I'm Not Annie Hall
Hold on while I quote Camus
When my first book came out, a local newspaper reporter interviewed me. She got some basic facts wrong, which ended up getting repeated in other newspapers, which is pretty funny.
But what forever stays with me is that she called me ditzy—in a nice way.
While I could have embraced my inner ditzy, the fact that a recent newspaper interview/feature had proclaimed me as ditzy absolutely freaked me out despite the fact that the rest of the interview was SO NICE and the reporter was SO GREAT. Which leads me to this essential question:
Why did she call me ditzy?
1. Maybe the whole "Yes, my skirt did fall all the way down scarring a tiny boy for life during Book Expo America" story.
2. Maybe the whole "Yes, I did misspell my own last name on my query letter that sold TIPS ON HAVING A GAY (ex) BOYFRIEND" thing.
3. Maybe the whole "You want to know when I was a newspaper editor? 2003? No. 2004? Maybe 2005?"
In a later interview she said I was like Annie Hall. For those of you who don’t know, Annie is awkward. Annie is nervous. Annie can’t handle being in the shiny intellectual mecca of New York City—at least in the beginning of the movie. She eventually becomes confident and finds herself. Thus, character growth.
What did that mean about me? I did not know. At all. But I wanted meaning.
Albert Camus wrote in Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 1991) that there is real human desire for meaning, while at the same time there's this "unreasonable silence of the world."
Sisyphus, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy stuck rolling a ball up a mountain over and over again, because the gods were punks. Every time he got to the top, the ball rolled down again. Camus used Sisyphus as a way to talk about the absurdity of life.
So, we desire meaning, Camus says, but the world is silent.
Or as Rick Anthony Furtak says in his essay about Bob Dylan called "I Used to Care, but Things Have Changed" it's this need to make our own "lives make sense" that gives focus on the absurd. *
What does that mean to us as writers? As people? I'm not sure. If you take this philosophy as truth, it could mean that our desire to be writers is part of the need to make sense out of the silence. It could mean that our need to make our lives not seem insignificant forces us to create and recreate stories where things are significant.
Or we could just like to string words together, maybe. Or, maybe, we want a good excuse to sit at the computer all day.
Camus writes on p. 13 of his book, "One day the 'why' arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement."
Or, as Furtak puts it, "This condition, in which the self has fallen away from its meaningful engagement with the world, is described by Camus as 'essentially a divorce.'"
Sometimes I think all of my writing is this essential quest to try to get away from that condition of divorce with the world, the endless searching for significance and understanding. I write stories to try to understand things. I mean, my first book, TIPS was written because I wanted to understand:
1. Forgiveness
2. How the hate crime that inspired this book could have occurred
At the same time my main character, Belle, is having this big ole tragic love affair issue where her entire concept of the world just crumbles apart. She tries to rebuild it, rebuild her world. I wanted to know how she could continue to care about anything when everything has been all shot to hell. She even focuses on the absurdities in people's characters (her mom's bad lyric guesses, her German teacher's outfits) because her world view has gone so out of whack.
"Okay. So what? "
I guess I'm just intrigued by the whole concept of writers as people who try to reconnect their own self and others' selves back into meaningful engagement with the world.
Do you do that? Do you think writers do that? Do you think people who aren’t writers do that?
Here’s a random Camus thought to leave you with.
“Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art.”