The Fall of Isabel Pabán Freed
Of all the ideas human beings have come up with, the idea of The Novel is by far my favorite, and I love to read about its death. There are so many suspects! And who doesn’t love acronyms? The MFA, that’s a good one. Remember when writers fought in wars and drove taxis and drank themselves to death? Remember how long those sentences were? Now they grade and write “invisible prose.” Well! say the MFA writers, we wouldn’t have to do this, actually, if the literary professionals in NYC just paid us enough to live. And how are we supposed to do that, say the literary professionals in NYC, when The Novel is Dead: no one wants to read long sentences anymore, except for people like us, of course, I mean we would love to publish that sort of thing, but we just gave Joe Biden $10 million for his “explain away hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians” memoir, and we can’t ignore the question of the bottom line. Bottom line? cackles the broke transsexual on Twitter — who is two years into HRT and ten years into THC — i think i hauve covid. She hasn’t written a novel because no one has paid her to, and it’s generally easier to complain online about not being paid for stuff you haven’t done than it is to write novels, so many other acronyms get in on the fun: PhD students submit the detritus from their unfinished theses to magazines run by young adults longing for the days when all that good CIA funding hadn’t yet dried up; the men who love men and the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists and the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists-who-love-men can all come together and agree that at least the other kind of MLMs make some money; there is money, it’s true, in the self-published KDP space, but to make it, you’ll have to write SFF, or otherwise bravely venture into the world of four letter acronyms, like Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica; alternatively, maybe you could just WFH: get an email job, like I did, and write on the side and accept, like I did, that here and there, you’ll get an email from a random person, or a person who knew you when you were online, or a friend, or whoever, who, sorry, never knew about all the suicide stuff, though it does kind of make sense, yeah, and well basically, you can just make your peace with the idea that the act of writing novels itself is enough, that once all of the external motivations for writing novels have been removed, whether by you or by the world, and once you really accept that finishing your novel will change nothing about your life except that you can start work on the next one, then it doesn’t really matter whether people are paying you to write or not; you will figure out a way to make enough money to write when you can, and you will write because you love it and because you still believe that writing, and The Novel, are important, that is, not necessary but needed.
I did that, and now I want money. You can buy my first novel here and my second novel here, or you can give me money on Substack here, or you can just click this button and give me whatever you want:
tipI write because I love and believe in writing. When I write something, it’s because I want that writing to do something. I never think about whether anything I write is “good” because I don’t write to get a grade, and I don’t read to assign one. I write and read to live a better, richer, more profound life, something that I began doing at an unusually young age and have kept doing because it’s worked for me, and because it keeps working for me. I self-publish things because that is what lets me write the things I want to write — the only writing advice I feel comfortable giving abstractly, which is to say, to you, the reader, someone I know literally nothing about, is that you should do whatever lets you write the things you want to write. In my case, that meant, e.g., working stable, relatively undemanding office jobs for 7 years so that I would never have to depend on my writing to pay my bills, which in turn meant I didn’t have to write to please literary professionals. I have, at various points, tried to sell my writing to literary professionals, and I have always failed; the few times I have been published “traditionally” have been when they’ve reached out to me. This has been at points frustrating, but generally this has been very good for me and very good for my writing. As a writer, I am a total cunt! I’m a diva! I do the things I want to do with my writing because why else bother? If I wanted to have a stable career, if I wanted status, I would not choose the art novel. It’s dead!
Many years ago, one of my very astute friends said to me that she thought most people wanted to be writers because they wanted to live a life of leisure. I have sat with this thought for many years, in part because some aspect of it obviously resonated with the resentment I felt and still feel seeing people who have not so much as earnestly started writing a novel spend hours and hours a day online, complaining that they don’t have the time to write because of “late-stage capitalism.” Like girl!
Your fucking phone 🫵
Over the years, I have seen, heard, and myself offered many excuses for “not writing,” which have almost always reduced down to lacking either the energy or time. In the seven-ish years that I was working office jobs, I also was learning to manage various symptoms that have been, in various clinical settings, diagnosed as having to do with Bipolar I Disorder, Bipolar II Disorder, Persistent Depressive Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Cannabis Use Disorder, and Gender Dysphoria — I passed both the self-diagnosis round and first clinical round of the Autism Spectrum Disorder screening with flying colors, but I ended up bailing half way through the more extensive final round because, for a lot of different reasons, some related some not, that was a time in which I wanted to kill myself. I also transitioned. I have continued, deepened, and worked hard at sustaining a very fulfilling romantic relationship. I have continued, deepened, and sustained many friendships, and I’ve made many more. I have put a lot of effort into repairing the relationships with my family that were strained by our respective approaches to the above. I’ve volunteered. I’ve smoked weed pretty much daily and done any number of other leisurely things, many of which were more pointless than smoking weed. I spent a humiliating amount of time on Twitter. I published two novels and a healthy number of essays. I go on a lot of walks.
