All Behind the Book essays

Writers write for only one reason: We have to. Because, honestly? This is a hell of a way to make a living; if doing it weren't a compulsion, I would have happily gone to law school, as my dad repeatedly suggested. I needed to write each of my books needed to, from the bottom of my soul but none more than this one. Writing Waiting for Daisy was a way to make sense of all that happened during my six-year quest to become a mother a time, as I tend to say, when I did everything I thought I'd never do in pursuit of something I wasn't even sure I wanted.

I didn't see anything like it in the stores: a book that, in a way that was both entertaining and true, addressed questions of whether to become a mother, of miscarriage, infertility and obsession. I'd received hundreds of letters and still receive them years later after publishing a piece in The New York Times Magazine on having a miscarriage in Japan. I'd broken a taboo by publicly discussing that experience; the gratitude readers expressed, and the stories they shared were both startling and heartrending. But even that wouldn't have been enough to get me to publish the details of my husband's sperm count. I also knew my story was, quite simply, a gripping yarn (hence the swashbuckling subtitle: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother ) and what writer can resist that? Here was an opportunity to stretch out, to use a more intimate, funnier voice than I could in my reported work a voice that was more like myself. It was also a chance to tell stories that I've always wanted to write about the people whom I encountered along the way: my first true love, who, with his wife, now has 15 kids (yes, 15, and yes, she gave birth to all of them). Or the so-called parasite single women whom I met in Tokyo. Their legendary shopping sprees were propping up their country's economy even as their refusal to marry or have kids was threatening to bring it down.

As a journalist, I've always been more engaged by ordinary lives than by the canoodling of celebrities, convinced that each of our stories has the potential to reveal a larger truth. I also felt that, if I was willing to put other women under the microscope I better be ready to turn the lens on myself. And truth? I thought writing a memoir would be easier than reporting: After all, I could do the whole thing without leaving my house. Plus, I'm not going to call myself and yell at me after the book is published for the way I described my hair. So I was surprised by how difficult I found the process, and not only because of the painful nature of the material. Writing about someone else, I have my notes, my transcripts, and that's it. Writing about myself, the material was as infinite as my memory. Culling it, creating the character of Peggy and carving my experience into a cohesive (I hope!) narrative was a daunting challenge. For about the first year, I mostly stared at my computer screen, played online Boggle and despaired of ever finding my way. It was my husband who helped me break through that block. He suggested I go to a therapist we knew, not so she could shrink my head (I'd had enough of that), but because she was trained to elicit a narrative of meaning from her clients. Perhaps if I recorded a few sessions, he said, I'd start to see my story's shape. It worked. I've been Boggle-free ever since. With Waiting for Daisy, I also hoped to weigh in on the latest cultural conversation about women's biological clocks, which I felt had gone badly off-track. Sure, it's harder for women to get (and stay) pregnant as we age, but I was furious over the new punitive media messages that reduced young women to their child-bearing potential, that warned them to marry Mr. Good Enough and back-burner their careers or miss out on having a child. I was equally irritated by the pathetic portrayal of professionally successful women who'd supposedly waited too long to have a baby. Someone needed to show what real life looks like for those of us struggling with these questions and pressures, to explore them without an agenda. Someone also needed to show the painful decisions and subtle manipulation that face millions of couples who enter infertility docs' offices. One in six couples will have difficulty having a baby; if that's not you, it's someone you know. But mostly, I wanted Waiting for Daisy to be a great story about being a woman in a confusing time, about trying to be true to yourself, trying to figure out the pieces of your life career, marriage, family in a way that works. And, if you're lucky, sometimes getting there.

Peggy Orenstein is a journalist, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and an author whose previous books include Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, and Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World. She lives in the San Francisco area with her husband, Steven Okazaki, and their daughter, Daisy.

I once heard someone say that if you want to find out what you aren't going to be doing for the next 10 years, make a list of your goals. Then at least you'll know a few things that won't be happening. The point being that life is really about the detours, not the destinations. But I'm a planner. I make itineraries, lists. And, as I prepared to write my latest book, I knew exactly what I was doing. I had gotten it into my head that I wanted to go down the Mississippi River in a houseboat that I would pilot myself. Why this lunacy came to me is a much longer story indeed it is what The River Queen is about but I wanted to do this. In the 1920s my father lived along the banks of the Mississippi and I was raised on his river tales. I was going to visit the places my father knew. I would do the whole river over a period of about two months. After all, I'd written a proposal, a very exacting 57-page document, a testament to what I was going to do, and a very fine publisher had agreed to publish it.

