Earlier this week, I sent my manuscript for On Permission back to my publisher with final changes and tweaks.
This is my fourth book — my fifth if you include my twenty-year-old, very dated cookbook — and you would think that I’d understand by now that there is a direct correlation between my health and my writing life. The peeling-back-of-layers, the digging deep, the obsession — they can all be overwhelming; writing is not, as some like to portray it, particularly romantic, despite what we see on Instagram. On the one hand, it is, more often than not emotionally exhausting, even when the work is going very well. On the other hand, there is also an absolute physicality to it, not unlike being a loosehead on a rugby team. I’ve played women’s rugby exactly once, and the last thing I remember after an opposing teammate grabbed the collar of my jersey straight-armed and flung me backward through the air like a candy wrapper was Keep your head up, Elissa. Everything else bore the brunt when I eventually hit the ground: my shoulders, arms, hands, knees, feet, hips. Even my ass was bruised.
Writing is not much different.
I admire my writer friends who develop routines that transcend the emotional and physical impact of doing this work; these are the ones who wake up early and meditate every morning for twenty minutes, or who get up and go to a meeting and then to yoga or the gym, and then come back to their desk. I would like to be one of them, and at times I have been. But ultimately, this is not how I’m wired: if I’m in the throes of working on something that is picking up speed, I usually can’t wait to get back to my desk first thing in the morning, and if that happens, I often don’t move until the end of the day. When I try to stand up, my joints sound like a rusting hinge on an old farmhouse door.
I wrote my first book when I was in my mid-forties and still commuting to Manhattan every day for my editorial director job, which was also sedentary, as was my very long train trip. It went like this: car to station to train to office to train to station to car to couch. Decompress, dinner, bed. Up at five. Rinse; repeat. The result: a book I was and still am proud of (just re-released in 2024), many chiropractic sessions with a dweeby young man/pisher who first asked me how old I was (by then, fifty), and then announced You own your back pain. I found a massage therapist who I started seeing twice a month, went back to the gym, and POOF: no more pain.
I wrote my second book a few years later, and infrequently commuting to Manhattan for my editor-at-large job, also sedentary. Same train trip, same hours. My body began to settle like a house. The result: a book I was and still am proud of (also just re-released in 2024), severe lower back pain, an epidural injection that was an epic fail (and a nightmare) and many acupuncture sessions with an absolute god of a man who has since, I gather, moved to Bhutan.
Yes, everyone is stretched, and insurance is a disaster of a business straight out of the cheese shop skit from Monty Python.
I wrote my third book when I was in my late fifties, no longer commuting, but in charge of my mother’s eldercare in New York, which required my jumping into the car and racing in from Connecticut on average a few times a week — I’m two hours away — to fix problems that could have been handled over the phone in minutes. The book was about this issue: becoming a primary caregiver for an emotionally estranged, constitutionally angry parent despite a very long history of mutual acrimony and animosity. Can the dark side of such a relationship ever be transcended? A complicated memoir, and I do not recommend writing any story from its middle while it is unfolding. By the time that book came out in hardcover exactly a year before the Covid lockdown, my body had changed profoundly, in part because of the stress of excavating the subject matter, but also in part because I had spent about an entire decade sitting on my rear.
My fourth book has just gone into production; I turned sixty last June. The creaks and crunching and grinding of joints is no longer a bother, but an actual thing requiring, I am told, some level of extreme seriousness on my part. As a former (keyword: FORMER) athlete (tennis, squash, swimming, skiing) I just assume I can haul myself back from the brink, only: not so much. I’m hearing helpful words of wisdom from people in the medical field along the lines of FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DON’T GO TO THE GYM UNTIL WE GET THE SCANS BACK. I’ve also discovered exactly how much the “wellness” community has changed in the last decade: no one talks to anyone else anymore. Doctor A no longer talks to Doctor B or Doctor C, and if you need, say, a bone scan because you feel like you’ve gotten just a smidge shorter since Obama was in the White House, go ahead and make the appointment yourself and be prepared to pay out of pocket for it. After that, you need to find someone to read the scans, and then treat you for the osteopenia you developed around Book 2, that your then-doctor never bothered telling you about because she doesn’t believe in it despite the fact that your bones are beginning to resemble Swiss cheese. If you’re a guy, you’ll have your own unmentionable problems, and I wish you luck with them.
There’s also the little issue of diet. Sit on your ass for many hours a day, and your metabolism has gone to bed, perhaps forever. If you’re over fifty, you get to be told by Doctor B that, as a post-menopausal woman, you’re essentially screwed. Eat some fish; you’ll feel better. The last time my doctor told me that, I said Let’s talk diet: which is your favorite — Mediterranean? Vegan? Vegetarian? Keto? Paleo? Low-Carb? Low- Sugar? What? What’s good for a clinically depressed, post-menopausal writer who sits in an expensive Aeron Chair for hours every day? She just looked at me, like I was crazy.
In other words: one hand has no idea what the other one is doing. Yes, everyone is stretched, and insurance is a disaster of a business straight out of the cheese shop skit from Monty Python. If doctors want us to DON’T GOOGLE (mine, the one who “missed” years of markers for osteopenia and then tried to cover it up by saying she didn’t believe in it), they need to understand something: we will take control if they don’t. We will find the answers. We will haul ourselves out of our expensive Aeron chairs and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and put ourselves on the healing road with or without your help, and without the benefit of more and more and more medication that will line your wallets and those of your pharma distributors.
But first, we’ll need a nap.
This post was originally published on Elissa Altman’s blog Poor Man’s Feast, The James Beard Award-winning journal about the intersection of food, spirit, and the families that drive you crazy. Read more on her Substack.
Header photo licensed through Unsplash+ in collaboration with Ave Calvar.