I have been married to a fellow writer for eighteen years. During that time we’ve bought a house, become parents to three amazing kids, and weathered the death of one of our parents and estrangement from another. My husband has also published ten books and countless essays and articles, cohosted a popular podcast, and been regularly invited to speak at conferences and universities. I, too, have published: a single novel and a handful of short stories and essays. Although I’d naively thought that our division of labor would become more egalitarian over time, the majority of my attention has gone to running our household, while Steve has maintained a hectic publishing and teaching schedule.
A couple of months ago I was looking for toilet paper in my husband’s bathroom when I found a letter written to him by my father-in-law in October 2016. The letter references a conversation the two men had, about some of the tensions between Steve and me. In it Ric, my father-in-law, urges my husband to consider how powerful he is, especially since he is “the published writer with an endless stream of confirming successes.”
He goes on to wonder if perhaps I’ve been allowed to pretend that I’m also a writer for too long, asking Steve, “[D]o you play along with the writer fantasy by facilitating the endless work on her novel?”
Sigh.
Now I feel the need to express my bona fides as a writer as they existed in 2016. I had gotten my MFA in the fiction workshop at the University of California in Irvine in 2007, despite being pregnant and terribly nauseated for most of my second year. I’d completed a novel as my master’s thesis, and by 2008 I’d contracted with my first agent. When that novel didn’t sell during the recession, I went back to the drawing board, completely reconceiving the plot while also working as the primary caregiver to two young children while my husband traveled frequently in support of his own books and for various teaching assignments.
In 2013 I gave birth to our third child, after another long, nauseous pregnancy, and in the next few years published a handful of stories while writing two other novels. I also edited and advised my husband on his writing projects—and was good enough at it that Steve urged me to promote myself as a freelance editor and manuscript consultant.
Although my consulting business steadily grew, like many, or maybe most, writers, occasionally I would despair about my own creative projects. In my darkest moments I’d wonder if perhaps I wasn’t meant to be a fiction writer after all. Maybe I should take the fact that I had been out of my MFA program for nearly a decade and still hadn’t published a novel as evidence that it would never happen and I should just give up.
Sometimes I’d say these things out loud to my husband. Invariably Steve would say something like: “What you’re doing is really hard. You have to esteem the process and not be so focused on the result. I’ve written and published a lot of books, but I have yet to publish a novel.” It helped to hear someone whose work I admired so much tell me that there was value to what I was doing, even if it never made it to the shelves of our local bookstore.
What to make, then, of this note, this evidence that while my husband had been urging me to esteem my (mostly unpublished) work, he’d been having an entirely different conversation with his father, one in which my work didn’t have value and was perhaps even a drag on our family? Later in the letter Ric refers to my having expressed the possibility of going back to school by saying: “[Y]ou could let her know that if she tries a course that heads for some kind of school, you expect her to complete it and do well without major extra burden to the family.”
Well, then.
Putting aside, for a moment—because it could be a whole essay on its own—the paternalistic notion that if the primary caregiver wants to educate herself in some way, she must do it without burdening anyone else in the family (translation: She better make sure she’s still cleaning the bathrooms and doing the laundry), consider that the main idea here is that my creative ambitions have already taken up too much space. That perhaps they had already become a burden for our family. There is also an assumption that Steve is entitled to set expectations for the kinds of work I do—whether that’s writing or anything else—with no sense that I have any say in what he works on or how he chooses to work, no matter how his schedule affects our family.
To be fair my father-in-law was born in 1938, and his notions of marriage—and what constitutes success—have most assuredly been shaped by his generation. Although he and my late mother-in-law, Barbara, were both psychoanalysts, it was she who had worked the “second shift,” managing the house and the three kids, cooking most of the meals, and organizing their social calendar. Ric was also someone with artistic talent—music, in his case—who internalized his family’s message that this was not something to pursue as a career but rather to enjoy as a hobby alongside the much more respectable and lucrative pursuit of medicine. (This was also true of my mother-in-law, who, although she’d studied piano at a performing arts high school in New York City, went on to become one of six women in her graduating class at Yale School of Medicine.) Perhaps he saw writing as a worthy ambition only if it resulted in “an endless stream of confirming successes,” which obviously his son had but his daughter-in-law did not.
