Wally Lamb - Why I Write

[Remarks given by Mr. Lamb to the National Council on the Arts.]

I didn't start writing short stories until 1981, the year I was 30, but I believe the seeds for my fiction writer's life may have been planted way back in 1961, the year I was ten. JFK had just been inaugurated, Dion & the Belmonts were belting out "Runaround Sue," and I was a public school student growing up in blue-collar Norwich, Connecticut. As such, I was required by my Italian-Catholic mother to attend catechism class at St. Patrick's Parochial School each Wednesday, which was where I had a close encounter with Sister Mercy.

This was, of course, the baby boomer era, and so, after spending the long school day with 34 or 35 parochial school students, the last thing Sister Mercy wanted to do on Wednesday afternoons at 3:30 was welcome into her midst 36 or 37 rowdy public school students. We were equally unhappy to be there and so there was acting out, answering back. Some of us were exiled to the cloakroom. Then, at 4:29 p.m. we would all thank God for His mercy and hold our collective breath. The old school clock on the wall in Sister's room was the type that measured time both visually and audibly. As the minute hand would prepare to move toward the magical moment of 4:30, it would first lunge back a bit, then thrust forward with a ca-chunk, ca-chunk. "Class…. dismissed!" Sister would announce and we would thunder toward the door and pound down the stairs as if the Good Humor man was waiting outside on the sidewalk with free samples. Now, I was much too big a scaredy cat to be a troublemaker in Sister's class; my m.o. for survival was to sit in back, say nothing, and try as best I could to blend into the wainscoting. But on the afternoon I became a fiction writer, I got a strange urge. I wanted Sister Mercy to like me. Or, if she couldn't like me, then at least to be aware that I existed. And so, on that day, when the minute hand lurched first backward, then forward, ca-chunk, ca-chunk, and Sister intoned those liberating words, "Class … dismissed" and my peers scrambled toward the exits, I hung back. Stood up. Approached, with trepidation, Sister's big wooden desk.

She was already scowling and correcting her parochial students' papers and so didn't notice me at first as I stood facing her. Now, earlier that same day, in public school, two of my friends, Howard Goldberg and Johnny Jacobsen, had brought into our science class a papier-mâché volcano. And they had poured baking soda into the core of their creation and, with the help of vinegar, had made lava bubble up and spring forth and dribble down the sides. And this demonstration had impressed me and was still very much on my mind.

Sister looked up from the papers she was correcting. "Yes, what is it?"

"Sister, my grandfather moved to this country from Italy in 1890," I said.

Which was true. He had. Pure, untainted non-fiction. But I could see from Sister's clenched facial muscles that it didn't impress her in the least.

And so I continued. "And … and, before he came over here, while he was still in Italy, this volcano started erupting in his town early one morning and he was the only one up and so he ran around pounding on people's doors and everyone woke up and ran to safety and… and he saved a bunch of people's lives."

Sister's facial muscles relaxed a tad. She cocked her head and her gold rim glasses glinted a little from the light of a fluorescent lamp above our heads. But I could see that my marriage of fact to fiction had fallen just short of being quite enough. For a fiction writer-to-be, it was a moment of truth. A moment suspended in time. Sister waited. I waited. And then, finally, I said, "…. And the Pope gave him a medal."

Well, Sister smiled broadly. She reached down to her bottom right-hand desk drawer, drew out a holy picture, and gave it to me. The following Wednesday afternoon, Sister knew my name, I had preferred seating up front, and, for the rest of that school year, whenever there was need for a note to pass from Sister to the office, you can probably guess who got to deliver it.

And so, at the tender age of 10, I learned of the rich rewards that can be yours if you take the truth and lie like hell about it.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I did not, after that experience with Sister Mercy, grow up to become a con artist or a pathological liar. I became a high school English teacher. And then a father. And, then at the age of 30, a fiction writer. We had no money, my bride and I, and when the kids came along, my wife took a leave of absence from the elementary school where she taught and we went abruptly from two teachers' salaries to one. But I'd begun setting the alarm for 4:30 am on Saturday and Sunday mornings and dragging myself out of bed early and fooling around with fiction. See, I'd get these characters' voices in my head, and I'd write down what they said and worry about them and root for them to be okay and wonder what was going to happen and not know what was going to happened until it came out of the pointy end of my Bic pen. As I worked on these short stories, I defied as best I could another voice, the voice of doubt, that kept saying to me, Stop kidding yourself. You're never get anything published. Get up from that desk. Go outside and mow the lawn.

