Three years ago I broke my brain. Or, I should say, my brain was broken by grief. That summer my graduate mentor, the writer Aurelie Sheehan, died after a swift and truncated battle with terminal brain cancer. I first learned of Aurelie\u2019s illness in June of 2023, but as I understand it, she received her diagnosis the previous December, and by August she was dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The death of a writing mentor is a specific kind of loss. In ways both quantifiable and unquantifiable, Aurelie had perhaps the most significant impact on my development as a writer. She was the only professor I studied under during all four semesters of my time in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, and she had served as my thesis advisor. In the seven years since I graduated, she had written me countless letters of recommendation for fellowships and grants and teaching applications. But more than any of this, my relationship with Aurelie was deeply personal, characterized by love and mutual respect for each other as people and as artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the weeks following her death, I struggled to articulate exactly what Aurelie had meant to me. She was not my friend, though our relationship was friendly. She was not my mother, though she had behaved maternally toward me. When I called my friend Cat Powell to tell her about Aurelie\u2019s passing, she used the term \u201cart parent\u201d to describe the role mentors play in the lives of young writers. That moniker was the most accurate description I\u2019d heard, but even it felt like it failed to fully convey the impact Aurelie had had on my life, especially in my conversations with people who were not artists, and I grew increasingly frustrated by my inability to communicate the exact nature of our relationship. This, I\u2019ve learned, is perhaps the most maddening aspect of grief\u2014the persistent feeling that no one else understands what we have lost because the loss is particular to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the rooms of 12-step recovery, I often talk about the fruitlessness of comparative suffering. I remind people that emotional pain functions in the body exactly like physical pain does. It lights up all the same pain centers in our brains. And because we carry our emotional pain in our bodies, because both emotional pain and physical pain are physiological experiences, our own pain will always be more real to us than the pain of other people. We may empathize with others, but empathy is an act of imagination: It requires us to imagine another person\u2019s experience and call upon similar experiences we have had in order to relate to them. For this reason, other people\u2019s pain is always an abstraction. It is not visceral, which is to say embodied<\/em>, in the way our own pain is. And though it\u2019s true that perspective can be helpful when discerning the difference in magnitude between our losses and those of other people, comparing our pain to theirs\u2014and by extension our right to feel our pain\u2014is not a productive undertaking. Everybody loses at that game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as frustrated as I was by the feeling that no one understood what Aurelie\u2019s death meant to me, my frustration was compounded by the fact that my grief over her death felt inconvenient<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The summer Aurelie died, I was in the middle of what I hoped would be the final revision of a novel I had spent five years writing. With the exception of my sobriety, I had never pursued anything with the same degree of devotion as I had that novel. For 11 months of each of those years, I had written for at least two hours a day on that book. Some months, I wrote for eight to ten hours a day. I\u2019d written the novel three times from scratch, beginning to end. And even during the months I took off between drafts, I was still conducting research for the project. I read thousands of pages of research in service of that book. And after five years, I was ready to be done. I was so close to being done with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And then Aurelie died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One afternoon shortly after her death, I got on my yoga mat and pushed back into downward dog position, and at the edge of my peripheral vision, I literally saw my grief, a presence hovering at the corner of my mat, waiting for me to let it in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI see you there,\u201d I said to the room. \u201cI promise I\u2019ll get to you when I can.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But<\/em>, I didn\u2019t say. Not yet.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n First, I had a novel to finish. I told myself I would grieve once I finished it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking back, I think I convinced myself that maybe I could out-busy my grief. At the very least, I hoped to assign my grief a timetable that would be more convenient for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Needless to say, this did not go well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a letter for Jami Attenberg\u2019s 1000 Words: A Writer\u2019s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Round<\/em><\/a>, author Megan Mayhew-Bergman discusses her anxieties about producing a novel she felt she could stand behind. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to write an adequate book,\u201d she confesses. \u201cI wanted to write a good book. My first versions felt adequate, not outstanding.