The life I couldn’t live—I wrote. It worked for a few years, numbed the longing a bit, but then Ari got sick and Shira went away to boarding school. And Dikla no longer delighted in me.
That was the beginning of one of those times. A crisis, I think it’s called. I figured it would be over in a few months, but I was wrong.
People on the outside don’t see it, but I know I’m sinking. And I know that now I write to survive. What does your workday actually look like?
For the last year, I’ve been waging an ongoing war, a trench war in every sense, against dysthymia: an acute mood disorder characterized by a chronic, low-grade feeling of depression. In simpler terms: Once I used to wake up happy and now I wake up sad. I’m not sure I know why, I have no idea how to shake it off, and I don’t know how much longer Dikla can take it. Lately I’ve had the feeling that she’s keeping her distance from me. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll catch it.
Anyway—my morning always begins with strenuous physical activity, running or bike riding, which is supposed to release mood-enhancing substances into my bloodstream. Then I call Ari and we talk about Hapoel Jerusalem basketball, the nurses in the department, the chance that the Shabak S rappers will reunite—anything but his illness. Though the conversation is meant to cheer him up, it cheers me up too and takes the edge off my intense feeling of loneliness. Then I doze off for a while, wake up, drink two cups of coffee one after the other, eat an entire bar of milk chocolate, and turn on my computer like someone who seriously intends to write his next novel. I sit in front of the blank screen. A few minutes later, I wander over to this interview, which was sent to me by an Internet site editor who collected surfers’ questions for me. I answer one or two of them. Three at the most. Now it’s one thirty already, my middle child is home from school, and the racket she makes in the living room is so distracting that there’s no point in continuing. So I turn off the computer and go to make lunch. We sit down to eat together. She’s been really prickly this last year, and I, with my dysthymia, find it a little hard to take. Nevertheless, I still try to get to her through the tangle of thorns that has suddenly shot up around her, but that’s so tiring that after lunch, I have to take a nap. I set the alarm so I won’t be late to pick up my sweet little son from day care. When he sees me come in, he laughs with joy and runs to me, and for a moment as brief as a song, it seems that everything will be fine. How autobiographical are your books?
Once, I knew how to answer that question. I mean I knew that I would always respond with blatant lies to protect myself and the people close to me. But I also knew the truth, which is that there are and always were bits of autobiography in my fiction, usually in the female characters. To throw readers off the track.
As time passed, things grew more complicated. Because, for example, what can you do with a book that predicted what actually happened in your life? You think you’ve created a far-out plot, something really bizarre. Then a year after the book comes out, the plot becomes reality. Is that autobiography?
And what about all the “behind-the-scenes” stories I tell the readers at those meet-the-author evenings, stories that are supposed to reveal the personal experiences that led me to write my books? From constant telling, those stories have become so polished and refined that I’m not sure anymore that they actually happened.
Not to mention the habitual tale-telling that has slowly trickled into my personal, nonliterary life.
For example, when I visit Ari in the hospital.
Before we went on our big trip together, my grandmother asked me: Who are you going with? When I said, With Ari, she sighed and said, Very good, he’ll take care of you.
Now his strong, sinewy arms have shriveled. And his once full cheeks are sunken.
He asks me to get him a glass of water from the cooler, and when I come back, we begin to talk.
Once, I used to tell him what was going on with me. Today, I tell him well-constructed anecdotes. And I see in his chemotherapy eyes that he knows I’m telling him a well-constructed anecdote, and he wants, he needs me to tell him one unpolished thing, something that has no beginning, middle, or point.
But I can’t tell anything but stories anymore. Everything that happens in my real life, from the moment it happens, is adapted into a good story I can tell sometime. When I meet with my readers. In interviews. In my hospital conversations with Ari, who closes his eyes while I’m speaking, takes my hand, and says: Let’s shut up for a minute. What are you working on right now?
The truth is that I’m still recovering from the previous book, or more precisely, from the endless emptiness that comes after I publish a book. That’s when I invest most of my energy in trying not to fall in love. The year after publishing a book is dangerous. You walk around with such a powerful inner hunger that people can see it from the outside. And the easiest way to satisfy that hunger is to fall hopelessly in love. Let’s say with a Slovakian documentary film director with a scar on her left cheek that looks like a dimple who you meet at the Haifa film festival. A passion that takes you a year to recover from. So it’s better to stay home. Withdraw from the world. Seal off your heart. To prevent any crack from forming that would
