Writing should be simple enough. A matter of applying words in a sequence onto paper. But it was New York City. The apartment was on the second floor, subject to all the noise of First Avenue. Beth Israel hospital was across the road, so too the fire station and the police. The building had a canopy outside the door, the only one in the street. A convenient place for all the dealers to congregate and blast the top ten salsa hits out of huge ghetto blasters. They were a polite bunch, holding the door open for me when I returned home. I had a computer but no printer. To print I had to hand the disc to my husband and wait for him to come home from work before I browsed the inevitably horrible first drafts. Virgil said he would spend the morning writing and the afternoon licking it into shape as a bear licks her cubs. He must have had a printer.
I was three quarters of the way through my second novel More Bread Or I'll Appear when my in-laws announced their descent. They did not know I was a writer. They live in Teheran and don't think much of the decadent West. My husband had not seen his family in many years; his prognosis for the upcoming visit was grim. He was afraid of my books scandalising his family. As he said, "You would have a great literary career if it wasn't for those books you write". To help him ease tensions I was willing to respect cultural differences and reveal nothing. We ran around our apartment cleaning and hiding anything slightly incriminating. My first novel, Breakfast In Babylon, reviews, magazine articles, interviews, publications with my poems printed, all were deemed Class-A top secret documents. The evidence was put in a box. We invented a respectable and vague profession for me - computers. This seemed to placate his mother; she said I could teach her daughter. I imagined myself demonstrating my only trick, cut and paste, for hours.
At eight thirty in the morning I rose and put on my one suit. I picked up my empty briefcase and bade farewell. The next hours were spent sitting on my roof in Manhattan, writing. It was August and I was on a tarmac roof with no shelter in a wool suit. The sun got hotter and hotter. At five o clock I came back down in the elevator, walked through the door, grilled, melted and sweltering. Nice day at the office indeed. This writing scenario lasted three days and I thought I should either get a job or leave the country. My husband tossed his family the keys and we hightailed it to Bali. My output lessened but I was most content. I wrote a chapter on the plane, which I lost in Guam.
On my return, my writing days continued uneventfully, regularly writing from four to eight on my computer and correcting old drafts. It can be a drudgerous business, occasionally enlivened by the excitement when the story comes together and the words are alive and glistening on the page.
The year before publication was spent fine-tuning with the help of my editor. But suddenly in January, my in-laws returned. By that time we had moved just outside New York to New Jersey. Head bowed, I wandered through town in desultory fashion in my wool suit, clutching my battered briefcase, which had never yet crossed the threshold of corporate America. To my horror the town library was closed for renovation. I paced through canyons of snow piled in giant mounds, black from exhaust and frozen solid.
I prepared to come back to the house and come out of the closet, proclaim my shameful profession for once and for all. Tell them that I had won numerous awards, given readings from Dresden to San Francisco, spoken at Notre Dame and Harvard, got favourable reviews in the New York Times. Then I recalled all my characters rampaging through the pages indulging in depraved sexual liaisons, consuming copious amounts of stimulants and thought better of sudden confessions. More Bread Or I'll Appear was completed in the emergency room of the local hospital among frantic, sick people and a staff too busy to notice that I had not registered any complaint.
Finally, my stern father-in-law stumbled on my books, displayed prominently in a Manhattan bookshop. He confronted my husband and asked couldn't you have found anyone more degenerate? No, my husband told him cheerfully, I looked long and hard.
More Bread or I'll Appear by Emer Martin is published by Allison and Busby