Writing Process
I kept tapes of my process when I was re-writing my first novel with the help of a very gifted younger novelist, Sarah. The first thing she told me was to cut my novel by half (It was 600 pages of mostly monologues). After I did that she started questioning my character's weakness. "What's the matter with this woman, she'd ask, "her husband reads her diary and she doesn't get mad, instead she apologizes to him for thinking about another man."
That was the first time I had thought there was anything odd about it. Next she took on the overpowering mother in the story. She set a timer and told me to choose if I wanted to be mother or daughter.
I took daughter and she proceeded to provoke me, telling me she coulldn't come out to California because her cat was sick and anyway I didn't keep the house up etc. until I finally cried out.."Oh, damn you I don't care if you never come to visit. I hate you."
"That," said Sarah" is what is missing in your novel." We went on this way for over a year. I've written a story about it ("Learning to Write Leah's Way" for Women's Studies..don't know if they have an archive.) It was a particularly haunting experience because after building up my character giving her a job and new confidence and finally reaching the last chapterwhere she stands up to her mother...Sarah, my guide committed suicide. Literally drank herself to death.
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Matthew Biberman says:
Rena Grant
She taught at NYU and organized the Lacanian reading group in NYC. Perhaps you crossed paths with her? Similar story re: drink and death.
Brenda Webster says:
suicide and drink
I was pretty much tied to the English Department at Columbia and didn't run across her.I tried Lacan when my daughter became interested in him and found him not worth the effort of reading over and over to get a drop of meaning. And more phallocentric than Freud!
Matthew Biberman says:
Lacan / Freud / Phallus
Interesting comment re: Lacan. Of course you are far from alone. But I dig him and when I mentioned this to an older colleague and said that the women in the class where getting into Lacan, he commented, well of course, he is not Freud. It is tough going but I read him like the surrealist he is. Derrida's essay on him (at the back of the Postcard) is very astute, though you may find that even funnier to contemplate--Derrrida as a crib on Lacan! The story about Derrida asking Lacan to interpret his son's comment "Daddy, I lie in the truth" is haunting.
Brenda Webster says:
psychoanalysis
Matthew, I have given up on Lacan but just had fun writing a psychoanalytic introduction full of axes and castrations for The New American Library's edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.