The Writing Life, 9 to 5

It is a tall order, converting a professional life directed by external pressures to a life in which you impose the pressure.

I am on a leave of absence from the rat race, writing fiction and essays. I am ensconced in my office in my cabin-like house on the top of a hill. My daily commute involves a long brisk walk around the densely wooded block on which my house sits, 20 minutes of exercise with weights and coffee over the morning paper. Some days, the whisper of eucalyptus trees is all that I hear.

I don’t have to search out clean hose with no runners laddering one leg. I don’t even have to find socks unless there is a chill in the air in my office. I can communicate with editors, interview agents, say warm hellos to mentors and friends via fax and electronic mail and telephone. No one need know whether I have flossed or if I am wearing shower shoes with purple plastic flowers adorning the vamp. There are no time sheets or expense reports to complete, no dry-cleaning to pick up, no gas tank to fill, no boss to hate. To say that this idyllic existence sometimes scares me spitless is to indulge in understatement.

I am from a family that works. At jobs, at which one is accountable to bosses. Both parents put in serious time at arduous labors, getting up every day and punching time clocks, notwithstanding their resentment for the work they did. My father worked a hot and dangerous assembly line, putting bus engines together, while my mother sweated in commercial laundries for as long as I can remember. They came home dead tired. During their 39-year marriage, they worked different shifts, passing each other in the night, trading responsibility for their children. It was their ambition that we not do backbreaking labor.

Necessity invented my life as a semiprofessional laborer, white-collar variety. I had a daughter to feed. Insurance claims processing financed my education; lawyering financed Kelley’s. I used to keep a list of alternative employment in my mind’s eye, jobs that I imagined would chafe less than whatever I was doing at the time. I would carry the mail, which would at least put me outdoors. Or I would become a dim sum cart operator. Several of my equally frustrated friends and I would offer up our bits of shrimp and miniature tarts and gossip about which tables ordered the most ridiculous combinations. Or I would write full-time, sitting in an office alone, with Aretha Franklin drowning in her own tears in the background, drafting and redrafting an essay, a short story, a perfect poem. Nah. Dream on. Writing was something to do on the side, late at night, after a day of doing work that failed to engage me.

Now the daughter is an adult, planning her own family. She does work that she finds rewarding and believes that when it stops being rewarding, she will find other work. The relationship I have been in for 16 years has legs, it seems. My family life is balanced, and one of my dreams is in the middle of coming true.

I have put my briefcase in the back of my closet, where it may languish awhile before becoming garage-sale fodder. The high-maintenance clothes have been hung beyond my line of vision. I run my errands with relish during the day, talking to anybody who will listen, listening to anybody who will talk. My theory is that I cannot comment on life without having regular contact with the living.

Then I sit me down. I close the mental doors on the worrying parents, on the pitying fully employed. I practice saying “write” as an answer to the inquiry about what I do with my days. Sometimes, when the silence lengthens, I read dogeared pages of “Bird by Bird,” Anne LaMott’s work on the writing life. If I don’t find a passage that will help me go on, I at least find a line that will make me laugh, and that will help me go on.

The speculative nature of writing and hoping that first someone will publish it and then someone else will read it, that is work. As certainly as slinging steel is work, as clearly as customer service is work, I am working at writing. I just get to work in my favorite bathrobe.