The Writing Life

Fran Schumer

Word Count 1728

Sometimes I think I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to wear a bra or pantyhose or go into an office every day. I never liked leaving my nest, no matter how dingy or small; my apartment, my desk, my refrigerator, and the loose clothes I wore made me happy. They were ‘home.’

My first novel, written at age six, began: “It was a good day and a bad day. It was a good day because we found buried treasure. It was a bad day because my wife died.” When even my mother couldn’t stop laughing, I realized that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a writer (my teachers agreed) and I put the idea aside for a couple of decades.

In the summer of 1968, I had my first real job. I worked, unpaid, as a teacher’s aide at a Head Start program in Manhattan. The program, an offshoot of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, was designed to give preschool children from low-income families a “head start,” educationally and otherwise. I took the job because it would help me get into a more selective college, and because it seemed like the kind of job a person like me would do, that is, a person who wanted to see herself as good.

Mostly, I loved that job because it gave me a taste of independence. From the minute I left my house in the morning, I felt something I hadn’t felt before: grown up. The city, the subway, the different kinds of people, crowded so close in subway cars you could see what they were reading, wearing, it all dazzled me. The commute gave me additional time to read, which I loved. Sometimes, I became so absorbed in my book that I read while I walked the dozen blocks between my house and the subway. After a few weeks, the walk became so familiar I didn’t even have to look down to see the curb. I could feel my way to the train. Stepping out into daylight, I saw a Manhattan that even on rainy days seemed to glow, all those tall buildings, the shops, the bakeries. I felt as far from home as Dorothy when she arrived at the Emerald City. I wondered why anyone would want to live anywhere else.

My second job lasted three days. I worked as a WATS telephone operator (a flat rate calling system) at the Chase Manhattan Bank in lower Manhattan. I would be heading for college that fall, and my parents wanted me to earn money for my expenses. Whether I liked the job wasn’t relevant, except to me. I hated it. The work was mind-numbing. It required that I answer the telephone with one sentence, “WATS operator, may I help you?” punch in the three numbers the caller requested, and repeat the process all over again. The only part of the job I liked was lunch. The office was freezing and at noon, I would drag my refrigerated body into the courtyard to thaw. The worst part was telling the head operator, my parents, and the nice man across the street who had helped me get the job that I was leaving.

At college I found something else I didn’t want to do: any career that required further schooling. For mostly that reason, I became a writer, and generally freelance. I liked being my own boss, and the challenge of writing enough to pay the rent. Once, I couldn’t and I asked my father for a loan. He refused. He had paid for my college education; the rest, he said, was up to me. His decision caused me to hustle even harder, and I ended up writing a ridiculous piece on plastic surgery for the National Enquirer. At the same time, I was writing a complicated story for the New York Times Magazine on a tenure dispute at Harvard. I was surprised to see that the Enquirer’s fact checkers were more scrupulous than those at the Times, probably because the Enquirer was sued more frequently.

One of my first freelance articles was about the weekly lunches I had with my father. Growing up, we hadn’t spent much time together. My mother raised us; he was mostly at work. After I moved back to New York, in 1979, we made a habit of meeting for lunch every week. My father worked as an exterminator, and with or without me, lunch was the most exciting part of his day. Because he did jobs in all five boroughs, he knew where to find food that was ethnic, excellent and cheap. One day, I decided to write a piece about our lunches. I mailed it to the New York Times. On Father’s Day, the Times published it in the center of its Op Ed page. I watched as my father read the article, which I’d written pseudonymously. When he finished, he cried.

On the basis of that story and others, I was asked to be the Underground Gourmet for New York Magazine. In those days, you didn’t need many credentials, and I was thrilled to get the job. It required that I only write up places I liked, which meant I never had to write an unfavorable review. I had myself been the subject of a bad review for a book I’d written, and it scarred me–the most annihilating summary of the book, a “pathetic whine.” I never wanted to inflict that pain on anyone, which the column allowed me to avoid. The job was gratifying for another reason. With very little effort, I could dispense happiness to friends and acquaintances. All they had to do was agree to eat and drink for free and share their opinion about the food, which New Yorkers love to do.

