Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Anita Mathias's Blog on Faith and Art

Prodigies of Fast Writing

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How Fast Can You Write?

By Michael Agger 
Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand. Hunched over my keyboard, I’m haunted by anecdotes of faster writers. Christopher Hitchens composing a Slate column in 20 minutes—after a chemo session, after a “full” dinner party, late on a Sunday night. The infamously productive Trollope, who used customized paper! “He had a note pad that had been indexed to indicate intervals of 250 words,” William F. Buckley told the Paris Review. “He would force himself to write 250 words per 15 minutes. Now, if at the end of 15 minutes he hadn’t reached one of those little marks on his page, he would write faster.” Buckley himself was a legend of speed—writing a complete book review in crosstown cabs and the like.
 
I remember, too, a former colleague who was blazingly fast. We would be joking at lunch—”Imagine if David Foster Wallace had written a children’s book”—and there it would be in my inbox, 15 minutes later. Not a perfect draft, but publish-it-on-your-blog good. He could sit down at the keyboard and toss off Chopin or Ragtime, while I was banging away at Chopsticks and making lots of mistakes. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-du-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-du-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-DAH!
It’s no secret that writing is hard … but why can’t I be one of those special few for whom it comes easily? What am I doing wrong? Why haven’t I gotten any faster?

In search of the secret of quickness, I started with a Malcolm Gladwell passage that’s always piqued me. InOutliers, he discusses the now famous 10,000-hour rule—the amount of time it takes to achieve true mastery—and quotes the neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concern pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again.” Fiction 

writers? Really?

Read the entire article at http://www.slate.com/id/2301243

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost: A Friendship vital to each other’s success

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Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war

When Thomas and Frost met in London in 1913, neither had yet made his name as a poet. They became close, and each was vital to the other’s success. But then Frost wrote ‘The Road Not Taken’, which was to drive Thomas off to war
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost

Edward Thomas and Robert Frost … so close was their friendship that they had planned to live side by side in America. Photographs: Cotswolds Photo Library/Alamy. Digital Image by David McCoy for GNM Imaging
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost’s cottage in Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared war on Germany. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to hear the guns from their corner of the county. They had no idea of the way in which this war would come between them. In six months, Frost would flee England for the safety of New Hampshire; he would take Thomas’s son with him in the expectation that the rest of the Thomas family would follow.
  1. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
  2. by Matthew Hollis
  4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

