MRS. WOOLF Regrets She's Unable to Lunch Today, MADAM

Rare Birds and Wordless Friends

“Oh my gosh, I’d love to but I have to write!”

“You’re too sweet for thinking of me, but I’ve got this short story I’m working on and I just can’t get away…”

“Sounds great, would it be OK if I brought my notebook and worked on a little essay while we’re having coffee?”

At some point, stung by the low single-digits number of friends who signed up for my dusty old newsletter or who will probably even read my novel should it ever be published (“You? Wrote a novel? Oh lord, here we go…”) I realized in a new way an old truth among writers which I had obviously already come to accept (Nobody cares) but has given me fresh peace:

Writers are basically word parents.

Everyone knows someone who gets married, has a baby, and is never heard from again. You don’t hate them, they don’t hate you, it’s just that they’ve emigrated to a distant continent (or planet) and they’ve got a new life now, a new language, new friends, new concerns you don’t share, and that’s totally, absolutely OK—SO great to see you! *Off to college yet? No? **Still in preschool? Ugh.

*published
**unagented

It’s so OK and so great that you don’t even feel the need to say “We should get together soon!” because you know you won’t and you know they’re happy with their choices and you know you prefer not to deal with the perpetual distraction of short, loud, overly-energetic narcissists.

I happen to run in circles where kids are not the norm, lots of singles and childless gay couples with dogs, so the rare birds who have kids take themselves off to this new realm of parenthood, thank god, and get on with the enterprise of population replacement—a necessary if overindulged service—out of sight and out of mind.

It’s not the parents, of course, on whom I have looked with some consternation over their not signing up for my newsletter—they have an obvious but distasteful excuse. Finally it dawned on me that it was I, me of all people, that had traveled to new environs in which many of my friends could not join me, the land of written words, and stories, and talking about written words and stories, which to them must feel as exotic as minivans, and probably as quaint as pots of ink and quill pens.

In fact, recently a dear friend introduced the droll term “Edwardian lady novelists” which we now invoke toward anything too outrageous or crude, and it took me quite a little while to realize that though he was being almost entirely ironic, I actually AM an Edwardian lady novelist deep down, and all the irony in my employ of the term was entirely self-referential. It is only occurring to me now as I write this that he might have been slyly remarking on the preciousness of my vocation without as much irony as I assumed—more later!

Such is my new Substack adventure (because in this other place they—we—no longer use the retiring terms “newsletter” or “blog”) that I could theoretically write about something so dear to my friends’ hearts as French bulldogs and yet it would ring with an accent and inflection too strange to endure—Why write, when you can talk? Why call when you can text? Why text when you can Whatsapp? Why novels when there’s “Drag Race”...?

Ah, me—that other kind of strange species who runs off into the blue and, rather than have the good taste to drown myself in a pool or river, has the audacity to return and insist on demonstrating alien customs and mementos as eccentric as so many henna tattoos and breathing regimes. 

In short I’ve concluded I really can’t blame them for ignoring my “stack” and other literary maneuverings, though while I am engrossed in the daily care and feeding of my words, which require so much of my attention, I do hope those friends who prefer to remain wordless will not in turn blame me for my distraction.

Asking them to care very much about my writing would be like asking me to babysit your three-year-old:

“What do you mean Mommy’s never read “The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4” at bedtime? What about Volumes 1 through 3, or 5…? No? Lies!”

“What’s that? What’s that you say, child? WHO is Buhbinia Poof?”

“I really must have a word with your parents.”