In those years, people often asked, “how do you stay so thin?” The truth about reviewing is that you hardly get to eat, much less savor the food; you’re working. In the days before Yelp and cell phones, my husband, who worked as a federal prosecutor at the time, invited several F.B.I agents to join us. When they saw how busy I was, tasting this and that, scrambling to get it all down on the tiny notepad I carried and tried to hide, they offered to “wire” me for my next job. Because I did little more than taste dishes, I often came home famished. After so many fancy meals, all I wanted was a bagel, scrambled eggs or a bowl of cold cereal.

As any critic who writes reviews knows, readers will disagree. One who didn’t agree with a favorable review I’d written about a Korean restaurant in the West Village wrote a letter in which she distilled her appraisal of the restaurant into three words: “Ugh, vomit, puke.”

Mostly, however, I wrote about non-food related topics. In 1989, a friend called and said, “You’ve got to write about this new drug I’m taking.” My story, the first written about Prozac in the popular press, appeared on the cover of New York magazine that December. Instantly, Simon and Schuster offered me a contract to write a book about the drug. I turned it down. I felt I couldn’t write about Prozac unless I tried it, and as I was planning to get pregnant soon, I didn’t want to take a chance.

A more long term assignment was the year I spent being the “as told to” person for a woman involved in a business scandal. Since I signed a contract saying I would never divulge information about the subject, I can only reveal a few glimpses of my personal experience. The best part of the job was having a small plane fly me each week to the beach town where the person lived. The least pleasurable part was that I didn’t have the satisfaction of putting my own thoughts on the page; I had to write someone else’s. From that experience, however, I learned that it is far easier to write someone else’s story than it is to write your own.

In my many years of freelancing, I wrote articles, essays, book and restaurant reviews, and two non-fiction books, including the “as told to,” which became a bestseller. It was the most lucrative job I’d had. The least lucrative, however, was more memorable. It was the first short story I ever wrote, for which I was paid $25. Getting rich was never part of my freelancer’s story. Once, when I complained to the editors of The Nation that they were only paying me $100 for my many months of work, the editor said, “You’re lucky. The most we’ve ever paid for an article was to the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and that was $125.” The writer, Calvin Trillin, used to boast that The Nation paid him in the “high two figures.”

Not long ago, while cleaning out our house in preparation for a move, we gathered all the old newspapers and magazines in which my stories had appeared and scanned them into my computer. Going through them, my husband, my toughest critic, said, “These are really good.” He hoped I could appreciate my success; I was, he said, in the five percent of all writers who live entirely on their earnings as writers. “You’ve done all kinds of writing. You have a real body of work.” I was pleased to hear his praise, but it didn’t solve my other problem, berating myself for not being as successful as I wanted to be. I’d never aspired to win a Pulitzer Prize, but at least I would have liked to have health benefits, which as a freelancer wasn’t ever going to happen. This constant self-undermining was a character defect, and although it didn’t keep me from working – quite the opposite, it drove me – it did keep me from feeling satisfied with my long and productive career. I’m not alone in this feeling, of course. Even celebrated authors or painters or code-writers or anyone who cares deeply about what they do, I’ve read, are prone to this kind of self-doubt, this constant striving. It’s not a problem I think I’ll ever solve, but I manage it. I wake up each morning and work toward the kind of success that is within my grasp: to write a sentence that dazzles me.

Fran’s poetry, fiction, and articles have appeared in various sections of The New York Times; also, Vogue, The Nation, The North American Review, and other publications. She is the co-writer of the New York Times bestselling Powerplay (Simon and Schuster) and the author of Most Likely to Succeed (Random House). Her poetry chapbook, Weight, was published in 2022. She wrote the Underground Gourmet column for New York Magazine, and the restaurant reviews for the New Jersey Section of the New York Times.