"... and I’d think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think 'well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.' Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me."
That's Elizabeth Wurtzel trying to give a believable answer to the question why she went from the life of a writer into the big law firm lawyer's life. So you think, with all my free time I could be raising 5 kids, so.... I'll go to law school and work in a big law firm?
Actually, I understand the logic. When you are purely a writer, you are hanging around the house a lot. You can feel very odd and at loose ends. If the house is empty, you may think, I could be raising kids what with all the time I spend loafing and moping, but that doesn't mean you want to raise kids (who you must know will be demanding during your creative spurts as well as your down time). It just means, it's a weird way to live, on your own at home. Maybe what you need is not other human beings in the house, but to get out of the house, to have a life that has more to do with interacting with adults and affecting the network of adult activities. Law is the perfect entree.
And a writer needs something to write about. You may venture out into that complex world of adult enterprises and eventually bring it all back home, where you can write again. We were just talking about the way Bill Ayers signed up as a merchant seaman, thinking he'd gather the material he to write a great novel. Was Ayers thinking about Herman Melville? Joseph Conrad? Was Wurtzel thinking about Scott Turow?
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I thought she went to law school as her writing career was kaput, and she had/has a large amount of debt. Maybe I'm offbase...
"When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done."
This is certainly true for me.
In a previous life in the pizza delivery business, I found it was true for the business as well. When the place was overstaffed for the business at hand, service suffered. Too many people, not enough to do, so no one did anything with any urgency.
Good for her for getting a new gig. Lord knows, her writing career wasn't going anywhere and she never produced anything worth reading anyway.
Maybe some other lame 90s pop culture figures can go to law school also. Have the guys from Matchbox Twenty taken their LSATs yet?
Can someone tell me if her book specifically directed at women was a good read?
I've read everything else she wrote, but I couldn't get past the title of that one.
I also understand the logic, but I don't understand continuing to hang around the house when the ideas have vanished.
My legal experience has been limited to the receiving end, so to speak. Similar exploits have provided writers lots of usable material over the years. But attending law school to find your voice seems to be a lot like getting a tat saying 'Struggle Builds Character' instead of doing some real struggling at something constructive.
Removing her pajamas would have been cheaper than law school.
"In your pajamas with nothing to do."
Sounds like a pretty sweet life to me. Ah well the grass is always greener you know.
I'm trying to finish my first book, and find myself spending too much time at Althouse.
Ayers wanted to be Poe's hallucinatory A. Gordon Pym, the stowaway cannibal who seeks entrance to the Hollow Earth and discovers a race of jet-black Antarctic savages.
I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog.
Thurber said he never did anything worthwhile until he started raising Scotties.
So thhhaaats what artsy types do for a mid-life crisis.
AJ,
It sounds like a sweet life, but if she's not writing...time to do something useful.
I understand her work ethic completely! I do best with a deadline.
Althouse likes when I just lounge around all day in nothing but my pajamas.
"The only thing for me at home is my dog, really. If I didn’t have a dog, I could live in the office."
Either have two or more dogs or have none at all. The thing dogs want most is other dogs. Humans who imagine they can meet that specific canine need, offering nothing more than their own human companionship, are suffering from delusions of grandeur.
I don't think it's delusional to rescue a single dog and think it's going to be better off getting plenty of exercise and affection versus spending God knows how long in a crate. Talk about the perfect being the enemy of the good.
Wurtzel always has struck me as a sort of prostitute, so I think it makes sense for her to find a more lucrative way to sell her wares. She wasn't writing literature, and she probably won't be practicing law. Selling Elizabeth Wurtzel seems to be her thing.
PatCa:
I am looking forward to the day when there are no deadlines. Are we in a depression yet? Heh.
I've been enjoying your recent commenting, Jen Bradford - terse, controlled, perceptive, humorous.
I agree that it isn't delusional to think that rescuing a dog from a shelter is generally a good thing. My point is - why stop there? Which is what it sounds to me like Elizabeth Wurtzel has done. Clearly there are exceptions to my two-or-more-dog rule and I could easily be mistaken about Wurtzel. Perhaps, for example, she has an elderly dog who is intolerant of other dogs.
Or maybe she is, in fact, for her dog, bitch enough all by her lonesome.
My husband's been working from home for a decade now. While I do some on-site stuff, on average it's not more than 10-12 hours a week, and I work the majority of hours from home. This year, I'm homeschooling my son, so he does most of HIS work here, too. One trick I've learned is to get dressed in the morning (dressed up is not required, of course), if anyone finds that helpful.
