I always knew Esme was a talented writer, but I will confess I didn’t realize she was this hilarious. Her candor and humor is so refreshing, especially in light of a week that saw me taking care of sick kids and night wake-ups and general frustration with the small, repetitive world that parenting can be.
Esme’s incredible book, The Choice , which she co-wrote with Dr. Edith Eva Eger, is out now. The memoir details Dr. Eger’s story of surviving the Holocaust to become a renowned psychologist who works with patients in healing from trauma. The book was reviewed in the NYTimes. She’s also a very talented cellist who played with the band Seashell Radio in Tucson, and whose music I loved back in the day!
What Esme says about kids and creativity and the rearrangement of time rings so true for so many of us. Here’s Esme on writing and process:
How old is your child/are your children?
Four and two. They wear the same size shoe.
What do you do for a day job, if anything?
I am profoundly lucky to make a living as a writer. I taught high school English (and college comp and creative writing during grad school) for a bunch of years before this. People told me that by year seven of teaching I’d have a life of my own again outside of school. But by year thirteen, having taught in four different states, I still found teaching to be dangerously devouring of self. And I’d become a mom. And I was the family breadwinner and procurer of health insurance. My creative life had completely vanished. I knew it was going to be me and the yellow wallpaper if I didn’t make a change. My supportive husband was willing to shift things up and take some risks with me, and a year later I resigned from my teaching job mid-year and signed a contract for my first book. Now my husband and I are both creative freelancers. There are costs for sure and it can be scary and maddening. But for us, the alternative was much scarier.
What is a typical day like?
5:00 – 6:00 a.m., wake to my toddler groping my chest, demanding to nurse.
6:30 a.m., pry myself away from her death grip and force myself out the door in the dark to the gym (it’s less than a block away, any farther and I would never get there).
7:20 a.m., return to the brightly lit house where both kids are now running around like maniacs and my husband has made coffee and we will spend the next hour saying things like, “The cat water needs to stay in the bowl,” and, “What’s in your mouth, food or leaves from the plant?” and making lunches that will return to our home in various stages of sogginess and/or decomposition.
8:20 – 9:15 a.m., drive the loop between preschool and daycare and back home while carrying on an unceasing discourse (“How many more days until Halloween?”; “Knock, knock, who’s there? Poop hat head.”; “Why is that man sleeping in the park?”; “What is war?”), singing Moana songs, and making impossible left-hand turns in rush-hour traffic.
9:15 a.m. – 2:45 p.m., write, delete one thousand and twelve Zillow alerts from my email, neglect the dishes, wait so long on hold for yet a third customer service rep at Oregon Health Plan to tell me what to do about the error message that has stalled my application that the error message disappears and I have to start all over again anyway.
3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., pick up the kids, carry armloads of backpacks and lunchboxes and coats and artwork and school fundraiser memos and discarded socks and rain boots and trash in from the car, navigate four continuous melt downs (two human, two feline) since everyone has reached a critical blood sugar crisis at exactly the same moment.
4:00 p.m. – 6:30 p.m., the season of whine. I will not blow up at my children, I am better than that, take more deep breaths, break up a fight, try to chop one single onion, break up another fight, I can choose how I respond, I will not blow up, breathe, breathe, OH MY GOD FUCK THE FRIDGE IS NOT TO PAINT ON AND PUT DOWN THAT GODDAMN KNIFE!!!!
7:30 p.m. – ???, the long, steep climb to bed.
??? – 11:00 p.m., have every intention of writing some more or at least reading something edifying but usually just attach myself to the couch with wine, chips and Stranger Things, or fall asleep putting the kids to bed and wake up yet again with mossy teeth.
How do you turn off that part of your brain and turn to your own creative work? And how do you find the energy and time to make space for your own endeavors?
