The Ordinary Hazards of my (Not-So-Much) Writing Life

I’m writing a book about France and my father and walking from Paris to Avignon. You’re not wrong if you don’t think those elements fit effortlessly together. Then again, a lot of books are that way. James Baldwin once said that for him, writing is about “finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out.” I think that’s why I write, too. To get at what’s hard, least obvious, maybe painful, possibly true. It’s never easy.

Is that why I fuss over my house plants, spraying cooking oil on the leaves to rid them of scale? (My scale-prone Schefflera tree is taking over the room, shown above post-party.) Is that why I bake loaves of dense, grainy bread and chocolate-chip S’mores cookies that I’m so proud of inventing? (Actually, I add marshmallows and graham crackers to Jaques Torres fantastic recipe.) Is that why I’ve returned to running, logging more and more miles each week? Is it all just one big, obvious effort to escape the hard work of writing or at least an effort to do less of it?

I’m the sort of writer who produces long breezy drafts that need lots and lots of revision as I hone my point in an effort to discover what I’m really trying to say. I have 70,000 words describing my 2022 trip from Paris to Avignon. But a description of the waypoints on a walk does not make a book so I layer the narrative with thoughts about the French, my state of mind and descriptions of my father. I can only hope I’m doing the above with enough depth and insight that a stranger might care.

It’s easy to hide behind vague language and, like most of us, I do it all the time. Clarifying my thinking means cleaning up my writing. Hours go by, the dog nestled by my feet, as I tinker with the draft. It’s easy for me to go on about about my father’s love of France in a way that feels familiar so that’s what I do until I realize how hollow my knowledge appears once it’s right there in front on me on the screen.

Staring at the disappointing result of my labor, I get up from my bed/desk to water my ferns—again. That’s why I love ferns—they thrive on too much love. It is possible to over-water a fern but you’d have to really try. You could call these intervals productive. Maybe my brain is churning as I soak the soil, adding more water, and more, until it gushes out in a surprisingly clear flow, threatening to overwhelm the saucer.

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that I don’t really know something fully until I’ve fleshed it out in writing. That’s why almost every book (and probably long article, too) poses and answers at least one essential question. Although it might seem simple to figure out what that question is, it’s not. Sometime I think my question for the book I’m calling South From Paris is as simple as did I know my father? But then I need to fit the France piece in, which isn’t difficult since France was always a big part of who my father was. So then my question becomes did I know my father and what did France have to do with the man (I thought) I knew? Neither is quite right.

What most muddles me of late is solving the problem of defining what “France” meant to my father and what it means to me. It’s a giant bitch of a problem to think through. I read and read—history, political books about laicite, memoir. More and more, the idea of the pleasure-loving, cerebral, vaguely indolent people whom it’s easy to think of as “French” runs up against the reality of who a French man or woman is today and there, as they say, is the rub.

Then there’s rural France. My father’s book, France on Foot, published in 1999, offers the reader an idyllic version of France, one you would have found if you went walking in the French countryside in search of memorable food and wine. This is precisely what he did. He was a chef, after all. He excelled at cooking, eating and drinking. It’s not a criticism, then, that he sought out the best restaurants and wineries in a country famous for both. I grew up with a version of this idealized France in my head and now I’m shaking out what bits of it my big walk in 2022 did not dislodge. The France my father experienced in the 1990s doesn’t exist anymore, or if it does, only in precious pockets where tourists drive the economy. This is a long way from the reality of France and probably always has been.

I wonder, is my vision of my father also clouded, tainted by idealism and nostalgia? I have memories, a handful of letters and his book as primary sources. (If you can call memory a primary source!) I can only ever know the man through the lens of being his daughter. This is when my head starts to hurt so I get up and make a loaf of that grainy bread.

There’s no recipe because every time I make it, I just dump the ingredients in a bowl, mix, let it rise, gently deflate, place the dough in a loaf pan and bake until the center reaches 200 F. The dough consists of rye, whole wheat and semolina flour plus cornmeal, salt, a handful of flaxseed, sesame seeds, nuts, maybe some raisins or dates and a sprinkle of dried yeast. And water. Of course.

I love how dense this bread is. My husband Dwight and I find ourselves standing at the kitchen counter, shaving shards off the loaf which we butter, salt and eat. We repeat the process until we’re ashamed of ourselves, the equivalent of several normal slices having disappeared. Dwight likes to keep a cookbook open in the kitchen so he can read while he eats. (Naturally! He wrote the book on the topic.) I often end up doing the same.

Belly full, I go back to work, staring at the letters filling my laptop’s screen as I ponder the story I have to tell. Thin as it is, thank god for the basic narrative skeleton of walking from Paris to Avignon upon which I can lay my story. Chronology is the writer’s friend—sometimes I feel it’s my only friend in the great morass that is this book. Lost, I wonder if I have the question all wrong. Maybe it’s closer to was my father as extraordinary as I’ve always believed and, by the same token, is France as exceptional as I’ve always assumed? Now that’s a question for a daughter who wants to figure out the contradictions of both a country and a beloved, if flawed, parent.

That’s when I get up off my bed/desk to lace up my flashy Hokas to run through Harlem down to Central Park where the trees have exploded in a ridiculously showy pink and white riot of blossoms. It can feel like a different country down there—brighter, cleaner, more colorful. As I jog along the park’s perimeter, spry runners sprinting past me, children and dogs nearly tripping me up, I ponder it all. And then I do what my father, an epic traveller, did all the time; I plan a trip.

What is more fun than planning a trip? For me, as diversions go, dreaming of an ideal walk is as diverted as I get. I yearn for alpine climates so when I get home, I plop down on the blue velvet sofa, sweating into its soft fabric, as I plot the course of the GR5 on my miraculous iPhiGenie app. (It shows every last detail of the French trail system.) I look up hotels and gites d’etape and chambres d’hote, mileage, times and distances before I stop to remind myself, again, to get back to work. I don’t.

Instead, I tell myself that this, too, is part of my book. My father wrote about the French trail system; I’m planning on walking it. Again. Isn’t that something? And with that excuse in hand, I dream some more. Who knows, maybe I really am getting my work done.