For those of you unfamiliar with Hanne Blank, she is a profoundly gifted writer and editor whose interests tend towards sex and gender. She has been working for the past couple of years on what promises to be a fascinating tome on the subject of virginity, and I can’t wait for it to appear on bookshelves.
Anyway, she has a blog — although she hasn’t posted anything there in a few months — but I went there today and came across a post wherein she discusses her grieving process for the book, which had recently gone to the publisher for review. It’s a moving and beautiful piece of writing, and I wanted to share it here, because I suspect it applies to most writers — and now that I’ve read it, I feel a bit better prepared for the process upon which we are embarking. Read on for an excerpt…
The book on the page never — at least not for me — exhausts the book in the head. You grieve when the book is done partly because it’s a relationship that ends, and like losing any other partner with whom you spend so much time, the loss leaves a hole. You grieve because when it goes, it doesn’t phone home for a while, because of the mighty, encompassing digestive silence of the machine that turns manuscripts into books. You grieve because of the ghosts, all the could-haves and might-have-beens and conversations you didn’t get to have and that will never be quite the same in any other context: you can try to have them, sure, but it’ll be another book that generates its own milieu, its own constellations in the sky.
It’s inevitable, of course. It’s part of the great turning wheel of getting ideas out into the world. And you know that. I know that. I suppose it could be said that the grief is part of the work: it’s the work of having something that has been your book, constantly-changing and interior, and now needs to become everyone’s book, fixed and exterior.
Catholics, Erasmus argued in what was a rather Protestant way for a Catholic cleric like him, had an obligation to marry: it was as senseless to remain a virgin purely for the sake of the virtue associated with virginity as it would be to keep an apple tree in blossom forever for the sake of beauty and fragrance. The breathtaking promise of a blossom is the price you pay for the nourishing fulfilment of fruit.
Sometimes you grieve for the blossoms even as you look forward to eating the fruit.
