My husband and I have a running list of writing jokes. We pass these back and forth when he’s trying to talk me off the Ledge of Despair, my name for the frightfully high psychic shelf where I totter unsteadily above the mental freeway that will spell my certain death if I leap, which is what I want to do.
What drives me out there is my current writing project, languishing next to a letter from a coveted literary agent. In the letter, the agent promises nothing in the way of representation (yet) but alludes to grand possibilities. All I have to do is winnow down my two memoirs (equaling 600 pages) to one heart-stopping, luminous 200-page pearl of literary genius, and then we’ll talk.
The first joke is really just one line my husband is fond of tossing out when I’m on the Ledge. “I thank God every day I’m not a writer,” he says.
It’s funny, yes, but he means it. Because, while we can all agree that writing isn’t coal mining (the gold-standard metaphor for “slowest, darkest, dirtiest, most grueling job out there”), he knows it actually kind of is. Not that he’s ever tried to be a writer. He hasn’t had to. All he’s had to do is watch me write, rewrite and revise the same book seven times over the course of 10 years to see the parallels.
The second joke goes like this: A woman calls her husband at work, crying hysterically. “I was ironing when your agent called and without thinking I left the iron on and it caught the shirt on fire and then the curtains and then the whole house! There’s nothing left, we’re ruined!”