I don’t know where you learned that stuff. When I was in school—and I, like so many other bookish girls and young women, wanted, and even tried for a while, to be a writer—they taught us that long sentences were inherently the products of sloppy thinking. That asides were messy. That parentheses were loathsome. (Loathsome! No kidding. They actually hated certain punctuation marks. How is that sane?) They’d demonstrate the power of the declarative sentence—and there is, to be sure, no more frequently powerful a kind of sentence—while claiming, against all kinds of contrary evidence (e.g. in Ellison, O’Connor, Salinger, Roth—the list goes on and on) that declarativeness was somehow determined by the raw number of syllables in a sentence (i.e. the fewer the better) rather than the frequency and placement of stress. Tin-eared, all of them. Maybe that’s changed. Maybe there’s a genius teaching at Washington. I tend to doubt it.
But if you do continue to write, Belt—and I imagine you will—please trust me on this: refine what’s yours. Strive to get better at sounding like yourself. You are not fully formed—no one every really is—but you are muchly formed. Precociously formed. If you seek out teachers, judge their worthiness only on whether they enjoy what you already do. Whether they enjoy it. Whether it speaks to them. If they only admire it—let alone if they don’t like it—they can’t possibly help you to get any better.
I know that, as with anything positive I have to say about you, you’re taking all of this with a grain of salt. Part of me wishes that weren’t so, but most of me knows that you wouldn’t be you if you accepted your loving mother’s praise as gospel. That’s also part of why I think you’ll continue to write: you have the temperament. Doubting praise, your mother’s or anyone else’s, is an outcome of your wanting not merely to be thought of as good, but to, in fact, be good. That, incidentally, is what makes a person good, and it’s necessary to make a writer—any artist—great. Not sufficient, but necessary. And it’s just as necessary to know it’s insufficient. Now you’ve been told.
So, sad as I am for you—that you will no longer have me around—I really do think you’re going to be fine. You have found a vocation, something you’re always going to love to do, or, at the very least, feel is worth doing. That’s no small thing.
I’ve discussed it with your father. You asked me not to show him or even talk to him about what’s in your journals, and I haven’t, other than to tell him that your talent for writing is surprising, even to me, who thinks the world of you in all things, and that I’m all but certain you’ll be a writer. I want you to know what his response was. He said, “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up.”
I have no brothers, nor any male cousins. I hardly dated before I met your dad. All I know about fathers and sons comes from novels and movies and the two of you. The two of you have been growing distant. Over the past few months—maybe longer, maybe I’ve been slow to notice—it seems you’ve begun to (accurately) sense just how different you are from one another. He’s loud, outgoing, aggressive even, doesn’t read much, prefers to fish, to watch boxing, is excited by certain forms of circumscribed violence. You, like me, are quiet, a little too shy, content to walk around and think, to sit upstairs in your room and think. In sum (if I haven’t already reduced you guys enough): he tends to hate being alone, and you often need to be alone.
Maybe you’ll eventually learn from each other. I know I’ve certainly learned from your dad. Most saliently I learned self-confidence (though I don’t think he’d call it that; he’d probably say I “found my legs” or “learned to take it on the chin”). And I think he might have learned a thing or two from me: just the other day, when you showed him Kablankey and he gave him that onion, you saw the way he melted—he wouldn’t have done that when we first started dating; back then, if he’d sensed any kind of fuzzy feeling coming on that didn’t have its origins in me or some underdog boxer or hero of the Second World War or a Springsteen lyric or something, he would have looked away and, if he couldn’t look away, he would have been too embarrassed to say anything, let alone anything resembling “I just want to eat it right up,” or whatever it was he said about Kablankey. But we’re in love, your father and I, and we were young when we fell in love, and now, though our love has only grown more intense, we’re not so young, not so able to change. So while you might change some—might become more like him—he isn’t likely to change very much, if at all. Still, I’ll tell you the same thing I told him when he said, “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up”: be patient with him. Despite your differences, you’re not at odds. You asked me not to show him your journals because you don’t think he’d like them (you’re probably right) and, because he’s your father, you value his opinion about what you do. Yet because you’re his son, he, regardless of his opinion about what you do, values you; “Tell me how to keep from fucking it up” is Clyde-speak for “tell me how to help Belt be whoever Belt wants to be.” So instead of dwelling on how you two wouldn’t ever bother to know one another if you weren’t related (not to guilt you, but that entry really broke my heart a little when I read it), try thinking about how, because you’re related, you have a rare (a onetime!) chance to be friends with someone so different from you. I want you to be friends.
So like I was saying, I told him, “Be patient.” And I also told him to move my PC from the basement to your room. I don’t think work will attempt to take it back, but they might—it’s theirs. If so, Dad’ll buy you a new one. He’ll make sure you always have a computer to write on. (A quick note about writing on computers: the sooner you get comfortable doing it, the better. Your handwriting is just not very good, Belt, and the extensive revising that you do—all the crossed-out words and margin notes—make reading it, and therefore, I’d imagine, editing, also, harder. The delete key was invented for you.) He also happily agreed to buy you a new book each week and to maintain the (pretty good, I must say) library in the bedroom, even if you move, or he gets remarried (in which case I suppose he’ll move the library into another room—don’t get mad if he does this, it’s fine). Last but not least, he will not discourage you from studying whatever you might want to study in college. Maybe it’ll be English. Or even Creative Writing—they teach that, now, you know. I’m not saying I think you should major in either of those things—I majored in English, then Philosophy, and I think the humanities effectively murdered my desire to write—but rather that I trust you to know what’s best for you to study, and your father will, too.
He’s a good man, Belt. He’s kind (however sometimes inconspicuously), he loves you (ditto), and he always keeps his word.
So I’ve covered my atheism, your writing, and my hopes for you and your father. I wish I had something of value to tell you about women, or girls, about falling in love, marriage, having kids, but, apart from my telling you that I believe you’ll meet a good person to fall in love with if you remain a good person, that I really hope I’m right about that, and that falling in love with your father was the easiest thing I ever did, and, with the exception of becoming your mom, the most rewarding—apart from that, I have very little to say, and I’m not about to start making things up. I was very lucky to meet your father. It was at-first-sight and it made no sense. There’s no great anecdote. We met at a bar, where I’d gone to read. He came up and said hello. I really don’t remember what else was said. We were drawn to one another. We clicked. There was fire. All the clichés that are thankfully justified. I hope our luck runs in the blood. As far as I can tell, luck is what you’ll need; you’re like me in that way. You know well, and perhaps—though hopefully not—too well, how to be alone. My sense is: don’t seek love out. But that’s only based on my own singular experience. I met your dad when I was twenty-one because he came up to me. Maybe I’d feel different if I’d been twenty-two, twenty-three, thirty—who knows? You’ll figure this stuff out without your mother. Without your father, too. I guess that’s one thing I do feel I can tell you. You will—you won’t be able to help but to do so—figure falling in love out with the person you end up falling in love with, and until you meet her…you’ll have no idea.