On Writing My Faust Novel

I started writing Clutch at the end of a teaching fellowship in Leipzig, Germany, in spring 2023. When classes ended, my department told me I could stay in my borrowed flat until the end of finals. No teaching, just fielding student questions as they arose, waiting for their term papers. Free time was a tantalizing prospect for someone who’d adhered to the rigid schedule of quarterly literary magazine production for most of her professional life.

(How and Why to Create Your Own Walking Writing Retreat.)

Some other person would’ve taken the 90-minute train to Berlin and bopped around that magical city for the month; I’d also eyed Eurorail passes, imagining the cobblestones and lacy turrets of Prague and Budapest and Vienna, not so far away. But no, I had an idea about a story: Five friends reunited on a girl’s trip, tripping on mushrooms in the California desert. (Reader, I perhaps have some personal experience with this sort of holiday.) I wanted to see where it went.

And so I stayed in my pajamas for a week, then another. Ten days and 10,000 words later (Note: This is faster than I’d ever written anything; typically I’m a slowpoke at the keyboard), I thought I had written a long short story; my agent said she thought it was the start of the novel. I was equal parts frightened and exhilarated by her assessment, and with it, I returned to America. I had no idea what I was stepping into.

It was a happy reunion with my partner, except… he was scary skinny, 60 pounds lighter than he’d been a year before (and this was a man who did not have 60 pounds to give). He had gotten a bad bout of Covid the prior summer, despite his vax, and after initial symptoms had cleared, a new set of bugaboos arrived, things that had compounded while I was away.

Along with the weight loss, his reading comprehension had withered: He’d read a paragraph, and by the end of it, had forgotten the beginning, and so he’d have to start again. For some, this might have been a mere frustration, rather than a life-altering development, but he is an Modernist literature scholar who wrote his doctorate on Joyce’s revisions. (And you thought getting through Finnegan’s Wake once was hard!) Reading was important.

Fridays, after being on campus Tuesday through Thursday, his body felt worse, he told me, than after he’d run the Dublin Marathon; Friday and Saturday he was like a wet noodle or a drying worm—something spineless and splayed out and probably writhing. By Sunday he’d perk up marginally, only to get dragged by the work week anew.

I hadn’t realized how bad things were when I’d been in Leipzig. We were both shitty on the phone; often I wouldn’t get him on the horn until 1am local time, and by that point I just wanted to make sure that nothing had caught on fire over the course of the day (we had a new house in New Jersey and one very, very old car). On those calls, he couldn’t articulate and perhaps I didn’t want to hear how bad things were for him.

What would he have said: I lost another two pounds this week? Every moment that I’m not working I am sleeping? And what could I’ve done about it from Germany? Airmailed peanut butter? No, I was too busy listening to Bach motets and channeling the voice of the omniscient narrator that’d eventually guide readers through Clutch to really face what was going on at home.

But seeing—with my own two eyes, no Zoom cameras mediating the view—how much trouble he was in, I was snapped back to reality. And to literature: I thought of and tried not to think of Faust. I had Goethe on the brain that spring: The German author had studied in Leipzig in the 1760s, and I had eaten several meals in an ancient cellar restaurant that had purportedly been a favorite of his university days; he wrote it into Faust. The waitstaff included a few men dressed head-to-toe in red that liked to slink up to tables and yell. A gimmicky fright for the tourists, but it seemed to me that their sudden, cackling appearance tableside was also meant to remind us that our tasty meals came at a price.

Logically, I understood the nature of coincidence, but I couldn’t help but wonder if my writing, going so well, was some kind of even trade, a Faust-style bargain in our marriage. Here, I’ll take a good stretch of writing in exchange for your health and happiness. I hated that possibility, and so I shoved it off and flew into caretaking mode. All the domestic labor my husband had been muddling through on his own was heaped onto my plate: house cleaning and yardwork and cooking and shopping and dog walks quickly took hours out of every day; I thought of Betty Friedan and then stopped thinking about her, the hand-to-hand combat of our wild half-acre yard was more ax-wielding homesteader than Feminine Mystique.

Meanwhile, while he was limping through the school day on campus, I read and wrote and read and wrote with more focus than I’d ever thought I could muster. After plowing through several ensemble novels—think Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything—I had a new sense of how to manage a group of protagonists (which was different than how I’d managed my last ensemble novel, as The Cactus League had taken its cues from team sports), and after a few weeks of stomping around my office, writing pages and throwing them away, the structure of Clutch snapped into place. Our yard, only semi-tamed, was annoying the neighbors, and our dog, 60 pounds of fluff, was always shedding tumbleweeds across the rugs, but the writing, at least, was going great.

That summer, the first we spent in our new New Jersey home (we’d swapped a swish-but-financially-unsustainable apartment in Manhattan for a mortgage in the burbs), I treated writing like a job, which felt strange and wonderful, as my few other unemployed summers were hectic with job applications or money woes or big transitions. Meanwhile, my husband’s summer teaching load was relatively light, but he didn’t have energy to do much beyond it: worm in summer linen.

That was okay, I told myself: We hated the beach! I didn’t need to go on vacation, I’d just spent six months in Europe! When I rose hours before him (he was sleeping 11 or 12 hours a night, as teaching allowed), I saw it as time to ignore him, to write without guilt. By the end of my writing day and domestic duties and mounting back pain (a story for another essay: breaking one’s back while doing the laundry; if the sacrum is truly the strongest bone in the body, I have little faith in the skeleton), I’d often match his exhaustion. The yard inched back toward untamed; I was humbled by the local groundhogs and the speed with which invasive vines could grow. I had just turned 40 and he was 42, but we might as well have been octogenarians, the way we sprawled across the sofa at the end of each day, the way we each felt physically wrecked.

