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wrote without thinking. You skied fast. You
    dove in. You didn’t stop to feel guilty. You bought the art sup-
    plies. You followed the hunch.
    4. Write for five minutes about one of these times.
    5. Pick two more times—one from each list. Write about them
    together.
    6. Make a list of the people who’ve helped you to trust in yourself.
    7. Post this list near your writing desk.
    8. When you get scared, look at the list.
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    3
    How I got through My
    Worst Block Ever
    (and How you Can too)
    Before Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes ushered in the memoir craze that ignited in the mid-1990s, only a few lone-wolf memoirs could be spotted on
    the horizon: Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings ; Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior; Russell Baker’s
    Growing Up ; Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life ; arguably even James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son . The civil rights, gay rights, and women’s rights movements of the 1960s fostered our sense of
    the importance of the individual’s story of awakening. The early
    seventies gave rise to the New Journalism, a quirky first-person
    nonfiction that lived in the no-man’s-land between journalism
    and memoir (Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las
    Vegas , Joan Didion’s Slouching Toward Bethlehem ). The literary conditions that would herald in new bookstore shelves labeled
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    T h e o P a u l i n e N e s t o r
    “Memoir” were falling into place, but for the most part, rabid
    fans of first-person realism like myself depended upon the au-
    tobiographical novel, such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar ,Jack Kerouac’s On the Road ,Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying , and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn .
    Aside from those few important exceptions, we didn’t have
    the possibility of memoir as a genre in the eighties, the time
    when I first dreamed of becoming a writer. It was a dark time.
    Duran Duran dark. We didn’t have memoir, but we did have the
    Brat Pack. We had Less than Zero ; we had Bright Lights, Big City .
    And we had Tama Janowitz and her damn Slaves of New York .
    These writers were writing a sort of cinéma vérité fiction, fiction that read like memoir, but memoirs of a particular class and
    place, memoirs of everything that I was not.
    These books sprung from the self-referential impulse of
    moneyed, big-city youth—in New York or LA, usual y—a few
    years out of the Ivy League. The main characters possessed
    plenty of resources, breeding, and powerhouse networking con-
    nections to fall back on when the coke ran out. And they were
    male, except for Janowitz. So it was Janowitz who became the
    focus of my first case of writer envy. Like me, she was female
    and writing about “real” stuff. Unlike me, she had oodles of long
    hair and a tiny waist, and lived a groovy Lower East Side life that people actual y wanted to read about.
    I loved Slaves of New York and I hated it. I hated it because my life was so impossibly off-center. I spent my coming-of-age
    years in Canada, not New York. I went to a community col-
    lege, not Yale, and at the time Slaves hit the bookstores, I was living in the middle of the desert, waiting tables in a Cajun
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    W r i t i n g i s M y D r i n k
    restaurant. I was twenty-five and just about to receive the col-
    lege degree I should have received three years earlier if I hadn’t
    dropped out to travel, party, make batik T-shirts, waitress, and
    drink coffee by day and vodka cranberries by night with other
    aimless youth. In between all that, I read a lot. Although I pos-
    sessed an amorphous desire to be something called a writer , I didn’t know what I wanted to write. I knew no writers. I had
    no idea where to begin the career trajectory that goes from
    waitress to writer.
    But like almost every other time