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So close was the friendship that had developed between them that Thomas and Frost planned to live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming. But Thomas was a man plagued by indecision, and could not readily choose between a life with Frost and the pull of the fighting in France. War seemed such an unlikely outcome for him. He was an anti-nationalist, who despised the jingoism and racism that the press was stoking; he refused to hate Germans or grow “hot” with patriotic love for Englishmen, and once said that his real countrymen were the birds. But this friendship – the most important of either man’s life – would falter at a key moment, and Thomas would go to war.
Thomas was 36 that summer of 1914, Frost was 40; neither man had yet made his name as a poet. Thomas had published two dozen prose books and written almost 2,000 reviews, but he had still to write his first poem. He worked exhaustedly, hurriedly, “burning my candle at 3 ends”, he told Frost, to meet the deadlines of London’s literary editors; he felt convinced that he amounted to little more than a hack. He was crippled by a depression that had afflicted him since university. His moods had become so desperate that on the day he was introduced to Frost, he carried in his pocket a purchase that he ominously referred to as his “Saviour”: probably poison, possibly a pistol, but certainly something with which he intended to harm himself.
At such periods of despair Thomas would lash out at his family, humiliating his wife, Helen, and provoking his three children to tears. He despised himself for the pain he inflicted on them and would leave home, sometimes for months on end, to spare them further agony. “Our life together never was, as it were, on the level – ” Helen reflected candidly after his death, “it was either great heights or great depths.” But Edward’s heights were not Helen’s, and his depths were altogether deeper. He sought professional help at a time when little was available, and was fortunate to come under the supervision of a pioneering young doctor, a future pupil of Carl Jung’s, who attempted to treat him using a talking cure. The clinical sessions had been progressing for a year when Thomas abruptly turned his back on them. Yet he continued to look to others to help wrench him from his despondency, believing that a rescuer would one day emerge. “I feel sure that my salvation depends on a person,” he once prophesised, “and that person cannot be Helen because she has come to resemble me too much.” Such a figure would indeed arrive to help him in his distress – Robert Frost.
Frost had moved his family to England in 1912 in a bid to relaunch a stalled literary career. Then in his late 30s and a father of four, he had managed to publish only a handful of poems in America’s literary magazines. He had not been sure whether to relocate his family to London or to Vancouver, so while his wife did the ironing, he had taken a nickel from his pocket and flipped it. It was heads, which meant London, and two weeks later the entire family was steaming across the Atlantic.
He found a publisher in London for his poems soon enough (partly subsidised by himself), though few critics gave his work a second look. But Edward Thomas did. Where other reviewers mistook Frost’s verse as simplistic, Thomas was moved to announce his 1914 volume North of Boston as “one of the most revolutionary books of modern times”. Thomas was a fearless and influential critic, described by the Times as “the man with the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry“. He had been quick to identify the brilliance of a young American in London called Ezra Pound, and instrumental in shaping the early reception of Walter de la Mare, WH Davies and many others besides; and he was quite undaunted in taking to task the literary giants of the day if they fell below the mark, be they Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling or WB Yeats. When Thomas praised Frost, therefore, people began to take note.
North of Boston was a revolutionary work all right. In a mere 18 poems, it demonstrated the qualities that Frost and Thomas had – quite independently – come to believe were essential to the making of good verse. For both men, the engine of poetry was not rhyme or even form but rhythm, and the organ by which it communicated was the listening ear as opposed to the reading eye. For Thomas and Frost that entailed a fidelity to the phrase rather than to the metrical foot, to the rhythms of speech rather than those of poetic conventions, to what Frost liked to call “cadence”. If you have ever listened to voices through a closed door, Frost reasoned, you will have noticed how it can be possible to understand the general meaning of a conversation even when the specific words are muffled. This is because the tones and sentences with which we speak are coded with sonic meaning, a “sound of sense”. It is through this sense, unlocked by the rhythms of the speaking voice, that poetry communicates most profoundly: “A man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply,” Thomas wrote.
Neither Frost nor Thomas claimed to be the first to think about poetry this way, but their views certainly set them apart from their contemporaries, who were in furious competition in the charged atmosphere of the years before the war. Strikers, unionists, suffragettes, Irish republicans and the unemployed were just some of the rebellious groups that England strove to tame in 1914, and might very well have failed to suppress had war not broken out. The young poets emerging at the same time were, in their own way, also in revolt against the decrepitude of Victorian Britain. The centre of their activities was the newly opened Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, from where two rival anthologies were produced: the manicured but popular Georgian Poetry, compiled by the secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty, Edward Marsh, and the radically experimental Des Imagistes, edited by Ezra Pound. It took no time at all for these parties to quarrel: so exasperating and offensive did Pound find Georgian verse that he challenged one of its protagonists to a duel.
Thomas and Frost ploughed their own furrow. Whenever Thomas visited Frost in 1914, they would walk out together on the fields of Gloucestershire; wherever they walked, they moved in an instinctive sympathy. Frost called these their “talks–walking”: and in them, their conversations ranged over marriage and friendship, wildlife, poetry and the war. Sometimes there was no talk and a silence gathered about them; but often at a gate or stile it started up again or was prompted by the meeting of a stranger in the lanes – a word or two and they were off again. They went without a map, setting their course by the sun or by the distant arc of May Hill crowning the view to the south; at dusk, the towering elms and Lombardy poplars or the light of a part-glimpsed cottage saw them home.
“He gave me standing as a poet,” Frost said of Thomas, “he more than anyone else.” But Frost would more than repay the favour that summer, recognising an innate poetry within Thomas’s prose writings, and imploring his friend to look back at his topographic books and “write them in verse form in exactly the same cadence”. Thomas would do just that, and with his friend’s encouragement, started down a path that would take him away from the “hack” work from which he earned his living. Jack Haines was a poet and solicitor living nearby in 1914 and was one of the few people who witnessed the transition at first hand. “It was towards the end of this same year that Thomas first began to write poetry himself,” Haines recorded, “and he did so certainly on the indirect, and I believe on the direct, suggestion of Frost, who thought that verse might prove that perfect mode of self-expression which Thomas had perhaps never previously found.”
The poems came quickly, “in a hurry and a whirl”: 75 in the first six months alone. He revised very little, explaining that the poetry neither asked for nor received much correction on paper. Often he went back to his prose to find his poem. Sometimes his source was a notebook that he kept on his walks, at other times his published books; and though the gap between his initial notes and a verse draft could be many months, once he began on the poem itself he usually completed it in a single day.
But poetry was not the only thing waking in Thomas in those summer months as the war began. Late in August, walking with Frost through the afternoon into the night, Thomas jotted in his notebook:
a sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a 1/3 moon bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it.
The war was three weeks old, and for the first time Thomas had imagined his countrymen fighting abroad, under the same moon as he. He was indifferent to the politics of the conflict, but he had begun to weigh up the worth of the land beneath his feet and the way of life that it supported. What would he do, if called on, to protect it, he asked himself. Would he do anything at all?
For a year, Thomas would question himself this way. It would take two incidents with Frost to help him to find his answer.
In late November 1914, Thomas and Frost were strolling in the woods behind Frost’s cottage when they were intercepted by the local gamekeeper, who challenged their presence and told the men bluntly to clear out. As a resident, Frost believed he was entitled to roam wherever he wished, and he told the keeper as much. The keeper was unimpressed and some sharp words were exchanged, and when the poets emerged on to the road they were challenged once more. Tempers flared and the keeper called Frost “a damned cottager” before raising his shotgun at the two men. Incensed, Frost was on the verge of striking the man, but hesitated when he saw Thomas back off. Heated words continued to be had, with the adversaries goading each other before then finally parting, the poets talking heatedly of the incident as they walked.
Thomas said that the keeper’s aggression was unacceptable and that something should be done about it. Frost’s ire peaked as he listened to Thomas: something would indeed be done and done right now, and if Thomas wanted to follow him he could see it being done. The men turned back, Frost angrily, Thomas hesitantly, but the gamekeeper was no longer on the road. His temper wild, Frost insisted on tracking the man down, which they did, to a small cottage at the edge of a coppice. Frost beat on the door, and left the startled keeper in no doubt as to what would befall him were he ever to threaten him again or bar access to the preserve. Frost repeated his warning for good measure, turned on his heels and prepared to leave. What happened next would be a defining moment in Frost and Thomas’s friendship, and would plague Thomas to his dying days.
The keeper, recovering his wits, reached above the door for his shotgun and came outside, this time heading straight for Thomas who, until then, had not been his primary target. The gun was raised again; instinctively Thomas backed off once more, and the gamekeeper forced the men off his property and back on to the path, where they retreated under the keeper’s watchful aim.
Frost contented himself with the thought that he had given a good account of himself; but not Thomas, who wished that his mettle had not been tested in the presence of his friend. He felt sure that he had shown himself to be cowardly and suspected Frost of thinking the same. Not once but twice had he failed to hold his ground, while his friend had no difficulty standing his. His courage had been found wanting, at a time when friends such as Rupert Brooke had found it in themselves to face genuine danger overseas.
The encounter would leave Thomas haunted, to relive the moment again and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost – in the week when he left for France, even in the week of his death – he recalled the feeling of fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand-off with the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and possibly even by the most important friend he had ever made, and he vowed that he would never again let himself be faced down. When the moment came he would hold his nerve and face the gunmen. “That’s why he went to war,” said Frost later.
But it would take one further episode in Thomas’s friendship with Frost to push him to war; and it would turn on a work of Frost’s that has becomeAmerica’s best-loved poem.
In the early summer of 1915, six months after the row with the gamekeeper, Thomas had still to take his fateful decision to enlist. Zeppelins had brought the war emphatically to London, but Thomas’s eyes were on New Hampshire, to where Frost had returned earlier that year. Thomas prepared his mother for the news that he might emigrate, and told Frost he seemed certain to join him: “I am thinking about America as my only chance (apart from Paradise).” But Thomas’s prevarication got the better of him once more, and though conscription had yet to be introduced, he told Frost of the equal pull of the war in France. “Frankly I do not want to go,” he said of the fighting, “but hardly a day passes without my thinking I should. With no call, the problem is endless.”
But the problem was not endless as Thomas thought, for a poem of Frost’s had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas’s hand: a poem called “Two Roads”, soon to be rechristened “The Road Not Taken”. It finished:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, “The Road Not Taken” has been understood by some as an emblem of individual choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes responsibility for – and so effects – his own destiny. But it was never intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky.”
Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome of the road not taken? For another: had the poet chosen the road more travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the poem intended to explode a more earnest reading. The two paths, he wrote, had been worn “really about the same”, and “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black”, showing the reader that neither road was more or less travelled, and that choices may in some sense be equal.
But the poem carried a more personal message. Many were the walks when Thomas would guide Frost on the promise of rare wild flowers or birds’ eggs, only to end in self-reproach when the path he chose revealed no such wonders. Amused at Thomas’s inability to satisfy himself, Frost chided him, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.”
To Thomas, it was not the least bit funny. It pricked at his confidence, at his sense of his own fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And now the one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely – in particular, towards the war – appeared to be mocking him for it.
Thomas responded angrily. He did not subscribe to models of self-determination, or the belief that the spirit could triumph over adversity; some things seemed to him ingrained, inevitable. How free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go, rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to make himself a new home. None of this was Thomas. “It isn’t in me,” he pleaded.
Frost insisted that Thomas was overreacting, and told his friend that he had failed to see that “the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing”. But Thomas saw no such fun, and said so bluntly, adding that he doubted anyone would see the fun of the thing without Frost to guide them personally. Frost, in fact, had already discovered as much on reading the poem before a college audience, where it was “taken pretty seriously”, he admitted, despite “doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling . . . Mea culpa.”
“The Road Not Taken” did not send Thomas to war, but it was the last and pivotal moment in a sequence of events that had brought him to an irreversible decision. He broke the news to Frost. “Last week I had screwed myself up to the point of believing I should come out to America & lecture if anyone wanted me to. But I have altered my mind. I am going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me.”
In walking with Frost, he had written of the urgent need to protect – and if necessary, to fight for – the life and the landscape around him. “Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly at English landscape,” he explained, though he had struggled for some time to see what it was that might be done. Finally, he understood. Thomas was passed fit by the doctor, and the same week, in July 1915, he sat down to lunch with a friend and informed her that he had enlisted in the Artists Rifles, and that he was glad; he did not know why, but he was glad.
“I had known that the struggle going on in his spirit would end like this,” his wife wrote.
Thomas brought a unique eye to the English landscape at a moment when it was facing irreversible change. His work seems distinctly modern in its recognition of the interdependence of human beings and the natural world, more closely attuned to our own ecological age than that of the first world war.
Though few of his poems were published in his lifetime, his admirers have been many: WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and Michael Longley among them. But perhaps no poet ever valued him more highly than Robert Frost: “We were greater friends than almost any two ever were practising the same art,” he remarked. A war, a gamekeeper and a road not taken came between them, but by then they had altered one another’s lives irrevocably. Thomas pulled his friend’s work from obscurity into a clearing, from which the American would go on to sell a million poetry books in his lifetime. Frost, in turn, released the poet within Thomas, and would even find a publisher for his verse in the United States. That book would carry a dedication that Thomas had scribbled on the eve of sailing for France: “To Robert Frost”. Frost responded in kind, writing: “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had.”
At twilight when walking, or at the parting of ways with a friend, Thomas could feel great sadness that his journey must come to an end:
Things will happen which will trample and pierce, but I shall go on, something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable, something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a strong citizen of infinity and eternity.
He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter 1917; he had survived little more than two months in France. Yet his personal war was never with a military opponent: it had been with his ravaging depression and with his struggle to find a literary expression through poetry that was worthy of his talents. And on the latter, at least, he won his battle.