Historically, I'm better with deadlines, too, and that was exacerbated by a few years of working nightside at a newspaper, in charge of getting stuff to the press in time. Sometimes I wish that weren't true so much. However, I will say I've gotten better about it over the past few years, and taking on homeschooling my child on top of everything else is certainly accelerating that process!!!!!!!!!!!
Well Meade, that was partly defensiveness on my part. The shelter said my dog was terrific with other dogs, cats and children, and she is none of the above. And God knows why, but she seems to think I am all that and a bag of chips. I suspect another dog would not be met with grateful relief, but am admittedly not prepared to risk it. Thanks for the nice remarks.
Meade: Doesn't that depend on the breed, first, and all the circumstances of the owner? I'm not sure I'd agree with your statement globally.
That said, I personally believe your statement is 100% true of pugs, for example, the breed of our own dogs (though, sadly, one of them, at 16, is surely nearing the end, which means the youngest, the 11-year-old, will spend some time as an only).
The new "cult of experience" involves spending a few years in the Peace corps or working for an NGO, then writing fiction based on your experience. There's nothing illegimate about this, in my view.
Much of this fiction is reasonably good. Tom Bissell is one such author to check out, for those interested.
When the writer is an irredeemable narcissist, on the other hand, there may only be so much material you can explore. Some contain multitudes, others do not.
Wurtzel has fully explored the alternative of paying someone to listen to her talk about herself (that is to say, a shrink), but the exhibitionism factor in such a circumstance is really rather low.
As for working from home, I have to have a deadline to be worth a damn. If I have a show, I will work 15 hour days without batting an eye. If not, I can pretend to be doing "research" indefinitely, or will just circle the runway endlessly and not finish anything. The problem is that it's hard to find something that fills those phases without derailing any hope of working like a maniac over a sustained period of time eventually. But in my case that has meant some pretty pathetic jobs.
And even though Wurtzel is sort of non-serious, we cannot underestimate the effect of 9/11 on artists. We discussed this in my writer's group many times. It just felt trivial and self-indulgent to be home in your pj's worrying about your art when the world had just blown up, and was continuing to blow up.
The literary world post 9-11 is now either thematically or explicitly political, and maybe that just didn't fit her any more.
So I kind of respect her for going to law school and for sobering up.
Since Wurtzel is enduringly trivial and self indulgent, and never aspired to create "art" in the first place, I'd be reluctant to credit her with that sort of epiphany.
It's been my experience that dogs usually work out more of their social ordering for themselves when humans interfere less. Unfortunately, for too many dog owners, their dogs are surrogate children, or worse - spouses, and they want all the children to always play nicely and share and be fair.
But dogs have to be dogs which sometimes means growling, snapping, stealing, dominating, etc. Top dog, underdog. It's their nature. Someone has to be alpha. Once that is established, everyone tends to settle in... until, of course, it needs to be reestablished.
reader iam, Pugs are great. Time for your next adoption?
JB, you ARE all that and a bag of chips - Alpha Rescue Heroine - and I personally salute you.
Here, I'll make another wild blanket statement: All dogs should be trained to crate. For a host of reasons, but mainly because it's just so doggone civilized for them, and teenagers, and lawyer/writers, to have rooms of their own - somewhere the rest of us can send them when they're being... difficult.
I need to keep trying with the dog park. Off-leash she is somewhat better, but still acts like a Mama's girl and hangs by me instead of socializing. She was in an open-space shelter in Brooklyn when I adopted her, just sprawled out with froggy legs while 20 dogs ran in circles around her. So I know she can handle it, but like me she seems flummoxed about what to do after hello.
patca: "The literary world post 9-11 is now either thematically or explicitly political..."
Couldn't disagree with you more.
On that logic, Harriett Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the greatest novel of all time. It probably had the most impact, in its day. Is it a timeless masterpiece that touches or moves anyone now? Not exactly.
There was a lot of pressure on artists in the 1930s, when the Soviet Union still seemed like it might turn out well and communism was very trendy, for artists to do "socially relevant." This led not only to the Stalinist hatred of any art that did not serve the mythos of the state, but to the little-remembered kitschy "heroic" art favored by Hitler, as well as the Nazis burning of books.
It's the same logic decried by Edgar Allan Poe in his criticism of the Boston literary soirees of the 1840s, which said all art ought to be "uplifting" or otherwise serve as medicine to heal the wounds of the world.
