I read a letter this week that blew my mind. It was posted on The Marginalian, which is a great read if you’re looking for a new spot for literary insight. Physicist Richard Feynman wrote this letter to his dead wife two years after she died, wherein he reflected on how, if anything, she was even more present with him despite the passage of time. Her death did not alter his love for her. He still felt it, even if he wasn’t with her. This is grief. It’s how I feel about my marriage ending. It’s how I feel about losing my house—the house I love very much, that I just sold, which I am leaving soon.
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Selling my house was a very long and thoroughly exhausting journey. Now that the sale has closed, I feel a deep sense of relief, but also sadness. I think it’s important to honor those feelings. Change is hard. It hurts. There is grief to moving on, even when you’re excited about the future. I call this the in-between feeling. I am neither here nor there. I am in-between. I am in transition, a ghost of sorts—untethered.
I feel this way at certain stages of my creative work, too. When I’m in between drafts, trying desperately to find my way to solid footing again. It’s so very hard to tolerate the chaos of those moments, when the story is blown to bits around me, littering the floor and my mind, causing me to lose sleep at night. I know if I trust in my process, I will find my way through, but the in-between sucks. I love my book. My book is dead.
A book is both alive and not during revision. The body has been taken apart, harvested of organs that are good enough to save, but no longer part of a functioning whole. It’s a bizarre feeling, dismembering your own story. The change is painful and uncertain. There is no guarantee the pieces will go back together again. A Frankenbook may evolve into beauty or horror—often both, before you’re done with it.
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