What Getting Published Will Not Do for You

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 An amusing list from Meg Rosoff 




This week it’s for everyone thinking that publishing a book will solve your financial, career and self-esteem issues and cause your nearest and dearest to treat you with respect and awe.

The reality is…

  1. Getting published will not write your second novel for you.
  2. Or entice laundry fairies to come live in your house.
  3. It is unlikely to make you rich. Most writers also have real jobs.
  4. Getting published will fill your children with respect and awe until you ask them to clean their rooms.
  5. “When can we have the next one?” is what publishers say directly after “congratulations on your first novel!”
  6. The role of the second novel is to prove that the first one was a fluke.
  7. Being shortlisted for a major award is nice, but unless it is the Booker, none of your friends will notice.
  8. Being shortlisted for a minor award requires attendance at a long ceremony followed by sincere-looking applause for someone else.
  9. If you are lucky enough to be reviewed, it will usually be by the only person you have ever been rude to. The accompanying photo will announce publicly that you could afford to lose a few pounds. (A flattering jacket photo, on the other hand, will inspire people to remark how terrible you look in real life.)
  10. Publishing a novel will not grant you immortality. In the unlikely event that your book survives to the next century you will almost certainly be too dead to care.
Having said that, writing novels is by far the best job I’ve ever had.
 .

Some favourite lines from Shakespeare

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 I am grateful

For Shakespeare who wrote
Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
           Merrily, merrily shall I live now
          Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Amanda Hocking, Star of Self-Publishing

