Chapter 128: Telling the Hardest Story of All
Much as I have written about the power that comes from a story that a writer needs to tell, there are stories that many writers, though steeped in a particular experience, cannot bring themselves to tell. I know this from personal experience and suffice it to say that the prospect of reliving a period of profound pain and terror is something that I have and suspect always will avoid.
That is why I admire writers who rather than avoid experiencing the sadness again, plunge back in – to make sense of what they saw and often lived. Writers like my friend and colleague James G. Robinson.
In 2017 James’ son, Nadav, died. He was five years old and was born with a congenital heart condition that imperiled his life from the outset. James and his wife Tali had two other sons and together the family lived in the face of Nadav’s illness and what it portended. Emphasis on lived.
James is Director of Data Products at The New York Times, and is perhaps the wisest and most incisive person I know when it comes to understanding audiences. It’s what he brings to the classes we’ve been teaching for over ten years. After Nadav’s death, James planned a family cross country road trip, replete with family-generated playlist, and wrote about it for the Times’ Travel Section.
Its final passage floored me: For me, returning was heartbreaking. We stopped for gas in a particularly gritty part of New Jersey (not as cheap as it used to be) and everything I’d left behind started rushing back.
I started the New York playlist at the top of the Outerbridge Crossing, Frank Sinatra crooning his lungs out in the jostling traffic; and whether by perfect planning or blind luck the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” kicked in just as we hit the Verrazano-Narrows and left Staten Island.
And as we climbed the span, and I saw the city arise out of the gray fog, I burst into tears.
James could not leave the story there. He wanted, needed to write a book about Nadav, and his life. This did not come easily – not in the writing, and not in finding a way to get it read. In a business where the default response to most ideas is “no” James encountered a publishing world uneasy with the prospect of a book about the death of a child. James is not one to give in so easily. Months turned into years. And now his book, More Than We Expected: Five Years With a Remarkable Child, has just been published.
James and I have talked a lot about the book over the years. But I still had questions. Beginning with the most obvious: Why did you need to tell this story?
James replied: “This question has two parts. Why I needed to write it, and why I needed to publish it.
“A year after Nadav died, I started staying late after work to write. Every evening, I’d park myself in the empty NYT cafeteria, and craft a thousand-word essay about the things we’d experienced in Nadav’s life. The topics ranged widely: “Fear”, “Anatomy”, “Music”, “Food”, “Faith”. My primary motivation was simply getting these memories out of my brain. As I wrote at the time:
“Part of it, I’m sure, is just general, unfocused grief. But part of it is also my fear that if I don’t keep rehearsing all of the memories I have, they’ll be lost. Perhaps if I can get them down on paper, I can let them take a break from my brain; they’ll be visitors, not tenants. Into the book they go, and there you stay, permanently, until I need you. In the meantime, get out of my head.”
“As you can tell from that passage, I already had a hunch that these essays might become a book. I’d written the Travel piece for the Times which had shown me (1) that my writing was at a high enough level to be published and (2) that our story could resonate with others. And along the way, the need to have it published became more and more important to me.
“Part of this had to do with reaching an audience. I suspected that the discipline of pulling these disparate threads together in the service of a coherent narrative might help me make better sense of it all. And perhaps, like the Travel story, sharing what we’d been through could help others in similar situations. I’d become comfortable telling strangers about what we’d been through. All too often, I’d discover, they had some similar hidden pain to share as well.
“But most of all, I felt that being published would grant Nadav’s life a certain permanence. It meant that my story would be there for his surviving brothers when they were old enough to understand it -- even if I wasn’t. And by reaching people who’d never met Nadav, the book would not just honor his memory -- it might somehow help him live on.
I wanted to know what was hardest about telling this story. And what brought him joy.
“The hardest thing about writing the book was finding the emotional energy,” he replied. “Immersing myself in the past was gratifying; it conjured up long-lost memories, making them real in my mind as I figured out how to put them on the page. But it was also like unconsciously dragging around an anchor every day. After just a few hours, I’d find myself utterly drained.
“And everything in publishing takes so long, adding to my exhaustion. Just producing a first draft that I felt comfortable circulating to agents took nearly two years. Landing an agent (which involved another major revision) took even longer. And even though getting a book contract is something to celebrate, the last stage of the process might have been the most stressful. In retrospect, it may not have been the healthiest environment in which to process grief.
“That said, it was completely worth it. And not just for the sheer thrill of holding a printed book in my hands. The best part of the process is when you finally figure something out on the page, you get the phrasing just right, and it just clicks. At its best, the words just flow out of you, like the final pieces of a baffling puzzle finally falling into place.
“Some of my favorite writing in the book comes in Chapter 53, which I wrote in a single sitting. It’s a memory from my childhood that I’d never considered in the context of Nadav’s life, but it gets everything I wanted to say right, in a way I’d never realized before. And I haven’t changed a word.”
Finally, I knew that deciding how to tell the story did not come easily or quickly. How, I wanted to know, did he arrive at the way he chose to tell it.
He replied, “When I started out, I had no idea how to write a book. I began with essays, which have always been my most comfortable form of writing. But when I circulated what was essentially an essay collection to prospective agents, the feedback was consistent: this had to become a narrative.
“So I decided to see how what I’d written might look if I arranged it chronologically. I loaded all of the essays into a great piece of software called Scrivener, which allowed me to chop them up into paragraphs. Then, using emails, photos and medical records, I labeled each paragraph with the date it happened. Finally, I sorted the paragraphs chronologically.
“I think this process had two big advantages. First, it made it completely obvious what was missing: mostly, important context for the things that had occurred, and the decisions we’d made. So I wrote through the work, filling in the mortar between the bricks I’d laid. Hopefully this made it far easier for readers to follow and understand.
“The second effect is more subtle, but I think just as important. Since the paragraphs from my original essays are now scattered throughout the text, their original points of coherence remain. If I’m right, this makes for a much more layered and nuanced effect, helping to preserve consistent themes throughout the book. For instance: the ideas from my original essay on “Fear” keep popping up, as does “Faith” -- still connected like strands of gluten in a braided challah.
“I have no idea if this actually works in practice, because I’ve long since lost any objective detachment from my writing. But I hope it does. I suppose that this is the most fun part -- to let the story loose in the wild, and see it anew through the readers’ eyes.”
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We’ll be away for a few weeks. Blame it on a very very leaky heart valve that needs repairing. We’ll be back on December 1st. In the meantime, early wishes for a very happy Thanksgiving