Book review: ‘Don't Quit Your Day Job'
"Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit," Sonny Brewer, editor. MP Publishing, 272 pages, $24.95.
It's been a long day at a job that sucks your soul out through your eyeballs. You're a Xanax away from walking up to your boss and shrieking these magic words: Take this job and shove it!
Well, maybe not just yet.
For those of us still awaiting liberation, there’s “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit,” a collection of essays by a host of Southern writers who once worked jobs every bit as numbingly demeaning as yours before they could earn a living from their writing.
It’s been decades since Rick Bragg had to break rocks with a sledgehammer and Tom Franklin delivered pizza. George Singleton no longer drives a garbage truck, and Joshilyn Jackson won’t be separating the pink (receiving) dot-matrix copy from the blue (processing) again any time soon.
Daniel Wallace has left the care of dogs behind but not the lesson he learned from “the holy cycle” of their lives -- and poop. Finding herself half naked in her boss’s bed was the last memory Michelle Richmond expected to confront when she “set out to write an essay about telemarketing.”
Funny, how that works. The 23 writers in “Don’t Quit Your Day Job” remember those lame gigs as if their last day there ended yesterday at 5 p.m.
Editor Sonny Brewer, author of "The Poet of Tolstoy Park” and “The Widow and the Tree,” originally planned the book as a memoir of his own experiences, having worked at just about everything under the sun. He told a friend he was going to call it “Forty Hats.”
But when his friend thought Brewer was compiling an anthology, an irresistible idea was born. So instead, Brewer set about collecting essays by writers he knew: Pat Conroy, John Grisham, Brad Watson, Barb Johnson, Tim Gautreaux, Silas House, and others whose once deadly dull (and in some cases deadly) day jobs often held clues to what would come later.
Back when she was a “would-be bohemian art fart” masquerading as an office assistant, Jackson found herself envying the conversations between coworkers with whom she had nothing in common. So she invented My Boyfriend Dan, an icebreaker who “made the long hours of paper rind peeling go faster as I bent to the writerly task of developing his history and character and keeping his personal timeline straight.”
Bad jobs build character, good for toughening the soul to withstand the demands of the writing life. Bragg writes of the backbreaking pulpwooding that still gives him nightmares about mangling his hands, but taught him “how easy it is -- at its hardest -- to do what I do.”
Everything Gautreaux needed to know about the isolation and loneliness of writing he learned during his brief stint at a tiny south Louisiana radio station in the mid-1960s. He compares the eight hours of announcing he did each day with “wind in a hackberry tree next door or a distant train whistle or a garbage truck six blocks away crushing rot, just off the edge of hearing and consciousness, something to fill an empty space in a room or a head.”
And you thought you were bored.
Day jobs can be a hotbed of material for later fiction. Teacher Suzanne Hudson found hers in a “place riddled with stories and peccadilloes ... a land of double-dealing and plotting and subterfuge and intrigue” -- middle school.
Selling underwear at Sears didn’t inspire Grisham, but as a lawyer his client files were a goldmine, yielding “misery and conflict on a grand scale.”
The late Larry Brown worked as a firefighter, cut pulpwood, cleaned carpets, painted houses and built chain-link fences. His first book, about a vicious Yellowstone Park bear, was “327 single-spaced pages of sex and man-eating” that no publisher (understandably) would touch. It would be years before he used material he knew and loved from his native Mississippi.
That brain-numbing, mystical, laugh-out-loud funny, so-degrading-you-may-wish-you’d-stayed-longer-to-tell-the-tale job you’re just about to tell Boss Man to shove? Timing can make all the difference.
During the psychedelic ’60s, William Gay spent his days dipping bales of boat paddles into vats of steaming shellac, “drunk as a lord” on the fumes he inhaled. As he struggled to even stand up, let alone muster the “enormous snake-eyed concentration" required to do his job, Gay began to imagine his intoxication might give way to a higher consciousness: His mind would expand and “the doors of perception” spring open, revealing the mysteries of the world “printed out in simple block letters like a ransom note.”
No such luck.
But on the same wintry night Gay finally quit that job, a different door opened, onto a certainty he hadn’t known before. “I would find some way to make a living and I would write at night. I had no words for the way the snow looked drifting down in the streetlights and I wanted those words. If they were anywhere, I would find them.”