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the exception of my sobriety, I had never pursued anything with the same degree of devotion as I had that novel.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Reading Mayhew-Bergman\u2019s words, I felt my own insecurities articulated. I had once told my mother, also a writer, that I would rather write a book that did the thing I wanted it to do and never see that book published, than publish a book that failed to do it. I am a competent writer, and I trusted my ability to write a competent book. But like Megan Mayhew-Bergman, I didn\u2019t want to write a competent book. I wanted to write a great one. To settle for competency would have felt adjacent to failure. And yet, even after five years of drafting and revising, I still hadn\u2019t produced a version of my novel I felt I could stand behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And so I persisted revising the novel in an attempt to outpace my grief, and as I did, something happened I could not have predicted. I began to experience an ever-present and unbridled rage. I lost patience for anything and anyone. When someone merged into traffic in front of me without using their blinker, I found myself screaming at them from the quiet confines of my car. I was short with customers at work. I became intolerant of my co-workers. And I knew\u2014I knew<\/em>\u2014that my rage was my grief coming out sideways. My grief was telling me it would not be ignored. Still, ever the optimist, I tried my best to ignore it. I continued to revise the novel, and I continued to rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then one morning my avoidance of my grief reached its limit. I was standing in my kitchen, feeding my tiny dog his breakfast. The tiny dog was 14 years old and the size of a kitten, and the vet had recently prescribed him a diet of wet food. But the tiny dog had become a bit neurotic in his advanced age, and that summer he had begun to refuse to eat his food unless I hand-fed it to him. Did I mention this was wet <\/em>food? It was a disgusting process we performed twice a day, and it made for a terrible mess. That morning, I stood over the tiny dog and waited for him to eat his food from his dish, and all of my rage boiled to the surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what you want from me!\u201d I screamed at him\u2014though, of course, I knew. He wanted me to feed him from my hand. \u201cI don\u2019t know what you want!\u201d I screamed again. \u201cEat your food! Just eat your fucking food!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then the tiny dog was mostly deaf. He just looked up at me and cocked his head. And in that moment all my resistance gave out. \u201cThis is not sustainable,\u201d I said. I was so dysregulated, I felt like an insane person. I was so angry, I felt like I was on fire. So I decided to pause the novel revision and allow myself the time and space I needed to grieve Aurelie\u2019s death. For the next month, I did very little. I read, and I slept. I went to work, and I wept on my yoga mat. And twice a day I got down on the floor of my kitchen and fed the tiny dog wet food from my hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI guess this is just what we\u2019re doing now,\u201d I told him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Slowly my rage subsided, and my patience returned to me. In some ways, this was the last gift Aurelie ever gave me, those moments with my dog on the floor of my kitchen, because one month later that tiny dog\u2014the dog I got when I was 10 months sober and had lived alongside for the last 14 years\u2014stopped eating altogether and died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I cannot say for certain whether it was the consecutive losses of Aurelie and my dog, or the proximity of their deaths to one another, but whatever the case may be, the combined grief of those losses broke my brain. I don\u2019t know how else to describe it. In the weeks that followed, I felt concussed. I moved through my days in a haze of distraction. I would arrive at my job and not remember driving there. I would stop people mid-conversation and ask them to repeat themselves because I could not follow what they had just said. It became impossible to read or do anything that required sustained concentration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By then I had set the novel revision aside for more than four weeks, but there was other work that needed my attention. Earlier that year I had started publishing a series of essays about the intersection between the writing life and 12-step recovery and mindfulness practice. The first two essays in the series had been fairly easy to write. Each essay had taken a week to draft and another week to revise. The next essay was on the topic of rejection, and it centered around a piece of advice Aurelie had offered me post-graduation about the difference between the creative and business mindsets.