Several months ago, when I finished the manuscript for my book, and then again more recently, when I submitted the final draft of it to my publisher, people told me the same thing: you must be so relieved. You must be so happy! Usually I responded to these polite comments with affirmation, saying yes, I was relieved, I was thrilled to be finally done. And that was not a lie, exactly, because who would not feel a sense of relief after years of hard labor in the gulag that is writing a book? But the full truth, I must now admit, was a little more complicated. If I stopped to probe my relief, what was hiding behind it was more like a vacancy, an absence of feeling. Having completed my book, I was hollow.
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Back in November 2017, I drove out to Sag Harbor on the East End of Long Island to have tea with Peter Matthiessen’s widow. I told Maria that I wanted to write a biography of her late husband, the renowned novelist, naturalist, Zen roshi, and fleeting CIA agent. Maria is a no-nonsense woman, and along with her blessing she gave me a warning: I was committing to something far larger than I realized, a vast impossible labyrinth of a subject. I smiled, sipped my tea, and, in the weeks following, signed a contract with Penguin Random House. My original due date gave me three years to finish—in retrospect, less of a deadline than a grand delusion.
Acknowledging it was done, passing the text over to my publisher, meant losing something I’d come to depend on.
Peter Matthiessen wrote thirty-two books. I began by reading them in sequential order. I read all the secondary material I could get my hands on, the interviews and essays and profiles. This was a hell of a lot of stuff, but it was manageable; I could still see the boundaries I had to work with. Then Maria gave me a copy of Matthiessen’s hard drive, and I began to understand what I had got myself into, why she had warned me. On the hard drive were 39,933 items about Zen and whales and the CIA. Because the files were haphazardly organized, I would need to go through and rearrange them into my own custom database.
At the same time, there was Matthiessen’s paper archive to consider at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. This, too, would turn out to be far larger than it looked on the surface. There was a finding aid online, but it failed to note that Ransom staff had only catalogued part of the collection thus far. It wasn’t until I spoke with an archivist that the uncatalogued part was revealed to me, like an iceberg suddenly inverting in the water: dozens of boxes filled with correspondence, drafts, journals, notebooks, audio tapes, and samples of Bigfoot fur. The challenge was so vast and formidable that I realized it would be impossible to go through it all on occasional research visits from New York. And so, in 2019, my partner and I relocated to Texas, much as Robert Caro once moved there for Lyndon B. Johnson, and I became a fixture in the Harry Ransom Reading Room.
Some writers approach their writing like a regular day job. They go to their desk; they get on with the tasks at hand; they clock out and turn to other activities, enforcing a line between work and life. That is the healthy approach to writing: just a job like any other, dentistry or plumbing. But I am incapable of being so regimented. For me, there is no line between work and life. I go to my desk in the morning and do not leave, psychologically speaking, until I am in bed, unconscious. Even then, sometimes the work continues in my dreams.
I conducted hundreds of interviews over the course of the seven years on this project. I traveled to the Hamptons, to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, to bird sanctuaries, mosquito-infested swamps, a Zen monastery in the Catskills. In May 2022, I walked hundreds of miles across the Himalayas, retracing the journey Matthiessen made famous in his classic book, The Snow Leopard. The journey took three weeks, and left me with the kind of altitude sickness that manifests as bloody noses and explosive fits of coughing. I returned to America harboring a parasitic infection that required a nuclear bomb of antibiotics to eradicate.
Sometimes my husband got annoyed with me for getting overly “absorbed” in my writing project. I was creating an atmosphere in our house, humming as I bashed on the keyboard, that was “too intense” and “stressful,” he complained. The stress radiated out and distracted him in the other room. He felt assaulted by it. I shrugged off his concern, insisting I was simply dedicated, the unspoken implication being that he was not dedicated enough. To myself, I said I could stop whenever I wanted—the same language, I now realize, that an addict uses to excuse their addiction.
But the truth is that working on this book gave my hours shape and meaning. It gave me, a person prone to existential malaise, a means of keeping the demons at bay. After a while, I began to understand myself in relation to the book. It turned into a frame for everything else. When somebody asked me what I did, that perennial American question—“So, what do you do?”—I replied that I did True Nature. In other words, I allowed the project to become an identity.
And this is why I was engulfed by a sense of hollowness when I finally submitted the manuscript. Acknowledging it was done, passing the text over to my publisher, meant losing something I’d come to depend on.
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Do other writers feel the same way when they finish a book? I’m in the “weird gulf that follows a massive creative project,” I recently texted my friend Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X.
“The gulf! I know it well,” she replied.
Looking for reassurance, I asked her to tell me what she meant.
Writing should not be so completely consuming that one’s sense of self comes to depend on the status of a manuscript.
“I usually just cry a lot and feel frustrated,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “I really feel happiest when a project is ongoing, when I have something to answer to, and there’s always a fear at the end of a book that it’s the last one I’ll ever write. Now that I’ve been writing for a decade, I try to anticipate the slump and have something else to work on lined up, even if it’s a small thing, an essay or a story. But I still feel depressed. Later a little relief comes, but the depression is more memorable.” (She added, supportively, “I think the fact that it hurts to finish a book is a sign that you did it right, that the book has a piece of you in it, that you deeply care.”)
Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Alternatives, described a very different and enviable reaction to finishing a book. “It is euphoric,” she told me. “It’s better than winning a medal at the Olympics because you don’t have to look at a ribbon or coach or clock to see how you’ve done. You know yourself how you’ve done. You’ve seen it through. That is the doing. That’s what was needed. And, unlike a triathlete, or a sailor for that matter, you’re unlikely to throw up. You bask, bask, bask (I like to bask for at least six months)…because every single other minute of the novel writing process is pencil-in-the-gut agony.”
I also asked Heather Clark, whose biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet, was even more involved than my own of Peter Matthiessen. What did she feel after Red Comet was done? There was “no elation” after nearly ten years of work, Heather admitted, “not even relief—just a deep sense of satisfaction that I had left nothing on the field with this book. I had done all I could.” Her overriding impression was one of being spent.
Heather immediately launched into other biographical projects; she did not allow herself to dwell in the gulf for even a moment. This was Matthiessen’s strategy as well: on to the next thing before the angst could catch him. Caoilinn, on the other hand, procrastinates before she starts something new—“until I reach peak self-loathing.” Catherine distracts herself with travel, dinner parties, elaborate hobbies. She suggested I consider something “really punishing and awful, like Pilates or learning how to maturely deal with your feelings or making sourdough.”
I am still figuring out what’s next for me. Right now, in between scribbling lines of this essay, I float around the house like an empty nester, stunned by the silence, staring out of windows. But I am trying to treat the gulf, or slump, or whatever you want to call this state of suspended animation, as an opportunity to renegotiate terms with my work. Writing should not be so completely consuming that one’s sense of self comes to depend on the status of a manuscript. One should not radiate stress through solid walls.
The poet Alina Stefanescu recently tweeted a good line from Kierkegaard’s notebooks, written by him after a late night of writing: “My head is as empty as a theater, where a play has just been performed.” It is time, I think, to do a gut renovation of the theater while it is still vacant, before the next performance begins.
