Katherine Ellison is a friend and fellow Wombatista – a group of writers I gather with for the occasional dinner and chat. She’s one of those writers I hold in awe: a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who has written for Smithsonian, Time, Fortune, Working Mother, and The Atlantic Monthly – and can also write the long stuff. Her books include The Mommy Brain, The New Economy of Nature, and most recently, Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention. Buzz is a memoir and “…an insightful, fast-paced, unexpectedly funny read” (that’s People Magazine) that is “…riveting, beautifully written and totally credible” (that’s the Huffington Post). Her post below about writing it is as honest and moving as the book itself. – Meg
Many years before I started falling in love with boys, I fell in love with writing.
I was smitten at age 11, as a chubby fifth-grader, after Archie Comics paid me $10 for an essay about my pet Schnauzer. I had few friends back then, besides the Schnauzer. But writing came easily to me. “Tell me more,” the world of publishing seemed to whisper. I didn’t need to be asked twice.
I was already filling up journals: first the girly-pink-plastic-covered kind, with puny locks, then cheap blank books from Chinatown, bound with the brilliant silk also used to make the body-hugging dresses called cheongsams.
Writing was my vivid and intimate ally in the midst of my family’s bewildering chaos. My father, a big-hearted, complicated man, was suffering in ways I couldn’t begin to understand. On nights when his anger erupted in fights with my brothers, I’d cower in my room, scribbling the details of the latest melee.
Some people cope with fear by counting steps or turning a light switch off and on. I learned to write, chasing a similar fantasy of taming random reality. Writing let me choose where to focus my attention. While I couldn’t control my father, I discovered that I could coin a phrase.
As I grew older, writing assignments, like a generous lover, paid my bills and led me on exotic adventures. When I was 21, my first newspaper job walked me down the aisle of independence, out of my father’s house. Writing introduced me to my future husband, a fellow writer, while we were covering the Contra war in Nicaragua. We spent a working honeymoon reporting in Brazil. But writing remained my most constant companion.
All this is by way of explanation for what happened many years later, when I’d left newspapers to freelance, while raising two high-maintenance boys. It had become, again, a time of bewildering chaos. My first-born son had been diagnosed with Attention-deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, as had I. We clashed constantly. After marrying a man so much calmer than my father, counting on mellowing out the gene pool – think Labradoodle – there I was again, living under the volcano.
And for once, writing offered no respite. In the fall of 2007, I was working on a proposal for a book about plastic pollution, yet couldn’t focus on anything other than my son’s escalating crises at school and home. And so one day in desperation, I started writing about what was closest to my heart. This time, the words came easily, describing worries I hadn’t yet managed to acknowledge – such as how, while I’d never stopped loving my son, I’d certainly stopped wanting to be with him. As I watched the words form on the screen, I realized I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d hugged him.
Like a friend insisting on honesty, writing cajoled me to reveal these painful truths, eventually reminding me how my son, in the midst of yet another argument, had shouted something I’d needed to hear.
“Understand me!” he’d pleaded.
As I read these words back to myself, they formed a challenge. I dropped the project on plastic, and resolved to do my best to use my writing to find a way out of our fix.
Several benefits accrued immediately. Research provided a way to venture into the crazy souk of our modern mental health care industry, granting license to interview top experts and cherry-pick strategies to deal with our problem. Whereas before I’d felt isolated, judged by other mothers, my writing connected me to other writers, providing one of those proverbial villages I’d longed for to help me raise my child. Not least, writing offered a pretext to ask my now elderly father to explain what he’d been living through while I was growing up. His answers helped dissolve decades of anger.
By the end of the year I dedicated to this project, writing had given me back my mothering mojo. Once again, I was hugging my son all the time. Today we still have problems but are no longer locked in a tug-of-war: writing redefined our struggles as a project deserving our joint efforts.
I’ve known all along that writing’s gifts are rarely free. Writing about my son raises moral issues that certainly didn’t arise when the topic was foreign wars or my Schnauzer. Even now, months after Buzz was published, I still wonder. Will what I’ve written threaten our family’s privacy? Might it undermine the new trust I enjoy with my son and my father? Will the bargain be worth it?
My doubt torments me.
Writing about it helps. – Katherine