<\/a> The deadline for the essay was approaching, and I thought writing it might be therapeutic, a way to ease back into my creative work while accommodating my new cognitive impairment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n An essay that should have taken me two weeks to write, took me more than eight weeks to complete. I struggled to track the logic of the argument, the progression from one paragraph to the next. The harder I pushed through my brain fog, the worse the brain fog became. This alarmed me for many reasons, not least of all because I knew I would never be able to finish revising my novel in that condition. Grief had broken my brain, and now even competent writing felt out of reach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In hindsight, it probably would have served me better had I simply stopped writing altogether and allowed my brain more time to heal. But I\u2019ve learned I am better when I am writing\u2014engaging in a creative practice has become an essential component to my psychological, emotional, and spiritual health\u2014and in the depths of my grief I was afraid to forego it. So I made a different decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I decided to put the novel revision on an indefinite hiatus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, in the meantime, I wrote a bad book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019ve all read them, have we not? The bad books? The books that sold for six or seven figures. The books that were heaped with critical praise and awards. The books that made the bestseller lists. The books that even our most trusted readerly friends recommended. I\u2019m not talking about the books that are not suited to our tastes. I read a lot, and I don\u2019t like the majority of the books I read. This is likely an unfortunate byproduct of my years working as an editor. I am generally inclined to think that most writing could be better, more thoughtful, more carefully developed, or more boldly executed. I also finish every book I start reading because I believe even books I don\u2019t like have something to teach me about the craft of writing and the art of storytelling. I\u2019m not talking about those books. I\u2019m talking about the books that when we read them seem to us obviously and objectively bad. I\u2019m talking about the books that leave us bewildered, wondering how they got published in the first place, or why they performed so well in the market. I\u2019m well aware that none of these judgments are actually objective. I\u2019m not delusional. And yet I remain convinced that everyone who reads enough has read a bad book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By late October, I was still deep in my grief and my brain fog still had not lifted. If anything, it was worse. There remained a ceiling to the level of critical thinking I could access. I simply could not get my brain to switch over into a higher gear. I finished the rejection essay, but only with tremendous effort, and the difficulty with which I had completed it convinced me I did not have the mental bandwidth I needed to return to the novel revision. I called my friend Cat to complain about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In some ways, this was the last gift Aurelie ever gave me, those moments with my dog on the floor of my kitchen.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n Cat was in a tight spot of her own. That fall her second novel had died on submission, the second novel of hers to die on submission in three years. There are many reasons a book fails to sell\u2014anyone in publishing will tell you this\u2014but Cat Powell is one of the best writers I know, and from my perspective, her novel\u2019s failure to sell had very little to do with the quality of the work and more to do with the work\u2019s representation. Either way, the disappointment was crushing. Cat had decided to part ways with her agent and was debating whether to throw in the towel altogether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI cannot imagine writing another book only for it to not sell again,\u201d she told me. \u201cI don\u2019t think I\u2019d survive it.\u201d Then Cat paused and said, \u201cBut I have an idea\u2014and it\u2019s a good idea, I think\u2014for a short novel I could write.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat\u2019s weird,\u201d I told Cat. \u201cI<\/em> had an idea for a short novel this past summer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This was true. Around the time I learned of Aurelie\u2019s diagnosis, I awoke abruptly from a dream. That summer a family of foxes had burrowed into the hillside below my bedroom window, and in the early hours of the morning, one of the foxes had screamed and startled me out of sleep. I shot upright in my bed, and there it was: an idea for a short and spooky literary novel about a woman who travels to an artist colony to research a cursed play. As I lay in bed for the next hour, outlining the premise of the novel in my head, I felt that familiar mixture of excitement and dread. It was a good idea, I believed this, but I did not have the time to write it. I was still only a third of the way through the previous novel\u2019s revision. The next morning, I jotted down a few notes in my journal about the plot and the characters. I hoped the idea would stick around. Then I promptly forgot about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I told Cat this story, she got very animated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe should write our short novels together!\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I laughed. \u201cMaybe one day,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then I asked Cat if she had ever heard of The<\/em> 90-Day Novel<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few years prior, during the early months of the COVID shutdown in the United States, I was taking my daily afternoon walk while I caught up with my friend T Kira Madden on the phone. I was two years into writing my previous novel and had just started the book over from scratch\u2014again. <\/em>I told T Kira if I ever wrote another novel, I would never write it the way I had written this one. At the time, T Kira was writing a novel of her own. She asked me, \u201cHave you ever heard of The 90-Day Novel<\/em>?