From the couch, I reminded myself: This was the life I wanted. A book unfolding itself before me, the time and space and creative capacity to turn a spark to crackling kindling to what I hoped would become a roaring flame. Sure, there was my husband’s illness and the groundhogs and my own back pain, but I didn’t want to wonder too deeply about what I’d sacrificed so that I could charge forward on the page, and so I shut it out.

In our big, suburban kitchen I cooked more elaborate, wholesome, caloric meals: panzanella salads with farmstand tomatoes and local cheese, bowls of my favorite cherries, available for only a few weeks each summer… as if healthy, Instagrammable dinners could make me forget about my husband’s illness and my broken back. I was also trying to shut out the cellar restaurant, those big platters of roast meat and the men in red and the compromises I’d made. To anyone who listened to my brag about Jersey tomatoes that summer: Please accept my apologies. I was desperate.

At the end of the summer, my husband and I drove to the mountains of western North Carolina where I’d have another guest teaching appointment. For 10 days we slow-walked in the mountains, waded in pools below waterfalls, cooked meals with friends, felt generally hopeful. At the end of his stay, I sent the hubs and the dog north in a rental car, and we began our respective school years. I would spend the two months of my teaching gig renting a small octagonal cabin, 7,000 feet above sea level. The views were stultifyingly beautiful, the cabin’s eastern exposure a wall of windows overlooking undulating green mountains.

Each morning, I wanted to see the sun rise over those mountains, almost as badly as I wanted to finish my book, the pages of which were really flying now. I’d wake in the dark, sit at the kitchen table, and write as the day lightened out of those broad windows. I had six, seven hours of writing time before I even had to think about my late-afternoon class.

Did I know where the story was going? For all the structural guidance Jaffe and McCarthy had offered, both writers ended (spoiler alert) their ensemble novels with a fatal fall. I loved both books, but the matchy matchy conclusions of a woman with a broken neck felt disappointing; by sacrificing one of their respective groups for a thrilling climax, they’d ventured into deus ex machina territory. I knew I needed the women in my book to survive their lives; if Clutch ended up feeling deus ex machina, well, I’d be praying to a different deus. There was a certain desperation in my conviction; my own fall, the broken back my doctor told me was slowly healing on its own, had absolutely, entirely, certainly nothing to do with my insistence.

When I called home—easier now than in Germany, as we were in the same time zone—I hoped that maybe things would be better for my partner, as they had become for me. They were not. If anything, his fatigue had worsened. Student papers were taking longer to mark; whenever he was not working, he slept. I felt for him, but I also wanted him to feel for me, to be happy that I had this view and was making such progress on my manuscript. Or, if he couldn’t do that, a part of me wanted to hold my happiness. Protect it. And so we talked less, and I thought of Faust more.

It was the dog, a sweet diva of a mutt, who dealt the final blow to my charmed Appalachian sojourn: She was acting out, agitated at his illness and my absence. She bit another dog, she broke several teeth chewing at the door of her crate, she had an ominous lump on her neck. My husband reported she’d need emergency dental surgery; they’d cut out the neck growth while she was under. We had planned a road trip for the end of my teaching appointment, leaf peeping along the Blue Ridge Parkway, but that kind of pleasure now seemed impossible. As soon as my class was done, I drove home, forgoing the pretty parkway for 10 hours of clogged interstate.

The dog returned from the vet with fewer teeth, a cancer diagnosis, and an inflatable new-alternative clown collar that made her look Flemish. I returned to cooking protein-laden, veggie-forward meals; we added Muscle Milk to my husband’s diet, trying to push his weight up the scale. I cleaned and raked leaves and bought peanut butter in four-pound increments. My recent life in North Carolina—the sunrise writing sessions, the staggering beauty of the mountains—slid into the gray of a New Jersey November, of domestic routines, of research into long Covid clinics and alternative therapies, of nursing the dog and my partner and myself. When I could, I wrote, desperately, toward the end of my story.

The ending I arrived at wasn’t right, of course. Too bleak. I tried again, adding a little light to its last notes. After the end, I went back to the beginning. Following the fast first draft—nine months, tip to tail—I’d spend another season revising the manuscript for submission to editors, then a year and a half wresting revisions into the book’s final shape (to the typesetter who had to reckon with my five rounds of page proofs revisions: I apologize).

During that time, my husband and I both found new doctors and physical therapists and routines that preserved energy and better managed pain. Slowly, we regained strength—maybe we were 70-somethings, rather than octogenarians at the end of the day, though we continued to collapse into the sofa each night. We remained alone in our pain, but slowly we began to better understand the other’s discomfort, the other’s efforts at healing. The yard looked better, then worse again. The dog got old, and healthy, and continued to shed with abandon.

Creating Clutch had given me a new understanding of what I was capable of as a writer, but in time I also came to see it as a wildly selfish act. Writing it had taught me about the possibilities of character and structure and my creative reach, but it also showed me what in sickness and in health meant when the rubber met the road. Because even as we were getting better, and my writing tipped from manic inspiration into the slow, steady work of revision, and then to the humility of staring at a new and blank page, I knew—I’d never forget—that half a world away there was a cellar restaurant, with its menacing red-suited waiter and his knives just waiting for his next shift.

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