Never mind that I knew little about boats, let alone locks and dams. I bought books. I learned nautical terms as if I were studying French. I studied the basics of hydraulic engineering until I knew more than anyone I know who isn't a hydraulic engineer. I understood, for example, exactly why the levee-only policy had been bad for New Orleans. But then in May, three months before I was to leave, my father died. He was almost 103 years old, so his death shouldn't have surprised anyone, but his mind was intact and I thought he'd just keep going.

I had a long grocery list of things I intended to ask him. What was the name of that island where you spent your summer? Tell me more about Klein's, the clothing store where you worked as a young man. Talk to me about the river when you were a boy. His death threw me into a depression I couldn't seem to snap out of. I had no desire to move, to travel, to go anywhere, let alone plan a huge trip. But I was committed and so I went up to LaCrosse, Wisconsin, where my nephew lived and where I found two river pilots, charmingly named Tom and Jerry, who convinced me with great laughter and guffaws that it was impossible to go down the river in a houseboat alone. But Jerry had a boat he wanted to move south. They agreed to take me halfway and arranged for a friend to take me the rest.

Two weeks before I was to leave, Katrina happened. As I watched the horror unfold, which I don't think I need to describe here, my trip took a turn, a bend, I hadn't imagined. How could I sail in my boat all the way south? As I sailed with Tom and Jerry, it seemed I literally had to go with the flow. I had no idea how far this journey would take me. There was a tremendous sense of the unknown. My father's death meant he would not be telling me which island he'd visited or more about his time in Hannibal. But it also meant, in retrospect, that I was free to write about him in a way that I never could while he was alive. I did not anticipate this feeling, for I missed him terribly, but there were things left unsaid.

As the aftermath of Katrina unfolded and the price of gas soared, the whole venture to New Orleans was looking more and more moot. But I had things in my favor. Tom and Jerry were good guys, great guys actually, and, by a bit of luck, excellent river pilots, and they also immediately became great characters. I knew I wanted to stay with them and our wreck of a boat as we journeyed south. It wasn't long before I found myself standing on the bow of our boat, phoning my editor to tell him that I was throwing the well-wrought plan for my book out the window. Nothing that I'd exactly foreseen about this book was coming to be. And my editor replied that he didn't give a flying fattuty (or words to that effect) about the history of the locks and dams. Just tell me about your father, is what he said.

It was as if I had been banging my head against a wall and someone opened a door. I walked through a portal I hadn't seen and wrote the book I never anticipated writing. I began with the stories my father had told me, memories of his humor and his anger, moments I had never tapped into before. As I say in The River Queen, what began for me as an adventure and a lark turned into a journey into memory, childhood and the past. And it was definitely not what I had planned.

Acclaimed writer Mary Morris blends memoir and midlife journey in her latest book, The River Queen. The author of three travel books, six novels and three collections of short stories, Morris teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Just after my 11th birthday, in the summer of 1950, I moved from Washington, D.C., then a small, segregated Southern town, to the Georgia Warm Springs Polio Foundation where I would live without my parents off and on for two years. When I left Warm Springs precipitously following a disastrous accident in which my young and secret love, Joey Buckley, and I had raced downhill in our wheelchairs and flipped, I was almost 13. I was the perpetrator of that adventure that much I’ve always known or at least suspected but what went on with me at Warm Springs before I was expelled, who that young girl, restless and rebellious, growing up in the sunny banality of 1952 had been, was the impetus for writing Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven.

