ME and the art department to talk to you about cover stuff, for the PR department to start annoying you with author information forms you have to fill out so that they can appropriately pimp your book later on. It's a perfectly normal expected silence while the machine of the industry absorbs the wad of content you've just fed into it.
It's still wretched. And you have to sit on your hands when you're fairly aching to call your editor on the phone and pester him or her like a six-year-old on a car trip: "are we there yet? are we there yet? when will we be there? will we be there in one hour? is it one hour yet?" You have to give them time to deal with it; there's nothing else to be done. You couldn't have written it overnight and certainly they can't read and edit it overnight either.
The delay gives you more than enough time to assume the worst. In fact it gives you ample time to imagine an America's Top Forty of Totally Crap Outcomes, to cast them and costume them and direct them like Cecil B. DeMille in glorious blazing Technicolor and super Dolby surround sound with extra subwoofers for that rumbly feeling during the crash scenes. Even if you've been through it before and you know that really none of it is all that realistic, even if you know that Writers Is Nuts and therefore so are you, you do it anyhow.
But then you also stand aside from all of it, to some degree, observing, and knowing that you're just generating noise to fill the silence and the emptiness, the big vocation-shaped space where a book used to be and where the ghost of a book is still rattling around talking to you about all the things that you didn't do or might've done and all the things you and it still have to say to one another.
It's hard to know what to do with that. It's unfinished business. The book on the page never -- at least not for me -- exhausts the book in the head. You grieve when the book is done partly because it's a relationship that ends, and like losing any other partner with whom you spend so much time, the loss leaves a hole. You grieve because when it goes, it doesn't phone home for a while, because of the mighty, encompassing digestive silence of the machine that turns manuscripts into books. You grieve because of the ghosts, all the could-haves and might-have-beens and conversations you didn't get to have and that will never be quite the same in any other context: you can try to have them, sure, but it'll be another book that generates its own milieu, its own constellations in the sky.
It's inevitable, of course. It's part of the great turning wheel of getting ideas out into the world. And you know that. I know that. I suppose it could be said that the grief is part of the work: it's the work of having something that has been your book, constantly-changing and interior, and now needs to become everyone's book, fixed and exterior.
Catholics, Erasmus argued in what was a rather Protestant way for a Catholic cleric like him, had an obligation to marry: it was as senseless to remain a virgin purely for the sake of the virtue associated with virginity as it would be to keep an apple tree in blossom forever for the sake of beauty and fragrance. The breathtaking promise of a blossom is the price you pay for the nourishing fulfilment of fruit.
Sometimes you grieve for the blossoms even as you look forward to eating the fruit.
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hanneblank) wrote,
