Right now I’m reading two celeb bios: Barbra Streisand’s 900 page autobiography, My Name is Barbra, which I’m deep into (in part because I’ve borrowed it digitally and the library will swoop in back in 14 days) and Henry Winkler’s Being Henry. I knew very little about Barbra’s early career and nothing about her childhood, and certainly I had not realized how very young she was when she began to get famous, appeared on Broadway, made her first albums and TV specials, etc. 19 years old and on Broadway! 20 years old and standing up for herself and her artistic preferences and starting appearances on TV talk shows. Living with actor Elliott Gould. Having their son at 24 in the midst of her Funny Girl fame. (some fascinating anecdotes in that section about how hard it was for the directors and producers to understand that she was exactly the actress/singer they needed). She quotes from a letter she received from playwright Tennesse Williams after he saw Funny Girl, and he tells her with remarkable intuition that not only is she one of a kind talented, but that part of her talent comes from the sadness of her childhood, from the need to be her own person and trust herself and take care of her art even if those around her in her early years did not recognize the special gifts she had.
And although I’ve just begun Henry Winkler’s, there’s definitely a commonality (although for different reasons, including having to compensate for severe dyslexia) about his formative years and pushing to achieve the creative life he needed to live despite lack of family support and in fact outright negativity about his abilities. Let me add here that I’ve had the privilege of meeting Henry (thank you book world), and he is a wonderfully kind human being (which comes across in his book) in addition to his talent!
In any case, I’ve been thinking hard about all that these past few days, about what it takes to produce art, whether it’s writing or music or painting or whatever your muse and talent give you. We have to be brave and our own advocates. We have to know our own worth. We have to have a thick skin for the rejection, and we have to know when the criticism is accurate and how to fix what’s wrong. Been pondering what makes us artists. Are we born that way, seeing the world through a creative lense? Or does the need to create art come from lived experience? Or perhaps it’s some mystical combination.
For me, my desire to write developed from reading, which sparked me to make up stories. (TV and movie watching helped, too, I’m sure). I’ve always wondered about authors who say that they never read as a child. I suspect they were consuming story in other ways. I don’t think writers grow into writers like Athena springing fully grown out of Zeus’s head.
We were a reading family when I was growing up, with books and magazines everywhere in the apartment, including in the bathroom. Does anyone else read in the bathroom? Do you read the back of cereal boxes, too? I still do. I had a book on my lap for almost every meal growing up. If I’m eating alone, I can’t imagine eating without reading.
I won’t say that my parents encouraged my writing in any serious ‘this should be your career’ kind of way (it seemed far too impractical to them unless I planned on teaching) But they didn’t discourage me either, were always happy to read and praise my stories. They also let me read what I wanted, and if I picked up something too far above my life experience, I usually put it down again. (I’m looking at you, John Updike’s Couples, and all those enormous paperbacks my mother preferred by authors like James Michener) All that ‘free-range’ reading and skimming and browsing and standing in Rosen’s drugstore memorizing celebrity birthdates opened me to the world and helped turn me into a writer. Rummaging through my parents’ bookshelves and reading everything I got my hands on, including things I’d probably never have picked up on my own, was good for me. Reading widely taught me to appreciate the grey areas, to recognize half-truths and lies when I hear them, to understand there are often no simple answers (although sometimes there are) and that nuance and historical knowledge are crucial to understanding the world and what we humans do while living in it. And in case you were wondering, I read a lot about celebrities, too. Biographies and autobiographies, and articles and interviews in fan magazines that mostly I read while standing bookstores or drugstores like the one on the corner of our block that also had a vast collection of those spinners that held dozens and dozens of Bantam paperbacks of all tastes and genres. The store owner had a thing for sci fi, and so that’s where I acquired my collection of paperback novelizations of the first seasons of Star Trek. (now there’s a tidbit for you!)
Somewhere in there, I became a writer and later, a published writer. An artist who knew she wanted to use her words to tell stories that tried to make sense of the human experience. And who will always enjoy hearing and reading about how other people came to their creative lives.
If you write or draw or paint or compose or play an instrument or knit, or whatever your talents have given you, how did you come to your art?