Male Writer Characters and Other Monsters
They say that you should write what you know, so it’s no wonder fiction is filled with stories about, well, writing. Writer characters can be found in every genre — Stephen King has some great ones and, minor spoiler alert for fans of Bridgerton, in the books Penelope Featherington eventually tries her hand at writing a novel. But my all-time favorite, the one who lives rent-free in my head and has come to embody for me the archetype of “male writer,” is a character from a book I suspect most readers of this newsletter won’t be familiar with: the dad from Sarah Dessen’s 2009 YA novel Along for the Ride.
Along for the Ride is about a girl named Auden who decides to spend the summer before college living in a beach town with her father, stepmother, and their brand-new baby. Dessen’s books are typically about girls between the ages of 16 and 18 who are finding themselves (and, usually, a hot-yet-sensitive guy) while dealing with fairly heavy shit. Auden gets off pretty easy, honestly. There’s no sexual violence, intimate partner violence, or parental abandonment or death in this book. She’s got some unresolved ish from her parents’ divorce a few years back, but her bigger problem is that her parents are both self-involved literary types who are utterly clueless about human relationships and have, unsurprisingly, failed to teach Auden anything useful about how to relate to other people because they have no clue themselves.
I first discovered Dessen’s books when I was in grad school. Dessen is (although she hasn’t published anything new in a few years) a big name in her genre, sort of the Emily Henry of YA. (She’s also newly on Substack as
!) With all the dense scholarship I was reading, I couldn’t manage anything for fun much more challenging than The Hunger Games. Which isn’t to say that The Hunger Games isn’t challenging in its own way. I have a deep, abiding fondness for YA books, and sometimes I think it’s a lot harder to execute them well than it is adult books.I try not to judge people based on their literature preferences, but I do judge people based on their literary judgments. And if I hear someone make a dismissive, disparaging remark about YA or romance, that pegs them for me as the kind of person who tries to seem smart and cultured by opining on subjects they haven’t bothered to educate themselves in.
Dessen’s characterization of Auden’s parents is brilliant. Her mom is described on page 2 as “an academic scholar with a smart, sharp wit and a nationwide reputation as an expert on women’s roles in Renaissance literature,” and on the next page her father is described as “author of one well-received novel, now more known for his interdepartmental feuds than his long-in-progress follow-up.” By the time Auden narrates the demise of their marriage on page 5, you already feel like you know these people:
They’d originally come to the U straight out of grad school, when my dad was offered an assistant professorship there. At the time, he’d just found a publisher for his first novel, The Narwhal Horn, while my mom was pregnant with my brother and trying to finish her dissertation. Fast-forward four years, to my birth, and my dad, riding a wave of critical and commercial success—NYT best seller list, National Book Award nominee—was heading up the creative writing program, while my mom was, as she liked to put it, “lost in a sea of diapers and self-doubt.” When I entered kindergarten, though, my mom came back to academia with a vengeance, scoring a visiting lectureship and a publisher for her dissertation. Over time, she became one of the most popular professors in the department, was hired on for a full-time position, and banged out a second, then a third book, all while my father looked on. He claimed to be proud, always making jokes about her being his meal ticket, the breadwinner of the family. But then my mother got her endowed chair, which was very prestigious, and he got dropped from his publisher, which wasn’t, and things started to get ugly.
I found Auden’s mom sympathetic and compelling, even though she’s pretentious and judgmental and gets into a romantic relationship with one of her graduate students that none of the other characters seem to acknowledge is deeply problematic. Auden’s dad, I loathed. And kind of envied.
Early on, you learn a key detail about him: he has an alleged “sleep condition” that means he must get nine hours of sleep a night. In the very first chapter, Auden’s mother predicts — correctly — that he isn’t going to be much of a help with Auden’s new half-sister and recalls how little support he gave her: “I was lucky if he changed a diaper every once in a while. And forget about him getting up for night feedings. He claimed that he had sleep issues and had to get his nine hours in order to teach. Awfully convenient, that.” In the second chapter he confirms this himself in response to Auden’s concerns over her exhausted and depressed postpartum stepmother: “The baby’s up a lot at night, you know, and I’m not much help because I have this sleep condition and have to get my nine hours, or else. I keep trying to convince her to get in some help, but she won’t do it.”
It’s that personal pronoun that kills me — “his nine hours,” “my nine hours.” It’s a subtle detail, but it really goes a long way toward hinting to the reader exactly what kind of Male Writer we’re dealing with here.
