The Methodology of Blogging

I don't really know what happened to Shakespeare's daughter. Faulkner supposedly pointed out to his own daughter the absolute irrelevance of Susanna Shakespeare to posterity as an explanation of why his writing mattered more than his parenting. My mom often recounts to us the story of how Gabriel Garcia Marquez got the idea for 100 Years of Solitude just as he was pulling the family car out of the driveway for their summer vacation, upon which he canceled said vacation and went to work. She used to tell these stories with an air at once defensive and whistful. I'm not as bad as those guys, she seemed to say, but just imagine how good I'd be if I were. It seems that the worst possible outcome for a writer's offspring to take up the pen in turn. That is how we got stuck with Frankenstein. I recognize that writer's children are seldom either happy or well-adjusted, and I won't profess to speak for them. But let me say that being a novelist's daughter has its distinct upsides, and one of them is training.

A writer can only write what she knows, which is why all the writers I know are inveterate gossips. As the children of a writer, my brother and I were farmed out at an early age to glean material for my mother--not, I think, for her to write about, but just because she liked it. Each day when we got home, the standard question was, "How was school? Did anyone behave badly?" This system had benefits, such as when I complained that one of my classmates had been mean to me and Mom knew the backstory in such detail that she immediately offered to nail my classmate's tongue to the floor. But it is seldom prudent to tell ones parents the whole truth about what goes on at school, and occasionally it was necessary to keep quiet--I only rarely lied to my mother as a child, preferring to store up my duplicity for really vital falsehoods. If the answer was "nothing" or "no one," I was likely to be told that I was useless, or in later years, that I sucked (the latter could never be used back at Mom after the time she retaliated with details about her and my father's sex life). It wasn't until very very recently that I realized most people are raised to consider gossip a vice, and talking about someone behind their back to be shameful. By then, of course, it was an ingrained habit and I could no more shun the narrative life than I could take up snuff, or start wearing a burka to work.

That's all well and good for you, cause you're the ones who get to hear my stories. But it's a little unsettling for the rest of creation if, as Joel would put it, you decontextualize it. I'm not one of those people who runs around writing down her observations for later use. Once, at Columbia, I found myself at a student poetry reading seated next to the late Kenneth Koch. I was there to support Dave A, who was one of the featured poets, and during Dave's reading, I noticed Koch make an approving grunt, as if to say "enchanting, just enchanting" and pull a little pocket-sized notebook out of his shirt, on which he made a note. What was he writing? Was he observing Dave's affect at the podium (distinctive as it was) or was the old guy just plagiarizing? I told Dave he'd better keep an eye on Koch's publications from now on, something I would never have advised under normal circumstances.

So I don't run around jotting, but I do always have an ear out. It's what I've been trained for. You wouldn't ask a Navy SEAL to leave a nice old lady stranded on a boat full of pirates, and you wouldn't ask me to turn a deaf ear to a conversation in which a bunch of anthropology students repeatedly refer to "stratosfied societies." You wouldn't ask me to leave Crotch-in-the-Popcorn Nick or Perpetually Experimenting Gay Chris to be identified by their surnames. You need me out there, butting into the lives of strangers in order to protect you from having to do it yourselves. To entertain my readership of 12, there's no quirk, no mishap, no public misconduct that I won't commit to this keyboard. So if you plan to be funny around me, remember to say it's off the record.