But I let the lawn grow and toiled away on weekends and summer vacations and then, one day, ratcheted up my courage and submitted a story to Northeast magazine, the Sunday supplement of the Hartford Courant. This story, my fourth or fifth, was a first-person tale of a hapless fat woman whose jerk of a husband had just left her. Her name was Mary Ann at first and then she became Dolores. I liked Dolores, who was struggling to survive with self-deprecating humor, biting sarcasm, and Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Mallowmars, M&Ms. I put the story in a manila envelope and mailed it to Northeast. For seven months, I heard only the sound of silence. Then one afternoon, long after my publishing fantasies had been reined back in, I got a phone call from the editor, Lary Bloom. He said he was going to publish my story. I hung up, grabbed my wife and danced her around the kitchen. Then I picked up our three-year-old son, Jared, and tossed him so high into the air that his head hit the ceiling. (But don't worry: this was one of those suspended ceilings with the lightweight panels. He didn't hurt his head; it just disappeared for a second or two in the rafters and then re-emerged.) The story, titled "Keep in a Cool, Dry Place," was published in Northeast on Easter Sunday, 1984. I drove at dawn to the convenience store, bought three Hartford Courants, and, for ten minutes, couldn't bear to look. Then I did look, and sat there by myself in the strip mall parking lot, and cried like an idiot. I was on my way.

Now fast-forward 16 years to June of 1999. My son Jared has transformed from that airborne three-year-old into a 6'2" man of 18. These days, if I tried to toss Jared into the air, I'd need back surgery. He helps me heft my luggage out to the driveway where a purring limousine waits. By this time, I've been touched twice by the magic wand of the Oprah Book Club, and readers have responded favorably, and so I am about to go on the road-- flying progressively west on a 12-city book tour to support the trade paperback release of my second novel, I Know This Much Is True. A chauffeur opens the back door for me–a courtesy which embarrasses me a little, just as, when I walk through airports around the country and see my books in racks and storefront windows, I look away from them, grateful but chagrined.

Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high, punch holes in walls, trash the furniture with their band-mates. But authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments, we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room service sandwiches or ironing our clothes for the next reading or watching Judge Judy. On my book tour, I met one elderly woman who informed me that writers like me, who let their characters use four-letter words, are degenerates who are ripping and tearing at the moral fiber of this great country; and, twelve or thirteen people back in the same signing line, I met another elderly woman who stood fidgeting with her pocketbook strap as she informed me that, in her humble opinion, I was "one of the best writers to ever shit behind a pair of shoes." In Berkeley, California, a middle-aged man told me, in tears, that his brother, a recent suicide, had suffered from schizophrenia and that my novel had been a life raft tossed to him at a time when he thought he might drown from guilt and despair. Entering a Borders bookstore in Austin, Texas to autograph copies of my book, I passed none other than Monica Lewinsky, exiting after having autographed copies of hers. In Lexington, Kentucky, I met, in the signing line, a bride of two hours who was still wearing her wedding dress; her groom, she said, was waiting in the car. And in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio, I had the most surreal experience of all: in the act of channel surfing, I came upon the quiz show Jeopardy at the exact moment my name surfaced. "He wrote the novel She's Come Undone," Alex Trebeck stated. And the three contestants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the bed in Room 714 of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a timid and tentative voice, Who is Wally Lamb?

I am, when I write fiction, people other than myself. To write a first person novel is to go on a journey by sitting each day in the same place--to park yourself before the page and, simultaneously, to stow away in the suitcase of some other, imagined person's life. To see the world from a foreign perspective. That's how I became a woman in She's Come Undone and the embittered twin brother of a paranoid schizophrenic in I Know This Much Is True. In the latter novel, I was also a turn-of-the-century Sicilian immigrant although, at the time I was writing in the voice of Domenico Tempesta, the protagonist's grandiose grandfather, I possessed no passport and had never traveled outside of the continental United States. So I do not usually follow the standard rule espoused in creative writing classes: write what you know. My impulse, instead, is to write about what I don't know so that I can live the life of "the other" and move beyond the limitations--the benign prison--of my own life experiences and explore tales of other imperfect, unfinished people who launch themselves from the safety and security of home into the realm of the unsafe, the unknown, because they want something, need something, that home can't give them. Characters, in short, who are on quests. Odysseys.

My odyssey as a fiction-writer almost ended a month or so into the writing of my second novel. It had taken me nearly nine years to write my first–to manage the balancing act of hands-on parenting, full-time high school teaching, and stolen pre-dawn weekend hours for fiction writing. I was exhausted, fearful that I was a one-shot wonder, and frustrated that I was always disappointing somebody. My kids and my wife and my ailing parents all needed me, and my students needed me, too, as did my characters, neglected for long stretches and stranded on some island I could never seem to get to. I paced; I apologized; my hair fell out; I caught 3:00 a.m. reruns of Kojak and Rhoda Morgenstern. And during one such long night of insomnia, I made the painful decision to pack it in. To give up writing. I couldn't do it; it was just too hard.

