The Writer: Morning Revisionings
Bad at routine, Lucy Grealy, and some resources
Hello Writers,
I want to thank all of you who have become paying subscribers, and all of you who opened this email with an open heart. Thank you to the wonderful writer who commented and noticed the absence of this newsletter for the past couple weeks. It’s good to know it’s noticed, and I am sorry your inbox hasn’t been filled 3x a week with some inspiration.
Before we get into this morning’s revisioning, I need to admit that my neurodivergent brain cannot handle routine. Does anyone empathize? Establishing and maintaining routine has been a challenge for me my entire life. So, I’m going to keep doing morning revisionings, but they aren’t going to have a specific format or be sent on specific days. They’ll arrive a few times a week, in the mornings. I hope that’s ok. Some of them may be very short, and some may be chock-full of resources.
More than anything, I want these gentle missives to be encouraging and inspiring for you.
As a first-year PhD candidate I also want to have flexibility for me, so I can sustain output. Please know that paid subscriptions really, really help. Not just in a financial sense, but in the sense that, when I see a paid subscription, I am reminded that there are people who value this little space and want more of it, and I want to make it wonderful for you and also feel the potential for a supportive community.
In addition to this writing space, I’ll be adding in audio for my readers. Substack has a new tool that makes it easy for us to record audio for you, so I’ll start reading some of these newsletters and I’ll also possibly be exploring podcasts and interviews.
Anywho— thank you for being here.
With love,
Anastasia
An Enduring Read
This week I want to write about a book I reread last week and have read countless times, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face. I will always be sad for my teenaged self for not coming across this book when I was younger, as it was released in 1994, when I was fourteen years-old, and for not knowing Grealy as a writer until after she died.
I first encountered Grealy after reading Truth and Beauty, by Ann Patchett, who went to Sarah Lawrence with Grealy and was one of her closest friends. The book has been criticized, but when I read it I felt seen as a former addict, an intense friend, and someone who has struggled with friendships in general. The book is incredible, in my opinion, and must have been so difficult to write.
But really, what the book did was introduce me to Grealy. After reading Patchett’s book I picked up Autobiography of a Face and inhaled it in two days. Grealy’s prose is linear, granularly observational, and deeply reflective in a way I aspire to be in my own prose.
The book details Grealy’s childhood, both before and after she was diagnosed with bone cancer in her jaw. Here’s its opening paragraph (after the prologue):
KER-POW!
I was knocked into the present, the unmistakable now, by Joni Freedman’s head as it collided with the right side of my jaw. Up until that moment my body had been running around within the confines of a circle of fourth-grade children gathered for a game of dodge ball, but my mind had been elsewhere. For the most part I was an abysmal athlete, and I was deeply embarrassed whenever I failed to jump bravely and deftly into a whirring jumprope, ever threatening to sting if I miscrossed its invisible boundaries, like some science fiction force field. Or worse, when I was the weak link yet again in the school relay race. How could one doubt that the order in which one was picked for the softball team was anything but concurrent with the order in which Life would be handing out favors?
The question Lucy leaves us with— how can one doubt that one’s social acceptance and existence in that hierarchy mirrored the favors one was doled out by Life, is one of the many threads of questioning threaded throughout the book. That ker-pow, the first paragraph, all caps, singled-out, was the moment Grealy’s jaw started aching; the moment that led to all the other moments.
The book ends before Grealy really experienced success as a writer, because it was the book that brought her success but also seemed to thrust her into a kind of upside-down world, where she was admired and respected. After spending so much of her life being ruthlessly mocked, taunted, and ogled at by friends, strangers, and classmates, this must have been nothing short of a hallucinogenic experience, to experience such success and admiration.
The book, and Grealy’s stories and writing beyond its scope, is really an investigation into how our childhood experiences truly shape us. Despite her sickness, Grealy, as a young child, was fully formed, with a strong sense of dignity and selfhood. The book subtly and deftly brings the reader into a childhood and adolescence, reconstructing all the events and experiences that chipped away at that selfhood and dignity until Grealy was, despite her resistance and cognitive understanding of her inherent worth, convinced that there was something fundamentally wrong with her. That she didn’t truly deserve love, and was unloveable.
I think many of us can relate to this in various ways.
Watch Grealy’s interview with Charlie Rose.
Autobiography of a Face is on sale right now, you can get the Kindle version for $2.99 here. I hate Amazon and often link to other booksellers, but if you want to read the book now, this is a good bet.
The week before last, before a hurricane threatened Tallahassee and then veered east, destroying swaths of land and taking way too many lives, I sat down to revise a piece of nonfiction I’d written this past winter. The piece was, and still is, messy. As a white person who spent a portion of my life navigating primarily Black spaces, I continue to struggle with how not to privilege whiteness, or default to whiteness, in my writing. I am white and my perspective is white. Yet the story I’m writing into involves a lot of people who are not white, and we all did bad things together, and we were all struggling. I first tried to avoid navigating these hierarchies of race by fictionalizing everything, but I’m learning that I need to just write into it, and let it be messy, and work to make it good.
I took a piece of writing and made it better. I revised it, and it’s being workshopped this week. It feels terrifying, but I also know that it’s a gift for me to have workshop at all. To be able to hear other people’s perspectives and feedback.
It feels so good to be working on something other than my book. And it reminds me that in order to write and revise work, in order to be the writer I want to be, who creates and finishes things, I have to, you know, do that.
What are you working on right now? What is something you want to create and/or finish this week?
Speaking of writing and finishing, here’s a great Twitter thread with lots of publications looking for submissions:
Resources
Chill Subs database for publications accepting submissions in October.
Dorthe Nars writes about the invisibility of middle-aged women in LitHub. Dorthe Nars is a Danish writer who writes excellent short work and also just published a book through Graywolf Press called A Line in the World.
Erika Dreyfus has an excellent newsletter (more geared towards freelancers) and here’s her October list of many things and many resources!
A wonderful tweet via Matthew Salesses about race and choice in writing.
Imagine discovering a Byzantine mosaic when you were just trying to plant more olive trees, via Hyperallergic.
Christine Sun Kim asks How Do You Hold Your Debt, via The Paris Review
Donate to Hurricane Ian relief HERE.
Thanks for reminding me about this book, I’ve been wanting to read it but it fell through the cracks. Also “If I want to be a writer who finishes things”....finishing is so hard, isn’t it? Sigh.