i heard harold kushner speak last week at the 92nd street y. i have never read his enormously successful book when bad things happen to good people, but my friend--who was a congregational rabbi--spoke highly of him. his theology and writing was incredibly important to her during her studies as a scholar and young rabbi. kushner has written a new book called on disappointment. he studied the life of moses and has distilled three or four or five (or whatever that magic book-selling number is) lessons on how to deal with disappointment.
i was ready to be illuminated. i was ready to love what he had to say. what i got instead of helpful words of wisdom were platitudes that were dressed in terribly anachronistic and sometimes non-sequitur examples. the lecture (and probably the whole book) was just a mess, a waste of time--dare, i say: a disappointment.
i have been dealing with a lot of disappointment as of late. my great american novel/great american creole novel/great novel/good novel/not-as-bad-as-the-other-stuff-that gets-published novel STILL is not published. i admit, i had an idea at some point that i had to write a novel by 30 then 35. now i'm pushing 40 and hoping that it happens before then, but . . . who knows.
there are days like the last few days when the feelings of disappointment have been overwhelming (i couldn't even bring myself to blog when really i've found so much joy in this Instant Publishing Business!) -- yes, i try to keep myself in the game: writing grant applications for my next project, reading books on novel revision, writing notes and working on new stories. but still there has been a crushing feeling of disappointment that i have not been able to overcome with kushner's handy-dandy ideas.
FINALLY, yesterday, the disappointment lifted just a little bit: just enough to make me feel excited about the writing again. i went to the bookstore to buy myself some kind of business or computer book --it's the only kind of reading i find i can do on airplanes. i noticed that the best american short stories edited by ann patchett had just arrived. now, i trolled the website around the time i thought maybe maybe my story published in alaska quarterly review would make the cut .(by the way: this would have been a very long shot. i have a friend whose first published short story won him an o'henry but it just doesn't happen --plus his story is brilliant!) of course, i knew from the publisher's website that i hadn't made it in the book so i picked it up in my grumpy, disappointed way. who were the jokers who got in and not me? (as you can tell the disappointment is also mixed with delusions of grandeur -- i think that's part of the reason i get so disappointed --the standards are very high.) the "jokers" are writers like alice munro (love her), tobias wolff, mary gaitskill and robert coover. okay, so they aren't jokers. and then for some reason, i paged to the back of the book and saw that there was a list titled "100 other distinguished stories of 2005"--an alphabetical list where i found my name and the name of my story Light-skinned-ed Girl! hooray. hooray! (you can download it at my website if you're interested.) that's how my disappointment is cured. that and not attending another kushner lecture (but maybe i will pick up his first book).
