Article: Five Things I Can’t Live...
Five Things I Can’t Live Without was born when Miami mated with unemployment. If you’ve read the book, it might seem an unlikely spawn, so allow me to explain.
In early September 2005, I was headed for a cheap, end-of-summer vacation in Miami. The destination might seem strange, since I live in Berkeley (a bridge away from San Francisco) in California, state of legendarily beautiful beaches. But California beaches are something of a bait-and-switch: Undeniably gorgeous, but even as far south as San Diego, the ocean can chill your bones. Miami has no such handicap. What it does have is a hurricane season, starting right about Labor Day, which no one thought to mention. But I was 30 years old, and by that age, no one’s obligated to tell you anything. Which is the best and the worst part about being thirty.
Well, I dodged a hurricane and the lasting impact of the Miami trip came in the unlikely form of beach reading. I’d never read chick lit before, but I wound up being delighted by my starter book. Sweet, vulnerable, winning, funny, insightful—all the things I’d want my writing to be, if I still wrote. But I hadn’t written a creative word in years—I’d dropped my dream of being a writer to study marriage and family therapy—and I wasn’t planning to. That’s where unemployment comes in.
At that time, I was a social worker, a job that was intended to tide me over until I got to do therapy full-time. While I didn’t have the grand epiphany in Miami that I couldn’t stand my job, there is undoubtedly a relationship between getting away from my job and suddenly quitting it several weeks after my return. And there is undoubtedly a relationship between quitting my job and Nora quitting hers in the first chapter of the book. If nothing else, I knew where to begin. I knew a little something about the trifecta of liberation, fear, and hyperanalysis, and that thankfully, at least some of the time, it could be funny.
Chick lit came back to me with three weeks until my temp job started. I had some time to kill and a meta-life to occupy so I started working on the then-untitled Five Things I Can’t Live Without. The more feverishly I wrote, the more I realized that chick lit was the perfect vehicle for exploring what had always been my primary interest and passion in life: relationships (with lovers, friends, colleagues, and most importantly, with ourselves.) Turned into the best job I ever had. I’m just hoping it’s not temp.
Copyright © Holly Shumas