A Really Good Day(64)

For the past five years, I have earned a good living. Not as much as my husband, but enough so that if I had to I could support a middle-class lifestyle for our family. Was it because I was making more money that I suddenly felt free to resent his vast collection of obsolete audio equipment and his uncomfortable couch? Could it be that simple?

Like every other young woman in a “Take Back the Night” T-shirt, I read A Room of One’s Own in my first Women’s Studies class. And my second, and my third, and I think pretty much every single Women’s Studies class I ever took. Woolf’s message is clear, compelling, and seductive: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Actually, Woolf was quite specific. If a woman is to indulge in the literary life, she must have five hundred pounds a year. According to a number of Web sites whose authority I have decided for no particular reason to trust, five hundred 1929 pounds sterling is worth $38,383.44 today. I make more than that.

So I’ve got the money. What I don’t have is a room of my own.

My husband came out of the bathroom, dried his hands, and turned to me, loins girded for the fight he anticipated.

I cut him off at the pass. “You’re right. You’ve been right all along. I want a room of my own.”

“Finally!”

“I want my own studio.”

“Exactly.”

“I have been fighting with you for months—”

“Years.” Okay, he was starting to get a little drunk on my capitulation, but I guess he had earned it.

“I have been fighting with you for years because I couldn’t accept that I deserved my own workspace.” Finally, we could put this stupid argument to bed. We knew the answer!

My husband opened his arms and I fell into them. Then my face fell.

“We have a problem,” I said. “Studio space is just too expensive. And there’s nowhere here for me to work.”

“What about Dr. Schaeffer’s consulting room?” my husband asked. “Could you work there?”

“It’s dark and gloomy,” I said. “It’s a vampire’s lair.”

“Paint it,” my husband said. “Paint it white.”

“But that’s the original woodwork!” I reminded him of what happened with the Gamble House in Pasadena, the masterpiece of Arts and Crafts architecture designed and built by Charles and Henry Greene. The son of David and Mary Gamble, the couple for whom the house was built, put the house on the market, only to change his mind after overhearing a prospective buyer flick a derisive finger at the floor-to-ceiling teak and mahogany woodwork and say something to the effect of “First thing we’ll do is paint all this dark wood white.”

“Yeah, but this isn’t the Gamble house,” my husband said. The woodwork in our house is lovely, but it’s fir, not mahogany. Moreover, we’ve preserved it throughout the rest of the house. “It’s just the one room. And we don’t ever plan on selling. Let the kids worry about the resale value.”

I wasn’t done arguing. “The office isn’t empty,” I said. “The assistant uses it. Where would she work?”

Who, he wondered, needs a room more, the assistant or the person who is ostensibly to do the work the assistant is meant to facilitate?

Well, when you put it like that, the answer was so obvious.

“She does,” I said.

This feeling of being undeserving, then, and not money, was the heart of the matter. All of this rootlessness, this squatting in corners, in cafés, at the kitchen table, has been a manifestation of my insecurity—not about my failure to earn as much as my husband, but about the inherent value of my work. I don’t feel I deserve a room of my own, because I feel, no matter how much I earn, that my work is worthless.

These are some of the things I’ve said about my work:

? “They’re meant to be read with the amount of attention you can muster while breastfeeding” (about my murder mysteries).

? “It’s kind of glorified Chick Lit” (about Love and Other Impossible Pursuits).

? “It’s more of a polemic than a novel” (about Daughter’s Keeper).

? “I’m not an artist, more of a craftsman.”



I suppose much of this has to do with how I got my start, as the author of a series of commercial murder mysteries, the kind you might find on a rack in a drugstore. When I published those books, I loudly proclaimed I had no literary pretensions. I thought I was being honest, but now I realize I was just being cowardly—saying what I worried others might say about me before they had the chance to. If I dared to nurture creative ambitions, I would put myself in danger of failing to fulfill them.

Though I am proud of my books, there is a vicious voice in my head that tells me I’m worthless. Even when I hold in my hands the finished product, even as I feel my chest expand with pride, the voice says, “This book isn’t any good,” or “It’s okay, but you’ll never be able to do it again.” Every single time I sit down to work, I hear that ugly whisper in my ear. How can I expect others to take me seriously as a writer when I look down on myself?

As I write this, I realize that during this past month that ugly voice has been quieter. There were even days when I didn’t hear her at all. It can only be microdosing (or the mother of all placebo effects) that has allowed me to distract my inner self-loathing insecurity-monster long enough to have what has turned out to be the most productive month of my writing life.