I write about death a lot. Always have. About terminal illness and celestial apocalypse and women killed for the amusement of men. Murderous cults and a family line of women who see people’s deaths when they touch them. I handled these weighty topics as any overconfident young writer would, like a sixteen-year-old with a fast car. Full of heady delight at the speed and weight of the thing. Unconcerned with my own recklessness. Unscathed by the kind of sadness I depicted in my work.
There is a history of mental health struggle in my family, but I was like my mother, always canted towards optimism. Not one to dwell. When depression crept up in my early twenties, writing was a balm. Sitting down to work felt like breathing air of a different temperature. It cooled me in summer, comforted me against the bone-deep chill of Chicago winter. With writing, I could keep unhappiness at bay. Skim its surface, only feeling enough to render it on the page.
Looking back, it was easy to see my foolishness. Like a fire eater, toying with sadness was my show trick. I knew the thing well enough to extinguish it before it touched my skin. I could mime the swallow.
And then, predictably, the trick stopped working. Right around the time my first novel was published, depression took hold of me. I was living in Riverside, California, working on an MFA in creative writing. By the beginning of my second year, I was having trouble getting out of bed.
At first, I tried my old remedy. But the more I wrote, the less of a comfort writing was. Through workshop after workshop, and in reading online reviews of my book, my inner critic had grown vicious. I could only imagine what I wrote though the eyes of others — my professors, my fellow students, people I barely knew. I couldn’t read over anything I’d written without anticipating the scoffs, the critiques, the disappointment. My writing wasn’t mine anymore, it seemed. I’d made public what had been my own private joy. And, in doing so, I had ruined it.
When I couldn’t fix the depression, I decided the most important thing was to try to hide it. It felt ungrateful to be unhappy, especially after I’d been granted my most cherished wish: to have a novel published. Being undone by the pressures that came with success seemed a new kind of weakness — and a contemptible one.
What I’d hoped would be a short-lived bit of melancholy — the kind that might arise with any major life change — became a deep depression that did not release me for four years. It manifested as exhaustion, the nerve-weary feeling of a near miss in traffic. I walked through my days shaky, close to tears. Everything I ate tasted suddenly underripe. I salted my food until my tongue burned.
I moved back to Chicago and decided my problem would be solved by working harder. Aside from my full-time office job, I spent the next year finishing a draft of my master’s thesis, and then gave up and wrote an entirely new novel instead.
The new novel was painful to write, and I assumed that made it more serious. It was not exuberant. It was careful and contemplative and lean. It gave my inner critic no opportunity to point and say “See, here: how frivolous she is. How sentimental. How young.” In the end, the novel lacked energy, which was no surprise. I lacked energy, too.
I was lamenting this fact with a writer friend when he asked what kind of book might be more enjoyable to write. A thriller, I said. That would be fun. I love a good thriller.
Over the next few weeks, usually over beers in one of Chicago’s many dive bars, we talked about this potential novel. Spitballed ideas. Imagined the turns a story would need to keep a reader engaged. And then something happened. I picked up my phone one evening on my bus ride home, and began to write so quickly that I could barely type fast enough on the screen’s little keyboard.
That was how it went. The book came to me in a deluge. It was the opposite of the compulsiveness with which I’d written since my MFA program, where I’d developed the unfortunate habit of polishing and re-polishing workshop pieces until they were nearly worn flat. This writing was rough, but the ideas came so quickly that it was impossible for me to slow down. Over the next four months I wrote 80,000 words. 11,313 of those were in a two-day period.
I’ve spent a lot of time since wondering why this book brought me back to writing, and I think it has something to do with vanity. In graduate school, and after my first book was published, I began to view my work a proxy for how people saw me. If a piece was clever, that meant I was smart. If it was restrained, it meant I was mature. I was unable to write for the joy of it anymore, because I was trying to use writing as a tool to manage how people saw me.
Four years of depression stripped me of my ego. I wanted only that feeling of solace again. I wanted only the next exciting turn, the next moment of clarity. I wanted to write a book that might lift some other woman out of her bus ride and transport her somewhere more exciting.
I’d be lying if I said writing The Lost Girls was enough to break me out of my depressive spiral. But rediscovering the joy of writing was the catalyst for every subsequent decision I made that finally allowed me to surface. A changed person, certainly. More fearful, less rooted in optimism.
More like my protagonist, I realized after the fact. Marti, a woman I’d written to be the opposite of me. Reckless, headstrong, self-destructive, and brave — whereas I could be leveled by a single unkind word. But still, I’d created a character who was relentless in her pursuits, even in the face of her own grief. Her search was for a missing sister; mine was for the writer I used to be. And in finding Marti, I found myself again. A little more tender, but upright. Looking forward. And writing about pain with more insight — and more empathy, I hope — than before.
Jessica Chiarella is the author of And Again. She holds an MA in writing and publishing from DePaul University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
