On the Material of Living
What these summer days have been teaching me.
Earlier this week, I did a little road trip from Springs to Quogue and back again. Springs and Quogue are both part of the Hamptons, but the two towns are at opposite ends of this long eastern stretch of Long Island, and my geographic radius tends to get pretty small in these summer days (the beach, the coffee shop, the library, the pizza place) and so I feel justified in calling it a road trip. I was spending the day in Quogue seeing a few friends. One of these friends is an expert in a particular field, and the novel I’m currently working on is related to this field, and over the last several months, I’ve been repeatedly picking her brain. We had lunch at the beach club under a yellow-and-white umbrella, and over sandwiches and salads and Diet Cokes, I peppered her with questions, and she gave me her answers and insights.
We talked about other things too (summer plans, the books we’re reading, life in general) but as I walked away from that lunch, my mind was mostly filled with tidbits I wanted to jot down, new directions I wanted to explore. I’ve made a decent amount of headway with this new novel (to clarify, I’m not talking about The Helsinki Affair—coming November 14!—but rather the novel that will follow Helsinki), but the novel is still a fluid entity, and conversations like these are crucial in shaping the path it will take from here. I had a long-ish drive home. I stopped for gas in Southampton, where it’s considerably cheaper than in Springs, and bought a Diet Dr. Pepper (yolo), and half-listened to a podcast, and half-daydreamed about the novel.
The next day, I went over to a friend’s nearby house in Springs. She’s an artist (a wildly talented artist, might I add!), and while her art is visual rather than verbal, we have much in common when it comes to navigating these creative careers—both sides of it, both the purely artistic and tactically professional. We talked and talked. Her dogs barked at the garbage truck. She squeezed lemons to make fresh lemonade. We went for a swim in her pool, and afterwards we ate lunch in our wet bathing suits, and we talked some more. There are ebbs and flows to a creative life; there are moments when you are highly visible, talking up your new work, doing the promotional hustle1, and there are moments when you go quiet, and disappear from the public eye for a while. We talked about these notions of seasonality, and how to build an intentional rhythm and structure to make this life more sustainable and joyful. We talked about deadlines and finances and email newsletters. Eventually I got in the car and drove home. I sat down at my desk, still in my wet bathing suit, and began writing this piece.
These leisurely lunches, these meandering conversations: these are a departure from the typical structure of my workday. On a typical day, I tend to start writing in the morning, around 11 or 11:30 a.m. I work for a solid three hours, then I eat a late lunch and zone out for a while. (Preferably by watching Claire Saffitz or Alison Roman on Youtube.) Then, in the afternoon, I might deal with emails or accounting or smaller tasks, or maybe I’ll start a Substack piece. If I’m working on a freelance editing project2, this is when I might do some editing. Once a few hours have gone by, I’ll often get a second wind creatively, and I’ll go back and noodle around with the book a little more, editing what I wrote that morning. Until it’s 6:30 or 7 p.m., and then it’s time for dinner. It’s been almost five years since I stopped working in an office, and over those years, this routine has become so regular that I can basically set my watch by it.
During this, our second summer out east, I have been wrestling with how rigid I can be, how rigid I want to be, about my adherence to this routine. The texture of life out east is different from the texture of life in the city. I love my routine—it makes me feel calm and grounded and energized—but ought it change in this different place, during this different season? Especially in the summer, there are other things on my plate, other things to absorb my attention. We’ve had a steady stream of houseguests, and with that comes more socializing than usual, and more chores than usual: more laundry, more cleaning, more grocery shopping. We live a short walk from the bayside beach, and more days than not, I knock off closer to 5:30 p.m. to wander down for an evening swim. It’s a lot quieter out here, and I tend to sleep a little later than I do in the city. There are dates with new friends, coffee dates and lunch dates. Getting to know a new area, a new community, it’s a wonderful and joyful thing, but it doesn’t just happen automatically. It takes a certain amount of energetic investment.
What all of this means is that my typical summer week is going to be a little less productive, in terms of raw mental output, in terms of words written and emails sent and connections made, when compared to a typical week in the rest of the year. I am reminding myself—I have to keep reminding myself—that this isn’t a bad thing!
It’s good to vary the tempo, to let the seasons of the year have different textures. The seasons of life, too. When I think back to how hard I worked in my twenties, when I was a full-time editor and also writing fiction in the morning before work, and also occasionally attending spin class before writing that fiction, I think to myself: wow, that was extremely tiring. And also: I might never work that hard again.
