The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton

Author:Meg Waite Clayton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2008-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

ALL THAT FALL, even with so much going on, I worked on “Michelangelo's Ghost,” revising and revising. As the Chicago Eight became the Chicago Seven, as two million people participated in the first moratorium against the war, as others were going off to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or reading The Godfather or The Andromeda Strain, I sat at my typewriter. The amazing thing was I didn't want to do anything else. I didn't want to go shopping or to the movies, I didn't want to watch That Girl or Laugh-In or even Johnny Carson, which I'd always loved. And I wasn't alone. Brett was revising her novel, Linda started a new story, and Ally traded in her “Not Some Duck” for a porcupine who was at least moving out of her journal onto full pages in a way the duck never really had. Even Kath was writing: gut-wrenching journal entries that were melodramatic and awful, that made me want to talk her into leaving Lee, just dumping him and starting over. But even now, with divorce not the taboo it was back then, it's a hard thing to tell a friend you think her marriage is over. It's impossible, really. What if you're wrong and she leaves him when the next day he might have dumped the girlfriend and, having gotten that out of his system, gone back to life with her and old age and all the till-death-do-us-part happily-ever-after she'd hoped for at the altar on her wedding day? Which was the way Kath's sad melodrama of a story would end if she ever finished it, if she ever got beyond ideas jotted in her journal, you could tell that from the little she'd written. As if by writing it she could make it true.

I'm not even sure now how we'd gotten to the point that we were all writing. I know writers who have a talisman or a ritual to make writing easier: bunny slippers they wear or a certain candle they always burn when they're writing; putting pen to paper at sunrise, or noon, or 11:00 P.M.; sitting in a certain chair in a favorite café or walking their dog on the beach first; playing one song on their iPod on infinite repeat for one novel, then choosing another song for the next. But that always strikes me as dicey. What if that café table is taken? What if the dog you walk on the beach eats your bunny slippers? What if your iPod dies? And the fact is, we were mothers and wives; if we waited for the stars to align just so, we'd still be waiting.

I suppose what we did was park our butts down and write any moment and any place our children were otherwise occupied. We got up early and wrote while our households slept. We carried journals and pens and even manuscripts in our purses, and if the children fell asleep in the car on the way to the

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