The Capacity to Be Alone

A lyric essay on shame, shamelessness, and writing a novel under duress.

I don’t like novels. I love a few novels and brought some of them with me: The Hour of the Star, Woman at Point Zero, Forever Valley, Maud Martha, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I also brought a few novels, or novel-like books, that I had not yet read but that I thought I might love: Suite for Barbara Loden, Ban en Banlieue, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights. The rest of the reading I planned to do was, directly or indirectly, about shame.

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I first heard the term good-enough mother in a conversation with a poet friend who was training to be a psychotherapist. This was years ago; I had just begun to feel what I think is meant by a maternal instinct, or to suspect that my desire to parent might be stronger than my suspicion of that desire—stronger even than my fear of ruining my life. Good-enough seemed possible, seemed right.

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I read about the difference between guilt and shame in an essay written about Odysseus by a literary critic long ago. I forget the argument, but I remember the difference, or the fact of there being a difference. Odysseus’s palm tree made an appearance, too—though that might have been in a different essay, one about nostalgia, or was it grief, possibly by someone else.

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In my novel, the main character—Eleanor—is a woman who does not want to be a mother. I sent a draft to a new friend, a writer I admired, who said she could relate. I thought of writing back to clarify but