MY SECRET SUCCESS

The Women’s Bookshop Christmas Newsletter came today bringing a dull emotional pain and tears. Yet another year has passed and still my novel is not finished. It’s one of those small deaths bringing the grief. The characters I’ve created, their world from so long ago shimmers, like the dream they were. Never now, to attain any semblance of reality. Never to become black words on paper, images in people’s heads, wet tears on their cheeks or a sharp kick in the guts. I don’t want to let go of them or my identity as a writer. This is what I’ve been since I was a young girl. It’s the thing I was going to become, one day. A writer.

I flick through the newsletter and my grief transforms to anger, bitter spite and a thinly pointed hatred I shoot at particular writers who smile out yet another success. A taste of injustice, perhaps quite unearned, sours in my mouth. I’ve tried to read her and her and I found their writing wanting, thick like porridge, or simply uninteresting. But, it doesn’t matter if I think my writing is better. They are good because they finished their novels. They got their novels accepted by a publisher, printed, distributed and bought and read by an audience. They have an audience. They are someone. “…one of New Zealand’s best-loved writers, famous…” Famous!

Who am I? I’ve become many other things. Identities that weren’t in my child’s mind – researcher, mother, dancer, lecturer, mentor, consultant… things I do for money; things I became in the, what’s now obviously a mistaken, belief that becoming an expert would enable me to earn more per hour and then I could work less hours and have more time for writing. Then I’d have time to do what I truly want to do, my true profession; be my real self. But, no. I scribble this on a pad atop the breadcrumb strewn chopping board. Delaying. Fudging for time. Sending my daughter back to the TV instead of making an event out of making jelly; cleaning up dishes; getting dinner on.

I taste injustice because I imagine these women, these “award-winning” “highly successful local and international” authors don’t sort out their words from the crumbs off the bench. They probably have a-room-of-their-own. They have time and somehow they’ve been gifted freedom from labouring. I imagine they were privileged to begin with: white colonists from well-to-do backgrounds, families with money and that old-English support for women to pen women’s stories. They’re networked. They know people: publishers, editors, kind reviewers. “It’s who you know…” I tell myself. Weak consolation for my sense of failure and disappointment.

Creative New Zealand gave me a grant once, which enabled me to take 3 months off. If only they’d made it 6. I would have finished the novel. It’s nearly finished. It’s been nearly finished ever since then. Since then, I’ve not had more than a few hours at a time to put to it and those few hours are sometimes months apart.

This is stupid, self-deprecating rubbish. Of course I am a writer. The majority of my written poems, short stories and academic writing have been published. I don’t have a collection of rejection slips - this is not the common tale told by made-it authors to encourage wannabes at festivals. In the last year, I’ve had 5 scientific journal articles and 1 chapter in an International Encyclopedia published! And, yet it’s the pages of The Women’s Bookshop newsletter that I want to feature in. To be among those who inspire other women.

The newsletter promises that Barbara Anderson’s Autobiography Getting There is inspiring. Instead of feeling deflated by her prolific success, I decide I should buy her book and find out how she became a published, known, loved and famous writer. Surely there’s a trick or two in there for me. Even those who seek to inspire need inspiration from time to time.