As I approach my five-year anniversary in France, I’ve been thinking a lot about what if I’d made a different choice. What if instead of moving to Collioure, I’d moved to Paris, where they have stop-lights, doctors, and restaurants that are open in January? What if I’d buried the desire to move to France altogether?
This woulda/coulda/shoulda compulsion is one of the occupational hazards of living; the older we get, the more choices we’ve made (or haven’t, because to not make a choice is often the same as making one), the greater our impulse to regret. There are thousands of memes about living in the moment and making the most of our one wild and precious life (thanks Mary Oliver, no pressure), but humans aren’t just living machines, the urge to reflect and analyze comes with having a big, complex human brain.
This is an excerpt of an essay I wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books about Jesse Browner’s exquisite memoir, How Did I Get Here? : Making Peace with the Road Not Taken (HarperWave, 2015). (Disclaimer: I’m fully aware that Jesse Browner is a hetero white guy who possesses the greatest gift of privilege: good options, and the ability to choose among them. I’m sharing this with you, dear readers, to offer evidence that whatever your regrets may be, if you could hop in the way back machine, you probably would have done the same thing, or something similar, anyway. It’s time to say yeah, no, not happening to berating ourselves for past choices. Agreed?)
How Did I Get Here? grew out of an essay Browner published in Poets & Writers (September/October 2012) called “Lives of the Civil Servants: The Choices We Make,” written on the occasion of turning 50. In late 1980s, after graduating from Bard College, Browner was living la vie bohème, reading manuscripts and screenplays for a New York talent agency during the day and bar-hopping at night. In the pre-gentrified Lower East Side, his was a life of edgy, arty glamour where “Just crossing the Bowery was like an exercise in urban warfare, but then you got to the Jones — a tiny box of heat, light, and chatter on a block where a single footstep would echo for weeks.”
One day a friend told him about a freelance translator job at the United Nations where, for a few hours a day, he would sit around waiting to see if anyone required his services (he is fluent in French), for which he would be paid a full day’s wages. Who could pass that up? Browner eventually found himself employed as a full-time linguist with juicy benefits: six weeks of paid vacation, health insurance, rent and education subsidies, a generous pension. He eventually found himself married. He eventually found himself with children and a mortgage. Suddenly, he was squeezing his writing — his life’s work — into the wee hours of the morning. That Browner has produced four well-received novels, as well as a handful of notable translations matters not: By choosing love, tranquility, and comfort, he despairs that he has sold himself out on the most fundamental level.
Browner is a droll tour guide through his self-inflicted agony, diving deep into the broader unanswerable questions everyone eventually asks. What if I’d declined that job offer? Gone to law school? Married him instead of him? Moved to L.A.? Had the baby? Not had the baby? Said no to the in-laws moving into the guest bedroom? Eaten more leafy greens? The longer we live, the more forks appear in our individual roads, and the day arrives, as it did for Browner, in which we wonder how we got here. That it’s rarely a matter of making one splashy choice that changes everything is immaterial. We are almost never the last person to make the final train out of the war-torn city. Most of the time our choices aren’t even choices, but are merely the result of unwitting inertia.
Browner’s struggle to reframe his understanding of his dilemma, and thus absolve himself right there on the page, gives this book heat and relevance. We are given to understand that once he married and fathered his children, his options narrowed. There was no question that the family might move to a less expensive city, or that he and his wife might settle upon one of those new-fangled arrangements whereby she carried the financial burden while he wrote for an agreed-upon number of years. His first commitment was to be a husband and father — a provider.
Like a lot of writers I know, Browner confesses to suffering from acute Geoff Dyer envy. The idiosyncratic Brit (Out of Sheer Rage, Jeff in Venice, But Beautiful) has, writes Browner, “succeeded in living out his youthful fantasy of carefree bohemia, unburdened by responsibility or specialization, and has been rewarded with fame, glamour, and the admiration of his peers. Apparently, Dyer has found a way to live as free as a butterfly, and get paid to do so.”