But 9 or 10 months earlier, on a dare from my wife, I had applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a creative writing fellowship and the very next day after my sleepless night of decision-making, the telephone rang and I was flabbergasted to learn that I had just been awarded one. With the $20,000 prize and, more importantly, with the faith the NEA had put in me as a writer–the message they had sent me that my stories might matter--I took a leave of absence from teaching and was off and running once again. The NEA had given me the gift of time to experiment and learn and grow. My fellowship commenced in January of 1993. My family and I lived frugally and made the money last for the next twenty months. During that period, I wrote fiction in the morning, researched in the afternoon, and was Dad in the evening. I visited libraries, hospitals, Native American museums, and, most significantly, New York's Ellis Island. I read about and talked to identical twins. I spoke with and learned from families who had endured domestic turmoil and mental illness about how they survived and coped. These generous people told me stories that were heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious and, little by little, I cobbled together the knowledge I needed to write I Know This Much Is True. And along the way, I remained grateful to the mother of a son who suffers paranoid schizophrenia and who, early into this 6- ear creative odyssey of mine, had jabbed a threatening finger in my face and warned that if I was going to take up the subject of mental illness, I had better get it right because the popular culture was already overloaded with stereotypical "psycho-fests" and spook shows that fueled misunderstanding and added to the already-formidable burdens of the mentally ill and their families. And if in the end, I wrote a novel that was truthful rather than exploitative–a fiction that chips away at misunderstanding rather than adding to it–I want you to know that that book would not exist today had I not received the gift of time and the validation from the NEA. Like Sister Mercy years before, the Endowment had noticed me. And I ask that you do the same for other writers who are on their way but struggling.

Finally, I want to say that, as an American writer whose government gave him a life-altering gift of faith, it is important for me to give back. My wife and I designate 10% of my book earnings to organizations that help the mentally ill, the victims of domestic violence, and the arts. But more meaningful to me, personally, than checkbook benevolence is the time I spend in the slammer. My involvement with York Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Niantic, Connecticut, was triggered in 1999 by what I have come to think of as a serendipitous accident. Having by then taught writing to high school students for 25 years and then to university students for another two, I had just resigned from teaching so that I could work full-time on my third novel. Now, at the time, I had a third book contract and precious little else. No plot, no characters. Just some advance money from the publisher, and a recurring image in my head of an empty prison cell with the door swung open, and a working title which I'd plucked from a gospel song: Said I wasn't gonna tell nobody but I couldn't keep it to myself, what the Lord has done for me. My book contract reads: Due June of 2004 from Wally Lamb, a book-length fiction manuscript.

Reluctantly, I said goodbye to my university students and colleagues, emptied out my office, and returned the key to the English Department secretary. I was closing the door on teaching, literally, when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was Marge Cohen, the librarian at York prison. Two suicides and several more attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair, Marge explained, and the prison school faculty, groping for something that might help, thought that writing might be useful to the inmates as a coping and healing tool. Would I come? For free? Yes, I promised. Once. For 90 minutes.

On the hot summer day when I kept my promise, 30 inmates elected to attend my program. Dressed identically in maroon T-shirts and pocketless jeans, they entered in all colors, sizes, and shapes. Their attitudes ranged from hangdog to Queen of Sheba. Most had shown up not to write but to check out that guy who'd been on Oprah. I spoke. We tried some exercises. They asked questions: You met Oprah? What's Oprah like? At the end of the session, they challenged me to return. I said I would if they promised to write something. Anything. Two pages, minimum. We'd listen and react to one another's work. Each woman's draft would be her ticket into the workshop.

At session two, 15 of the original 30 were no-shows. Crystal wanted compliments, not feedback. Asaya said she'd meant to be vague and unclear–that her business wasn't necessarily the reader's business. Diane, at 54 the senior member of the group, eyed me suspiciously. She'd written under a pseudonym, Natasha, and sought reassurance that I would never, ever read her work aloud. I predicted Diane would be gone by session three.

But it was at the end of session three that Diane couldn't keep her writing to herself. Her shaky hand went up. She asked if she could read what she'd written. Then, in a soft, tentative voice, she began a disjointed three-page chronicle of her horrific life story: incest, savage abuse, spousal homicide, lawyerly indifference, and parallel battles against breast cancer and the dark depression that often accompanies long-term incarceration and shuts down hope. When Diane stopped reading, there was silence. Then, applause. The dam of distrust had been sledgehammered. The women's writing began to flow.

It's been two and a half years since those first sessions. The brave writers who have stayed the course have faced their demons without flinching, revised relentlessly, and become a community. Through their autobiographical writing they have given voice to a voiceless population, and I have come to know them not merely as the drug abusers, gang members, thieves and killers they have been but also as the complex, creative works in progress they are. Each woman has discovered the intertwined power of the written word and the power that resides within, even at an institution that exists to render her powerless. They are tough cookies, these students of mine, not because of their crimes but because they will be neither defeated nor silenced, and I am proud to tell you that the anthology of their autobiographical writing, which I am currently editing, will be published by Regan Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2002. Its title is Couldn't Keep It To Myself: Testimony From Our Imprisoned Sisters. I have learned a lot from these gals–important, useful stuff for me to know both as a writer and as a human being. When you give, you get back. The NEA taught me that. Please continue to safeguard the awarding of fellowships to writers of promise and to work toward bringing in from the cold our brothers and sisters who paint and sculpt and dance and make art with cameras. Art, as you know, illuminates life and in these confusing and scary times, we can all use a little illumination. Thanks for listening.

National Endowment for the Arts
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