The koan of a creative lifeOn the questions writers circle for decades without knowing why, ‘until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer.’
I’m on a DIY writing retreat with a couple friends, so I’m recirculating this newsletter from 2023 on how artists are so often circling around the same question for most of their lives. I wrote this as I was working on my memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Secret Past, which you can now read!Joyce Carol Oates has a secret. It is “the vexing riddle,” the “koan of my life,” she wrote in her journal in 1978. Oates wondered if “it is a secret embedded deep within everyone’s life, but particularly within the life of the creative artist.” The secret has persisted all the decades since—and it’s the focus of Rachel Aviv’s beguiling New Yorker profile of Oates, which draws heavily from the aforementioned journal, now housed in the archives of Syracuse University. The profile never conclusively uncovers the secret, although Aviv makes a compelling case that it has something to do with “the question of personality” that runs throughout Oates’ work and her doubts about “whether she actually has one.” As she wrote on the first page of her journal: “Does the individual exist?” Across her 63 novels and 47 short-story collections, Oates “keeps coming back” to this “problem of being a self,” Aviv writes, “as if there is something she still needs to figure out.” Of course, lots of writers “keep coming back” to a particular problem, question, or theme. “Many authors grapple with a central preoccupation in the course of a career, until the mystery eventually loses its pull,” writes Aviv. I’m reminded of the James Baldwin quote, “Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.” It’s impossible to say whether Oates’ secret—seeing as it remains a secret—is similarly “embedded deep within” every person. But there is often a vexing riddle or koan at the heart of any creative life. It is not always a secret kept from the world; often it’s a secret even to us. I’m thinking of Dani Shapiro, a fantastic memoirist—one of my guiding lights—who across her career has written around themes of identity and not belonging. A few years ago, a DNA test revealed that her father was not her biological father, which led her to write Inheritance, a memoir that feels like the book—the discovery—she was working on all along. There was a secret at the heart of her life, and it drove her writing for decades. All those questions around identity and feelings of not belonging were cast in a new, brighter light. Now I read back over her earlier books and go: Oh, there it is. That secret of paternity was unknown to her, but it showed up on the page. It’s even in the book jacket descriptions for her earlier novels and memoirs, with language about “the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds,” “a family spiraling toward disintegration,” “what happens to love in the face of the unexpected,” “the forces that shape our most elemental bonds,” and “the precarious ledge upon which our most vital relations… are balanced.” Often, writers are compelled towards questions and themes without fully understanding their “why.” Maybe they think they have an idea of their “why,” but the idea so often develops and expands with new insights. We write toward understanding, but understanding is layered. You read Shapiro’s books, first to last, and see a writer gradually building toward the whole truth. But it’s also right there the whole time. I’ve seen this in my own writing. Whether in reported features on the porn industry or essays about faking orgasms, I’ve long grappled with sex, shame, desire, power, control, authenticity, and feminism. I had some sense of the “why” driving these preoccupations, which I unpacked in my memoir: being raised in Berkeley by a pair of sex-positive hippies, coming of age amid the competing influences of feminism and sexualized pop culture, the teenage disillusionment of finding my feminist father’s porn subscription. More recently, life events switched on a “new, brighter light.” I recognized part of my “why” in my mom’s past: twenty years before I was born, she was sent as a teenager to a “home for unwed mothers,” where she was coerced into placing my sister for adoption. I’ve more or less known about this since I was teenager, but its importance in my life was a secret to me, until I found my sister in the spring of 2022 through a DNA test. (Yes, another DNA test.) It was only after finding her that I could see my mom’s pain and how it shaped me. I mean really look at it. As I’ve written before:
My mom felt marked by the scarlet letter; I turned the scarlet letter into my career. Is that my koan? I don’t think so. It’s another layer. It’s the next book, the one I’m working on right now. These central themes and preoccupations aren’t unique to writing or art. This is how we live our lives, and how we make sense of them. We circle around, we keep coming back. “Until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer.”
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