ENVY: or The Greasy Green Perils of the Writing Life
By Jennifer Anne Moses
I recently published my seventh book and first collection of short stories, THE MAN WHO LOVED HIS WIFE. It's both my best book and my worst launch. That's because there was no launch. My indie publisher, Mayapple Press, has plenty of grit and commitment, but only enough pennies in the publicity budget to afford to put my book on their website.
A few weeks before my own non-launch, a friend from grad school published her second novel with a Big Five house. It was promptly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. As bad as that was, it was nothing compared to googling her stats and finding that she had some 744 reviews on Goodreads--compared to my six. Then again, as my husband pointed out, big publishers have budgets to do things like send review copies out to book bloggers and Goodreads reviewers, so maybe her more than 700 reviews had more to do with the relative budgets of our relative publishing houses rather than the quality of her work versus mine, and what really matters is getting the work done and feeling good about it, blah blah blah, so on and so forth, but what did it matter? By then I was too far gone---envious, miserable, self-pitying, resentful—to either track or care. Also, how could I hear a word he was saying when the small, infantile, pea-green, and gaseous monster who lives inside my brain was screaming: but it’s not fair!
It was April. I’d just had my first vaccine, people were dying, wars were raging, and in America there were multiple mass shootings. But what was really not just or right was that I had to be my own publicist, whereas my friend could just sit back in glory.
It turns out that I’m not the only writer who suffers (on occasion) from runaway envy, something I might have been aware of earlier, but wasn’t, because other than a very small circle of intimates composed of my husband, my two dogs, and a handful of my stuffed animals, I never told anyone how petty and self-pitying I can be. But then, in a tizzy of writer’s-envy despond, I let the kitty cat out of the bag, and whined out loud to a friend of mine (who happens to be a bigly published writer). Figuring that at her level of publishing, she would have no reason to sink into the depths in which I myself so readily swim, I asked her if she too had ever, even once, gone into a private little rage of malignant bitter bile because someone else’s book/article/op-ed had gone bigger than hers. To which she replied: is it that obvious? Then I emailed another, even more bigly published pal of mine, and said: you’re famous. Doesn’t that help? She answered that every writer she knows is a seething cauldron of low self-esteem, including herself. Which made me feel better.
Because if there’s one thing I most definitely have experienced, it is a seething cauldron of low self-esteem that eats my liver out. My own personal solution? The belief that if only I can finally make it big time---the gold medal, the brass ring, Prom Queen, and Queen of the May---I’ll finally be sufficiently successful to feel good.
So my solution is utter nonsense, illusory at best, self-defeating and immature at worst. Not to mention that I’ve actually achieved my youthful dream of “being a writer.” The point of my endless not-enoughism? There is none. Or rather, if believing in the “if only” got me up and going as a youngster with no clear path to enacting, let alone achieving my dream, the ever-shifting goal posts at least kept me moving forward.
The only problem is that if you hold onto envy and its ever-attendant moving goal posts long enough, it leaves you feeling sick.
But if envy is rampant among writers at all points in their careers, it’s also a great subject for fiction. The recent best seller (not that that’s fair) The Plot, by Jean Hanff Korelitz, has great fun with the theme. My favorite of Cynthia Ozick’s short stories is “Envy: or Yiddish in America.” In it, an obscure Yiddish writer is so consumed by envy of another Yiddish writer—widely believed to be based on the Nobel-winning I.B. Singer—that he drives himself to the brink of insanity. The story is wildly hilarious and cuts to the bone.
When I was a miserable and self-hating child who, frankly, had been taught from the cradle that the only important thing in life was to be successful like fill-in-the-blank, my late mother would tell me: “Jennifer, there will always be someone smarter/prettier/more popular/more talented than you, and there will always be some less smart/pretty/popular/talented.” But by the time she was trying to get this bit of wisdom and reality through my addled head, it was too late. I was already convinced that the only way to get the love and attention I craved was by being bigger, better, smarter, faster, prettier, and most of all, more famous. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, so there were plenty of bigshots, celebrities, and VIPS around to compare myself to. But I was a lousy athlete, a good but hardly spectacular student, and not particularly popular. So the only way to achieve my goal was, duh, to be a writer, hopefully published (a lot) and also, in possession of a book prize or two, and publicly beloved, at the top of the bestseller list, and a frequent invitee to give the college commencement address. “Dear graduates of (because this is my fantasy, why not go for it?) Harvard, today we gather here under the elms, etc., etc.”
Suffice to say that it isn’t working out along these lines.
But what is working out is being the age I am, meaning that I’m aging out of some of the pettiest of my competitive pettiness. Despite the recent eruption, these days I can usually allow the spikes and flows of envy to course through me with minimal damage, and get back to work.
For me, the work itself—the day-to-day frustrations, joys, distractions, and all the rest of it—is always the solution. Even when it’s going terribly. Even when it’s not going at all. And when I can hold onto the reality of “the writing life”—that it consists not of the thrill of being in the spotlight or the moment when you write “the end” and know that you mean it, but of the endless moments that are the nitty-gritty of getting the work done—I can also sit back and not give a damn if a writer whose work I loathe gets a front-page review. Even better, I am free to be swept away by whatever I’m reading, even if—as in the case of the recently-published novel The Netanyahus that I loved so much I wanted to leave my husband of 33 years to marry the novel’s author, Joshua Cohen (who is more than twenty years my junior, but never mind)—a tiny sliver of my ego wished I’d written the book myself. And that’s because as much as I’d like to be more evolved than I am—enlightened, grounded, with an open heart for all creatures and a sure knowledge that I am own my own path—my ego will never stop piping up. The good news is that these days its voice is rarely either shrill or loud. And it’s hardly the only voice that dwells inside me. Other voices speak to me, too, pushing at my imagination, demanding to be heard and seen. The path forward is always in front of me—just there at my fingertips and the end of my pen.
Ah! But I contain multitudes!
Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of seven books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently The Man Who Loved His Wife: Short Stories in the Yiddish Tradition. (Mayapple Press.) She's also a painter. She and her husband are the parents of three grown children, and live in Montclair, NJ, with their extremely bad dogs.