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 Storyseller



By STRAWBERRY SAROYAN

The New York Times




Amanda Hocking, the star of self-publishing, was sitting in the front seat of her Ford Escape earlier this spring when she spotted a messenger delivering flowers to her home in Austin, Minn.  
    “They’re probably from, like, my mom,” she said as she walked up to her porch. “Or my dad. He always sends flowers.”
    Inside, Goldman had set the assortment of gerbera daisies and roses on the coffee table.
    “Who are they from?” Hocking asked.
    “St. Martin’s Press,” Goldman said. “That’s your new publisher.”
    That morning, Hocking’s deal with St. Martin’s was announced: $2 million for her next four books, a series she’s calling “Watersong.”
    She casually opened the card. “ ‘Thrilled to be your publisher,’ ” she read. “ ‘Thrilled to be working with you. Sincerely, people.’ ”
    People?
    “Well, ‘Sincerely, Matthew Shear and Rose Hilliard,’ ” she said before trailing off, referring to a head of St. Martin’s and the woman who would be her editor there.
    If Hocking seems a bit blasé about signing her first deal with a traditional publisher, and a multimillion-dollar one at that, it’s hard to blame her. Since uploading her first book on her own last spring, she has become — along with the likes of Nora Roberts, James Patterson and Stieg Larsson — one of the best-selling e-authors on Amazon. In that time, she has grossed approximately $2 million. Her 10 novels include the paranormal-romance “Trylle,” a four-book vampire series that begins with “My Blood Approves” and “Hollowland,” which kicks off a zombie series whose second book will come out in the fall. Her character-driven books, which feature trolls, hobgoblins and fairy-tale elements and keep the pages turning, have generated an excitement not felt in the industry since Stephenie Meyer or perhaps even J. K. Rowling. “She’s just a really good storyteller,” Hilliard says. “Whatever that thing is that makes you want to stay up late at night to read one more chapter — she has it.”
    Hollywood feels the same way: the “Trylle”series was optioned by Media Rights Capital,which was involved with “The Adjustment Bureau,” among other films; the screenplays are being written by the woman who co-wrote “District 9.’’
    Given this success, it’s fair to ask why Hocking has decided to go with a so-called legacy publisher at all.
    “I’d always known that if I could get the right deal, I would take it,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have gotten this kind of deal six months ago.” It’s a deal that pays less than what Amazon, in partnership with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, bid, but there were doubts about whether the big bookstore chains would carry a book published by their competitor. (Also, Hocking says, Amazon wanted to restrict e-book rights to the Kindle and offered a lower rate of royalties than she often gets from what has been self-published.) And Hocking wants to reach as many people as possible among the 85 percent or so of the population who don’t have e-readers yet. “For me to be a billion-dollar author,” she would tell me later, “I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.”
    Hocking took a bite of a chocolate and looked at Goldman, who also works as her assistant. “Get my mom on the phone,” she said. “Tell her I got flowers. She’ll freak out.”
    Hocking, who is 26, comes across as a hipster schoolgirl. The first day we met, she wore aTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt, jeans, a giant glittery dime-store frog ring and no shoes, revealing her electric-blue toenails. She was living in a home the size of a modest Manhattan one-bedroom. Its porch was decorated with a plastic pink flamingo and little pink-flamingo-shaped Christmas lights.
    Hocking gave a self-deprecating tour. In the kitchen, she pointed out a hole in the ceiling that her cats, Squeak and Nikki, like to crawl up into so they can nap in the eaves. In her office there was a framed check from Amazon for $15.75 for her first royalties, from a year ago. When we settled down in her living room, Hocking described what was, for someone who becomes a writer, a not-unfamiliar childhood. “I was seriously depressed for most of my life,” she said. She channeled her feelings into fan fiction. “A lot of stuff I did was different takes on ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Labyrinth.’ I was going to end up with Luke Skywalker and stuff.” What was unusual, however, was her age: she started writing, or at least telling stories, at 3 or 4. “I remember one when I was 8 or 9. It was about a girl and a leopard who rescued people. They were like a duo.” (The plot of “Hollowland” involves a girl and a lion helping people escape the zombie apocalypse.) At 11, her parents separated, and when she got a computer that year, she said, “that was like the biggest lifesaver ever.”
    High school was rough, though not outlandishly so. “She says no one remembers her today, but she was in the punk-arty group,” said Goldman, to whom she has referred on her blog as “my platonic life mate.” Hocking was also a bit of a loner, Goldman added. “She would always be home writing when people were hanging out.”
    By the time she was 17, Hocking had completed her first novel, “Dreams I Can’t Remember,” which she sent to every agent she could find through Google and “Writer’s Market.” All of them — “about 50,” she said — rejected her, mostly with form letters. Today she doesn’t think the agents made a mistake, and blames her query letter as much as the work itself. “I was whiny and depressed and thought life was going to be handed to me.”
    She kept at it, intermittently. She also worked as a dishwasher at Oriental Express, watched her B.F.F. fall in love, dated a bad boy. “He was in a band with some friends of mine — what instrument did he play?” she asked Goldman.
    “Second guitar,” Goldman replied. He turned to me. “The band was called Tranquil Chaos.”
    As bad boys in bands called Tranquil Chaos tend to do, she says, he broke her heart. Then she was fired. Then her best friend married and moved away. Hocking wondered what she was doing with her life.
    Inspiration struck when she caught a clip on YouTube of Blink-182’s Mark Hoppus talking to Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. It was short and simple — essentially, Hoppus encourages all the kids out there to make their dreams come true. “I was like, That’s it!” Hocking said. “This whole time I’ve had a passion and I’ve waited for it to happen. I need to do it.”
    It was January 2009, and Hocking started treating writing as a job. Before, it was “something I always did . . . like playing video games.” After, she wrote even when she didn’t feel like it. Over the next year, she wrote “at least five or six new novels.” Initially, these were like her earliest books, darker than her current ones, more cerebral and less “fun,” as Hocking might say. They were romances, like her later, published books — but without paranormal elements, and she was still developing her technique. She described one novel, “Reckless Abandon,” as being about “a girl and a guy falling in love, but there wasn’t a lot going on. It was just terribly long.”
    After studying bookstore shelves and researching the industry to see what was published, as well as reading lots of Y.A. novels, Hocking figured out that romance was an evergreen when it came to popularity, but that paranormal elements really helped books take off. “My Blood Approves” and its sequels emerged from this recognition. Then, trying to be more innovative, Hocking moved beyond vampires and, in the “Trylle” series, onto trolls. Why trolls? “I didn’t want to write about shifters or fairies. I don’t really like fairies.” At first, she wasn’t a fan of trolls either — “they kind of freaked me out” — but when she ran across a line in her research that said they could sometimes be attractive, she decided to rethink her position. “They’re not so common, and I thought: No one else is doing this. Let’s go for it.”
    She made quick progress. Her actual time spent writing a novel, she said, is two to four intensive weeks. “But I say that and people are like, ‘Whoa, that’s fast.’ And it is. But the series I sold to St. Martin’s, for example, I’ve been really working on it in my head for over a year. So by the time I sit down to write, it’s already written.”
    Still, she continued to receive nothing but rejections from New York. “There were a couple days where I was like: I’m giving up. This is horrible. I’m never going to be able to do it.” She sighed. “I sent off my last letters to them at the end of that year.” Her last rejection came in February 2010. It was a form letter.
    Two months later, Hocking uploaded “My Blood Approves” to Amazon and, about a month later, to Smashwords, a service that makes her books compatible not only with the Nook but also with less popular devices like BeBook and Kobo. (When, in October 2010, it became possible to self-publish directly on Barnes & Noble’s site for the Nook, she did so.) It’s a surprisingly simple process in each case — much like signing up for Facebook. She took the e-leap because she thought that even if she sold her vampire books, there was going to be a reaction against them before they made it into stores.
    The first day, she sold five books. The next, five more. “I took screen shots a lot,” she said. Then she uploaded another novel and sold a total of 36 books one day in May. “It was like: 36 books? It’s astounding. I’m taking over the world.”
    Soon she started selling hundreds of books a day. That June, she sold 6,000 books; that July 10,000. “And then it started to explode. In January, it was over 100,000.” Today, she sells 9,000 books a day.
    Hocking is at a loss to explain the phenomenon. “I’ve seen other authors do the exact same things I have, similar genre, similar prices” — like many self-published authors, she prices her books radically below what traditional publishers charge; typically hers cost between 99 cents and $2.99 — “and they have multiple books out. And they all have good covers. And they’re selling reasonably well, but they’re not selling nearly as well as I am.”
    The stories themselves are most likely the answer: part quirky girl-like-Hocking characters, part breakneck pacing, part Hollywood-style action and part bodice-ripping romance — they are literature as candy, a mash-up of creativity and commerce.
    It’s a formula, however, that took a while for Hocking to concoct. She recalls a moment of truth around the time she was 21. “My whole life I would always read things like I write — lighter young-adult stuff. But I would also read stuff that was darker, like Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, and that was the kind of stuff I would try to write. Because I was like, these books are good” — worthy, highbrow, of artistic value.
    One day, Goldman intervened. “He just said: ‘These books you’re writing are not you. You’re forcing yourself. That’s not who you are. You’re a silly, fun person who likes silly, fun things. Stop trying to be a dark person.’ ” She paused. “I told him: ‘No, you’re an idiot. Those books are crap.’ ”
    But she took his advice and started writing stuff that resonated more personally. She summed up the difference between her books and the likes of Vonnegut thus: “Theirs are not actually character-driven, they’re not books about people. People are just used to explain an idea. And my books are about people — who might happen to have ideas.”
    Later in my visit, Hocking agreed to show me the house she was moving into a few weeks later; it was one of her few indulgences, she said. (Another is a model of a life-size Han Solo figure encased in carbonite that cost “about $7,000,” she admitted shyly.) We drove a few miles, then pulled into a spacious and tidy area in front of a ranch-style home. Compared with her current place, it was the Taj Mahal: well-kept grounds, total quiet, McMansions on either side.
    A conservative-looking woman, Hocking’s real estate agent, greeted us. “That’s what all the rooms are going to be painted,” she said when we entered the dining room, referring to a creamy beige on its walls. “It will be a nice primer for you.”
    “Cool,” Amanda said, checking out a chandelier on the ceiling. “This is going to be a music room. I’m going to put a piano here” — she pointed to a near corner — “and some high-backed chairs in funky colors. This room will be painted a dark purple. I like color.”
    We headed into the living room, which has 40-foot-high vaulted ceilings. The place, I thought, evoked the castles or fantasy worlds her characters often ascend to (in “Switched,” the troll’s castle has “vaulted” ceilings, and a chandelier figures in a major plot point). “My stepdad is going to build a bench to go here so it will be like a window seat,” she told me excitedly.
    Hocking led the way down the hall, pointing out a guest room, then the room which would be Goldman’s — “I lived alone and I hated it,” she said. “I don’t go out that much” — and finally stopped in the master bed and bath, which included a claw-footed bathtub the size of her current office. “This tub is crazy,” she said.
    Downstairs, a room lined with built-in bookshelves would be her new office, and a large room with a stone fireplace the “movie room.” There was also a “craft room” with its own kitchen.
    Throughout the tour, Hocking seemed surprisingly mature, comfortable in her own skin. Back in the car, she agreed, attributing this to her writing breakthrough, and to Goldman’s counsel, too. “When I stopped judging myself, that was actually a huge turning point in my whole personality. I realized that it’s O.K. to like things like ‘The Breakfast Club’ even though it’s not critically acclaimed. It’s O.K. to like the Muppets. I’d always been a closet lame person,” she said and laughed. “I think I became cooler when I stopped trying to be cool.”
    The next evening, Hocking gathered at Steve’s Pizza with Goldman; her mother, Lorraine Felt, a medical transcriptionist dressed in a light green cardigan and floral dress; and her stepfather, Duane Felt, who works in I.T. and sported jeans, a flannel shirt and a Reebok cap. A local institution, Steve’s is a place that Hocking and Goldman favor, and it was full of local families. (Hocking’s father, Rick Hocking, a truck driver, lives in nearby Blooming Prairie.)
    Settling into a table upstairs in the “game room,” which featured old-school pinball machines and photos of Austin High cheerleaders on the wall, the group ordered two pizzas and talked about Goldman’s 25th-birthday celebration the previous night.
    “We bought $8 champagne,” Hocking said, waving the finger with her frog ring on it in the air. “I had half a flute.”
    Duane caught sight of her ring and dubbed it “big pimp bling.”
    Lorraine, her curls bobbing, laughed along with Hocking, and then talk turned to the changes­ her parents have experienced in the wake of Hocking’s success.
    Duane told the group he was at the post office earlier that day and overheard someone saying, “You hear about this kid making all this money?” (Hocking was on the cover of both local papers, after the St. Martin’s deal.) When Duane identified himself, a postal worker gave him special treatment.
    Lorraine listened and then turned to her daughter. “You don’t think you’re better than everybody else,” she said. “But you are.” She put her arm around Hocking.
    “I just write books that are silly,” Hocking replied.
    “But they’re relaxing,” Lorraine said. “They’re a break from reality. Readers get to ride along, and they don’t have to think about it.” Indeed, Hocking’s books are the John Hughes version of paranormal romance and action: picture a young Molly Ringwaldbeing drawn into the world of vampires, say, or a “My So-Called Life”-era Claire Danesbeing told she is actually a princess troll and has to fight bad guys.
    Watching this scene, though, I realized that Hocking herself has undergone a change as major as that of any of her characters. In managing to reach people via the Internet first, and then breaking into the traditional book industry that way, she has become her generation’s first literary phenomenon.
    The idea brought to mind an earlier moment when Hocking was talking about how she’d never visited New York City — at least since she was a small child and her father passed through on a job and “my mom was sure we were going to get raped and murdered.” So now that she’s made it, would she want to live it up, move away, become a “princess”? I asked.
    She shook her head. “When I was younger, I wanted to move out of Austin. But I think if I moved to the city now, I would still just sit in my house and go to Wal-Mart and Kwik Trip. . . . I like my friends, I like my family. I don’t really want to make new ones.” She also likes her fantasies — and can have those anytime, at home, just like her readers.