You end up with so-called subversive art like "Piss Christ" by Andres Serrano, and in literature Nicholson Baker's novel in which he more or less masturbates over his dream of assassinating George W. Bush, even "The Turner Diaries" (which is, after meant to serve a cause), etcetera.
None of which tells the targeted audience anything they didn't already know. But of course, for some, that's exactly what they want: to be told what they already know.
If you think you need obvious "social relevance" or you don't want to "waste your time", try, oh, "Disgrace" by J.M. Coetzee, "The Plague" by Albert Camus, "Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed." But these may not tell you what you want to hear.
Sounds to me like all she needs is some good old fashioned butt-sniffing.
Wurtzel? It's worth a try.
reader,
Talkin about your pugs again.
And, again you're noting that they shouldn't be alone.
That certainly is true of mine.
Ignacio,
I have no idea what your point is; either you have misunderstood mine or I have misunderstood yours.
I'm watching baseball instead.
Talk about falling up...
The Accused: Elizabeth Wurtzel—Crime Against Journalism—Plagiarism.
Rap Sheet-In 1988, Wurtzel was accused of lifting passages from another writer's work in her work in The Dallas Morning News.
Plea--None.
Sentence--Fired from The Dallas Morning News.
Afterlife--After her firing, Wurtzel managed to become the music critic for New York, The New Yorker, and publish the memoir Prozac Nation in 1997. (That book also faced accusations of fabrications).
In 2004, Wurtzel was accepted by Yale Law School.
Hollywood Ending--The film version of Wurtzel's Prozac Nation was made in 2001 but didn't appear in the U.S. until 2005 when it went direct to cable.
...from an article titled "The Liars Club"
1jpb: Am I supposed to know who you are, based on that comment? Another handle, maybe? No snark, just curious, on account of your curious comment. Because I don't think I've talked about my pugs all that often, here, and not at all recently, anywhere (and not all that often, in context, period, online). reader_iam has an e-mail , you know, readily available. And--please don't be offended--I don't, these days, have so much time for guessing games (and, for some time now, have not had such time) and, therefore, that skill set, naturally enough, has declined accordingly.
If I should know who you are, you should take no offense, but rather address it as indicated. (Trust me, I'll be suitably, and sincerely, abject, as appropriate.)
Wait. Unless.
Naah. Surely not.
(?)
billy ayres on a boat?
jack london- 'the iron heel'
or ...if u prefer...'call of the wild'...
w/pug /of course!
Meade says:
"Either have two or more dogs or have none at all. The thing dogs want most is other dogs. Humans who imagine they can meet that specific canine need, offering nothing more than their own human companionship, are suffering from delusions of grandeur."
It's so great when someone like Meade tells us how wrong we really are. There's so much to be wrong about, but fortunately there are plenty of people like Meade to set us straight.
Jen, keep going to the dog park - it does a rescue dog worlds of good to socialize.
We adopted one such dog, and had only him for about 18 months before adopting a dachshund, most definately NOT a rescue dog. The first one took awhile to adjust; he had enjoyed being the center of the universe, and the little weenie dog is alpha. But they're inseparable now, and are great pals. The weenie dog would hate to be the only dog; he loves being in a pack.
reader, I can recall a few times you've referenced the pugs, in threads with dog talk. Nothing specific comes to mind, but a pug lover would have noticed it, yes?
David, you are so right.
I like how raising kids is equated with doing nothing...
Writing certainly isn't very easy while raising children, and it might be easier for a lawyer.
And pugs are awesome. They're like miniature Labs. The are always hungry and like to fetch.
Dogs' place in the universe, read Adam's Task, the essays on Washoe and ``How to Say Fetch!''.
If it makes sense to you, you can use Koehler.
con't
Hearne's Animal Happiness and Bandit are worthwhile too, both glossed on the Amazon page by an uncomprehending critic ``A moving exploration of animals and their emotions'' and ``The heart-warming true story of one dog's rescue from death row.''
It shows what happens when truth encounters the popular press.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wurtzel#Controversy
Ann said...
"We were just talking about the way Bill Ayers signed up as a merchant seaman..."
When did this happen? I find the thought of Bill Ayers signing up to be a merchant seaman beyond reasonable belief.
That's about a close to being in the Navy as it gets. I went to Viet Nam on a merchant marine vessel. On the USS William Weigel.
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