Chapter 98: A (Writing) Life After the Law

Years ago my wife had a colleague who left a very good job at The New York Times for Wall Street, which had been his beat. “The income potential,” he told her, “is certainly handsome.”

I still recall the care he took with the phrasing, in particular the words potential and handsome. He didn’t say what they both knew he meant to say: I WANNA BE RICH LIKE PEOPLE I AM REPORTING ABOUT!!!. Instead, he felt compelled to take a circuitous route, one that veered toward but never quite ended apologetically. 

Not that he needed to. People leave the writing life all the time. They leave for lots of good reasons: glass ceilings that block advancement; boredom with work that never quite became what they’d hoped it might; and money. Money matters and it’s too often the case that writers and journalists are poorly paid relative to those with similar educations and careers.

It is easy to care less about the money when you are young – take it from someone whose starting salary in 1976 at a small newspaper in New Jersey was $9500, that’s annually not monthly. Things change when life gets more complicated – a partner, and especially kids. It's hard to maintain a passion for work when the bills pile up and you hear that there’s an opening for a communications specialist at double your take-home pay. 

Young writers are aware of this. Perhaps channeling their parents or college classmates whose seasonal bonuses far eclipse their own anticipated yearly pay, students will sometimes lament that they will never get rich being writers. 

This is, for the most part, true. Writing in general, and journalism in particular is not a life likely to include such words as Maserati or Hamptons beach house, unless you’re invited to a friend’s for the weekend.

When they mention this, it’s generally done to seek reassurance that they haven’t made a terrible mistake in their chosen careers. I assure them they have not. I tell them that while wealth may not necessarily be in their future, they will nonetheless have careers that others with far greater means will envy.

Yes, you will be asked: “are you still working at that paper?” And, “have you written anything I might have read?” It will never stop, so keep your guard up with strangers and remind yourself that even as they ask questions that suggest interest but whose effect is to undermine, what many are really thinking is: I wish I could be doing that too. I like to write. And least I used to, before…

Not that most ever will. It is the rare person who leaves the comfort and security of a prestigious career with a handsome income potential to embark on a career with all the uncertainties of writing.

So it was that a few months ago my wife suggested a novel I might like: An Honest Living, by Dwyer Murphy.

Dwyer Murphy? I asked.

Yes, she replied, do you know him?

Indeed I did. I knew Dwyer as the editor of CrimeReads, a terrific online purveyor of stories about, yes, crime. As it happened, the Review and CrimeReads had partnered on a few stories beginning with Miles Corwin’s The Black Dahlia, which unlike other publications we’ve partnered with, Dwyer was happy to run it as its full, 10,000+ word length.

So yes, I knew Dwyer Murphy and I suppose that as a publishing partner I loved him, too. But I had not known he was a writer. In fact, I knew little about him. 

I devoured the book - I cannot recommend it highly enough. And in the author bio I discovered that before he began to write he had been…a lawyer. But not just any lawyer – a lawyer at Debevoise & Plimpton, which describes itself as “a premier law firm with market-leading practices, a global perspective and strong New York roots.”

He had walked away. 

Or better said, he had walked to the writing life.

I had to know how that happened. So I wrote to ask. 

This is what he replied:

“Leaving the law was my goal almost from the outset, but it took a while, since I had a mountain of law school debt to get out from under first, and also I saw the use of having some professional experience before coming unmoored. It was an interesting way to get familiar with New York. You get exposed to so much as a lawyer. People are always letting you into rooms and showing you all the dark corners. But eventually I couldn't keep going. I'd saved up what I considered enough and shoved off. Actually my wife left the same law firm at around the same time and we moved directly to Paris. Packed up our suitcases and brought them into the office one day, then went straight to the airport and didn't come back for a long time. Got an apartment over there. Lived out a very particular dream we'd both shared. It was a dramatic, romantic exit in retrospect.”

I wondered what the firm’s associates and partners said when he told them he was leaving. The answer surprised me.

“I worked at a law firm that had a pretty good literary tradition. Louis Begley, the novelist, was still a partner there. One of the firm's founders was George Plimpton's father, so you used to see The Paris Review around. A partner who came in a little after me, John Gleeson, just put out a good book this year about prosecuting John Gotti. That's all to say that the firm had a reputation as somewhere you could go and get some experience and still be quite bookish, for lack of a better word. I don't think anyone was too shocked when I said I was leaving to write. They were quite supportive, in fact. Maybe a little dubious that it would work out in the end, but then, so was I. It was a pretty outlandish gamble.”

I did have one more question, not about his old life, but his new one: What does the writing life offer that no other life can? I wondered whether it was a fair question? He assured me it was.

He wrote “An intellectual freedom, in short. For me, it's the freedom to observe the human drama and to really dwell on all the little particulars and oddities that fire my imagination. It's hard to find an excuse in other walks of life to get lost in other people and their stories in that way. But as a writer, you have this kind of professional excuse to strike up a conversation and see what might come of it.”

Many writers have one book in them, and that is to be admired. It’s the subsequent ones that say, to one and all and I suppose to yourself, that you are a writer. Dwyer’s next novel, The Stolen Coast, is out in June.