A Good Life

On the Goldies and Gratitude

“There is more to life than books, you know, but not much more.” ~ The Smiths

Last week I was able to attend, for the final few days, the Golden Crown Literary Societies' Annual Conference. It was an amazing experience to get to spend time loving books, loving stories, in community. There was magic in the ability to turn the corner and find yourself in another great conversation about the books that have changed my life in all the best ways. To spend time talking craft with some of the best and brightest minds in the space. I felt full in a way that I haven’t in a long time, and more myself than I have since even before I got sick. 

I felt so much myself it created a kind of crisis. The good kind, probably, but a crisis nonetheless.

For the last few months, year really, if you would have asked me how I describe myself I would have quoted from Ada Limón’s Give Me This and said, “She is a funny creature and earnest / And she is doing what she can to survive.” Survival is essential and beautiful and built of reckless optimism. It is a worthy thing. An important thing. But, it is also the bare minimum of existence. It is the foundation of a life, the starting line of a life, but not a life itself. First, you must survive, then you also must live. And, hopefully, live in such a way as to honor your survival.

Live a good life… whatever that means.

I’ve read The Writing Life by Annie Dillard at least half a dozen times. It’s a book about what it means to be a writer - about what writing takes from you and what it gives in return. It’s not an easy book. I never know if I agree with or disagree with, or even understand, the heart of what Dillard was saying to help writers understand in her tiny tome. It’s breathtaking though. Brilliant and unflinching and the embodiment of that particular dichotomy found so often in those born in the northeast: it’s not particularly nice but it is unfailingly kind. It makes me think. It makes me a better writer. And, more than any other book on art, it has helped me understand what Edna St. Vincent Millay meant when she wrote, “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines and keep him there.” 

Lately a line from The Writing Life has been haunting me - sneaking its way into my conscious in the most magic vulnerable moments of the day - very late at night or incredibly early in the morning - when everything feels possible and you believe, if you just reach out far enough, you can touch the magic of the universe. 

I am existential by nature. I always have been. I have been asking variations of “why do I exist” and “what does it mean that I exist” since I was in kindergarten and my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I responded “I want to be a big knower and know what it means to grow up when I grow up.” I know this sounds like a precocious answer, but know it was my second answer. The first was a water tower because it was the biggest thing I could think of.

This has been one of the hardest years of my life. It’s not a secret. It’s been the kind of hard that ends at rock bottom, standing on the precipice of the rest of my life feeling Mary Oliver’s quintessential lines wrapping themselves around me.

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?” 

There is no shortage of sage advice and reasoned insight into what it means to live a good life. Mostly because, it seems to me, the question of how to live a good life is the defining question of consciousness. It feels like we are all bumbling around, bouncing off each other, mumbling constantly, ‘I am here. I am aware I am here. Now, what the fuck am I supposed to do with that?’ 

I am beginning to understand that there are likely as many answers to the question of “what it means to live a good life” as there are people living lives. I think this is at the core of why those lines of Mary Oliver’s hit so hard for so many. She isn’t asking you to tell her what it means to have a good life in general. She isn’t interested in the theoretics of a good life. She is asking what it means for you, very specifically you, to live a good life.

What does it mean for me, very specifically me, to have a good life?

I struggled with articulating my answer to this question for months. No matter how I posed it to myself or how other’s posed it to me I could not find an answer that felt true. I ruminated and I spiraled and I turned to book after book after book but nothing felt quite right. I knew what artists and philosophers and psychologists and astrophysicists said about what it meant to live a good life. I understood the teachings of religious leaders and mystics and self-help gurus. But, even armed with all that information, I still had no idea what a good life meant to me. I did not know what my good life looked like. I was worried I would never know, that I would forever be Goldielocks trying on the good lives of others hoping I found one that was just right. Then Anna Lamott, literally the most likely of sources, said something in an interview that unlocked me. When asked what advice she’d give to young people she said, “If you want to have a good life, become a reader.” 

It reminded me of the rest of that Annie Dillard Quote:

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading–that is a good life.”

A life spent reading–that is a good life.

GCLS was a gorgeous reminder that I do know what a good life, at least the first part of my good life, is. I might have lost the thread for a while there, but I’m clear now. It’s a life spent reading. But, more, it’s a life spent engaging and enriching and expanding a community of readers. It’s a life spent celebrating stories and the people who love them and who tell them.

Which brings me to the second really important aspect of a good life for me: gratitude.

On Saturday night I got to attend the Goldies. It was incredible to sit in a room with some of the greatest writers of sapphic fiction in the world and watch them be celebrated for the stories they gave the world this past year. And in a turn I never saw coming, I got to hear my name called twice once for general fiction and once for debut.

There is this beautiful Dietrich Bonhoeffer quote that goes, “In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” It’s surreal to me, my book being on a list of winners that include the likes of Virginia Black, Haley Cass, Clare Ashton, Morgan Lee Miller, and so many other incredible writers. My being given a great deal more than I deserve. And I can’t really process it, I don’t know that I ever will. But I do know that it doesn’t happen without y’all. And I ache with gratitude for each of you.

Thank you for taking a chance on a book that opens and closes with more vomit than most would find ideal. Thank you for taking a chance on an unknown writer who still mostly sees herself as a reader. Thank you for believing in this book, and in me, when I truly did not. I didn’t have words the night I won, and I still don’t really have the best words, and maybe that’s the point. I don't need the best words, I just need the right ones. And those I have. Those I will leave you with.

Thank you.