Who Will Finish Your Manuscript When You Die?

At a recent visit to the doctor, I could hear “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” long before I could see its musicians. It was a jaunty rendition, with synth beats and a full-sized xylophone echoing off the long corridor I had to walk to reception. I suppose it did exactly what it was meant to do: take my mind momentarily off my reason for being there. By the time I made it all the way down the hall to where the musicians played, I tried to catch their eyes to nod in appreciation, but their concentration was absolute. Or maybe they’d been instructed not to gawk at the patients entering Duke’s cancer center. A few weeks before, a doctor had found a tumor in my pinky that had eaten away most of the bone. I’d known something was wrong for a while. It broke all the time. I’d do downward dog, and snap. Grab a rope, and crack. It was horrible and painful and huge, but I resisted going in. It’s not the responsible choice, I know that. But I’d had cancer before, and malaria, and whooping cough, and a whole string of other unusual serious diseases that meant I was not eager to get back into the medical rotation. Plus this time, I had a baby. A baby and an incomplete book draft. What happens to those projects, those years, those buckets filled with our memory and imagination, when we die? One time, my well-meaning scientist husband asked me to estimate how many hours per week I’d spent writing my first book. Not realizing what he was doing, I answered. He bee-bopped on his phone, calculating, and then reported back to me, after having divided the advance on my first book by the number of hours I’d spent writing that book, how much money I was making hourly. I came very close to punching him in the throat. Most of us are not writing for the riches. We have something deep and wild that compels us to translate imagination and memory onto the page. We get it […]

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