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You read a book sometimes and think to yourself, “Where does this person get the brainpower to think up these ideas and come up with these words? How did they learn to write so well? How did they become so smart? How are they able to let go and just write exactly how they feel and what they think, to make themselves vulnerable?”
This is how I felt reading a book called The Unwritten Book by Samantha Hunt. It’s an unusual journey she takes you on – it feels like a stroll down a dirt path next to a canal – reflecting on life and how she sees it, the darkness and obsessiveness with death, and the fact that we’re all going to die.
Then she dives in to explain how her father, who was also a writer, was a recovering alcoholic and had died several years earlier but had started writing a book, apparently, that she found several pages of the draft of and embarked on an experiment to write the rest of the book that her father never finished.
A noble thing to do, in a way, helping out your deceased Dad finish what he wanted to write, making his imprint on the world more permanent, or something not really clear, and probably not that significant to hardly anyone but her.
She makes up this strange story, building on her father’s original draft of the book, sort of just winging it on what she supposes her father would have written had he done so but of course having no way of affirming with him whether the direction she went with his story was what he had in mind. He was a Yale graduate who worked as a book review editor for a not-well-known magazine published in New York. His job kind of reminds me of what I’m doing now, reviewing a book that most people will never read and most likely no one will be fazed one way or the other by what I’m writing about my experience reading the book.
The book then bounces around to many of her reflections about being the child of a father who was an alcoholic, how sad that seemed to be, mostly for her quiet yet troubled father whom she doesn’t seem to be bitter towards as much as sympathetic, and still unpacking what she thinks he cared about and what really motivated him and what he thought about his life and being her father. None of her questions are answerable, which makes the book mysteriously compelling.
She’s thrashing about with her words, expressing how she feels about being a mother of three daughters and how that all seems somehow hard to fathom for he,r and how she thinks about death and dying and the inevitability of it, and yet has whimsical fun going to boy band concerts with her daughters.
It’s an engaging and difficult to duplicate ride through her active, intellectual, and honest thinking about what it’s like to be her. One passage struck me because I can relate:
What do creating people and creating art have to do with each other? I still wonder if I can be both a mother and a writer. I am both, every day, but can I be both a good mother and a good writer? Do children stop art? Should artists have kids?
I don’t know the answer to her questions, but I have experienced the complications of trying to produce honest writing while at the same time being cognizant that the honesty may not be what my family wants to read or what they want others to read. There is an emotional area that art tends to beckon me to explore, which can be too revealing or disconcerting, or I’m not sure what.
There are plenty of artists who have kids and have navigated these dicey situations, so it is possible. What I will say is that if you want to be as authentic and real in what you write, you’re taking a risk of it not being well received. When that’s your family, it matters to you. The question is how much, and to what extent, are you willing to not be as honest as you feel?
Honesty is so often avoided because it tends to hurt people. Relationships strain or fracture, or end. Not good outcomes. But not writing how I really feel isn’t an outcome I want either. A conundrum we have here.
As I read the book, I felt the author was a bit too dark in that she brings up the death of her father and generally gravitates toward the subject of death seemingly every few pages. Her reflections on that came through in this way:
Recently, The New York Times Book Review described me as an “established horror writer.” Both words, “established” and “horror,” were a revelation to me. I do write about death. It just strikes me as funny because in all earnestness, while I wouldn’t file the work I make under the heading Romance, I really do believe that I am writing love stories over and over again. The dead do not scare me. Indeed, many of the people I love most in this world are dead.”
This book does, as I now reflect on it, come through as a love story. A daughter, a writer, loved her Dad, who was also a writer, and she wanted to honor him by letting the world know he wrote and had a book in the works. It’s sweet.
I loved my Mom and Dad, and they have died. I loved my uncle, who taught me how to appreciate time on the beach in the sand. He died.
She’s got a point: we do love people who have died. It’s just uncomfortable to talk about death as often as she writes about it for most people to handle, I suppose. We’re all afraid of death, or maybe not. Maybe afraid isn’t the right word. But you know what I mean – it’s death.
She’s a writer, and so am I. It took me about thirty years before I felt confident enough in my mediocre writing ability to be willing to tell people it’s what I do for a living. It’s a psychological hurdle none of us should consider trivial.
Writers, as I just showed you, are kind of insecure and think in quirky ways and tend not to care about the things most people who aren’t writers care about. Read what this author shares on this:
My phone is ancient; my laptop is old; my car is geriatric. My kids are embarrassed to arrive at school in our old jalopy. They still can’t believe I still wear the clothes I owned in high school.
My friend told me there’s no one he knows who cares less about the kind of car he drives than me. It’s true. My son told me he’s never known me to ever want to buy anything for myself. This is almost completely true, but I love buying food at Wendy’s and every other fast food restaurant ever created.
This not caring about lots of things is typical of many writers because I think they’re thinking about what they’re going to write, or just wrote, or want to write, pretty much every waking moment. When they’re watching TV, they’re viewing it from a writing perspective. Maybe I should write about why the game “Jeopardy” was created. I wonder what it would be like to write a blog about what Nikola Jokic thinks about American press reporters.
Inside our heads, we’re always writing, fixing a sentence, adjusting the structure, rearranging paragraphs, questioning whether our first sentence is captivating enough, trying to care less what people think. That last thing this writer wrote about:
This liberty, not caring what others think of me, is not something I knew as a girl, or not in public, at least. Losing this fear and settling into my body, with all its humiliations, is a wonderful benefit of aging.
The great irony is that for writers to convince you they care, they have to stop caring about you. The more we write what’s in our hearts, the less we concern ourselves with whether anyone will approve of what’s in our hearts, the more free we become, the better we write.
Writers do things to get attention. They’re not the most obedient or willing to step in line with societal norms. The author of this book reveals how she does this:
I told my husband he was having an affair with my best friend. I told my mom I had cancer. I told my sister there was a man living in my basement. None of this was empirically true to anyone but me. I believed it because I felt like it.
Why be this way? Why say things to get reactions? Why disturb people for no reason other than for your own jollies?
It’s not right. It’s not how we were taught to behave. It isn’t polite sometimes, and people can get offended by the words writers use and the ideas they share.
But write they must. They have to. They want to. It’s who they are and how they gain meaning in their lives. Writers can’t not write. It’s all they have and what they want. To survive, they write. To feel they have a purpose, they write. To make sense of senselessness, they write.
The author of this book wrote about her father and honored him, and that strikes me as noble and worth doing. She also wrote about how odd she feels sometimes being a mother with three kids and not caring about material possessions, and how much she thinks about death.
It’s how she sees things. At least she’s being honest about how she feels, and that’s why the book was worth reading, and I’m spending time now writing about it. She connected with me emotionally. She asked the big questions: Why am I here? What is the purpose of all of this? What happens when we die?
That’s what I liked most about the book: she kept asking questions, making observations, pouring out what’s on her mind in an uninhibited way that I found impressive and worthwhile.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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