"On Lily King’s WRITERS & LOVERS, and the Knot of Stubbornness"

by Hayleigh Santra

As the pandemic rages outside, I’ve been working on a piece of writing inside. I’ve dubbed this piece of writing the thing. Quarantine, if nothing else, has forced me to figure out how to fill all those hours I used to commute with, used to see friends with, used to go to bars with. Now, much of the time I once spent hanging and conversing and being in crowds of people (oh, to hug a friend!), I spend thinking about or working on the thing.

I’ve also been reading and re-reading Lily King’s Writers & Lovers. It’s an instructive book for a writer. For its simple and beautiful construction, for how efficiently each scene pulls the reader deeper into the story and propels the plot, and for its reflections on writing.

The narrator, Casey Peabody, has been working on her first novel for six years. She is thirty-one. She is seventy-three thousand dollars in debt. While Casey is revising her draft, she writes, “I think back on all the rooms in all the cities and towns where I wrote the pieces of this book, all the doubt and days of failure but also that knot of stubbornness that’s still inside me.”

Yes, I think every time I read those lines. I know that knot. The knot that remains after fear has marched through, spouting its unceasing commentary: what are you doing? This is awful. Just give up already. The knot that makes me get up day after day and return to my couch, where I open my laptop, where I keep adding to the thing.

I’ve also begun to pray. I didn’t grow up attending church. I’ve never thought of myself as religious. A part of me cringes even to admit to praying, in the same way I used to cringe whenever I heard someone say, I’ll pray for you. At best, that statement sounded condescending, and at worst, suffocating. But, there’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you admit you have no control over anything and you need some higher power from which to draw. To bring you, however late in life, to your knees.

The first image that pops into my head when I think of a nightly prayer comes from movies: just-bathed five-year-olds kneel down with their parted hair and clasped hands and ask God to bless people. Maybe because of this influence, my language is childish. Simple. My prayers go something like this: Please help those who are sick. Please help those who are suffering. Thank you for my bed. Thank you for my pillow. Thank you for my waffle blanket.

If I had a stuffed elephant, I’d throw him in there, too.

In Writers & Lovers, Casey turns to prayer, too. She’s having a rough time. Her mother died unexpectedly the winter before the novel begins. She’s fresh off a breakup. One of the managers at the restaurant where she waitresses has it out for her. She finds a lump in her armpit. Her novel is rejected again and again. She begins having panic attacks. After one such episode, she says, “I try to pray. I kiss my mother’s ring, and I pray for her, for her soul and for peace in her soul. I pray for my father and Ann and Caleb and Phil and Muriel and Harry. I pray for the earth and everyone on it. I pray we can all come together and live without fear. And at the end I pray for sleep. I beg to have back the ability to fall asleep. I was once so good at it. I pray hard and yet I’m aware that I have no sense of what or whom I am praying to. I went to church until my mother went to Phoenix, but I never believed the stories in church any more or less than I believed in Pinocchio or the Three Little Pigs.” Exactly, I think again. I continue to pray, night after night, to a God I have never felt much affiliation to before now. I pray for the earth and everyone on it.

Wayne Dyer says that the best time to thank God for all that has manifested in our lives is the time near sunset. When quarantine first started in New York City, sunset was around seven, which is also when people stop whatever they’re doing to give thanks to the healthcare professionals and essential workers who are working nonstop, risking their lives through this pandemic. It seems fitting that these two times of day are aligned, that we thank essential workers at the same time when it’s best to thank God for this day, for this breath, for the fact that our hearts are still beating.

When the quarantine first started, I usually added towards the end of my prayers, Please help me finish this thing. Please help this thing be good. Please help. Please help.

What a stupid thing to worry about, a piece of writing. Stupid and selfish.

“All I want is to write fiction. I am a drain on the system, dragging around my debts and dreams,” Casey says, while she’s struggling to revise her novel. It’s a silly thing, to keep writing. It seems pointless a lot of the time. Stupid and selfish.

Yet, I think for as long as I’m alive, a part of my brain will always be worrying over a piece of writing, no matter what is happening in the world, no matter what is happening in my life.

What helps us to endure amidst the pain and suffering and panic? I’m not sure. I’m sure it’s different for everyone. But maybe writing, for me, is a kind of prayer. Maybe art is a kind of prayer. Maybe walking. Maybe breathing. Maybe caring about something sacred to you, no matter how silly it seems to other people, is a kind of prayer. Or maybe I’m elevating something I love to give me an excuse to keep doing it.

The other day, I took a walk. I put on my mask. The first few times I walked with my mask on, it felt wrong. I couldn’t pull in enough air. It felt like I did when I was a kid trying to breathe through a snorkel mask at the neighborhood pool. Now, I’m used to it. I made my walk in the evening, after I finished re-reading Writers & Lovers again. I’d forgotten what time it was, but I was delighted to find myself outside at seven. I pressed pause on the song I was listening to. The street erupted. I was caught in a tide of gratitude. A man played the tuba in his doorway. A woman banged a pot with a wooden spoon. Someone down the street rang a cowbell. It sounded like a celebration. It sounded like the knot of stubbornness. To keep being grateful. To keep working. To keep dropping off groceries, and having babies, and writing things. To keep caring for one another. To keep on, to keep on, to keep on.

Every night, I kneel beside my bed. I’ve stopped caring about logic, about whether I’m being foolish. I’ve given up making demands. I figure God knows better than I do what I need help on. I thank God for my husband, for our apartment, for the daffodils in the park down the street. I thank God for my thing, as terrible as it is. As terrible as it may continue to be. I pray for the earth and everyone on it. I thank God for the stubbornness.

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Hayleigh Santra's fiction has appeared in The Jellyfish Review, Bewildering Stories, and Defenestration. She has an MFA from The New School, and she lives in Brooklyn.