Necessary Angel
by Lori Toppel
When I tell my friend of forty years that I’m concerned about promoting my newly published novella, as I’m still squeamish about social media, she says, “Well, it’s not like you’re this famous writer. I mean, it’s a really hard career, but you’re not going to sell tons of books at this point.” And in the car on my way home, I think, I’m not dead yet, I have time. And what about those stories I had just published––I mean, what about those? Then I remind myself: This friend has always given it to me straight.
When my sister once said to me that maybe I should give up writing because I don’t seem happy, and maybe I should do something that makes me happy, and I remember thinking, But I am happy––this is me, happy.
When my sons, who are in their twenties, occasionally say, “How’s the writing going?” And I think, They work, well, 85.5% of the time, and what if I could work 90.5% of the time? Would I be more successful? Come on, I say aloud, be real.
At a young age, I gravitated toward writers who had suffered bouts of madness in some form or another––Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, William Styron, among others. I empathized with the battle for emotional fitness, having witnessed it in my mother. As a teenager, I worried about becoming paranoid, depressed, and obsessive, as she often was. Over the years, I’ve been touched by one or two of these maladies, and, on occasion, the touch felt like a punch.
At thirteen, I got sick––a slow-to-diagnose illness of the gut––and was treated with a high dose and long course of steroids. One of the drug’s side effects: mood change. I thought I was going mad. When everyone was asleep, I spent hours looking at myself in the bathroom mirror, wondering why I felt outside of my body, as if I were an invisible angel flitting above my own head, assessing who I was.
Soon after, my father moved out and filed for divorce, and my mother couldn’t understand why he had stopped trying. Was she delusional? Angry at him, she yelled at my sister and me. She humiliated us as if that might humiliate him. She ran down our apartment hallway in her underwear while we waited for the elevator, hoping to escape. Around such mercurial moments, I wrote poetry and fell in love with Arthur Rimbaud, especially A Season in Hell and the quest for the deranging of all senses.
After I left for college, I began writing short stories. I was healthy. I was young, riding the pleasures of discovery through my work, a seemingly perpetual spring of joy. I got high more often, the invisible angel, wingless, became a harsh critic in my head.
I read Michel Foucault’s Madness & Civilization, intrigued by the Ship of Fools and its cargo: those deemed mad, allowed to wander from port to port, anchored to the journey, exiled from the city. Foucault describes the water as purifier: “...the soul as a skiff, abandoned on the infinite sea of desires...a craft at the mercy of the sea’s great madness.” I saw freedom and expanse, the ocean, as tied to those who were bound and diminished. I was pleased, even gratified. The “mad” character, the fool, was surfacing as the illuminator and soothsayer, the one who has been cleansed.
When I was too much a fool in the years to come––my wildness around men, their wildness around me, my unhappiness in my office job, and my sporadic writing, those incomplete stories curling a finger at me––my mother’s old ghosts began to hover. I quit my job to freelance and write more often. I sought out other writers. And the ghosts were quieted.
When I tell my friend, whom I knew in middle school, a friend I once revered because of her keen intelligence, that I hope, one day, to win a fine award, a coveted award, which is to say without saying it, that I yearn for recognition from those I admire, from her, and she responds to my fantasy with cutting clarity about her own work, that she’s happy to be successful in her community. And I think, She is reasonable and her intelligence leads her way. I’m deluded and this can’t end well.
“What does it mean, then, for me to win this prize?” asks Jenny Erpenbeck, the German author, in her acceptance speech for the Solothurn Literature Prize. She offers a few answers, including, “It also means that some of my descriptions struck solid ground, struck something like the blue clay in my last book...a layer deeper than anything can grow...Struck something that can be reached with the emotions, but not penetrated, the essential thing.”
That’s it, I tell myself, because who else would listen to such an egotistical fantasy? To appreciate that there are those who have entered your vision, that there’s a communal understanding––the digging, the discovery of rock-solid ground, the navy blue of all blues, the deep ocean felt from afar––the essential thing.
When friends, who have known me for as long as they’ve known my sons, for twenty years or more, ask me how I am, how are the kids, and the dogs, but seldom, “How’s work going?”
When a few other friends always ask about my work, when K says that, with this new novella, I might find a new agent. When T says it’s a little gem, and she hopes many read it, and when L texts that she wants to say I’m amazing. And I think, They’re very good friends. But, later, I rethink, slouching toward reality, about my age, my timidity, and how, if not for my immovable shyness, I might accomplish so much more. I wonder, then, if these friends have become complicit in my lifelong delusion.
When I can’t sleep at night, thinking about a scene or character, aware of who I’ve become as a writer, I experience a tangible wakefulness: I will not be distracted.
When morning comes, I sit at my desk.
Lori is the author of the novella The Word Next to the One I Want, the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You, and the novel Three Children.