About a year ago I saw my oldest daughter consciously start using art to process her emotions. She’s a sensitive kid, and gets into emotional snarls quite a bit, and she started throwing herself at a box of markers in her storminess and agitation, and the intense feelings would unspool. Watching her discover the power and utility of creative release has been a good reminder that we all need that time to touch in. I know from my own periods of creative deprivation that the consequences are too dire when we deny that need. While being a parent makes it that much harder to find the time and space for creative endeavors, it’s also what motivates me to do the creative maintenance. It’s like eating vegetables, getting fresh air. If I don’t model healthy choices for my kids, who will? And if I’m not taking care of myself, what kind of a care-giver can I be for them?
Being a mom has really rearranged my sense of time. The almost unendurable tedium of it, the punch-in-the-gut fleetingness of it. Having a creative practice helps me deal with both extremes. Sometimes my creative practice–and I fall out of even this humble habit too easily–is just to write down ten things about the day before I go to bed. Just a list of images, moments, sensory impressions, sentences optional. It’s low pressure, a lot less intimidating than TODAY I WILL WRITE A STORY or AN ESSAY or A CHAPTER or even A SCENE. And the little observations are more likely to turn into something bigger if I just let them drop on the page and don’t expect too much of them. At the very least, I’m able to find things to appreciate–or at least notice–in the tedium, and it feels like less of my life is getting away from me. It’s less about turning the mom brain off and more about paying attention in a different way. Worrying less about what I should be making and noticing what’s already here.
Sometimes I have to turn off the writer brain to parent effectively. I didn’t realize until I became a mom how much of my writing used to happen when I wasn’t writing, when I was driving or cooking or waiting in line at the post office. I rarely get that luxury anymore, of polishing sentences or trying out metaphors or following a thought all the way through without interruption, unless I’m “at work.”
Sometimes sleep is just way more important than anything else.
While being a parent makes it that much harder to find the time and space for creative endeavors, it’s also what motivates me to do the creative maintenance. It’s like eating vegetables, getting fresh air. If I don’t model healthy choices for my kids, who will? And if I’m not taking care of myself, what kind of a care-giver can I be for them?
What does your “space” look like?
We’re living in a tiny temporary rental right now, and the room with the desk is also the holding tank for all the kids’ toys. I used to be very particular about having a clean desk and a tidy work space, as though my creativity was a finicky house-guest who was going to run her fingers over every surface in search of dust and refuse to visit ever again if my preparations were sub-standard. Now I work half-sitting on a mound of Lego, the floor invisible under the make-believe picnic feasts and rabbit warrens. If my kids are home, forget about it, I have to leave if I’m going to see even a single sentence through. Sometimes I need the atmospheric pressure of noise and strangers to push against to dive deep, sometimes the idea of being creative and dressed is just more than I can handle.
What kind of supports do you have that make it possible for you to write?
A partner who believes in me and in equitably sharing the load, parents and in-laws who come stay with us and work their asses off, childcare we pay for (gotta spend a buck to make a buck), the love and example of friends and mentors who inspire and nurture me.
Your book that you co-wrote is out! How exciting to see something you worked on in print. What was your process like with that, in terms of writing, meeting with your subject, and parenting?
I was crafting someone else’s memoir, but so much of my own life is in the book too, birth and death and grief. I started working on The Choice around the same time that I became pregnant with our second child and so the whole process has been inseparable from my life as a mom. I remember going down to San Diego for two rounds of intensive interviews with Dr. Eger–the longest I had ever been away from my older daughter–and feeling the baby’s first kicks. I wrote one of the most important paragraphs of the book a few weeks after she was born, sitting on my bedroom floor hooked up to the breast pump, feeling all of the guilt and all of the hope that soon she’d accept a bottle so I could disappear for a few hours every day to work. Maybe it sounds a little cuckoo, but I was worried that being so immersed in the Holocaust, transmitting a story with so much horror while I was gestating and then nursing a newborn, would be harmful to the baby in some way, so when I was pregnant I would talk to the baby before I started writing each day, I’d picture her surrounded by light, I’d tell her that suffering exists but that the world is a good place, that she’s loved and cherished. And then I’d look at thousands of pictures of families on the arrival platform at Auschwitz in May, 1944, and sob. I also remember having to interrupt an intense interview with Edie’s sister, a fellow surivor, because my oldest was sick and needed Mama. Balancing parenting and the writing life has taught me that art isn’t this other room you visit to feel good or be productive, art and life are inseparable, and if you’re not living yours there’s frankly nothing to make. During the two years I was working on the book my husband and I both lost brothers–his to cancer, mine to suicide. Writing a book about choice and mental freedom in the face of trauma helped me grapple with the big life and death stuff. And I don’t think I could have written the book if I hadn’t been living through such poignant joy and grief.
