The False Gospel of Work: A Polemic

Hello and welcome to Not Knowing How! This week I published a review of Leslie Jamison’s Splinters at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Thank you for reading my work.

Gray and rainful, a lovely afternoon. My baby has been home sick all week, and time to work has been in short supply. But I’ve just emerged from two hours on Zoom to find that, while watching our child, that my partner has tidied and vacuumed our apartment and put the baby down for a nap.

Although both of my jobs offer no shortage of things that need doing, there is no obvious pressing task to which I must put myself. I struggle to think of what to do.

I should enjoy the rainy quiet, I think; I shouldn’t just spend this peaceful home and nice chilly weather on emails. So I settle in to do a different, more personal type of work and write this newsletter.

In my Notes app I keep a list of types of meditation to write about here. Thinness. The laundromat. Pilates. That time my mom and I hitchhiked at David Lynch Meditation Weekend. But as I labor to keep myself on this bimonthly publication schedule, one meditation rises to the surface, inspired by a book I just finished reading.

One friend called it “the best book I’ve read this year.” Another described it as “not a very good book.” In our world where few books of any kind, and even fewer less harrowingly painful memoirs about loss, gain any kind of attention at all, the fact it has been the subject of a great deal of debate online has only burnished its appeal.

I found Molly to be both excellent and grueling. I read it eagerly for hours before bed every night for a week, even though it gave me nightmares. I described it as “a pillbox of darkness” to more than one friend, for many reasons. One is the way Molly made me think about work. 

I’ll spare you the list of every job I’ve ever held. You can probably guess most of them, anyway: tutor, graduate instructor, personal assistant, adjunct. The funny thing about being a writer is that most of us work so that we might work, writing itself being so infrequently remunerative enough to sustain the cost of life.

Although he never explains the specifics, during the years described in Molly, Butler himself does not seem to need to do work other than writing in order to live. The titular Molly herself—Butler’s late wife Molly Brodak—is a contingent academic laborer throughout their relationship, working at the kind of contract teaching gigs with which I am well familiar because they constituted the entirety of my work experience prior to my current position.

In a book that attempts to be incredibly honest, Butler infrequently discusses the financial imbalance in his marriage. The reader is left to infer how much more money he has than Molly does when he pays off her student loans and, later, buys her the plastic surgery she wants. These two moments of large expenditure reflect back on the moment when they purchase a house together to suggest his money underwrites the house, although perhaps they are both on the deed.

Both despite and likely because of what seems like a relative degree of financial security, Butler is obsessed with work:

Molly herself similarly reveres what she calls “good hard work,” but she comes from a traumatic, impoverished background, and has none of the wealth and protection offered Butler by the parents whose deaths from dementia are detailed in the most powerful sections of the book.

Molly also behaves differently with the money she does earn:

I don’t quote this section to comment on the conversation about Butler’s portrayal of Molly, but to point out the values embedded within it: that there is a right, or at least desirable, way to behave with work and money, and that it is possible, through pure action, to attain his ideal.

This way of life has always seemed particularly aspirationally masculine to me. It’s taken me a while to unpack that this is because there is a good deal of privilege built into it. I’ve often castigated myself for not living this art-above-all hustle.

Work hard, play hard; submit every day; never stop hustling. For much—save childhood, all—of my creative life, I have been haunted by these capitalism- (and diet culture-) infused credos about the correct way to be an artist. What more could I have published, what greater art might I have produced, had I not been engaged in the work of being a teacher and administrator for the past decade?

In a (paywalled) post on her excellent newsletter Mommy’s El Camino, one of my very favorite writers, Wendy C. Ortiz, shared that she is “done submitting”:

I love this idea, not only because it’s one that I’ve lived (albeit without a conscious plan to do so) for the last few years. First (say from 2020-2021), no one would publish the work I sent them; then, little by little, I lost my taste for rejection and stopped submitting for the most part.

This was a big change for me. For so much of my writing life, publishing was everything. I submitted constantly, to hundreds of publications. A published piece was proof that I was a real writer, that my career had momentum, that people cared about my writing—and thus that my writing, and my self, mattered. Believing this made me very good at work. Eventually, work became the central feature of my life. But it took a long time for me to understand myself as a working person at all; I thought I was living my passion.

Ten years ago I became an adjunct faculty member at a small university in Los Angeles, a job explicitly forbidden by the rules of my PhD program that felt like a miracle. For years I had been hustling for teaching work, or trying to, within the confines of my rarefied circumstances as a person paid to go to school. Although the funding package for my doctoral program required multiple years of teaching, it also included two fellowship years. I won an additional, competitive fellowship, meaning I spent four years of my PhD teaching at that institution and three being paid to write.

The cultural standard in that program was an ever-present admonition that we students would never been employed in the professorships for which we were training. The market had been wrecked at some indeterminate point before we began our PhDs, and we were left to sift through the crumbs. Too bad! So sad! Many professors seemed low-key gleeful about it.

There were occasional half-baked attempts at professionalizing us for other careers. An email about some vague job one of us could maybe get at a union. A seminar during which we were instructed to write our transferrable skills into a sunflower-shaped chart. A crafty and difficult person I knew raised their hand in that seminar and asked how to market the fact that they were “tenacious” as a job skill. Their helplessness depressed me; how were any of us supposed to get anywhere in this stacked game?