I am not saying any of this with the expectation that you will be impressed, sympathetic, or even — if you are a “I am too busy to write” type person — self-critical. There are things I have had to overcome, and there are things that were given to me, privileges: my parents are well-paid college professors — STEM types that were at the University of Texas when I lived with them, but that are now at Harvard — and I also have white skin. None of this matters for you, though, because you do not live my life; you live your life. My life has been hard for me, but maybe it sounds easy to you: maybe the only problem in your life right now is money, and when you look at someone who has it, you don’t understand how they could struggle. I have had the interesting experience of being friends with many now professional class people who did not come from very much money: in the first few years of making more money than they knew what to do with, they were able to pay off debts, support their families, and ball out. I was genuinely happy for them, but I could have told them at any point that the bourgeois life they were pursuing would turn out to feel empty, and now that we are all entering our 30s, they have come to this conclusion on their own: they have good jobs; loving relationships, both romantic and not; hobbies they enjoy; and any number of other genuinely good things, but they feel there is something missing. I imagine many of them will fill this hole in their lives by having children. In my experience, the superiority some parents, both aspiring and real, feel towards people that do not want that, people like me, arises from their feeling of sacrifice: they believe there is something noble about giving up an aspect of your life for someone else. I find this confusing, as these people haven’t given up; they’ve merely delegated. In the 29 years I have been alive, often in spaces centered around high academic achievement, I have met many, many people who have broken under the weight of their parents’ expectations; not all of them have rebuilt themselves. I do not fault the parents alone for the decisions that led their children there: your home is not an island, and try as you might to do the right thing, that will never be enough. The climate crisis doesn’t stop when you start to recycle. It just gets a little better.
I listen sympathetically when my friends speak about this absence of meaning in their lives, but we both know that I have never had this problem: my dedication to the project of The Novel is clinically delusional, and thus I have a more or less infinite source of meaning and motivation I can return to. I have, through years and years of struggle, taught myself how to make meaning. I like the things I write, and I would have to be a different sort of delusional to disregard all of the positive external validation I’ve received to either genuinely feel or otherwise perform that particularly grating false humility many American writers these days indulge: I don’t think I’m the “best writer” or even a “good writer,” but, again, that’s just because I’m not trying to be. I’m trying to write things no one else can write because that’s what I understand the project of The Novel, and art broadly speaking, to be. Science, the shit my parents do, can tell you a lot of stuff about trees. Art can tell you about the human experience of trees.
I do not think I am the only 29-year-old these days who experiences trees with some amount of sadness. The sense in which “late-stage capitalism” has killed the novel has very little to do with MFAs, NYC, HRT, THC, PhDs, the CIA, etc. and much more to do with things like CFCs — to be a 29 year old with the basic level of consciousness required to pursue the project of The Novel is to be, on some level, thinking about the collapse of the climate. We are not the first generation of writers to think about the apocalypse, but I do think that the novelists a little older and a little younger than me are the first generation of novelists who are trying to make sense of the world when it is, for the kinds of people who aspire to be novelists, a fairly mainstream idea that the apocalypse is structural: humanity will not end because a few powerful people decide to use nuclear weapons; it will also not end because some other non-human figure, like God, decides to end it. It will end because everyone will continue to do what they are already doing. Whether or not The Novel has ever been a generally effective intervention in people’s lives, it has never faced a problem like this: if The Novel cannot save the world, it’s because until now, it’s never had to.
This summer was the first time in my life I did real politics, the sort that those who express skepticism about the “political novel” gesture to as a better alternative. My experience of political organizing was that it was frustrating, mostly because I was bad at it, and also because it is very hard. The people I was working with were also frustrated, often with the “passive” people we were, unsuccessfully, trying to activate. They didn’t seem to understand why people with time and money and seemingly functioning brains did not want to get involved to stop the American Gestapo from kidnapping their hard-working migrant neighbors off the streets of San Francisco, and in their frustration, they assumed it was because these people didn’t know enough about ICE and the horrible things they were doing. I failed to make my case that their passivity had nothing to do with a lack of awareness, and that in fact, these people, many of whom are themselves migrants or the children of migrants, by and large hated ICE as much as any of us; they just didn’t think we were doing anything meaningful to stop them. So why would they sacrifice something real for something imaginary, or, what is, when it comes down to it, nothing?
