THE FIRST TIME I READ MARIANNE WIGGINS’S NOVEL Properties of Thirst, it was unfinished. Or perhaps unfinishable is a better word. This was the spring of 2018, and the book had come to me in an enormous binder. The manuscript was 541 pages long, including an incomplete final chapter that began with an author’s note (the writer to herself, it appeared) articulating one of the problems Wiggins had been facing. “I haven’t been able to bring the language of this chapter up to my standards yet,” she wrote, “but I’ll get there.” The note was dated January 2016.
Wiggins’s self-encouragement reminded me of a related message I’d once encountered, from a Los Angeles novelist named Maritta Wolff. In 1975, at the age of 56, Wolff had set aside her last novel—it would be published posthumously in 2005 under the title —for the final time. As she boxed the manuscript (to revise later, perhaps, although she never did return to it), she added a single-spaced typed letter, marked with an array of editorial notes. “I what is wrong,” she observed, delineating the strengths and failings of the project. “I know the trouble spots and I know fairly well what is required to fix it.… I may