But for all of my raw productivity in my twenties, it was a narrower kind of existence. There wasn’t much time for meeting new people, for having random conversations in the coffee shop, for taking long walks in the park, for trying new things, for making new connections. This is the material of living, and art is generated from the material of living.
These last two summers in Springs, I’ve been exploring just how structured I want to be, in terms of my schedule and workload. Here is where I’m starting to come out: I want to strike a balance between the material of living, but also the processing of that material. Because this, too, is something I’ve realized: that writing is absolutely essential, no matter the season I’m in. Writing is how I make sense of things. Thoughts swirl through my head, foggy and nebulous, until I actually sit down and write them down. Writing is how I articulate the world to myself, and also myself to myself.
An anecdote, to show you what I mean. In June, we spent almost two weeks traveling through the Balkans and Turkey.3 Our last stop on the itinerary was Istanbul. It’s a spectacular city, but it’s also a BIG and LOUD city, and by that point in the trip, I was starting to feel a kind of sensory overload, like I was a sponge that had been soaked to the point of saturation, and now I needed to go home and wring myself out. I needed to process everything I had seen and learned and experienced. I need to write some stuff down! My energy, admittedly, was starting to flag. Andrew (whose energy and endurance was much steadier than mine) suggested that maybe I didn’t have to focus on processing things; maybe I could just experience things. Maybe that’s a lighter way to move through the world. Maybe that’s more mindful, more pure, more be-here-now. It was just around sunset, and we were having dinner at a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Golden Horn, kebab and pita and mezze. It had been a jam-packed day: ferries across the Bosphorus, a food tour on the Asian side, the Spice Bazaar, the Grand Bazaar, a performance of the whirling dervishes, walking and walking and walking. Travel is a form of total immersion. And when I am immersed in a new place, I can’t help but notice the way it makes me feel, and then I can’t help but want to make sense of those feelings. One can argue over whether or not this instinct is a good thing, but it’s an instinct that seems to exist very deep within me. If I don’t have the time and space to honor that instinct, I start to feel alien to myself.
Maybe it’s a fool’s errand, trying to make sense of things that don’t have to be made sensical! Feelings, for instance. The world, for instance! But this is what I have to do. I have to write things down. I have to wrestle with the world that I encounter, have to try to make sense of it—even in the hottest and laziest days of summer; even in the busiest moments of travel. For me, this process has an essentially circular quality. The material of living becomes the material of writing. Writing is what reminds me of my own capability. Writing is what makes me feel less overwhelmed and perplexed. Writing is what gives me confidence and empowerment, enough so that I can step back out into the world, and exist as a body moving through that world, and experience, again, that rich and distracting and joyful and sorrowful and unexpected and uncontrollable material of living.
Alright, y’all. It’s Friday in late July and the heat index in New York is CLIMBING. What’s a girl to do? I’ll tell you what: a girl is going to eat an ungodly amount of watermelon. Just in case you forgot, watermelon exists, and it is EXTREMELY delicious and refreshing. Pineapple, too. It’s summer and we need a treat! We’ve been plowing through fruit this past week, and as I stand there at the kitchen counter, butchering this poor fruit into submission, I feel a weird kind of gratitude to myself. I know that Future Anna, when she gets back all hot and sweaty from a run or the beach, is going to be so happy to find this container of very cold, very crisp, very delicious cut-up watermelon and pineapple in the fridge, and I think: thank you, Present Anna, for doing this. When you get your groceries, take the time to make them nice. Cut up your fruit and put it in a Tupperware. It’s a minor but beautiful act of self-care!
Such as telling people about your upcoming book events, or reminding people that they can preorder your book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Bookshop.org, or any other fine book retailer.
I don’t mention it here much, but I do still, on occasion and as time permits, do some freelance editing! If you’re curious about this, you can always reach me via my website.
Have I written at all about our Balkans trip? I’m not sure I have! I want to! But for now, if you’re interested, I will direct you to Andrew’s blog, here, which beautifully chronicled the day-to-day of the trip in both words and photography. One thing I especially appreciate about being married to Andrew is that I get to abdicate all photo-taking responsibilities when we travel together :)
I've also been thinking a lot about my creative process and being a women. Having a cycle in ancient time meant that before clocks, women had a much different (and visceral) sense of time that was based on the earth's rhythm.
I think especially for women, we associate the routines we do in 24 hours as discipline BUT the idea of a "24 hour day" is new, rigid and caterer to the reset capacity of a male body. It's been part of my own creative process to associate discipline with rhythm rather than routines.
Your post about being flexible and seasonal was the perfect encapsulation of this! Loved it!