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Must love books: writers & writers

JA January 14

Should writers date other writers? Can you love a non-reader? The answers were, according to two recent articles on HTML Giant and the Guardian, no and yes respectively (but a healthy appetite for books was listed as a definite plus on both sites).

Writers pairing up with other writers has always been a bit of a sticking point. The media love it – whenever author A pairs up with author B, at least a paragraph or two is inevitably devoted to their relationship in any interview or profile. Sometimes, the writers themselves take the plunge, either featuring their partners as ‘characters’ in their own novels, or else publishing related features. One such article, a greatly funny read by Eric Puchner on the Rumpus, laid out our general fascination like so:

Just as people prefer their mathematicians to be endearingly deranged, most people prefer their writers to be lonely schlubs. They seem to look at two writers living together as somehow unnatural, a zookeeper’s mistake... We expect them to be suicidal or drug-addicted or generally unhinged. Certainly we expect them to mistreat their spouses, those long-suffering caregivers. We do not expect them to put Elmo puppets on their hands or watch reality TV with their families or launch inquests into who left the washcloth at the bottom of the tub.

Sometimes though, this too can backfire. On a small aside, when novelist Ayelet Waldman wrote about her love for husband, Michael Chabon, versus her love for her children in the New York Times a few years ago, there was uproar. Waldman wrote about their ‘always vital, even torrid sex life’ and openly worried about why, unlike the women in her mother’s group, she had ‘not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make?’

I do love [my daughter]. But I'm not in love with her. Nor with her two brothers or sister. Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband. It is his face that inspires in me paroxysms of infatuated devotion. If a good mother is one who loves her child more than anyone else in the world, I am not a good mother. I am in fact a bad mother. I love my husband more than I love my children.

Among the reasons for HMTL Giant’s conclusion that writers should not date other writers were the following:

• Reading and/or critiquing each other’s work is terribly awkward and fraught with nuance. It may result in the laying of emotional landmines.

• If you are more successful than they are, they will, at least on some level, be jealous. If they are more successful than you, you will, at least on some level, be jealous.

• One person using the relationship as material is problematic enough. Both people using it is like CatDog trying to eat itself.

• You will be poor.

The issue of jealousy was certainly alive for Jonathan Franzen and his then girlfriend Kathryn Chetkovich. Both were deeply ambitious and struggled together for years, working long hours to perfect their respective manuscripts. When The Corrections was published to both critical and popular acclaim, it was too much for Chetkovich, who wrote an extremely frank essay entitled ‘Envy’ in a 2003 issue of Granta. On reading early drafts of the novel she remembers feeling the proverbial ‘stabs of dread familiar to all writers’, because ‘here were sentences, paragraphs, whole pages I not only admired but wished I had written’. After publication, things only became worse: ‘When the man was merely gifted but not particularly rewarded, I was comfortable; we were in it together, comrades in a world that didn't care what we had to tell it. But now, what did his success prove if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us, it will pay?’ Her jealousy continued to grow and the couple eventually split (although apparently they later reconciled).

Creative envy however does not always cripple a relationship. Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster have been married for almost 30 years. When they met in 1981, they both were relatively unknown and it was only six years into their marriage that Auster’s career really began to skyrocket. In an interview with the Guardian in 2008, Hustvedt did acknowledge that around this period there were times when it 'felt like people were trampling over you to get to the great man: you had the print marks on your body'. And then even after she published What I Loved to rave reviews, the couple were never far from the gossip columns, perceived as they were to be the glamour couple of the literati. As to the question of critiquing each other’s work, she says that they both value brutal honesty:

We do not humour the other. The reason is because we really do have the project at heart. It may be painful, but usually the criticism is something you've already worried about: it's pressing at a soft place. Then I'm grateful.

She adds that they are ‘not at all’ competitive.

YA novelist Justine Larbalestier also echoes this on her blog regarding her marriage to Scott Westerfeld: ‘we are each other’s first readers… we make many suggestions for changes to each other’s work. Many of which wind up happening.’ She notes, however, that even though they both write YA and work closely together, their styles, voices and tastes are markedly distinct. Eric Puchner also pointed out that this kind of complementary difference worked well for him and his wife:

I love Cormac McCarthy; she doesn’t. She worships at the altar of Henry James; I can’t bring myself to read much beyond Portrait of a Lady. Similarly, I don’t expect Katharine to like everything I’ve written.

Frankly, though, I don’t know how I ever survived without a novelist in the next room. Katharine is my first and last reader, and she’s saved me from myriad embarrassments. Hemingway once said that the most important thing for a young writer to have was a “bullshit detector”; I don’t think he meant a literal device, but he also never met my wife. She can spot an easy irony from pages away. She gives me exactly the sort of good, rough editing I’m looking for-and I do the same for her.

 

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