Because I am a contrarian who hates to be underestimated and never forgets anything, this gloomy environment made me absolutely determined to achieve what I was constantly told I would not and obtain a salaried teaching position.

I wanted to show what I could do, how good I was. I wanted to work and gain experience—to obtain that much maligned but to me glamorous thing, an adjunct gig. Besides, I needed the money. I was paid $21,000 a year plus benefits, $30,000 the year I won a competitive fellowship. I was only able to live on that because of the significant financial support from my parents. Most of my peers took out loans.

I applied to every job I could find, in all of the places people recommended: school websites, HigherEdJobs, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the MLA Job List. On Craigslist, which no one recommended, I found the job at the small college. I eagerly accepted its peculiar schedule of one eight-hour class every third Saturday, teaching an average of thirty students in onw eoom.

In this way I became first a faculty member in an MFA program and then, for a short and crazy period of time, its de facto leader. I advised theses, sat on committees, and graded hundreds of pages of writing a week. I began to wake up at two in the morning to grade before these classes, which began at 7:45 AM. This became a habit I maintained for the better part of the next decade.

Eventually I left that job, after it became clear there was no empowered person at that institution who saw me as anything other than an overearnest threat. After, I had better and worse jobs. I always loved the students, but everything else was hard. At my last position before the one I currently hold, I taught two classes per endless nineteen-week semester and made less than a thousand dollars a month after taxes. No benefits.

For a while, working like that, I felt I had lost the ability to read. In order to grade, I had my partner read my students’ work to me out loud, and dictated comments and marginalia for him to transcribe.

A few years after I left that job, a student I’d worked with there visited my city and invited me out for a coffee. I was having a bad day and doing a poor job covering it up. Noticing that I was down, my former student suggested that what might perk me up was to offer another workshop, like the one they had taken from me.

I had been so good at that work, they said.

Surely to do it again would make me happy.

I’ve spent the intervening years trying to understand why this made me so angry.

Work is an unimpeachable habit. Do it enough, do it hard enough, and work will take your mind off of anything. No one can criticize you for it; unlike substances, shopping, even exercise, work is an objective moral good. It makes money. It helps people (especially you, by making you money). It shows you have ambition.

You can work, and work, and work, and work some more, and who will tell you that it’s bad? That there’s something else you should be doing? Why would anyone suggest you should do anything else, when it so benefits you, and everyone else, to work and work and work? To give others your whole self in the noble labor of labor?

To be clear, I love my work. The jobs that pay my bills—running an MFA program and a writing conference—give me a place in the world. They connect me to a delicate web of community; they enable me to help people. Crucially, especially since I became pregnant for the first time, had a miscarriage, became pregnant for a second time, had a second miscarriage, became pregnant, carried to term, delivered, and now for the last six months have been more frequently sick than I have been well, thanks to the vagaries of daycare illnesses, my jobs provide me with health insurance.

I am grateful for my jobs. I’m happy to have finally landed in a place that I can settle in, an environment that does not actively chase me away with abuse.

But that doesn’t mean I have let go of the fear that I’ve somehow failed by living like this—that a real writer writes only, and pastes it together that way. Or the fear that I’ve somehow failed because my job is highly administrative, not the sleek 2/2 tenure-track job I gunned for, and almost got a few times.

Even reading Wendy’s admirable statement about turning away from the submission process, in which she self-identifies—

—made me think, well, I guess I’m nowhere. Although maybe I just need to get more creative with my taxes. There is always a way to feel bad, to feel less, in our own minds.

I watched my mother die a hard death. I have no illusions about my own immortality. But currently? I am alive.

How much of my life do I want to spend feeling bad? How much of yours do you want to spend feeling bad? What I’ve learned is that feeling of not enough, of striving, of longing for what you do not have is the opposite of writing, it is the opposite of art, it is the opposite of all of the things we attribute to the obscure beast of professional success.  

My partner and I, lifelong overachievers, have recently begun announcing to each other that we are breaking up with success. Breaking up with success doesn’t mean quitting our jobs, or giving up on our book projects, or not chasing our weirder creative fantasies.

It means less suffering and more everything that is not suffering. More process and less focus on the things I will never be able to control, like the marketing decision that branded my first novel “the intellectual Fifty Shades of Grey,” a designation that stuck no matter what I did to try to undo it.

I want to be in my community, hang out with my friends, listen to music, cook and eat together, read, paint watercolors, be a witch without thinking (as I seriously did between 2018-2021) that witchcraft, too, should become something at which I am professionally superlative.

I want all of that enjoyment to go into my work.

I want to fill my work up with the big and expansive and delicious things that feed me and make it possible for me to work at all.

I want to be in a generative loop with experiences and people and places and works of art.

I want to be a succulent garden basking in California sun, getting bigger and stronger, more resilient. I want to become more myself through the pleasure of being alive.

I want the inside of my head to look like a sky full of clouds.

I want everything

I make—in my work, in my life—to be a mirror of that sky.