\u201d T Kira explained that though she had not completed Alan Watt\u2019s 90-day novel writing program, she had found the first phase of the process, which consisted entirely of freewriting exercises, extremely helpful. I bought a copy of The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the Story Within<\/em><\/a> shortly after our conversation and read it. The program Watt outlined was appealing, but I felt too far along in my own process to switch approaches midstream. Still, the possibility of using the program for a future project stayed with me. If I ever wrote another novel, I told myself, I would give The 90-Day Novel<\/em> a try.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After my conversation with Cat, I continued to percolate on her suggestion that we write our short novels together, and I wondered whether using Alan Watt\u2019s program might be a way for me to keep writing without doing any further damage to my brain. I brought the idea to my recovery sponsor during our next monthly meeting. Cathy had been sober for more than three decades and was herself a writer, teacher, and visual artist. She had watched me persevere through the years I spent writing my previous novel, and she understood the impact Aurelie\u2019s and my dog\u2019s deaths had had on my cognitive faculties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think it\u2019s a great idea,\u201d she told me. \u201cI think you\u2019re too saturated with this other project, and you seem genuinely excited by the prospect of writing something new. At the very least, it might give your brain the time it needs to heal so you can return to the other book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By that point in my recovery, I had learned to follow directions, so after our meeting I went home and took a picture of The 90-Day Novel <\/em>with my phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I texted the picture to Cat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Okay<\/em>. I\u2019m in<\/em>, I wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following week Cat ordered a copy of Alan Watt\u2019s book <\/em>and we scheduled a phone call to make a plan. I like plans. I like setting plans down with paper and pen. It\u2019s one way I\u2019ve learned to clarify expectations and to hold myself and other people accountable for our actions. During our call, Cat and I made a list of agreements (with each other), commitments (to ourselves), and goals (for our projects) in preparation for The 90-Day Novel<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To begin, Cat and I agreed that for the next 90 days we would follow the program laid out in Alan Watt\u2019s book. Every morning, we would read Watt\u2019s entry for the day and complete the freewriting exercises and\/or drafting as prescribed. In short, we would do whatever Alan Watt told us to do. Once we completed the day\u2019s work, we agreed to text each other a short voice-message recording to confirm we had done our writing for the day, along with any insights we\u2019d had or resistance we\u2019d come up against. Finally, we agreed to a weekly phone call every Monday afternoon, during which we would process the week\u2019s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of commitments, Cat decided she would work on her novel for two hours a day, but I was concerned about my brain\u2019s ability to sustain that level of concentration, so I committed to working on my novel for one hour a day during the initial phase of the program. Once we began drafting our novels in phase two, I would reevaluate my commitment and adjust it if necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lastly, we set down our goals for our novels. My goals were fairly simple. One, I wanted to write a spooky (and slightly wacky) literary novel. Two, I wanted to write a short novel. I would aim for 60,000 words. And three, I wanted to write the novel in brief, concentrated blocks of text in which none of the dialogue was offset. It was a narrative mode I\u2019d used often in my short fiction, though I\u2019d never attempted it in the longform before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clarifying these agreements, commitments, and goals from the outset proved invaluable\u2014and prescient\u2014because at any point in the process we could return to our lists and measure our progress by how well we were abiding them and gauge whether we needed to course correct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the call, Cat and I set a date to begin, the seventh of November. If we followed Alan Watt\u2019s program to the letter, we\u2019d finish our 90-day novels on February sixth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The following Tuesday, we began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the days leading up to our start date, I set aside some time to consider what actions I could take to make The 90-Day Novel<\/em> as forgiving a process as possible. The agreements, commitments, and goals Cat and I had set down would help, but I knew if I was going to write an entirely new novel in 90 days and not overtax my brain, I would need to properly resource myself. The first thing I did was recommit to the intentional resting practice I developed in 2020, by which I would limit myself to four tasks a day, including the novel work.