The high point of How Did I get Here? is Browner’s imaginary sit-down with perhaps the most famous civil servant writer of all, Franz Kafka. He time-travels back to one of Kafka’s favorite literary cafes, where the two have a heart to heart. Kafka is Browner’s civil servant doppelgänger. “I find it very painful to read Kafka’s complaints about the demands of his job, partly because they sound so much like my own.”
But for all his endless kvetching, Kafka had a pretty sweet gig. From reading his letters and diaries, you would think he was shackled to a rickety desk in an airless cubicle next to a co-worker with a communicable disease, but his job as a claims investigator for an insurance company was stimulating and well-compensated, including a workday that ended at 2:00 p.m. He had plenty of time to write, hang out in cafes, and chase the ladies. After reassuring Kafka that his oeuvre will live on into the 20th century, and he will be declared a genius of modern literature, Browner encourages him to stand by his choices. “Either we set out to make our living by our pen by writing what we know will sell enough to feed, clothe, and house us and our families, or we write precisely what suits us and we stop complaining.”
At the end of Browner’s imaginary conversation with Kafka, he comes to the conclusion that the great tortured modernist kept his civil servant job because a part of him liked it. Even though he believed it was keeping him from the most important thing in his life, his work. “The only possible Kafka was the Kafka who happened,” he writes.
Browner and I don’t know each other (although he thanks me in his Acknowledgements for helping crowd-source his research — I answered a query he posted on Facebook), but we shared an editor at Bloomsbury for years, and I reviewed his first novel Conglomeros. At that juncture, in 1992, I was a few years down the road he had not taken.
In 1990, I published my first book and won a literary award, and the sum of the advance and the prize money equaled what I made in a year at the arts non-profit where I worked. This was it, I thought, my life as a writer has begun! I quit my job and haven’t had one since. Everything has gone into my writing. I had one child because I knew my then-husband, an independent filmmaker, and I wouldn’t be able to afford to raise more. (As an only child of an only child, I didn’t feel the urge some people possess to ensure their children have siblings.) After we divorced (two starving artists in one household), I supported myself, and then after I remarried, a new husband and his two children, all by my pen. My self-imposed rule for the many magazine assignments I accepted in order to make ends meet was that I needed to find some aspect of the story compelling. I refused to take just anything, and most of the time I didn’t have to. There was a lot of Top Ramen in my life. There were a lot of book advances that were generous, but not enough to ensure the publishing house threw everything they had into promoting my book. I had an advice column for a woman’s magazine. I drove hundreds of miles to teach workshops for $150 a pop. Sometimes, when I was lucky, I would have a big magazine piece due, a book review due, an essay due for an anthology and, like Browner, I found myself getting up in the wee hours to work on my novels. Needless to say, there were no juicy civil service-style benefits, aside from my hours being my own.
My tortured questions are the exact opposite of Browner’s: Would my writing have been better if I hadn’t relied on it to support myself and my family? If I had been able to write whatever I wanted, even if I only had a few hours a day in which to do it, would the work have been worthier? All it takes is one big novel to make a career — would I have been the next Harper Lee had I not taken Condé Nast Traveler up on their offer to send me to Palau for a scuba diving story? It’s not like I haven’t worked my ass off: for two decades I’ve practiced my craft, written from the heart, revised, revised, revised. And still, I am not Donna Tartt.
Meanwhile, the great irony is that though Browner took one path, and I took the other, our careers aren’t all that dissimilar. We are, I’m bound to say, mid-listers, as are the vast majority of writers working today. We are generally well-respected, but no one’s panting after our next books. Each of us continues to struggle.
How Did I Get Here? is by turns hilarious, profound, and unexpected, and leaves us to understand that while our lives may have wound up on a different shore than the one we’d set our sights on, that’s not such a bad thing. The only possible us is the us who happened.
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