You’re also a musician. Are you still playing with a band? Do you find that your music and writing fuel each other, or do they compete with each other?
The music and writing come from–and sustain–the same creative impulse. But they compete in terms of time. In those brief hours when both kids are out of the house I have to choose. And because writing is how I put food on the table, it gets prioritized. I thought my kids would enjoy hearing me play cello but they hate anything that gets my attention–my phone, each other, my toast–and it’s just not worth the battle. I haven’t picked up my cello–at all–in over a year. It sucks. Now that we live in a city again and my kids are a little older I’d love to be in a band again, but a band is like a second family, and I already feel like I’m falling short in what I give to my actual family. In the meantime, the nightly lullabies suffice.
Balancing parenting and the writing life has taught me that art isn’t this other room you visit to feel good or be productive, art and life are inseparable, and if you’re not living yours there’s frankly nothing to make.
What are you reading now?
I finally read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and now I’m tearing through Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment.
What’s the funniest/cutest/weirdest thing your kid has ever done?
My oldest daughter’s poetic sensibility just kills me. “Look, Mama, a hammock of birds!” she said. Or, “The night is so black it’s like a crow is staring back at me.” Once: “Mama, you’re the life of the world.” My youngest daughter’s new phrase–after she has made a pond of the cat water and bathed her baby in it, or dumped over the entire recycling bin, or covered herself head to toe in blue ink: “I was curious!” “Mama, I think you’ll want to see this …” big sister called while I was dealing with a pot that had boiled over on the stove. When I found them in the bathroom little sister was standing in a pool of toilet water, a piece of human shit in each hand.
Any advice you think you could offer writers in terms of process, schedule, creativity? Anything that’s really worked for you?
This gig as a collaborative/ghost writer has been a huge blessing because it’s transported me away from all the ego bullshit I used to face in my writing, all that really insipid self-doubt stuff (am I any good, do I have anything to say that’s worth saying, blah, blah, blah). Now I know what it feels like to come to the page freed from those questions and so when I return to “my own” writing some day (I know I will) I’ll have the muscle memory to transcend those ego hurdles, the agility to move more quickly to the useful questions: Is it true? Is it working?
First drafts are hard for me because there’s always such a distance between what’s actually there on the page and what I believe is possible. Sometimes I rush through a first draft just so I can get it out of the way. But it’s usually more satisfying if I can slow down and loosen my grip on the big picture enough to sink deeply into a single scene. My most productive mode is to spend the first part of each writing day revising what I wrote the day or week before, and then plow ahead into new material. I’m a heavy reviser. It’s nice to start the day in my least vulnerable mode and then, when I’m good and warm, nudge myself into the unknown.
I love outlines. I hate writing them but I love writing from them.
Thank you, Esme! I love your words of wisdom and your realistic take on parenting and creativity.
Wendy Schwall says
Esme, What a fabulous interview!!!!! And the photos- What a gift. Thank you Mary for this interview, and thank you Esme. I laughed, I cried, laughed again. hang on every word – am so awed and so proud of you – beautiful, creative, wise- incredible writer, musician and incredible mom. Love you!