A writer's public life is not -- as is often thought -- a round of glamorous parties, prize-acceptance speeches, and triumphant readings to amphitheatres full of loyal, cheering fans; it is, in fact, a grim treadmill of humiliation and neglect. Mortification sets the record straight, once and for all. A collection of seventy specially commissioned contributions -- true stories of public indignity by some of our finest living writers -- this is a celebration of defeat, and a chance to indulge in that most malicious of pleasures: schadenfreude.
You will read about dashed hopes and collapsing bowels, thwarted desire and unimpeded drinking; of fans queuing up for Stephen King's blood; Margaret Drabble bidding at a mock slave auction in Dallas; Louis de Bernières and the S&M prostitute; A. L. Kennedy's disintegrating trousers; William Boyd endorsing Shake 'n' Vac; Margaret Atwood's on-air brush with the Colostomy Association; about an author wanting to kill a member of her audience or another succeeding (accidentally) in killing his host's beloved pet.
These are the best kind of stories: those told against the teller. While readers may be transfixed by the baroque twists of fate, the toe-curling embarrassments, the body's betrayals, and the mind's vanishing acts, they will also wonder at these writers' brave acknowledgment of their own vulnerability and the willingness to expose their shame, a second time, before the public.
Mortification
By Robertson, RobinFourth Estate
ISBN: 0007170580Margaret Atwood
"Futility: playing a
harp before a buffalo."
Burmese proverb
Mortifications never end. There is always a never-before-experienced one waiting just around the corner. As Scarlett O'Hara might have said, "Tomorrow is anothermortification." Such anticipations give us hope: God isn't finishedwith us yet, because these things are sent to try us. I've never been entirely sure what that meant. Where there is blushing, there is life? Something like that.
While waiting for the mortifications yet to come, when I'llhave dentures and they'll shoot out of my mouth on some augustpublic occasion, or else I will topple off the podium or be sick onmy presenter, I'll tell you of three mortifications past.
EARLY PERIOD
Long, long ago, when I was only twenty-nine and my first novel had just been published, I was living in Edmonton, Alberta,Canada. It was 1969. The Women's Movement had begun, in New York City, but it had not yet reached Edmonton, Alberta. Itwas November. It was freezing cold. I was freezing cold, and Iwent about wearing a secondhand fur coat -- muskrat, I think -- that I'd bought at the Salvation Army for $25. I also had a furhat I'd made out of a rabbit shruggie -- a shruggie was a sort offur bolero -- by deleting the arms and sewing up the armholes.
My publisher arranged my first-ever book signing. I was veryexcited. Once I'd peeled off the muskrats and rabbits, there Iwould be, inside the Hudson's Bay Company Department Store,where it was cozily warm -- this in itself was exciting -- withlines of eager, smiling readers waiting to purchase my book andhave me scribble on it.
The signing was at a table set up in the Men's Sock and Underwear Department. I don't know what the thinking was behind this. There I sat, at lunch hour, smiling away, surroundedby piles of a novel called The Edible Woman. Men in overcoats and galoshes and toe rubbers and scarves and earmuffs passed by my table, intent on the purchase of boxer shorts. They looked at me, then at the title of my novel. Subdued panic broke out. There was the sound of a muffled stampede as dozens of galoshes and toe rubbers shuffled rapidly in the other direction.
I sold two copies.
MIDDLE PERIOD
By this time I'd achieved a spoonful or two of notoriety, enough so that my U.S. publisher could arrange to get me onto an American TV talk show. It was an afternoon show, which in those days -- could it have been the late seventies? -- meant variety. It was the sort of show at which they played pop music, and then you were supposed to sashay through a bead curtain, carrying your trained koala bear, or Japanese flower arrangement, or book.
I waited behind the bead curtain. There was an act on before me. It was a group from the Colostomy Association, who weretalking about their colostomies, and about how to use thecolostomy bag.
I knew I was doomed. No book could ever be that riveting. W. C. Fields vowed never to share the stage with a child or a dog; I can add to that, "Never follow the Colostomy Association." (Or any other thing having to do with frightening bodily items, such as the port-wine-stain removal technique that once preceded me in Australia.) The problem is, you lose all interest in yourself and your so-called "work" -- "What did you say your name was? And tell us the plot of your book, just in a couple of sentences, please" -- so immersed are you in picturing the gruesome intricacies of ... but never mind.
MODERN PERIOD
Recently I was on a TV show in Mexico. By this time I was famous, insofar as writers are, although perhaps not quite so famous in Mexico as in other places. This was the kind of showwhere they put makeup on you, and I had eyelashes that stoodout like little black shelves.
The interviewer was a very smart man who had lived -- as itturned out -- only a few blocks from my house, in Toronto, whenhe'd been a student and I'd been elsewhere, being mortified atmy first book signing in Edmonton. We went merrily alongthrough the interview, chatting about world affairs and such,until he hit me with the F-question. The do-you-consider-yourself-a-feminist question. I lobbed the ball briskly back overthe net ("Women are human beings, don't you agree?"), but thenhe blindsided me. It was the eyelashes: they were so thick Ididn't see it coming.
"Do you consider yourself feminine?" he said.
Nice Canadian middle-aged women go all strange whenasked this by Mexican talk-show hosts somewhat younger than themselves, or at least I did. "What, at my age?" I blurted.Meaning: I used to get asked this in 1969 as part of being mortified in Edmonton, and after thirty-four years I shouldn't have to keep on dealing with it! But with eyelashes like that, what could I expect?
"Sure, why not?" he said.
I refrained from telling him why not. I did not say: GeezLouise, I'm sixty-three and you still expect me to wear pink, withfrills? I did not say: feminine, or feline, pal? Grr, meow. I did not say: This is a frivolous question.
Whacking my eyelashes together, I said: "You reallyshouldn't be asking me. You should be asking the men in mylife" (implying there were hordes of them). "Just as I would askthe women in your life if you are masculine. They'd tell me thetruth."
Time for the commercial.
A couple of days later, still brooding on this theme, I said, inpublic, "My boyfriends got bald and fat and then they died."Then I said, "That would make a good title for a short story."Then I regretted having said both.
Some mortifications are, after all, self-inflicted.
Continues...Excerpted from Mortificationby Robertson, Robin Excerpted by permission.
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