bedroom, with two windows no less, for that purpose—evenings and weekends. It’s not much; but it’s better than nothing. And in the Sirena year, when I had my airy studio to share, when I couldn’t wait to get there, my veins fizzing at the prospect, it was perfect.
I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do, but the failure—the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit—is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough—or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say “Fuck off” to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done. Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: it is focused only on one thing, whether it’s on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It’s a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s myopia. But that’s what it takes. You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.
I’m like the children: my motivations and my reasons aren’t always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.
3
From the beginning, then, but briefly. I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston, called Manchester-by-the-Sea. The sixties were barely a ripple there, at the end of the Boston commuter line. It must have been our perfect beach—called Singing Beach on account of its fine, pale, musical sand, but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded—that afforded me my delusions of grandeur. It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you’ll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.
Or maybe, more likely, they came from my mother, fierce and strange and doomed. I had a mother and a father, a big brother—eight years bigger than me, though, so we hardly seemed of the same family: by the time I was nine, he was gone—and a tortoiseshell cat, Zipper, and a mangy, runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik, who looked like a wig of rags on sticks: his legs were so scrawny, we marveled they didn’t snap. My father worked in insurance in Boston—he took the train each morning, the 7:52—and he proceeded very respectably but apparently not very successfully, because my parents never seemed to have money to spare.
My mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes. For a while she tested cookbook
I always thought I’d get farther. I’d like to blame the world for what I’ve failed to do, but the failure—the failure that sometimes washes over me as anger, makes me so angry I could spit—is all mine, in the end. What made my obstacles insurmountable, what consigned me to mediocrity, is me, just me. I thought for so long, forever, that I was strong enough—or I misunderstood what strength was. I thought I could get to greatness, to my greatness, by plugging on, cleaning up each mess as it came, the way you’re taught to eat your greens before you have dessert. But it turns out that’s a rule for girls and sissies, because the mountain of greens is of Everest proportions, and the bowl of ice cream at the far end of the table is melting a little more with each passing second. There will be ants on it soon. And then they’ll come and clear it away altogether. The hubris of it, thinking I could be a decent human being and a valuable member of family and society, and still create! Absurd. How strong did I think I was?
No, obviously what strength was all along was the ability to say “Fuck off” to the lot of it, to turn your back on all the suffering and contemplate, unmolested, your own desires above all. Men have generations of practice at this. Men have figured out how to spawn children and leave them to others to raise, how to placate their mothers with a mere phone call from afar, how to insist, as calmly as if insisting that the sun is in the sky, as if any other possibility were madness, that their work, of all things, is what must—and must first—be done. Such a strength has, in its youthful vision, no dogs or gardens or picnics, no children, no sky: it is focused only on one thing, whether it’s on money, or on power, or on a paintbrush and a canvas. It’s a failure of vision, in fact, anyone with half a brain can see that. It’s myopia. But that’s what it takes. You need to see everything else—everyone else—as expendable, as less than yourself.
I’m like the children: my motivations and my reasons aren’t always clear. But if I can just explain, all will be elucidated; and maybe that elucidation alone will prove my greatness, however small. To tell what I know, and how it feels, if I can. You might see yourself, if I do.
3
From the beginning, then, but briefly. I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston, called Manchester-by-the-Sea. The sixties were barely a ripple there, at the end of the Boston commuter line. It must have been our perfect beach—called Singing Beach on account of its fine, pale, musical sand, but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded—that afforded me my delusions of grandeur. It makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore, with a vista open to eternity, you’ll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city.
Or maybe, more likely, they came from my mother, fierce and strange and doomed. I had a mother and a father, a big brother—eight years bigger than me, though, so we hardly seemed of the same family: by the time I was nine, he was gone—and a tortoiseshell cat, Zipper, and a mangy, runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik, who looked like a wig of rags on sticks: his legs were so scrawny, we marveled they didn’t snap. My father worked in insurance in Boston—he took the train each morning, the 7:52—and he proceeded very respectably but apparently not very successfully, because my parents never seemed to have money to spare.
My mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes. For a while she tested cookbook
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