I remember my mother used to go to bed for the day. The blackness of her mood seemed to darken her room. I don’t know why she left her door open. Maybe she knew, even in her unresponsive state, that she needed to be able to hear us. Maybe she thought it would be less frightening for us if we could see her. She was wrong. She loved us, but she was wrong.

We learned not to talk to her. We passed her doorway quickly, as if someone had died, as if we thought something might reach out from its depths and lay hold of us. Some days I wonder if something did.

Perhaps the hardest thing about writing is deciding what you will omit. Most of the first draft is usually dreck. The best may be the line you’re not even sure about, because you haven’t seen its like before, because it gouges deep and you’re accustomed to dribbling blood onto the page by the pinprick.

What the reader may need most is what you’re inclined to excise, because the terrible secrets of your life—those human truths that hold the power to make a reader see, with her quavering heart’s eye, that she is not alone—shame you, and undermine your cultivated, attractively broken image.

You court troubles, however, when you write that your mother is manic-depressive, that some of it rubbed off, that sometimes the world is so dark you can scarcely rise from bed, that it is dark no matter how early you start drinking or how late you sleep, the world is dark like the strangled light in your mother’s bedroom. [Read more...]