If no one is reading art novels right now, I expect that one of the major reasons is because we — the art novelists — are failing them. We are writing useless novels. Every other reason, while surely something “right” that would earn a good grade in school, is useless to us because it is a problem that cannot be addressed via the novel. We are all more than art novelists, and we can do things besides write novels — there’s a lot of time in the day — but if we are to be art novelists, then we do have to write art novels.
When I get a text or an email from someone saying that my writing has helped them in some small way, I am always grateful, but it’s not something I need to keep writing anymore. I take the project of The Novel seriously enough, for now. I do not think that The Novel is the only thing that can save the world, nor do I think The Novel will save the world alone. But I have learned two basic things from the seventeen or so years I have been reading art novels. The first is that what you should do with your life always begins with the concrete specifics of who you are and what your actual life is. This seems obvious, and it is, and yet very few people I know live this way. They want rules to follow. They want a form to fit their life, and their selves, into. You will never write a good art novel this way, in part because busting out of the form is kind of what the art novel is all about. Mikhail Bakhtin is a literary critic I quite like, and he has this great image:
An individual cannot be completely incarnated into the flesh of existing sociohistorical categories. There is no mere form that would be able to incarnate once and forever all of his human possibilities and needs, no form in which he could exhaust himself down to the last word, like the tragic or epic hero; no form that he could fill to the very brim, and yet at the same time not splash over the brim. There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness, there always remains a need for the future, and a place for this future must be found. All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical, on a man. But this surplus of un-fleshedout humanness may be realized not only in the hero, but also in the author’s point of view (as, for example, in Gogol). Reality as we have it in the novel is only one of many possible realities; it is not inevitable, not arbitrary, it bears within itself other possibilities.
Since I began transitioning, most clothes do not fit me well. They are often too tight, designed for people with bodies unlike mine. Thankfully, when I began transitioning, I had already been reading art novels for almost a decade, so I was prepared, not just to be a little comical, but for the agony of waking up every single day as a person I hated in a world that hated me. When I started to transition, many things about myself that I had been numb to suddenly became alive: I subjected so much of myself and my world to a scrutiny that almost killed me. The second thing that a sustained engagement with the art novel has taught me is how not to kill myself. And just to be so fucking for real with you, I think if you want to write art novels — and if you want to do anything else meaningful besides — you’re going to have to learn how to do that. You live in a time in which you have unrestricted access to so much more information about the world than any human in the times before you has ever had, and it will be so easy for you to spend hours of your day looking at pictures of the shreds of Palestinian children on your phone. That, I’m afraid, is the easy way out: to pretend that paying attention to something on a screen, or something in a book, counts. Because it doesn’t. You sort of just have to get in the mud.
I am not choosing to write art novels to try and help save the world because it is easy, and I am not doing it thoughtlessly. The confidence with which I write now is the product of well-over a decade of doubt. I have published a lot of writing recently. I had known for months that my second novel would be coming out sometime in the fall, and I had a few essays that, for various reasons, I had to withdraw from magazines or had never submitted in the first place, so I decided that in the lead up to my novel coming out, I would publish all of these essays on my website, and because I was having fun with it, I ended up writing a few extras. Not yet having committed myself fully to the project of The Novel, and expecting that nothing about my life would change except for the fact that I could start work on the next project, I joked with a few friends that this would be “The Fall of Isabel Pabán Freed,” smirking to myself, as I often do, for having made a clever pun.
I had no idea that my life would actually fall apart. I had no idea that there would be a day in which I would write an essay with that title, and I had no idea that on that day, today, my life would be, in so far as these things can be evaluated objectively, harder than it’s ever been. My life’s a fucking mess. But I am strong, stronger than I have ever been and ever expected I would be. I am ready for the agony that awaits me. And I am ready for that, and I say this without a trace of irony, because of The Novel.
I need writing to pay my bills now, not because I don’t have other ways to pay bills, but because I think I need to live that life to write what I want to write. I never expect to make money from writing. Although you can buy my first novel here and my second novel here and give me money on Substack here or you can just click this button and give me whatever you want:
I promise I am really not living my life as if you will. It’s just that it’d help.
Yours,