Also, he bullied his new wife into naming the baby Thisbe. And he has a habit that sounds irritating, bordering on actionable, of trailing off in the middle of a sentence and expecting the person he’s talking with to fill in the blank for him. This guy sucks.
As the book unfolds, Auden embarks on a quest to discover the value in friendship, fun, and failure. She also learns how to ride a bike. Meanwhile, her father’s second marriage starts to (unsurprisingly) fall apart. He’s finally nearing the finish line on that second novel he’s spent the better part of two decades working on, and he’s determined not to let the presence of a constantly-screaming newborn baby, one who he created, impact his plan to spend the summer writing all day, every day.
He does finish writing his book, about halfway into Along for the Ride. Predictably, he doesn’t then pivot to being an involved father. If anything, he gets even worse, because he starts leaving for days at a time to go to various industry events with his agent to shop the book around. Auden’s stepmother Heidi finally grows enough of a backbone to insist that he watch the baby for one (1) single night, and when she returns the two of them have a fight that ends with him moving out of the house and into a hotel, leaving his 26-year-old wife with her two-month-old infant and stepdaughter.
When Auden visits him at the the hotel, they have this exchange:
He sighed again. “She hides everything. Keeps it deep down, and you think everything’s fine, but then one day, out of nowhere, it suddenly explodes in your face. She’s not fine, she’s unhappy. You haven’t been doing enough after all. Oh, and you’re the worst father ever, also.”
I waited a beat or two before asking, “Did she actually say that, though?”
“Of course not!” he snapped. “But in marriage, all is subtext, Auden. The fact of the matter is that in her mind, I have failed her and Thisbe. From day one, apparently.”
“So you try again,” I said. “And do better.”
He gave me a sad look. “It’s not that easy, honey.”
“What’s the alternative, though? Just staying here, alone?”
“Well, I don’t know.” He got off the bed, walking over to the window and sliding his hands in his pockets. “I certainly don’t want to make things any worse than I already have. It’s possible they’d be better off without me. Even probable.”
I felt my stomach twist, unexpectedly. “I doubt that,” I said. “Heidi loves you.”
“And I her,” he said. “But sometimes, love isn’t enough.”
The weird thing was that what bothered me most about him saying this was that it was such a lame, throwaway line. He was a great writer: I knew he could do better.
Eventually, he gets kinda sorta redeemed, almost. Whatever. The story isn’t really about him. His wife runs a successful boutique, so even if his second book doesn’t really sell, they’ll be ok. And I assume it won’t, because when he finishes the draft he makes a big deal of reading Auden the final paragraph out loud, and it goes like this: “The path was more narrow now, the lacy boughs of the trees bending to meet each other as I walked beneath them. Somewhere, ahead, was the sea.” Come on, man.
And yet — even though he writes like that — this guy really, really protects his writing space and time. The detail about him that has stayed with me the most is this one, from Auden’s observations early in the book about his writing schedule:
I’d figured out that he took an apple up to his office every day after lunch. If it was a good day, he always got too immersed in what he was doing and didn’t eat it. On a bad one, though, the core was bitten down to nothing, nibbled to death, sometimes even in two pieces. On a whole-apple day, he emerged at dinnertime cheerful and talkative. On an apple-core day—especially a two-piece core—you did best to steer clear, if he even came down at all.
I’m currently taking advantage of my joint custody schedule (which I love) to take a writing retreat. Six days of morning hikes, quiet, and Japanese gardens. And even still, hundreds of miles from my family and our day-to-day concerns, I can’t imagine being able to focus so completely on my writing that I go full apple-core. It takes so much work to turn off the part of my brain that belongs to my children and my plans and worries for them.
Auden’s dad is the epitome of the “art monster” in Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation: “My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” It’s a memorable description, one that writers quote and discuss often. Usually with ambivalence, because it’s an image that is both attractive and repulsive.
Even just from my perspective as a writer — which is only one part of my life, one of many hats I wear — most of my writer-self doesn’t want to be an art monster because it doesn’t seem like the path to the best writing. My relationships with my family and my partner and my children push me every day to be more honest and empathetic, to approach my life with more humor, to describe my experiences and feelings more clearly and thoughtfully. In short, all of the qualities that go toward improving my writing.
I do have a tiny art monster inside me that sometimes screams to be let out. I’m not going to let her run the show on my life, because I don’t want my family to start talking about how Donna “needs her nine hours” (gag) or for my book to end up sounding like Auden’s dad’s book. But I’m trying to accept her without shame and give her all the room and all the apples she needs.