    The 100 Greatest Non-fiction Books

    By

    After keen debate at the Guardian’s books desk, this is our list of the very best factual writing, organised by category, and then by date. See how closely it matches yours – and help fill in the gaps on the blog
    British Museum Reading Room

    The greatest non-fiction books live here … the British Museum Reading Room.

    Art

    The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes (1980)
    Hughes charts the story of modern art, from cubism to the avant garde
    The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich (1950)
    The most popular art book in history. Gombrich examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the dawn of time
    Ways of Seeing by John Berger (1972)
    A study of the ways in which we look at art, which changed the terms of a generation’s engagement with visual culture

    Biography

    Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1550)
    Biography mixes with anecdote in this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the Renaissance
    The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell (1791)
    Boswell draws on his journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer
    The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys (1825)
    “Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health,” begins this extraordinarily vivid diary of the Restoration period
    Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
    Strachey set the template for modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian heroes
    Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
    Graves’ autobiography tells the story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world war
    The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein (1933)
    Stein’s groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an autobiography, of her lover

    Culture

    Notes on Camp by Susan Sontag (1964)
    Sontag’s proposition that the modern sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual aesthetics
    Mythologies by Roland Barthes (1972)
    Barthes gets under the surface of the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of contemporary myth-making
    Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
    Said argues that romanticised western representations of Arab culture are political and condescending

    Environment

    Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
    This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US
    The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
    Lovelock’s argument that once life is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival, revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things

