Bryan Charles
So there I was, standing under an awning on a street corner in Manhattan, staring across the way at a foliage-covered brick wall, on the other side of which was a ubiquitous fast-food outlet that had once been my haven, days away from becoming a published novelist and feeling, preposterously, not far removed from the brooding and solitary sandwich-eater I had once been, saddled with what had seemed back then like an unrealizable ambition. What was my problem? Why could I not, as many of my friends had implored me to do, enjoy it? A few possible answers in a moment.
First I would like to share with you an anecdote from grad school (and aside from writing the words I had the weirdest dream last night, I can think of no better way of inviting people to zone out). During my final year as an MFA student at Brooklyn College, I had a fiction workshop with Michael Cunningham. This was at the height of Hours mania; the movie had just come out and was receiving high praise, winning awards, etc. I was, I admit, highly intimidated. And if you were in this class with me and you say that you were not, at least initially, well, that’s bullshit. One day late in the semester Michael told us about the publication of his first novel (which is not, as many people believe, A Home at the End of the World). Then he said, “You know, when you publish your book, your life isn’t going to change in all the ways you think it’s going to.” At the time that he said this I probably had less than eight hundred dollars in the bank and not a penny of income and no prospects. I had a folder full of rejection slips dating back to the first Clinton administration. I was so mired in rejection that I had come to embrace it, expect it, adopt it as a worldview. I had been in the city long enough that the publishing circle had opened somewhat and I was now being rejected by friends and acquaintances. Already, at 28, I viewed myself as a failure—or a failure in the making—nobly carrying on, toiling away, sending out those stories, hammering out a novel. The man who had just told me not to expect my life to change if I ever published a book had won the Pulitzer Prize and partied with Nicole Kidman. I don’t recall exactly what was going through my mind when he said this but I know it boiled down to something like that’s easy for you to say.
Michael’s comment stayed with me and last summer, in the brief period following the sale of Grab when I felt unambiguous euphoria (this was the second phase for me, after roughly a week of heart-clenching anxiety; do you see a pattern here?) I gave an interview with my hometown paper in which I respectfully disagreed with his opinion on publication’s potentially life-changing effects. I explained that my life had been altered in important ways on a strictly emotional level. That remains true. As of this precise moment, 1:02 pm on June 23, 2006, I no longer feel like the embodiment of noble failure. I can look to my right and see my book on the shelf and it feels pretty good. Yet I also see the wisdom in what Michael was saying and believe him now to be absolutely correct. On a day-to-day basis my life has changed not at all. I’m in the middle of trying to write a goddamn book and it isn’t easy and I hope I can do it and I hope what I come up with turns out to be good. In this way I am no different from that slightly younger dude stuffing tasteless fast food into his self-pitying face. —BC
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