THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN, REDUX
DEPRESSION AND FAILURE
By John McNally
Writing a book saved my life.
I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I honestly believe that writing my second book, The Book of Ralph, kept me from acting on darker impulses. During the period that I was working hardest on The Book of Ralph—a comic novel-in-stories, described, after its publication, by authors and critics as “hysterical,” “wistful,” “humorous,” and “hilarious”—I was in the throes of the worst depression I’d ever experienced. My second marriage had hit a critical juncture, and I was deeply, irretrievably (or so it felt) unhappy. This wasn’t my first experience with depression. I’d had problems with depression since grade school, and over the decades the depressions would become more prolonged, more debilitating. I was thirty-seven that year. I’d recently begun a new job, my first tenure-track position. But everything felt as though it were swirling down the drain. My only reprieve was writing.
Despite those descriptions of the book or its overall comic tone, I was not entertained by what I wrote, even though I knew that I was writing a comic novel. I didn’t sit there and laugh when I finished a scene. I burrowed into it in a way that I hadn’t burrowed into anything else I’d written. It was my daily escape, and I felt more in synch with what was happening on the page than what was happening in my life, so much so that I would, on some days, hammer out a short story, revise it several times, and then send it to a magazine by the end of the day. Under normal circumstances, I would never have done that. It usually took two years to finish a short story—as long as six years, in a few instances. But I was feeling confident about the material, probably because I felt no distance from it; my relationship to it was symbiotic. It was my life support, and sending it out into the world as fast as possible was like sending SOS. messages out to sea in a bottle, hoping someone, anyone, would read them and recognize the message for what it was—a cry for help. Interestingly, the stories I sent out were accepted almost as fast as I sent them, which made me speed up the submission process and send out more. When I think about it now, it seems like the act of a madman. During a normal year, I might publish two short stories, three at the most. But in the two-year period that I worked on that book, I published fifteen—eleven in one year alone and four the next (and one of those four was a novella that was more than hundred manuscript pages long).
Where my mind would have wandered had I not had this book to write, I shiver to think. Because when I wasn’t working on the book, I was in another mental space. I remember shopping at Target one day and, without realizing anything was in front of me, pushed my shopping cart into a wall. I mumbled to myself when I walked the halls of my new job. I felt emotionally dead.
In his book On Writing, Stephen King documents his ambivalence, in the aftermath of being hit by a car that required multiple surgeries and months of rehabilitation, about continuing to write that very book: “[H]ow was I supposed to write about dialogue, character, and getting an agent when the most pressing thing in my world was how long until the next dose of Percocet?” But then he continues:
Yet at the same time I felt I’d reached one of those crossroads moments when you’re all out of choices. And I had been in terrible situations before which the writing had helped me get over—had helped me forget myself for at least a little while. Perhaps it would help me again. It seemed ridiculous to think it might be so, given the level of my pain and physical incapacitation, but there was that voice in the back of my mind, both patient and implacable, telling me that, in the words of the Chambers Brothers, Time Has Come Today. It’s possible for me to disobey that voice, but very difficult to disbelieve it.
Writing The Book of Ralph was my lifeline, and I clung to it each day. Wanting to live only in that space in my head that brought this other world alive, I held on tight.
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Pick up a copy of The Promise of Failure at your local indie bookstore or find it HERE.