The following essay originally appeared over the course of a week in the Olive Reader, the Harper Perennial books blog. There was a period during the writing of Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way when money was particularly tight and I was particularly desperate and lonely. Things really didn't have to be this way but I was in obdurate denial of my financial situation, convinced that if I even glanced at a job description for one second--especially in the financial services industry, where I had all my professional experience-the very verbiage common to them would corrode the purity of my artistic vision and bash me back into a fluorescent-lit past I was trying to escape for good. Creative thinker. Collateral marketing materials. Opportunity to excel. Dynamic, fast-paced environment. It made me sick just to think about it. As for the loneliness, I was then in a largely secret relationionship-type thing that was really more of a strong friendship with infrequent make-outs that seemed to function best on weekdays. Less pressure that way, I guess. Harder to convince yourself of the casualness of something if you find yourself at a movie after having dinner after having spent all of Saturday with someone. The girl was quite sick of it, I'm sure (not that we discussed it, since in addition to being secret, it was a hugely passive-aggressive enterprise), and by this time may have been seeing the man who is now her husband. Consequently I spent many weekends alone, calling friends only at the last possible minute, in the evenings, when I could no longer stand the anxious self-reflective energy bouncing off the walls of my apartment. These other friends always had plans, they were always doing some great city thing that cost just a bit more than I was willing to part with. So on nights like this what I found myself doing, what came to seem like the ultimate treat after a long week spent working on a novel, was going into the city to hang out at the Strand for a while then walking to the Subway on the corner of Fourth Avenue and 12th Street and splurging on a footlong roasted chicken-breast meal deal for dinner. You may have seen me there, through the big windows, as you passed by with your boyfriend or girlfriend (though I sat in the far corner by the bathroom and soda machine, sometimes with my back turned, to avoid this very thing). I had occasion to think of these times two Thursdays ago when I paused under an awning on the southwest corner of Fourth Avenue and 12th Street. It had rained heavily all that day and was just starting to mist again after a break. Despite the downpour I'd spent the whole day in Manhattan. I'd seen a movie, eaten a burrito and walked about every square inch of the city between Battery Park and Union Square so that I might, that night, be tired enough to lie in bed and pass out. You see, by then it had been several days since I'd had a natural and satisfying night's sleep, a state of affairs many I complained to attributed to the jitters induced by the imminent publication-- in less than a week--of Grab. I stood on that corner a long time wondering about this. I had a dry hacking cough. Two days earlier I'd lost my voice. And notwithstanding my full day of activity, that night would be the worst one yet, requiring at intervals an entire bottle of wine, an Excedrin PM, and another, stronger tablet available only by prescription to even approach the elusive zone of unconsciousness. Pre-pub jitters? Yeah, there may have been some of that going on. * But let me back up again here, this time to last fall, late November to be precise. I had just quit another day job and was about to leave town for two months to go to an artists' colony in New Hampshire and start work on a new book. It had been well over a year since I'd finished Grab and I was bursting to begin this new novel, which I'd been planning and outlining-on company time using company office supplies-almost since the day I'd set foot in my cubicle. Now, at the risk of personal embarrassment, I wish to be totally candid with you about my state of mind in the days after I quit my job but before I left for NH. I felt like a young prince. A genius. One of the best minds of my generation. Other writers had nothing on me, my talent, my drive to be great, my determination to truly matter to the culture. I had applied for and gotten into a place where the artistic process was valued so highly that lunch was delivered silently to one's doorstep in a basket (and I must say of the food there as a whole that I never ate better in my life). And after this great adventure there was the publication of my first book to look forward to, when my life would surely come to resemble those amped-up fantasies of heaven we associate with sucide bombers: golden copulations on perfectly formed clouds, warmed by pure, radiant sunlight. And the best part was it was all in the future, on the horizon. All I had to do was sit back and think about it. All I had to do-my only occupation--was anticipate. Sweet. Soon this changed. Two weeks later I took the bus to NH and set up shop deep in the woods and started writing. The weeks passed. I gained some weight; made some friends; got drunk every night; played a lot of ping pong; made crackling, satisfying fires in the fireplace; recieved the galleys of Grab; and the most important thing, got a lot of good work done, over a hundred pages. I took these good vibes back to the city. My money was holding out and I was on a roll. I felt, for the first time ever, like a real pro, deep in the first draft of a new novel while simultaneously shepherding an earlier book into existence, the way John Updike must feel every day of his life. Sorry. Can't have lunch tomorrow. I'm meeting with my publicist. And then just like that, as quickly as it came, all of this was gone. This was about, I'd say, six or seven weeks ago. Work on my new book tapered off. I didn't lose faith in the material or start seriously doubting its quality (I use the word "seriously" because a certain amount of self-doubt is present in all writers all the time; if not, the odds are good you're a fraud), I simply couldn't concentrate at the level required to keep going. The first two reviews of Grab came in, and they offered not drooling, unequivocal praise from big-name reviwers, but flat, plot-summary heavy assessments from anonymous critics who'd probably read twelve other books that day. That's when I got the first inkling that my small coming-of-age novel was not going to save literature. And that the world at large was not waiting for it with held breath. And that I would not be fornicating in the misty glades of Shanrgi-la. * So there I was, standing under an awning on a street corner in Manhattan, staring across the way at a foliage-covered brick wall, on the other side of which was a ubiquitous fast-food outlet