Dear Book Therapist

August 14, 2018 8:09 PM

Do you have a problem? Do you want a book to help you solve it? Book Therapist is Rosalie Knecht, LMSW, a licensed therapist and author of the novels Relief Map and Who is Vera Kelly? (Tin House, June 2018). She will be taking questions monthly for Lit Hub at [e-mail].

See also: Book Therapist columns for April, May, June.

posted by eirias (6 comments total)

This one got to me. Well, they all did, but especially this bit.

"You’re not going to successfully choose between having a regular job and making art. This is because you need food to live and a house to live in, and no career in the arts is going to provide those things for at least (AT LEAST) the first decade, if it ever does at all.
“Of course,” you’re saying. “Don’t patronize me. I know that. So what I’ll do is get some day job to pay the bills. Something undemanding, so that I have my mind free for the things I really care about.”
I’m here to tell you something: the day job is a mug’s game. What you want is a job that you really care about. Yes, that’s correct: I’m suggesting that you should have both an art practice that you are passionate about AND an actual, regular, out-in-the-world job that you also deeply care about. This was the only solution that worked for me, because going to a job I didn’t care about was actually profoundly enervating and depressing. In fact, I was too enervated and depressed to work on my art in my free time. The amount of time you need to spend on something to earn a living at it is simply too much time to spend on something that doesn’t matter to you. You will feel dead. You will feel like you’ve been cryogenically frozen. You’ll think it’s because you should be working on your art instead, but it will actually be because you need a better job."

I think she's right, but goddamn, I cannot figure out how to do that any more.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:13 PM on August 14, 2018 [9 favorites]

we lived in the same dorm freshman year of college. she was really cool and really smart and i never felt cool enough to talk to her. glad to see she still is cool and smart
posted by Jon_Evil at 11:21 PM on August 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I'm three paragraphs in and already there are onions.

I saw Lynda Barry speak once, and she said, referring to the inner voice that tells a creative person that they’re an idiot and their work is trash: “Would I listen to anyone else who talked to me that way? No, I would think ‘That person’s an asshole’ and I would never talk to them again.” I’ve found that this is an extremely useful rubric to apply to self-talk. Would I remain friends with a person who spoke to me the way I’m speaking to myself right now? Would I even remain in the same room with them, for that matter, let alone spend the rest of my day in dialogue with them?
posted by tofu_crouton at 5:46 AM on August 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

I have to spend a lot of time with people who hate me that I can't avoid, though. I unfortunately feel very obligated to listen to what they have to say, even when I've internalized their ah, helpful criticisms after hours.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:29 AM on August 15, 2018

“Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes.”
posted by tofu_crouton at 7:23 AM on August 15, 2018 [3 favorites]

I found this page when mildly webstalking the author (I picked up Who Is Vera Kelly? on a whim at Powell's and really loved it, and wanted to know what else of hers was out there). I am so charmed, one, by the choice to take stories seriously - as a tool that we can use, that we as humans do use, to solve problems; and two, by the fact that someone who is both a fiction writer and a professional therapist takes stories seriously in this way.
posted by eirias at 6:33 PM on August 15, 2018