Margie, Lucy, and the manuscript

The indifference of the world which Keats and Flaubert and other men of genius have found so hard to bear was in her case [in the case of the woman writer] not indifference but hostility. The world did not say to her as it said to them, Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. The world said with a guffaw, Write? What's the good of your writing? 
--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. 

I love this bit of Virginia Woolf because I have been writing since I was seven, teaching writing since I was about twenty-five, and every step of the way I have heard the world say to me, and to the people I’ve taught, mostly women and people of color, “What’s the good of your writing?” 

Margie is ninety, and she has completed what must be the fourth or fifth draft of her story: born in a tenement in the Bronx and regarded in her birth family as insignificant; married the wrong man and had, with him, three remarkable children, each different from the others and each courageous and inventive in their own way. Against all advice, Margie went to university as a grown woman, a mother, and then, despite her own misgivings and her mother’s disbelief, made her way to a degree. In the 70s she broke free of her marriage and set out with her three children to a new life as a social worker in the hippie heaven that was San Francisco. That's her daughter Lucy at the table with her, helping her to sort the photographs she wants for each chapter.

What makes Margie’s story unforgettable is her gift for sensory detail--a breeze caressing sun-burnt legs on a Bronx fire escape on a summer night, the sound of neighbors arguing, the smell of pond water and wooden rafters in a cabin at a camp run by a Settlement House.... And yet with every story, every page, Margie has been uncertain it was worth telling. Some voice in her head says she isn’t really a writer; her stories aren’t literary, aren’t worth saving, nobody wants them. “Who, you?” the voice asks, incredulous. “Write?” She counters that voice with her own, “There’s so much my children don’t know. I have such admiration for them, for the ways they adapted and made the best of things, the ways they grew into the adults they are now, not to mention all the things that happened before they were even born. I want to give them that.”

I want her to give them that, too, and I want the record of her powerful re-membering of her life to be preserved and honored, if only by her family. So I’ve offered to spend the next year, if it takes that long, helping her build a book of her many stories and photographs. Virginia Woolf said something else in Room:  “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”