that had once been my haven, days away from becoming a published novelist and feeling, preposterously, not far removed from the brooding and solitary sandwich-eater I had once been, saddled with what had seemed back then like an unrealizable ambition. What was my problem? Why could I not, as many of my friends had implored me to do, enjoy it? A few possible answers in a moment. First I would like to share with you an anecdote from grad school (and aside from writing the words I had the weirdest dream last night, I can think of no better way of inviting people to zone out). During my final year as an MFA student at Brooklyn College, I had a fiction workshop with Michael Cunningham. This was at the height of Hours mania; the movie had just come out and was receiving high praise, winning awards, etc. I was, I admit, highly intimidated. And if you were in this class with me and you say that you were not, at least initially, well, that's bullshit. One day late in the semester Michael told us about the publication of his first novel (which is not, as many people believe, A Home at the End of the World). Then he said, "You know, when you publish your book, your life isn't going to change in all the ways you think it's going to." At the time that he said this I probably had less than eight hundred dollars in the bank and not a penny of income and no prospects. I had a folder full of rejection slips dating back to the first Clinton administration. I was so mired in rejection that I had come to embrace it, expect it, adopt it as a worldview. I had been in the city long enough that the publishing circle had opened somewhat and I was now being rejected by friends and acquaintances. Already, at 28, I viewed myself as a failure-or a failure in the making--nobly carrying on, toiling away, sending out those stories, hammering out a novel. The man who had just told me not to expect my life to change if I ever published a book had won the Pulitzer Prize and partied with Nicole Kidman. I don't recall exactly what was going through my mind when he said this but I know it boiled down to something like that's easy for you to say. Michael's comment stayed with me and last summer, in the brief period following the sale of Grab when I felt unambiguous euphoria (this was the second phase for me, after roughly a week of heart-clenching anxiety; do you see a pattern here?) I gave an interview with my hometown paper in which I respectfully disagreed with his opinion on publication's potentially life-changing effects. I explained that my life had been altered in important ways on a strictly emotional level. That remains true. As of this precise moment, 1:02 pm on June 23, 2006, I no longer feel like the embodiment of noble failure. I can look to my right and see my book on the shelf and it feels pretty good. Yet I also see the wisdom in what Michael was saying and believe him now to be absolutely correct. On a day-to-day basis my life has changed not at all. I'm in the middle of trying to write a goddamn book and it isn't easy and I hope I can do it and I hope what I come up with turns out to be good. In this way I am no different from that slightly younger dude stuffing tasteless fast food into his self-pitying face. * On the day that my book came out--exactly two weeks ago--I went into the city and stopped in a few of my favorite bookstores to see what it looked like out in the world. My emotional reaction to this excursion seemed to microcosmically reflect both a) how I feel about publication in general; and b) how I've lived my life since the age of fifteen or so. It began at two smaller stores, St. Mark's Bookshop and Three Lives and Company, and the feeling I got at both was one of extreme warmth and accomplishment and optimism. There was even, I admit, a fleeting return to the "young genius" mindset I had going on last fall. To see my book displayed at these establishments, to speak to the staff and sign copies (full disclosure: one of my best friend's works at St. Mark's), to picture someone browsing here, picking up the book, looking at the cover, maybe buying a copy-it all made total sense and I felt perfectly at peace and right with the world. What happened next was I walked farther uptown and ended my journey at a big chain bookstore, at a bigger-than-usual branch, in a prominent Manhattan location. I went to the new release wall and there again was my book and for an instant the rush carried over, the sensation of pride stayed in full glorious bloom, until I paused and gazed up and began to mentally pan back, this space being physically much greater in size. The wall of new releases stretched almost to the ceiling and all around me were tables piled high with books, groaning under the weight, and there were countless titles on the opposite wall too, and down the main aisle and stretching all the way to the back of the store, there were books everywhere, there was every type of book--the Dan Brown and Da Vinci Code-related titles alone would have filled half of St. Mark's--I was standing among thousands of volumes and I was only on the first floor, there were three more above me. I am not writing this to trigger debate over the merits of shopping at small independents, since I've purchased many books at the store I've just described. I'm merely trying to say that at best this episode put things "in perspective" and at worst made me feel as significant as flyshit. But the thing is-and here's what I mean about this experience reflecting my life since age fifteen (and maybe all writers are like this, I don't know)--if I'd gone into that last store and my book had had a Dan Brown-style display, a whole table to itself, would that have been enough? Let's take it a step further. If I'd gone in there and my book had been the only one, the lone title in the whole store, would that have been enough? The answer is yes. And then immediately becomes no. And this is another reason why I haven't been able to enjoy the last month as much as my friends tell me I should, or as much as I thought I would back in the days when it was all just fantasy and, after that, anticipating. I've realized that no matter what happens with Grab it will not be enough. This state of affairs is born not of arrogance or prerogative but rather a steady humming low- (and sometimes high)-grade insecurity coupled with an outsized ambition I've never copped to publicly until now. It's possible that one day in the future, worn out by this dichotomy, I'll take the advice of a good friend and seek therapy, begin working out this and other thorny issues, phobias and existential concerns. Until then there is Chipotle, which is where I dine now that Subway no longer provides me with comfort. You may see me there some Saturday, back to the window, thinking about my novel. Copyright 2006 by Bryan Charles

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