Three years after that letter was written, I published my first novel, Witches’ Dance (Lanternfish Press, 2019). Four years later one of my short stories won first prize in a notable fiction contest, and my collection was a finalist for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Now I’m searching for an agent for my latest novel, a manuscript whose writing was interrupted by a pandemic and several frightening, painful medical issues. Although I did finally publish the novel that Ric observed me “endlessly” working on, his words still sting, all these years later.
Maybe it’s because no matter how much I’ve written or published—no matter the length of my bona fides—there is still a part of me that worries my writing ambitions are absurd. A fantasy to either selfishly entertain or set aside for more practical concerns. (Never mind that now, with two teenagers and a child with special needs, the majority of my time is spent dealing with practical concerns.)
Maybe you’ve felt that way too—especially if you’re a woman. Especially if you have kids and you’re the one responsible for their daily routines, filling out school forms, schlepping to medical appointments, all of those tasks that each take up such a seemingly small slice of time and energy but in the aggregate amount to hours, sometimes years, not spent writing. Maybe you have a partner whose ambitions are the priority such that, while yours aren’t expressly belittled, it often seems pragmatic to push them aside to make way for his opportunities. Or maybe you come from a family that sees an artistic practice as a luxury, full stop—something to indulge in only if it doesn’t take up too much room. It’s only fantasy, after all.
This, of course, raises the questions: Whose artistic ambitions are recognized as legitimate, and who is in a position to dream at all? It’s easy for me to say that we need people from all walks of life, all cultures and genders, to risk telling their stories, even when remuneration and recognition are not guaranteed. It’s quite another to actually take that risk when you’re deeply in debt or caring for children with special needs. Or if you’re surrounded by people who tell you in ways, direct or indirect, that your voice doesn’t matter. That your time and efforts are worth only the amount someone else is willing to pay for them.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties—during the few years between my less-than-stellar high school career and the first class I took at the local community college—I learned what it was like to live on minimum wage. I drove a 1987 Dodge Charger that constantly broke down but which I needed to get to my bartending job, my pizza delivery job, and my job behind the counter at the local music store. I remember the decrepit apartment I lived in with my older brother, the ten-dollar bill I’d take to the grocery store, hoping it could somehow feed me for a week, the credit card debt that deepened each time the Charger needed another repair. It didn’t matter how many hours I worked; at those rates it would never be enough.
Success in those years meant surviving. I had dreams, of course—I wanted to be a musician and a writer—but there wasn’t much time in my days to pursue them. Sure, I practiced my violin and guitar and wrote in my notebooks late at night, after I’d finished my final shift. But I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the leap from fantasy to reality. To make those dreams come true.
Now, if I ever added up all the hours I spent “endlessly” working on my first novel, writing and rewriting that manuscript for over a decade, I’m sure the $1,000 advance I got from my small press publisher would work out to less of an hourly rate than what I’d made at those low-wage jobs in the nineties. Does that mean I’m still not a real writer? That my dream still hasn’t come true? Have I existed in a fantasy for the past twenty years, pretending I’m a writer while the external markers of success—a large advance, a major award—have passed me by? Is it enough for me to see the value in my own work and in the act of writing itself, or am I somehow kidding myself? I’m aware, as I write these questions, that I’m not even sure who I am asking. It’s worth investigating who gets to decide these things—who, in the end, has the narrative control. Is it my father-in-law and the patriarchy he represents? Or does that power somehow lie within me?
When I asked Steve recently about the letter, he reminded me that the argument it references arose from my announcing I wanted to apply to medical school. Steve was strongly against the idea, and I found his reaction insulting. (I have a memory of his saying there was no way I could pass an organic chemistry course.) Now he told me: “I can see that I should have simply listened and shown support. My reaction was clearly stupid and hurtful.” He also said that he understood how hard it was to write a novel—and reminded me that he’d written five before finally seeing one through to publication. Although he was telling me this in solidarity, I couldn’t help noting that he’d had the time and space to write five unpublishable novels without anyone ever questioning his legitimacy as a writer, or his entitlement to take as much time as he wanted, or needed, to try again.
