LUCK

By Mary Lou Sanelli

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an essay entitled That’s Life in Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest book, A Woman Writing: What writing about writing taught me about determination, persistence, and the ups and downs of choosing a writing life.

“You are so lucky!” is what a woman rushed up to the podium to say to me last night after my reading at the University Bookstore in Seattle.

Sorry, I said to myself. I just can’t agree with you. I wish I could.

“My daughter wants to be a writer. How does she get started?”

A reply sprang into mind, one I’d heard in a movie that I was dying to try out. “If I told you,” I said, “I’d have to kill you.” I laughed.

She didn’t. How typical, I thought. All “tell me, tell me the truth!” Then void of a sense of humor when I do.

“I’m kidding,” I said. And stalling. Because nearly every time I’m confronted with this question, what is really being asked is how one gets published, and this question is an entirely different discipline. Plus, it makes me queasy. So whenever the question pops up, I say, “Tell her to write.”

“Yes, but how does she get published?”

See.

 “Tell her to keep writing,” I said.

No one wants to hear this. In people’s view, writing is publishing. Success is publishing. It’s difficult to say “failure is success if you keep writing anyway” to a mother who wants only the best for her daughter … quickly.

“If she wants to publish, she has to learn how to write,” I said, “and that takes a while for most of us.”

“Thank you!” she said. “It’s just that I want my daughter to be as lucky as you’ve been!” And then she threw her arms around me.

I felt like such a schmuck. I should have taken the time to say luck has nothing to do with writing for most of us. Maybe someday I’ll be able to say that luck is my friend, freely, but I’m not even close to being able to say that yet. What I can say is this: My writing has a lot to do with working at it. I’m the daughter of Italian immigrants. Honestly, all I know is work, work, work, work, work.

I stare at that last line. I almost want to apologize for it.

 But apologizing is something I stopped doing after my friend Rachel pointed out that the one thing she loves most about my writing, about me, is my honesty. Yet it’s the one thing I keep apologizing for.

Which was so honest of her to say that I haven’t apologized for it ever since. Rachel. Like a good novel, she has the ability to make our ordinary, everyday conversations feel very, very special. She allows me to be who I am. She expects me to stay that way.

“Writing,” I should have said to the eager mother of a young writer, “will do some wonderful things for your daughter. And, if she is lucky, she’ll survive the rest.”

Mary Lou Sanelli is an author whose latest book is A Woman Writing. When not working as a literary speaker on the Mainland, she lives in Honolulu. For more of her work, visit marylousanelli.com.

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