    History

    The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC)
    History begins with Herodotus’s account of the Greco-Persian war
    The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776)
    The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable
    The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848)
    A landmark study from the pre-eminent Whig historian
    Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963)
    Arendt’s reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of the Holocaust
    The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)
    Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous masses
    Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970)
    A moving account of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government
    Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
    Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful tapestry
    Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982)
    The great Polish reporter tells the story of the last Shah of Iran
    The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994)
    Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in this account of the 20th century
    We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999)
    Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community
    Postwar by Tony Judt (2005)
    A magisterial account of the grand sweep of European history since 1945

    Journalism

    The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990)
    An examination of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the journalist’s trade
    The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)
    The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD
    Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
    A vivid account of Herr’s experiences of the Vietnam war

    Literature

    The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781)
    Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works
    An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975)
    Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity
    The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)
    Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears

    Mathematics

    Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)
    A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference

    Memoir

    Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
    Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life
    Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
    This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society
    De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905)
    Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development
    The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922)
    A dashing account of Lawrence’s exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire
    The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927)
    A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge
    Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938)
    Orwell’s clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war
    The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
    Published by her father after the war, this account of the family’s hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust
    Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951)
    Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940
    The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971)
    A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka’s experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war
    The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975)
    A vision of the author’s life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry
    Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000)
    Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations

    Mind

    The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899)
    Freud’s argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture

    Music

    The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998)
    Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine

    Philosophy

    The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC)
    A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love
    Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180)
    A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective
    Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580)
    Montaigne’s wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form
    The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621)
    Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy
    Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641)
    Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe
    Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779)
    Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God
    Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)
    If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant’s attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings
    Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807)
    Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness
    Walden by HD Thoreau (1854)
    An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society
    On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859)
    Mill argues that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”
    Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883)
    The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch
    The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)
    A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress

    Politics

    The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC)
    A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances
    The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532)
    Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability
    Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651)
    Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being “nasty, brutish and short”
    The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791)
    A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens
    A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
    Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society
    The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
    An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that “proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”
    The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903)
    A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south
    The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949)
    De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history
    The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961)
    An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation
    The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967)
    This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan’s ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore
    The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)
    Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women
    Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988)
    Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits
    Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008)
    A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution

    Religion

    The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890)
    An attempt to identify the shared elements of the world’s religions, which suggests that they originate from fertility cults
    The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
    James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in terms of their origin or empirical accuracy

    Science

    On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859)
    Darwin’s account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe
    The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965)
    An elegant exploration of physical theories from one of the 20th century’s greatest theoreticians
    The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)
    James Watson’s personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA
    The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
    Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism
    A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)
    A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking’s account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation

    Society

    The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405)
    A defence of womankind in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout history
    Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511)
    This satirical encomium to the foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and corruption in the Catholic church
    Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734)
    Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel
    Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897)
    An investigation into protestant and catholic culture, which argues that the less vigilant social control within catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide
    Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922)
    A thorough analysis of political, economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the template for modern sociology
    A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929)
    Woolf’s extended essay argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated literary tradition
    Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)
    Evans’s images and Agee’s words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US South
    The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)
    An exploration of the unhappiness felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and stable family lives
    In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)
    A novelistic account of a brutal murder in Kansas city, which propelled Capote to fame and fortune
    Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968)
    Didion evokes life in 1960s California in a series of sparkling essays
    The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)
    This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author’s own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR
    Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975)
    Foucault examines the development of modern society’s systems of incarceration
    News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)
    Colombia’s greatest 20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel

    Travel

    The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355)
    The Arab world’s greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond
    Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869)
    Twain’s tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller
    Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941)
    A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history
    Venice by Jan Morris (1960)
    An eccentric but learned guide to the great city’s art, history, culture and people
    A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)
    The first volume of Leigh Fermor’s journey on foot through Europe – a glowing evocation of youth, memory and history
    Danube by Claudio Magris (1986)
    Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea
    China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995)
    A pioneering work of Chinese sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face
    The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995)
    A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a melancholy meditation on transience and decay
    Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)
    Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way
    Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002)
    Vargas Llosa distils a lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer’s craft

    Michael Cunningham on Virginia Woolf, his mother, and himself

    By

    Virginia Woolf, my mother and me

    Ahead of Review’s book club on The Hours, Michael Cunningham explains how discovering Virginia Woolf as a teenager inspired him to write his novel about her life – and how his mother provided a surprising solution when he got stuck
    Jack Rovello and Julianne Moore in the film of The Hou

     

    Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of literary history with a stone lodged in her pocket.
    She did, of course, have her darker interludes. More on that in a moment. But first I’d like to announce, to anyone who might not know, that she, when not sunk in her periodic depressions, was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.
    And, fearless feminist though she was, she could be reduced to days of self-recrimination if someone made a snide remark about her outfit. She had some difficulty putting herself together and, like many of us, suffered from a dearth of fashion sense. She was also enormously insecure about her work. She suspected, more often than not, that her “tinselly experiments” in fiction would be packed away with the rest of the artefacts and curiosities, all the minor efforts that occupy various archives and storage rooms.
    That’s not a new story: the under-appreciated artist, vindicated by time. But still. Woolf, an often charming but always delicate creature, prone to fits of depression, sexually frigid, never dressed quite right, most likely did not strike many as a figure heroic enough to withstand the gale force of history. Not compared to someone like James Joyce, the other great modernist, who blustered about his own genius to anyone who’d listen, who planned for his immortality as carefully as a general plans an attack.
    Among the reasons Woolf drowned herself, 70 years ago, at the age of 59 was her conviction that her final novel, Between the Acts, was an utter failure. There are relatively few significant writers who were, in their lifetimes, quite so uncertain about their accomplishments.
    Since the publication of my own novel, The Hours, in which Woolf figures as a character, I have unexpectedly become some sort of acknowledged, if peripheral, expert on her life and work. I’m surprised at how often someone will say to me: well, yes, Woolf was wonderful, but she was no Joyce, was she?
    She was no Joyce. She was herself. She had her limits. She wrote only about members of the upper classes, and she wrote not at all about sex. Her entire body of work contains two romantic kisses – one in The Voyage Out, another in Mrs Dalloway – and after those two relatively early books, no erotic episodes of any kind.
    But really, I suspect that whatever reservations some people may harbour about Woolf, as opposed to Joyce, have to do with the fact that she wrote about women, and about the domestic particulars that were, at the time, women’s primary domain. Joyce had the good sense to write mostly about men.
    As a woman, Woolf knew about the sense of helplessness that can afflict women given too little to do. And she knew – she insisted – that a life spent maintaining a house and throwing parties was not necessarily, not categorically, a trivial life. She gave us to understand that even a modest, domestic life was still, for the person living it, an epic journey, however ordinary it might appear to an outside observer. She refused to dismiss lives that most other writers tended to ignore.
    That may have had something to do with Woolf’s own precarious mental condition, and her fear that she herself was one of the figures likely to be dismissed and forgotten. If she took on too much, if she became overly excited, she could tumble into a state of despair for which the term “depression” seems rather mild. In her lucid periods, she was great at parties. In her other state she was inconsolable. She hallucinated. She lashed out at those closest to her, her husband Leonard in particular, with the deadly accuracy available to a genius and which, it seems, she retained even when reason had deserted her. That Virginia was no fun at all.
    The black spells always passed, usually in a matter of weeks, but Woolf not only lived in terror of the next onset, she worried she was too mentally unbalanced to sustain a career as a writer. Her fear of her own madness led her, when she started writing novels, to write two relatively conventional ones: The Voyage Out and Night and Day. She wanted to prove to herself and others that she was sane enough (most of the time) to write novels that were like those of other novelists; that were not the ravings and rants of a madwoman. She was further driven in her ambition to appear healthy by the fact that her editor was George Duckworth, her half brother, who had molested her when she was 12. It’s not difficult to imagine that, with those first two books, Woolf wanted to show Duckworth that he had not done her any lasting harm. It is also not difficult to imagine that few male writers of the period found themselves in similar situations.
    After the publication of Night and Day, in an effort to ameliorate Woolf’s black spells, to lessen her agitation, she and Leonard moved to the suburban quiet of Richmond, and set up a printing press in the basement of their house. This was the birth of the Hogarth Press, and one of its first publications was Woolf’s highly unorthodox novel Jacob’s Room. Publishing her own books, in concert with Leonard, made the crucial difference. Woolf was, rather suddenly, answerable to no one, and she had already demonstrated her capacity for writing novels that resembled other novels. And so began her period of great work, which continued until her death. She no longer needed to prove anything, to anyone.Jacob’s Room was followed by Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,Orlando, and on from there.
    This new freedom was essential to Woolf as an artist, but did not have much effect on her periodic lapses into depression. They plagued her throughout her life. Psychiatry was not even in its infancy at the time – Hogarth eventually published early books by Freud – and there was no remedy available to Woolf. In the 1920s it was thought that mental disorders might stem from infections in the teeth, which by some means worked their way into the brain. She had several teeth pulled. It didn’t help.
    And yet. If Woolf was better acquainted with profound sorrow than most, she was also, by some mysterious manifestation of will, better than almost anyone at conveying the pure joy of being alive. The quotidian pleasure of simply being present in the world on an ordinary Tuesday in June. That’s one of the reasons we who love her, love her as ardently as we do. She knew how bad it could get. And still, she insisted on simple, imperishable beauty, albeit a beauty haunted by mortality, as beauty always is. Woolf’s adoration of the world, her optimism about it, are assertions we can trust, because they come from a writer who has seen the bottom of the bottom. In her books, life persists, grand and gaudy and marvellous; it trumps the depths and discouragements.
    I read Mrs Dalloway for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school. I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.
    Mrs Dalloway, for anyone unfamiliar with it, concerns a day in the life of one Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old society matron. In the course of the novel she runs an errand, meets an old flame in whom she is no longer interested, takes a nap, and gives a party. That’s the plot.
    We are not, however, confined to Clarissa’s point of view throughout the novel. Consciousness is passed from character to character, like a baton passed from runner to runner in a relay race. We enter the mind of Peter Walsh, the old suitor; we go on a shopping trip with Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth; and we spend considerable time with one Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the first world war who is mentally unhinged. We also enter, more briefly, the minds of entirely incidental figures – a man who passes Clarissa on Bond Street, an elderly woman sitting on a bench in Hyde Park. We return, always, to Clarissa, but we see as well that as she goes about her unextraordinary day she is surrounded by the various comedies and tragedies of those around her. We understand that Clarissa, that everyone, in the course of performing their daily business is in fact walking through a vast world, and is ever so slightly altering that world simply by appearing in it.
    In Mrs Dalloway, Woolf asserts that a day in the life of just about anyone contains, if looked at with sufficient penetration, much of what one needs to know about all human life, in more or less the way the blueprint for an entire organism is present in every strand of its DNA. In Mrs Dalloway, and other novels of Woolf’s, we are told that there are no insignificant lives, only inadequate ways of looking at them.
    I did not, at the age of 15, understand any of that. I couldn’t make sense of Mrs Dalloway, and I failed utterly in my attempts to appear intelligent to that girl (blessings on her, wherever she is today). But I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences. I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.
    My only experience with sentences before then had been confined to the simple declarative. Woolf’s sentences were revelatory. It seemed possible that other books might contain similar marvels. And, as I discovered, some of them did. Reading Mrs Dalloway transformed me, by slow degrees, into a reader.
    Decades after that first reading, which rendered me both baffled and awed – which converted me, if you will – I attempted to write a novel about Woolf and Mrs Dalloway. I approached the idea with appropriate nervousness. For one thing, if one stands that close to a genius, one is likely to look even tinier than one actually is. For another, I am a man, and Woolf was not only a great writer but is a feminist icon. There has long been a certain sense that she belongs to women.
    Still, I wanted to write a book about reading a book. Mrs Dalloway, despite my general incomprehension of its larger purposes, showed me, at a relatively early age, what it was possible to do with ink and paper. It seems that for some of us, reading a particular book at a particular time is an essential life experience, and so every bit as much a part of our writerly material as the more traditional novel-inspiring experiences – like first love, the loss of a parent, a failed marriage, etc.