After I left the hospital with my father who had been dispatched to collect me pronto, as he told me, I never looked back until now. I never asked my parents what had happened and they never told me not why I was considered enough of a danger to the other children to be kicked out, not what had happened to Joey Buckley nor reprimanded me, nor inquired as to how I got myself in so much trouble. The questions I would ask them now I had no interest in asking in my 20s and 30s before they died. I had infantile paralysis when I was a year-old toddler living in Toledo, Ohio, so the fact of polio never changed life as I knew it. I walked with a brace and not particularly well, and so as a child, normal was my destination which I imagined as slipping seamlessly into the school group picture exactly like every other girl in penny loafers. Arriving in Warm Springs, after a fifth-grade year of remarkable failure in academics and deportment, I was thrilled to move to a place where crippled children were considered ordinary, only to discover that I was not crippled enough to qualify. As a novelist, I have been suspicious of memoir (although I love to read the memoirs of others), preferring the process of invention to retelling my own story, happier offstage behind the scenes. So I came to this book through the back door. We were sitting one night my husband and I at a bistro in one of those banquette seats beside a couple whose conversation was more compelling than our own and so we found ourselves included by proximity, when the husband asked us to join them. They were scientific researchers at the National Institutes of Health examining the very particular relationship between the AIDS and polio viruses. What struck me was the surprising similarity in social context between AIDS and polio, both viewed as a kind of moral stain. In the case of AIDS, the shame was sexual, with polio it was social a false conclusion that the virus struck only the filthy houses of the urban poor. Shame was the operative word for me, the catalyst which set me on a course.

And so began a circuitous journey back to the years I had lived at Warm Springs. I read about the history of polio and FDR’s impressive contribution to Warm Springs and the eradication of polio. I read about the silent generation of the 1950s and thought about the shame of illness, the character-defining frustration of a child locked in a paralyzed body, the dilemma of the sick child who feels responsible for changing the family’s daily life. A book was beginning to take shape, one in which my own story was the center of a larger subject. But I couldn’t find the center of my own story. Then one night as I was describing to my husband what had happened to me with Joey Buckley, I could feel in myself the fear and danger of telling truth and knew with a kind of crazy relief and excitement that the race I had instigated with Joey Buckley was the screen around which the rest of my memories of those two years could assemble.

And I began to think of what it had meant to me to live in a village of cripples, to travel the distance between childhood and adulthood for that short time by myself discovering the lure of religion and romantic movies and the danger of sexuality lurking in the embryo of adolescence.

The author of 13 novels, Susan Richards Shreve is a professor of English at George Mason University and the former co-chair and president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

Not long ago, I asked a high school creative writing class, How many of you want to be writers when you grow up? Perhaps half of the kids put up their hands and then, as if any movement of an adolescent limb automatically triggers more, they began flailing around, giggling and smacking each other.

"Settle down," the teacher said severely. "You should be taking notes for our discussion of Ms. Braestrup’s visit." Dutifully, the kids picked up their pencils and gazed at me expectantly.

"There are two things you need to know about being a writer," I said.

"The first is that writers write. Writers are so compelled to write that they’ll keep scribbling away about nothing at all, just to watch the words line up across the page. It has nothing to do with talent. There are bad writers and good writers, but writing itself could probably be called a mental health issue. Eventually there will be a cure, but in the meantime, if you’re a writer, you’ll know it because you can’t not write."

" The second thing is that, generally speaking, when we first start out, most writers don’t have a whole lot to write about. That doesn’t stop us, mind you. We write poems about the guy we have a crush on, his snow-white teeth, his sky-blue eyes . . . there are writers in their 40s and 50s who still write this way, but I don’t want you to be that kind of writer. So my advice is: Get a real job. You’ll need the money, since writing doesn’t pay well, and you’ll need to be useful. I recommend plumbing." The kids’ faces went blank. "Plumbing?" squeaked the teacher.

"Plumbing," I said, and the kids wrote the word in their notebooks.

"Plumbing pays pretty well, and it’s virtually recession-proof." I pointed out. "If someone’s toilet is broken, getting it repaired is not a luxury. And the job can’t be outsourced to some guy in Bangladesh, either, so the plumber’s job is about as secure as any job in the 21st century can be. Plus, a plumber spends time in people’s kitchens and bathrooms. There are stories ripening in those areas of your average house, stories in the manifold objects a good writer and plumber might pull out of the flush."

"What kind of objects?" a boy asked, while his teacher ahem-ed nervously and glanced at her watch.

"Just become a plumber," I said. "Trust me. I am not a plumber. I’m a law enforcement chaplain. It is my vocation, my work in life, a job I love. As a chaplain, I respond to immediate need, the terrible human suffering of the abruptly, unexpectedly bereaved. I am called to be present in love, to hold the body of the new widow, the sudden orphan, the father whose son drove away from the house in a teenaged rage and now will never come home."

