My guest author this week, Elizabeth Scarboro, is the author of My Foreign Cities–which was chosen as an Oprah Book of the Week, one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Notable Books of 2013, and one of Library Journal’s Best Memoirs of 2013. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it “Oddly uplifting . . . about recognizing those precious moments in life that Virginia Woolf once called ‘moments of being.’ It’s about savoring the present, not allowing sadness to dominate, and surrendering yourself to love, for better or worse.” Elizabeth’s writing has also appeared recently in The Millions, The New York Times, The Bellevue Literary Review, and The Huffington Post. – Meg
My first childhood ambition was to be a spy. I loved all things secretive – sneaking around, maps written in code, and the idea of a double life. I envisioned getting summoned to dangerous missions in the middle of the night. I told my mom to throw away my baby clothes, which she’d been saving for my future daughter, since I’d be leading a necessarily solitary life.
In some ways, being a writer is a safer version of my early spy dream. It allows me to shadow strangers. I get to investigate their motives and decisions, and be right there as their lives unfold. It also allows me to live a double life. While I’m a mother to two young children, and my life is thick with human entanglements, when I sit down at my desk, I am footloose, free to wander wherever I like.
I think writing first came to serve this purpose for me in my early twenties. I’d moved out to San Francisco, and in with my boyfriend. I’d always imagined I’d spend my twenties running around the globe, but then I found myself in love with Stephen, who had a serious illness, cystic fibrosis. I had to admit that Bangkok would be there, but if I wanted to be with Stephen, I had to hurry up. We got married when we were twenty-five. I was very happy to be with him, but I was also in deep. While my friends were moving between jobs and boyfriends, I was married, teaching sixth grade, and helping my husband decide whether to have a double-lung transplant. Writing helped offset the settled and serious nature of my days.
When Stephen died at thirty, I found myself floating, without much sense of purpose. I grieved hard, and I remember thinking, now that I know time is limited, I’m going to do exactly what I want with mine. I took a leave from my job and went back to school to get my MFA in fiction. It seemed crazy and impractical, but also just right. During that time, I started to allow myself to think of what I was doing as “really writing.” It wasn’t that I was writing differently than I had been before – I just realized that my fellow students considered themselves to be “really writing”, and their writing wasn’t that much different than mine. We were all muddling our way through.
I finished school; I fell in love again and got remarried. I started to edge back into a normal existence. And somewhere along the way I realized I had a book I needed to write. I wanted to tell the story of living with youth and mortality intertwined, before I forgot my old life entirely. So I began the long project of writing My Foreign Cities. I am embarrassed by how long it took, and I can’t even tell you how many pages I threw away. (I like to equate writing with practicing an instrument – all those pages are practice for the final recording. Otherwise I’d have to give up!) Over time, I found the rhythm of the story I wanted to tell, and the voice to tell it with.
Like most writers I know, I got (and get) sustenance from writer friends. Yes, we helped each other edit drafts, but more, we reminded each other why we loved writing in the first place, and offered support in navigating the publishing world. We encouraged each other in the face of rejection. And I needed that encouragement – my book was rejected by something like twenty editors before I found one who believed in it.
This week, My Foreign Cities is out in paperback. I’ve gotten reviews that made me happy, but I’ve found that what was meant the most are the many letters I’ve gotten from readers, thanking me for telling my story, and writing me about theirs. I’ve saved every one. And my many unpublished pages? My kids have been using them to make paper airplanes. Pages of my book, of my old life, have been flying around my living room, and for some reason this makes me happy. My desk is clear, awaiting the next project. – Elizabeth