    With my misgivings firmly in place, I decided that it was better to risk going down in lurid blue-green flames than to write the book one knows one is able to write. And so, I set out.
    My novel The Hours originated as a contemporary retelling of Mrs Dalloway. I wondered how much, or how little, Clarissa Dalloway’s character would be altered by a world in which women were offered a broader range of possibilities. That quickly proved, however, to be merely a conceit, and not an especially compelling one. We already have Mrs Dalloway, a fabulous Mrs Dalloway. Who in the world could possibly want another?
    Being dogged (doggedness is an essential quality for any novelist), I was reluctant to abandon the book entirely. I tried rewriting it as a diptych, in which I would alternate between chapters that concerned a contemporary Mrs Dalloway and chapters devoted to the day in Woolf’s life when she began writing the book. When she, ever doubtful and insecure, set down the opening lines of a book that, as it turned out, would live for ever. I even tried writing the Woolf story on the odd pages and the Clarissa story on the evens, so that they would kiss every time one turned a page. Ideas like that tend to make better sense in the solitude of one’s study than they do in brighter light.
    Still, even with the inclusion of a second strand, the book wasn’t right. It refused to shed its aspect of literary exercise. It stubbornly remained an idea for a novel, rather than an actual novel.
    At that point, I pretty much decided to let it go, and write another book instead. But one morning, sitting at my computer, I allowed my mind to wander into questions about why Woolf meant so much to me, enough that I’d spent the better part of a year writing a doomed novel about her and her work. OK, sure, I loved Mrs Dalloway, but every novelist has loved any number of books, and few of them have felt the need to write new books about the older ones (the only exception that comes to mind is Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which is, of course, a retelling ofJane Eyre from the point of view of Bertha, Mr Rochester’s first wife).
    What, then, was the matter with me? Sitting at my computer, I pictured Clarissa Dalloway, and pictured Woolf, her creator, standing behind her. And then, unbidden, I imagined my mother standing behind Woolf.
    As I thought about it, I began to realise that my mother was, in certain ways, the legitimate third party. My mother was a homemaker, the sort of woman Woolf referred to as “the angel of the house”, who, like many such house angels, had given herself over to a life that was too small for her. She had always seemed to me like an Amazon queen, captured and brought to a suburb, where she was forced to live in an enclosure that could not contain her, and yet ineluctably did.
    My mother managed her frustrations by obsessing over every conceivable detail. She could spend half a day deciding on cocktail napkins for a party. She planned every meal exquisitely, and still worried that they were failures. Germs decided eventually to cease entering the house entirely, because they knew they’d find no purchase there.
    Sitting before my computer, I began to wonder . . . If you removed the ultimate object – for one woman, a novel, for another, a home so perfectly created and maintained that nothing rank or dolorous could ever take root there – you had, essentially, the same effort. That is, the desire to realise an ideal, to touch the supernal, to create something greater than the human hand and mind can create, no matter how gifted those hands and minds might be.
    It seemed that in some fundamental way, my mother and Woolf had been engaged in similar enterprises. Both were pursuing impossible ideals. Neither was ever satisfied, because the end result, be it book or cake, did not, could not, match the perfection that seemed to hover just out of reach.
    That equivalency felt true to the spirit of Woolf’s legacy. She who had insisted so adamantly that no life could be dismissed, and that the lives of women were more prone to dismissal than were the lives of men.
    And so, with my mother renamed Laura Brown (after an essay of Woolf’s entitled “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”), the book became a triptych, and I went on from there.
    Although a great writer is always, first and foremost, a great writer, regardless of his or her life or subject matter, Woolf is quite possibly the greatest chronicler of the lives of women. Her women are rarely figures of fame or notoriety. Their skills tend to be the traditional womanly skills. Mrs Dalloway, like Mrs Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, is an immaculate hostess. Both are more than able to manage a dinner party, they are adept at helping everyone feel comfortable and included, they make certain that the food and the centrepieces are exactly right. We have, in the decades since, largely discredited those abilities, and favour – as well we might – women who take on the more global concerns that are still, even in 2011, more generally granted to men.
    Part of Woolf’s genius, however, resides in her refusal to condescend to her women, without ever aggrandising them. If anything, it’s the men in her novels who feel ever so slightly ridiculous: Richard Dalloway with his smallish job at court, Mr Ramsey with his constant need for reassurance about his brilliance, his potency, his potential. As the men work and fret and bemoan their places in the world, the women infuse their men, their families, their homes, with life. The women are the electric currents that run through the rooms. The women are the sources not only of comfort but of vigour and amplitude. The women know that in the end, we will still need food and love, after our jobs have been taken over by younger people and our earthly works have been put away on their shelves.
    Woolf was, not surprisingly, unsure about all that, even as she wrote so brilliantly about it. She believed that her sister Vanessa, who had children and lovers and a general air of reckless abandon even as she applied herself to her painting, was the truer artist. Woolf acknowledged that her sister was not necessarily the brightest of all intellectual lights, but still felt that Vanessa was the incandescent spirit, and that she, Woolf, was a stick, a barren and gaunt maiden aunt (her marriage to Leonard was companionable but not passionate), who spent her life producing books, an admirable pursuit but ultimately fairly dry when compared to the raising of a family.
    She felt that way even as she wrote A Room of One’s Own. The old feminine imperatives, it seems, are harder to shed than one might imagine. You could probably say that one of the measures of greatness is an artist’s ability to transcend his or her personality, insecurities and peccadilloes. Woolf demanded equality for women and, at the same time, worried that her childlessness meant that her life had been a failure.
    The Hours (which had been Woolf’s initial title for Mrs Dalloway), to the surprise of its author, agent and editor, somehow escaped what had seemed so clearly to be its destiny – to be read (probably disapprovingly) by a handful of Woolf fans and then march, with whatever dignity it could muster, straight to the remainders table. It sold well (if modestly by bestseller standards), and then – the biggest surprise of all – it was made into a movie. Which proved to be popular. With none other than Nicole Kidman playing Virginia, Meryl Streep as Clarissa, and Julianne Moore as Laura. Any number of people have asked me what I suspect Woolf would have thought of the book and the movie. I feel certain she’d have disliked the book – she was a ferocious critic. She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.
    My mother, the one living person who appears in the book, was not pleased by it, though she bravely maintained that she was. I, foolish creature, had thought she’d be happy about the fact that I considered her life important enough to portray in a novel. It didn’t quite occur to me that she’d also feel exposed, betrayed and misinterpreted. Mothers, don’t raise your children to be novelists.
    Several years after the novel had been published, while the film was in production, my mother was diagnosed with cancer. It had long gone undetected, and by the time it was found, was quite far along. She lived for a little less than a year after the diagnosis.
    I was in Los Angeles with her, my father, and my sister during her final days. I called Scott Rudin, the producer of the movie, and said, I don’t think my mother is going to be able to see the movie, could you possibly arrange for her to see whatever you’ve got of it already? Rudin had 20 minutes’ worth of dailies, on video, brought by messenger to my family’s house. I inserted it into the television, as the messenger waited discreetly in another room.
    And so I found myself sitting with my mortally ill mother, on the sofa we’d had since I was 15, watching Julianne Moore play her, as if she were being reincarnated while she was still alive.
    It was a small enough incident, in the general scheme of things. It was one of the minor mercies. And yet, 10 years later, I’m still struck by the way in which at one end of a time spectrum we have Woolf, starting a new novel, worried that it will prove to be a mere curiosity, another of humankind’s failed experiments, wrought by someone who was more an eccentric than a genius, a writer-manqué who concerned herself with ordinary women’s lives in a world beset by battles and tortures, the murder of entire populations. At the other end of the spectrum, over 70 years later, we have my mother, a woman about whom Woolf might in theory have written, seeing herself portrayed by a brilliant actress, knowing (at least, I hope she knew) that her life had mattered more than she’d allowed herself to imagine.
    Michael Cunningham will talk about The Hours at the Guardian book club at Kings Place, London N1 on 5 July at 7pm. Buy tickets online at:guardian.co.uk/books/bookclub For queries only call 020 3353 2881.





































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