the literary life THE TURN53 POETS & WRITERS^to say to him then. So I got up to leave
with poison jammed up in my throat.
Just before I left the room, he called
out, “I’ll admit your poor performance
is surprising. Your application essay
was one of the best I’ve ever read.”
That was the last thing he would ever
say to me. A few days later I changed
advisers. And switched majors—to
English. And three years later I some-
how managed to graduate with honors.
Take that, asshole.
Now, this isn’t meant to be self-
congratulatory. It’s meant to be a battle
cry. Because I did something then that
has proved invaluable to me as a writer.
I recognized the turn. And I took it.S
INCE you’re reading this
magazine, chances are you’ve
already had a run-in with
my freshman adviser. Some
shadow of him, I mean. He takes many
forms. An agent who fails to respond to
your e-mail. An editor who dismisses
your work as unoriginal. A classmate
who refers to you as a one-trick pony.
A friend or a spouse or a colleague who
reads your poem or story or screenplay
and says, “I’m not sure I get it.”
Doubt has long, white, bony
fingers—and a deadly firm grip that
can drag you down into the dark.
I know because I’ve been there. In
2004 I finished a novel called “The
Mystery Light.” My agent sent it
around to New York publishers. First
one round of submissions, then an-
other, then another still, over the
course of several months, until there
was no one left. Every editor had
passed. I remember my phone buzz-
ing in my pocket as I stepped off the
bus. I remember how steep the hill to
my apartment seemed as I trudged up
it, the phone pressed to my ear like a
hot brick, listening to my agent break
the news. The consensus among all the
editors was this: I could write, but I
couldn’t write a novel. The parts didn’t
add up properly to a whole.
I spent the rest of the day and a good
portion of the night on the couch,
the lights off, nursing a whiskey andlistening to John Coltrane. My wife—
who was then pregnant with our first
child, which made the stakes feel that
much greater—wanted to talk, but I
was reluctant to share with her what was
wrong. Because I believed that the past
two years of work had been a complete
waste. I had let her down. I had let my
unborn child down. I had let my agent
down. I had let myself down. I sucked so
bad that no one in the history of sucking
sucked worse than I sucked. Of this I
was certain.
That night I deleted the file for “The
Mystery Light” from my computer.
Then, in the sobering light of morn-
ing, I retrieved it from the trash and
pored over it again. I understood why
it had been rejected. I recognized its
weaknesses. But I also saw something
else: its strengths.
My adviser said I wasn’t cut out for
college, but my application essay had
been one of the best he’d ever read.
And so I pivoted. I became an English
major. The editors said they liked the
parts but not the whole of my novel. So
I pivoted again.
The book shattered in my mind,
and its many broken pieces rearranged
themselves into what I recognized
as short fiction. One story became
a dozen. And of those dozen, one of
them, a year later, snuck its way into
the new Best American Short Stories.
I’m glad I didn’t sell “The Mystery
Light.” Not selling that novel was one
of the best things that ever happened
to me. But try telling that to the guy
lying on the couch in the dark. The
bot t le of Ja me son be side h i m. C olt r a ne
playing on an endless loop on the ste-
reo. He wouldn’t believe me. He’d
probably take a swing and call me a
Pollyanna. But that’s only because he
didn’t realize he was on the wrong road
and needed to turn off it.
There’s always a turn.
I grew up obsessed with comics—
pulling them off spinner racks at gas
stations and grocery stores, collecting
hundreds and hundreds of issues that
I read so many times they fell apart in
my hands.