It is a thing I return to, and that becomes more urgent the older I grow and the more work I’ve made: what it means, to have such a consistently released body of work, representing decades of personal change. Write one book every five or six years, and you don’t have to answer for much. Write three to five books a year, year after year, for decades, and suddenly there’s a very clear progression on display for anyone willing to dig in.
What does that mean?
Artists have little by way of model for engaging with their older works: the most perennial stories are those that portray an embarrassed creator, dismissing their prior pieces as unworthy or callow and holding up the current piece as the more proper representation of the artist as she is; or the oblivious creative, who doesn’t realize she’s rewriting the same stories over and over—in that version, it’s the audience that’s embarrassed for the artist, who doesn’t realize she hasn’t been saying anything new in decades.
In the past, my philosophy has been unformed by anything other than a desire to honor readers who love the works written by a younger me: regardless of my feelings about my work when it felt less polished, or more unapologetic about its enthusiasms, those stories spoke to people, and for me to disown them was to reject their fans, or slight their taste. But that was a thing built from my empathy for others, and never addressed my personal feelings.
I suppose the real seed started germinating three years ago, when I was asked to put together the gallery exhibit for my high school alma mater. So many of the stories I’m writing now saw their genesis, as rough as it was, in my high school notebooks… my oldest canonical characters were brainstormed in middle school, and while they evolved a great deal Teen Me would recognize them instantly. Given that, what did I want to say to a hall full of teen girls? What else except ‘sometimes the ideas you have as a child are as worthwhile as you think?’ and ‘the themes that engage you as a girl may carry you through the rest of your life?’
What an outrageous statement that is when we have two equally untenable stories about that too, either ‘you need to grow up and leave your childhood things behind’ and ‘children are only ever interested in frivolous things.’ How much more challenging is it to say otherwise? The things that really matter will always matter, no matter how old you are, and no matter how young you are, you will recognize them. The only thing that will change is your experience of them.
Last month, while my father was in the hospital, I started listening to the audio edition of An Heir to Thorns and Steel… mostly because moving that series onto bandcamp reminded me that it existed, and checking the upload made me want to keep listening… and I did. I listened to all three books while juggling daily hospital visits with school commutes and other responsibilities… and when he died, I listened to it again while walking endless circles around my neighborhood in the dark, with dry cheeks and a constriction in my chest. Morgan’s books are some of the hardest I’ve written, anguished and uncompromising, and I wrote them at a time in my life—almost 17 years ago—when I was struggling with health issues that were consuming me and the people around me. All that pain is in it… and in that pain, like lances of light, the constant reminder that God is most luminous when we are weakest.
I replayed the final book a third time as I walked, not knowing why I needed to hear it so badly until I understood—abruptly and stunned—that Younger Me was talking through the story… to me. So clearly that the story peeled away and left her naked, in that space between past and present, and between two people. God is real, she was saying, through every chapter. Even in your darkest moments, God is real, truth is real, goodness matters, and the light triumphs. It triumphs in glory, redeeming all your grief and suffering.
Many people offered me comfort, and I honor them for the love that inspired their efforts. But none of them could reach me the way the me of the past could, by reminding me of things I believe, and have always believed. She didn’t know that her trials would end; she wrote to defy pain its victory over her, even if only in the moment. And I didn’t hear the words as a promise that suffering ends, because Young Me and Old Me both know that suffering only ends in the grave. It’s that she was frozen in that eternal now, where she didn’t know if she would ever be free and still she chose to believe in hope and goodness, that struck a consonance with the me of the present. In both our nows, we were desolate, and Young Me reminded me that I had chosen meaning over hopelessness, and that that choice still mattered to me, and that because I made it then and made it now, I was making it always, over and over, eternally.
In the past I have looked back on this series and thought it too raw and too mired in its extremes, darkness and brightness both. I no longer think of it as too anything. It was exactly what it had to be, and exactly what I needed. And it proved my point to the teens I spoke to at that gallery opening: the themes that fascinated me as a girl continue to fascinate me, because they continue to be relevant. How do you live up to the challenges love brings you? What do you do when confronted with trials that might break you? How do you love God in a vale of tears?
How do you live a life of meaning?
We can choose to be embarrassed by our younger self’s fumbling with our themes, or we can see them for what they are: the beginning of a lifetime of striving toward answers, knowing that we never fully achieve them. And sometimes our earlier reactions are truer, because our younger selves were less easily embarrassed by their enthusiasms and hungers, and those passions can reveal things that rationalizing obscures and experience can warp. Young Me can say, unashamed, “Life can be so bad you want to die, but God wins,” in a way that Old Me would try to refine or complicate. The polished version isn’t better. It’s just different, a facet on the same stone, cutting away toward the clear perfection at the center.
We do write the same story, over and over, and it can be a needful thing if we recognize that we’re always finding new perspectives on the same themes. It’s only boring if we never grow… and sometimes not even that, because you never know when the way you’ve said it this time is the way it will reach someone, the way nothing else in my oeuvre comforted me the way Morgan’s story did though so many of my stories confront the paradox of suffering.
I will never be done with the difficulties of living a life of light in a fallen universe. My stories won’t be either. And I no longer worry so much that my older work might grapple with those themes in a way I wouldn’t today. That’s a sign that I’m learning the most difficult and important lessons we can in this lifetime. And part of that is knowing that sometimes, the way I answered those questions in the past can be a more perfect response to the present than any reaction I might have today.
By many measures, I’m in the prime of my working life, with decades of experience behind me, artistic and personal. Many writers don’t begin writing until retirement! I can look forward to—I hope—many years before me of art-making. I wonder what piece I’m creating now will give guidance and comfort to a future me… and what readers will make of my arc when I have fifty years of published work behind me rather than twenty-five. Now I can hope that there will be something in my oeuvre for everyone, regardless of where they are in their journey, or what answers make sense to them. This, at last, is the beginning of what I was seeking: a healthy way of engaging with your earlier work and considering your future work… not as things divorced from you, but as an unbroken whole. Which is, in the end, another theme repeated in all my work, from the oldest to the newest: ‘we are never done until we are complete, and never complete until we are gone.’
All the moments that led to this moment are in this moment now. All the work I’ve ever made is in the work I’m making now, and will be in the work I have yet to make. A gift, I think, from a loving God, a hint of transcendence, of the artificiality of time. How good it is that it might be so.
May we be worthy of the gift.