So when people ask, "what do you do?" I don’t answer, "I am a writer." Never mind that writing is, at this point, my primary source of income; never mind that I will happily spend hours scribbling nonsense down on paper just for the joy of watching the words form. Writing is fun, like eating creme brule or knitting with cashmere. It is as chaplain to the Maine Warden Service that I give useful service; this is the tangible task to which I have been called. On the other hand, I thought, as I drove home from the high school creative writing class, my job has also given me stories. A book’s worth of stories, in fact, set in the wild, raw beauty of Maine and populated by characters as wonderful and diverse as any writer could ask for.

There is another question, one I haven’t answered completely for myself. Might I someday be able to think of writing as a calling, a way of being loving and present? Might the pleasure I take in the work be a sign not that writing is self-indulgent, but that it is, in fact, real life too? Maybe next time I talk to teenage writers, I shall ask them this: How might writing the act itself, your words dancing so seductively across the page be a response to human suffering, to need, to injustice? Might your obsession with words be your calling, urgent and holy?

Kate Braestrup has written for Mademoiselle, Ms. and TV’s "Law and Order." Her latest book, Here If You Need Me, is about losing her first husband, a state trooper who was killed in a car accident; becoming a minister and the people she’s met as a chaplain. She lives in Maine.

When we describe the premise of Identical Strangers, most people assume it’s a work of fiction. Separated twins reunited after 35 years? For sure, the story is the stuff of fairy tales. But in our case, fairy tales really do come true.

We met for the first time three-and-a-half years ago after discovering we were identical twins. Each of us had been adopted and raised by separate families who were never told we had a twin sister.

Immediately after our reunion, we began to jot down notes about our unusual situation and to compile endless lists of questions. What is it that makes each of us unique? Do we owe our personality traits largely to nature or nurture? Why were we separated? Would we be the same people we are today if we had been raised together? At the time, we didn’t realize that these initial scribblings would be the impetus behind Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. What started out as an idea to write a personal essay about our reunion became a common project that would unite us for the next two years.

Spurred on by our curiosity, we teamed up and became twin Nancy Drews. As we investigated our biological family and explored the reasons for our separation, we unearthed some unpleasant facts about the adoption agency that placed us. We were troubled to discover that as infants, for a time, we were part of a secret research study involving separated twins. Not only did we have a personal story to tell, but now we had a mystery to solve. It was clear a book was emerging.

Our friends and family were amazed at how quickly after meeting we began to work on the book and we had our own doubts. At first, we feared that writing together would put too much stress on our new relationship. We barely knew each other and suddenly, we would be forced to bare our souls and commit ourselves to working with each other on a regular basis. Meeting to share ideas at cafes and in each other’s homes, we got to know each other over brainstorming sessions. We eventually found that creating a shared narrative allowed us to bridge the wide chasm that separated us as strangers.

Since our individual stories were so different, when it came time to determine the structure of the book, we knew that we couldn’t write in one unified voice. It seemed only natural that we would each write from our own perspective. We had no idea how our sections would piece together or if they would fit at all. We began by mapping out key events we would cover, then set off to write on our own. Exchanging chapters, we were often astounded that we chose the same words to describe things. Other times, we were surprised that we viewed the same situations quite differently. Still, without much editing, our individual sections effortlessly complemented each other.

When we drew up the initial chapter outline, there was no way of predicting how the story would end. Would we confront the psychiatrist responsible for the study? Would we track down our birth mother? Because we wrote the book as the events were unfolding, our emotions were still incredibly raw. Overwhelmed by the pressure to compensate for so many lost years, during one particularly grueling writing session at a local coffee shop, we broke down in tears. Later we joked that writing together was saving us thousands of dollars on therapy. In truth, working within the constraints of a narrative forced us to put into words the puzzling emotions we were experiencing. By writing in the present tense, we also hoped to convey a sense of immediacy. We would thrust the reader into our absurd situation and force them to imagine what it would be like to encounter the double they never knew they had. Still, we were wary that chronicling the experience while it was happening might alter the course of events. We came to realize that writing a memoir requires some distance and we began to see ourselves as characters. Vowing to remain faithful to our characters, we didn’t want to do or say anything simply for the sake of a good story. We recognized that ultimately, our priority was the truth of the story of our lives. Elyse Schein is a writer and filmmaker whose work has been shown at film festivals in Telluride and Long Island. Paula Bernstein is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Redbook and Variety. Both sisters live in Brooklyn. Identical Strangers is their first book.