Vanity Fairest

I’d like to say that I’ve been busy, and I have been, socially, I suppose, but not with work. In fact, even though its summer and I don’t have much to do for my business, I have let the few things that I should be doing stack up for so long that I’m beginning to have something of an anxiety attack about it.

In the interest of making myself feel productive, then, I’ll work on something else altogether: my blog. Has it really been two months?

I have had a decently severe spell of writers’ block, brought on mostly by anxiety about my writing, which, I suspect, is the cause of nearly all cases of writers’ block. Just about two weeks ago, I submitted my application for Northwestern University’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. This particular program has an emphasis not just on either fiction or poetry but on creative nonfiction, which is, for those of you unfamiliar with the term (as was I, even while I was writing it), at least in my mind, the delightful love child of fact-driven journalism and pure fantasy fiction.

Its storytelling for liars. It’s what I do. (What, you thought all those Molly stories are 100 percent real? OK, actually, they were, but I do come from a long line of exaggerators.) It’s what Dave Eggers does, and David Sedaris, though they are by no means my heroes, and mostly I can’t stand either of them, though, admittedly, that’s more likely out of jealousy than dislike of their actual work.

I found out about this master’s program back in January (and I’m not checking that fact because this is creative nonfiction, so I don’t have to. See how much fun it is?) and have been fretting about it ever since. At their informational presentation, I felt not at all unlike the way I did when I met Rob: immediately and hopelessly in love, but filled with instant dread, certain, as I was, that I was about to have my heart broken again.

When summer began, the application deadline loomed, and I became paralyzed by my own insecurity. I’ve been told all my life that I’m a good writer; I have even believed it. But then I will settle in at my kitchen counter with breakfast and The New Yorker, and Hendrik Hertzberg or some other brilliant writer will wrap up a “Talk of the Town” essay in the clever kind of way that actually makes you smile or smack your forehead, and all my confidence in my own ability ends up down the drain like the leftover milk from my cereal.

Oh, Hendrik, you are the Seinfeld to my Full House. I love you, but loving you makes me hate me.

Can I really write? Do I really have something to say, and can I say it in a way that is witty or artistic or original enough to make it worth reading — or publishing, even? Or am I destined to languish in a kind of self-aware mediocrity, in which I am good enough to recognize what’s good but not nearly good enough to actually do it? As I am with so many other things I love?

Of course, this blog post could be the nail in the coffin of my writing career — we hardly knew ye! — given that at least half of my writing portfolio for my application is pulled from this web site, and the program directors are probably at this very moment saying about my work, “…. Meh? … but perhaps we should look at her blog and give her further consideration.” They will happen across this very post and its pathetic collection of run-on sentences, and that will be that.

And then what will I do? And who will I be?