Siobhan Adcock, novelist, mother and internet maven, confesses her desire to be cool, her complete inability to achieve said coolness and the possibility that that is ok. We LOVE Siobhan. Like love, love, gonna purpose at the end of Bachelor in Paradise, love.
Like a lot of people, I wrote a novel in a coffeeshop. A well-known statistic holds that 98% of all novels published worldwide since Proust were written in coffeeshops, and the other 2% were written in a charmingly-rundown antebellum mansion by Nicholas Sparks. And as anyone who’s tried it knows, writing a novel in a coffeeshop is not a cool thing to do. It is deeply, deeply uncool. It is the Height of Lame.
Under certain circumstances, however, novelists writing in coffeeshops may come to suffer the delusion that our behavior is cool, even heroic—and one of those circumstances is when the novelist in question is a full-time working parent with at least one child under three. I am here to tell you: It Happened To Me. I was the uncool older mom writing my novel in a coffeeshop. I got a slice of banana bread with my art.
Like most working parent writers I am hopelessly benighted and deranged, of course. We working parents who write our novels in coffeeshops are laboring to lift an infinitely precious boulder made of lies. We think we’re making art, and we think art requires sacrifice, heroic effort, and banana bread. When really, all that art requires is sustained uncoolness. This is why parents tend to make good artists, if we can find the time—sustained uncoolness is pretty much our baseline.
As a full-time working parent, then, I borrowed time from my job on late evenings, early mornings, odd days off, and summer Friday afternoons, and I betook myself to my local coffeeshop to write my novel. Sitting on the mismatched, ass-flattening chairs among Brooklyn’s young freelance creative class, I was happy, even grateful, to be there. Here I am in the epicenter of all artistic effort in America, and they serve Forty Weight. Everyone is so interesting! Who are all these people? They all look so cool! Are they wondering why I am wearing eyeliner and pressed pants and sensible two-inch wedge heels? I have to go to an office later, but how could they, noble artists, possibly understand that? Look at the guy behind the counter, he is cool, you can tell. Listen to the amazing indie rock he’s playing. Is it lame if I Shazam this? It’s lame. But I’m doing it, I love this song, whatever it is. Holy shit, this is indie rock from ICELAND they’re playing in here. I’m in over my head. Stay cool. Stay cool.
Over the course of the eighteen months that it took me to wring out a first draft, the coffeeshop regulars, to say nothing of the staff (who I preferred to think of as my “hosts”), ignored me completely. Although to be fair, the place is much too cool for me. Art by local artists on the walls, curated in a monthly rotation, and most of the art did not suck. Actual Icelandic indie rock, no joke. Graphic novelists work there. Industrial designers work there. Music editors work there. Sometimes someone would come in with a baby, this being a coffeeshop in Brooklyn, and all these intense working-artist people would actually be really nice to the baby. Or at least about the baby.
Me, I was there to escape a baby. My darling daughter (who I literally love to distraction, it goes without saying) had been born less than two years before I started writing a novel in this coffeeshop. The novel I wanted to write, my first, was a harrowing ghost story, an old-fashioned tale of terror, set in the tell-tale hollowed-out heart of what’s been referred to as the mommy wars. I needed to get out of the house to write this book. I also probably would have needed to get out of the house to write a novel about skateboarding elves, but in writing a novel about motherhood, I found it easiest to work in a place where I wasn’t also working at mothering anyone.
And whenever I sat down in this 98% baby-less place, blissfully uncool, I entertained charmless little fantasies about telling the counter staff, someday when the novel was published, that I wrote the whole thing here, as I blushingly handed them a copy. Yeah, it’s signed, you don’t have to display it on the wall or anything, it’s not that big of a deal, but I just wanted to say thank you for providing a space for me to commit art. In the coffeeshop I fell deep into a self-congratulatory K-hole, and who knows, maybe that’s part of what enabled me to push through and finish.
My coffeeshop novel writing felt heroic to me because I had managed to carve out time for it during a period in my life when there was always, always something in the sink to be washed—breast pump parts, bottles and bottle parts, endless little food containers. There was always something else to take care of, even after the baby was in bed. Work was hard, and parenting was hard, and in both of the major theaters of my life, there was always some puzzle to solve. Other writers I knew—mostly the ones without children or jobs in New York—were getting writing fellowships to famous places in the woods, and I liked to joke, not bitterly at all ha ha no no, that I was the recipient of a highly-competitive Coffeeshop Fellowship, only like two billion of them are given out a year but I’m just trying to stay humble, you know?
But it was also a time in my life when, if I accomplished anything at all other than parenting my child and doing my job, people would congratulate me heartily—like, crazy-heartily. This seems wrong to me. It is true that work and parenting are like similarly-charged magnets pushing against each other without even knowing why they’re doing it, and better minds than mine have written about how it’s so hard and why it’s so hard. They’ve written about it a lot, in fact. The working mom’s struggle in America is a real thing, and it sucks most sincerely, but it also prompted a reaction in me that I didn’t anticipate. Because the message I kept hearing was: Working mothers are so out of their minds with stress that no one expects working mothers to do anything other than work and mother! And my gut response to that was: That’s outrageous! (Maybe it’s also true. But still: Screw that! Outrage!) I would not lower my standards for myself. I could not. I would write, I would work, and I would baby, and if I had to go to a coffeeshop to do that first part, then my doing so would be an act of everyday heroism. Quid pro quo.
And as I wrote the novel, which happens to be about two mothers working their asses off while trying to do something other, additional, more, I was reminded that, after all, plenty of working mothers are out there right now, being doctors and fighting wars and discovering medicines and stuff, not succumbing helplessly to the notion that because it’s hard they should get a medal for living their lives. Now that the novel’s written and I’m on to my next one (still writing in a coffeeshop, natch), I have to look back on the desperation that drove me to the coffeeshop with one of those annoying little fond smiles of indulgent understanding: Oh, my dear, I would say to my past self. It’s just sitting down and moving your fingers on a keyboard, you know.
I was uncool, I was about ten years older than everybody else, I was hopelessly self-deluded, and I was a mom of a little kid, but I was writing a novel in a coffeeshop just like everybody else in the damn world.
As a lot of people who write novels will also tell you, though, you don’t just do your writing work in your coffeeshop. Some of your novel, the parts that rise up out of nowhere like skeletons from a graveyard at night, usually gets written in your head while you’re thinking about other things, or while you’re not thinking at all. The other place where I wrote my novel was actually in my baby’s room, in this hideously uncomfortable glider chair where I would sit and rock her to sleep in the evenings, both of us blissed out and blanked out, both of us breathing deep, both of us a little bit unconscious and a little bit conscious. I had dreams, she had dreams. Some of my dreams made it into the novel and some of hers might have too. A glider is not a glamorous place, and it’s not a place where anyone can pretend to be anything they’re not. It’s not a place where acts of heroism happen—or is it? In that place though, the two of you are all right. You’re cool.
Credit Sara Bonisteel
Siobhan Adcock is the author of The Barter, a novel about motherhood and marriage and work, and some ghosts. She lives in Park Slope with her daughter and husband and no ghosts. Come and say hi on Twitter.