Burn This

Bex O’Brian

Word Count 1077

I’ve been working on a novel for more than fifteen years. I can’t remember when I started it. I can’t remember the impulse behind wanting to start it. It was first person, then third, then omniscient. Initially, it was filled with lots of sex. But it’s hard to write sex, unless you’re Philip Roth. I hope that being lousy at writing sex isn’t a correlation to how you are in bed. Anyhow, I took all the sex out. Then I went back to first person. I had the characters end up hating each other, then switched it. The mother was a confidant and then a rival. I put the sex back in when I decided the book should unfold while the protagonist was splayed out, bound to four bedposts, while her lover, a forgetful man, wanders off for some reason and fails to return.

I had my characters swear. Every other word was fuck. Then I took all the swear words out except dickwad. Through all the iterations, I’ve liked that dickwad. It was in the middle of the book. Now it’s near the top. Why do I suspect it might end up being the last word? Lately, I have been judiciously sprinkling back in a few fucks, shits, motherfuckers, and assholes. 

I killed off the love interest, thought it was good to have him dead, so my character is free to remember him, revise him, loath, love, desire him without him getting in the way.

What hasn’t changed in all the years is she is much younger, and he is much older. As I’ve gotten older, I have had to figure out the timing of things repeatedly. I wanted her to be about fifty when he died. That worked because I could pin her dates to mine. If I keep doing that, now she has to be in her sixties. I wanted the lover to be born just before World War Two, but the way things are going, I might have to switch it to after or some other bloody war. I also have to make sure through all this movement of time that I am matching up with changing cultural references. I hate when I notice slip-ups in other people’s books. 

When I started the book, I lived mostly in Brooklyn, where I would go into my office, sit down, and write. I hated it. I hated being stuck in that room, but I thought that’s how writers work. My mother worked that way, my first and present husband worked that way. Every day I could practically hear my husband’s brain working in there. If I was bored and merely wanted to ask him what he would like for dinner, he would look up from his desk as if he’d never seen me before and couldn’t for the life of him imagine how this strange woman manifested in front of him for the sole purpose of ruining his thought process. 

You could interrupt me, you could call me. I didn't care. I could be mid-sentence when the phone rang, and I’d be like, “Hey, great, who’s calling?” It was actually only one person, my sister, who called three or four times a day with nothing to say, but that was ok, I had nothing to say, I had been sitting in a fucking room doing nothing but writing.

It was nice to look at the books on my bookshelf, but it didn’t make up for the claustrophobia I felt being stuck in that room.

Over the course of writing the book, I left the room. I thought, ‘You know what? There’s a whole apartment out there. Why the fuck should I be bound to one spot?’ So I started taking my computer hither and yon. I cooked, wandered around, stared out the window, danced, and in the midst of all this, every so often, I would sit down and bash out a few words.

I have left the apartment and come across the pond to France, where I sit still even less.

At the inception of this novel, I was fertile, barely, but I certainly was full of sexual verve. Now I am long past menopause, and the passion between the characters seems almost comical.

I haven’t been writing in a complete vacuum. Over the years, people have read it. My agent, for one, was reasonably enthusiastic but wanted one more run-through. Then his agency went bankrupt. A trusted accountant was skimming off author’s royalties. Not mine. The one book I had published up to this point had only sold seven thousand copies. My agent moved to a new agency, and we’ve stayed in touch, but since the book isn’t near done, or perhaps it’s overdone, it’s been a while. 

And, there’s the cultural shift that has occurred. Not much room for a late mid-aged white woman. I think I should probably age another ten years; that way, I could be like Penelope Fitzgerald, taking the literary world by storm in her seventies.

In truth, I don’t think about what other authors are doing. I don’t think of the scores of MFA students being spit out into the market each year. I like writing my book, or at least the ten minutes a day I devote to it. Although I think about it, probably twenty hours a day. Some people will frown on this, but I often write after a cocktail. It’s fun. And it’s when I feel calm enough to make real what I have been thinking about all day. One cocktail. After that, everything you write is shit.

I like my title, The Last Lover. I haven’t chosen an epigraph. Need I? Never really understood the point. Is it supposed to be the thing you refer to that launches you into writing? Or is it supposed to be a clue about what we’re about to read?

I’ve thought about my acknowledgments. But you work on a book this long, people come and go.

So what will happen? I once told Rebecca, with whom I co-edit Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, that I think about writing as a sand drawing, a meticulous work of art takes the artist days, months, years even, when, upon completion, she runs hers hand through, smearing the masterpiece into oblivion. 

Every once in a while, I get this wonderful feeling that if I ever get this book done, I can destroy it. It’s mine to kill. That gives me great comfort.

Bex is the author of the novels (Under Bex Brian) Promiscuous Unbound and Radius, also available here. At present, she’s working on a new novel entitled, My Memoir Of An Impossible Mother. Read an excerpt from Radius on our DPA+ page, here.