The question of whose work is “indulged” and whose work is seen as “necessary” is one I suspect has attended the relationships of other artist couples throughout history. I deeply admire my husband’s writing and think he deserves every accolade he’s ever gotten; at the same time, as the years have gone by, I’ve come into an increasing awareness of how quick I’ve been to step aside, put down my own projects, and direct my attention elsewhere. Much of this is due to external forces—how often I’ve been praised for my mothering or my attention to some mundane, logistical detail, versus my writing—but I’ll admit that some of it is internal, too. Writing a novel is incredibly difficult, and while laundry can be tedious, it’s not hard. There are plenty of afternoons when I could have been writing but instead folded towels and dreamed. But, of course, at the end of the day the laundry must be done—and what makes it feel urgent to devote time to writing a novel? Some external reward? Or an internal sense that the work is important, regardless of its reception?
One of the other things I’ve done since my father-in-law penned that missive in 2016 is present at various writers conferences. One of my favorite lectures to give is about characters’ fantasy lives. (I swear I developed this talk long before I stumbled upon that letter.) In it I make the point that writers can learn a lot about their characters by considering their fantasies, and it can sometimes be useful to describe those fantasy lives on the page. We reveal ourselves in our daydreams, the logic goes, often in ways we’re not fully conscious of. Some of the character examples I use are Walter Mitty from James Thurber’s classic story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” the barber from George Saunders’s story “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” and Tom Ripley from Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley (Coward McCann, 1955). When each of these characters fantasizes on the page, readers see them more clearly.
We understand, then, that Walter Mitty is desperately unhappy in his marriage, that the barber hates himself too much to make a connection with a real live woman, and that the person who murderous Tom Ripley really wants to kill is himself—even when each of these characters does not. It is through their fantasies that they articulate their most hidden, their most secret selves. It is through their fantasies that they are known.
I wanted this talk to be relevant to nonfiction writers, too, so I included works like Tara Westover’s Educated (Random House, 2018), Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2020), and A Ghost in the Throat (Biblioasis, 2021) by Doireann Ní Ghríofa. In each of these memoirs, the authors use fantasy to illuminate the nuances of their lived experiences, like a prism refracting light into more colors than you can otherwise see. I love these lines from the opening chapter of A Ghost in the Throat:
This is a female text, composed while folding someone else’s clothes. My mind holds it close, and it grows, tender and slow, while my hands perform innumerable chores…. This is a female text, written in the twenty-first century. How late it is. How much has changed. How little.
Ghríofa’s fantasy life causes her to return again and again to a poem written by an eighteenth-century Irish noblewoman, and as she reflects on how those verses have resonated with her over the years, she reveals new dimensions of her internal life, linking the two women across time and across language; a life of the mind and the page, amid the laundry and the list. Fantasy is the essential ingredient here, one that elevates drudgery into meditation, and an intellectual exercise into something like love.
Maybe I’m wrong, then, to take issue with my literary ambitions being described as a “fantasy,” while my husband’s are considered real and worthy of a life’s work. Maybe I shouldn’t take that word as an insult, because isn’t that the whole point of writing in the first place? To take a fantasy—an intangible dream, notion, or idea—and make it into something? First on the page and then in the mind of another human being? To perform that miraculous alchemy that results in multiple people having the same fantasy—dreaming the same dream—at the same time?
And isn’t it true that in order to create something, or change something, we must first be able to imagine it? Perhaps we should begin with imagining a new definition of success, one that holds doing creative work, no matter its remuneration or accolades, as the highest accomplishment—and one that acknowledges, too, the domestic and quotidian labor that makes such dreaming possible. That to me seems a dream worth pursuing.
Erin Almond is the author of the novel Witches’ Dance (Lanternfish Press, 2019), and her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Sun, Colorado Review, Literary Mama, Normal School, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti column. Her short story “The Unbearable Weight of My Heart” won first prize in the Pangyrus Fiction Contest, and her essay “My Connecticut” is included in the anthology Life’s Short, Talk Fast: Fifteen Writers on Why We Can’t Stop Watching Gilmore Girls (Norton, 2024). She works as a manuscript consultant and writing coach and can be found online at erineileenalmond.com.
Thumbnail credit: Sharona Jacobs