<\/a> The second thing I did was implement a practice Julia Cameron refers to as \u201ccontainment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the third installment of The Artist\u2019s Way <\/em>series, Walking in This World: The Practical Art of Creativity<\/em><\/a>, Julia Cameron cautions artists against discussing work-in-progress. \u201cTalk uses creative power,\u201d she writes. \u201cTalk dilutes our feelings and passions. Not always, but usually. It is only talk with the right person and at the right time that is useful. As artists we must learn to practice containment.\u201d Cameron goes on to explain, \u201cBoth a person and a project need a roof over their head. Both a person and a project need walls for privacy. Just as it is uncomfortable to have people enter your home when it is in chaotic disarray, it creates embarrassment and discomfort to show a project too early to too many people. What\u2019s worse, it\u2019s risky. Projects are brainchildren. They deserve our protection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I ever wrote another novel, I would never write it the way I had written this one.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n I knew from experience what Cameron meant. During the years I wrote my previous novel, I discovered that talking about the work had two unintentional (and unfortunate) effects. First, when the writing was not going well\u2014and the writing was often not going well\u2014talking about my frustrations with other people kept me stuck in an antagonistic orientation toward the novel. I would say things like, This novel is going to be the end of me<\/em>, or, If this novel doesn\u2019t kill me first<\/em>. These narratives begged the question: Why on Earth would I want to work on a novel I felt was going to kill me? And for that matter, if projects were indeed brainchildren, why would the novel trust me to write it when these were the stories I told about it? Giving voice to these narratives over and over only reinforced them, and they certainly didn\u2019t leave me feeling remotely encouraged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other pitfall I discovered was that so long as talking about the novel was on the table, I experienced a constant low-grade anxiety in my interactions with people. When I met up with friends or family, I found myself bracing for the inevitable question: \u201cHow is the novel coming along?\u201d Or worse, \u201cWhen do you think your novel will be done?\u201d The answer was always the same\u2014\u201cI don\u2019t know\u201d\u2014followed by all the familiar stories and a resurgence of my frustration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So as Cat and I neared our start date, I decided to take Julia Cameron\u2019s advice. I reached out to all the important people in my life and informed them that for the foreseeable future I would no longer be discussing my creative work. For the next 90 days, I would only talk about my writing with Cat and my sponsor. I would tell no one else I was writing a new novel. This decision also provided me a convenient pivot when anyone else asked about my writing. In response, I asked them if they\u2019d ever heard of Julia Cameron or The Artist\u2019s Way<\/em>. Then I described Cameron\u2019s perspective on containment and told them I wasn\u2019t currently discussing work-in-progress. If they asked me again at a later date, I simply said, \u201cI\u2019m still practicing containment.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With our agreements, commitments, and goals in place, and the support of my intentional resting and containment practices, Cat and I embarked on The<\/em> 90-Day Novel<\/em>. The program is divided into two distinct phases. The first 30 days are devoted to what Watt calls \u201cimagining the world of the story,\u201d and consists of daily free-writing exercises and structure questions designed to lead the writer to a loose outline of their novel. The next 60 days are dedicated to drafting the novel proper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I bought a large yellow Moleskine notebook, and every morning I read Alan Watt\u2019s entry for the day. Then I set a timer on my phone and responded to the five or six freewriting exercises for five minutes each, longhand. During the remaining 30 minutes of my one-hour commitment, I answered the structure questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I knew from my previous reading of The 90-Day Novel<\/em> that Alan Watt relied on Aristotle\u2019s classical three-act structure and the Hero\u2019s Journey outlined in Joseph Campbell\u2019s The Hero with a Thousand Faces<\/em><\/a> as his models for novel writing. I have a lot of respect for the work Joseph Campbell did to popularize mythic narrative traditions, but I also recognize that Campbell was a product of his time, and the Hero\u2019s Journey has always struck me as an inherently misogynist narrative framework. No sooner did I commence answering the structure questions than I found myself resisting them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI hate this model of storytelling,\u201d I voice-messaged Cat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cat was sympathetic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s definitely problematic,\u201d she messaged back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, to her credit, Cat reminded me of our first agreement: For the next 90 days, we would do whatever Alan Watt told us to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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