Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
So begins Robert Frost’s iconic poem, The Road Not Taken. His words, the poem’s main theme about choices, resonates more than ever in a technologically-modern world saturated with choices. For many, and for good reason, oodles of options are not welcome. “Choice overload,” it has been coined, and the phenomena often has a deleterious effect on people, i.e. they are more indecisive, more unhappy with their choice, and more likely to feel regret.
You’ll have to read the book to find out what Kyle did next. But you have a choice here, and a good one, to learn more about this author, about writing, and why it’s important to look back in order to see forward. Here’s the Q&A:
The circumstances behind this book happened decades ago. Why write about it now? What was the trigger?
KS: I stumbled upon a YouTube talk. It was a video about taking back our power and re-owning the qualities that we project on to others, especially the positive qualities. I wanted to share something in the comments about how I once developed a romantic infatuation—“Limerance” is what I’ve since learned this phenomenon is called—with a man I met when I was 23. He was a documentary filmmaker from France at the height of his career. I was just out of college. I’d lived in Chicago my whole life up to that point. I was hardly “crushing it” in the real world. But boy was I crushing hard on this French guy. Quelle surprise! He didn’t turn out to be the paragon I thought he was. But a story counts for more than just its finale, so I typed it out on my phone. The story kept unraveling, though. I cut and pasted the fast-draft into the comment box. The box couldn’t contain it, so I pasted it into a Word doc. It came out to 73 pages. I started editing and rewriting, fleshing out the details. Several months later, I had a memoir. It’d been five years since my last book. I’d been yearning to get on to the next one like you wouldn’t believe. Then this one came along, out of the blue.
I am also nearing fifty. And I’ve always heard that fifty is a turning point in one’s life. One of my favorite movies is Woody Allen’s “Another Woman.” It’s one of his chamber dramas from 1988. Gena Rowlands plays a philosophy professor who‘s recently turned 50. She’s used to living the life of the mind. She takes refuge in intellectual pursuits, often in order to shut out things in her life and in her past that she does not want to look at. Yet a chance encounter with a stranger and a series of life crises suddenly force her to take stock. The film enters Bergman territory as Rowland’s character undertakes an exquisite journey of self-reflection and self-discovery. As a meditator and rabid journaler, I’m always up for that kind of stuff. I was like, “If that’s what 50 is, then bring it on!” I guess “François” is my answer to “Another Woman.”
People always say, ‘there’s a reason for everything.” But I believe we affix reason to everything. What do you think of this idea in relation to your book?
KS: I do believe in an interactive universe and I love to study astrology and tarot, etc. You can see I’m dancing around saying, “There’s a reason for everything,” but I do believe that’s true and if that makes me naïve, oh well, there are worse things to be. Having said that, the napkin that appears in the story, and which was a thing in real life, was more of a symbol for a prospect that I thought could catapult me out of the banality of my everyday existence. I had this mover and shaker’s address and phone number on a napkin, and I wasn’t going to loose my grip on that napkin for anything. It’s kind of that one-shot deal that Eminem raps about in “Lose Yourself.” (Oh my God! I’m gay and I just referenced Eminem. But credit where credit is due, he’s become a lot friendlier to us over the decades, by almost 180 degrees.) What I came to discover, however, was that my experience was anything but banal upon closer inspection. Nobody’s is.
There’s much wisdom in this book. How did you come to gain this perspective?
KS: I think wisdom comes from deep contemplation of our own experience. Pain often brings us to a place where we’re willing to focus on what’s going on in our life and on the situations, relationships, and events that have led us to where we find ourselves. In that way, pain is a conduit to wisdom, but it’s not the only conduit. Our commitment to going within and discovering the nature of our thoughts and behaviors is another conduit, one which can free us from a lot of undue pain in the future. Age doesn’t always confer wisdom. We know this. We’ve all known people who could live for a hundred years or more and still speak and act unwisely. But I do think that, as we get older, we’ve messed up so much that we’re more inclined to think, “That’s it. I have to sit down and take a good look at my situation.” And maybe we even go looking to what people from the past, people wiser than ourselves, have said about situations like ours or about the human condition in general. Again, not everybody does this. But if we have any amount of wisdom, at any age, we will.
What compels you to write?
KS: I love writing. I just love it. I know that a lot of writers, even ones who are immensely talented, say they hate writing. And I can see why. It can be unnerving when we can’t get it going. I know the agony. But once you do get it going, there’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like the sense of flow and immersion that it brings. Writing isn’t the only way to attain such a state, of course. Some do it through dance or music or what have you. But for me, writing has always been a lifeline, ever since my mom told me I had a knack for it when I was 11 years old. That story’s in the book, in fact.
I also always learn something valuable when I write, including about writing. Regarding Francois, it helped me better understand that a book comes when it comes. No use in forcing it into existence, not if you want a book worth reading. And it can be so long in coming; only, then it comes so suddenly. We have to wait and we have to be ready. As Rilke says in “Letters to a Young Poet”: “Patience is everything.”
I also learned that we can turn our defeats and humiliations into art (and memoir is just as much an art as any). In that way, they become our triumphs. As Pema Chödrön says in “The Wisdom of No Escape”: “It’s about finding our own true nature and speaking from that…Whatever our quality is, that’s our wealth and our beauty; that’s what other people respond to.” To think that our life experience, whatever it is, is our wealth. Who knew that, if we just wait a while, we can transform our disappointment into something creative, relatable, and redemptive. This isn’t the first time I’ve learned this, but it was a privilege to learn it again.
What’s next?
KS: More books. In “The Denial of Death,” Ernest Becker argues that what drives us to write books or chisel statues or build monuments or empires is our instinct to rebel against the inevitability of our death. We think that if we can’t cheat death, then we can at least leave something behind us. Horses leave things behind them. I hope my books are at least better than what horses leave behind them.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
