Work and the Writing Life: Shifts in the Relationship Between ‘Work’ and ‘The Work’ in Twenty-First-Century Literary-Advice Memoirs

Abstract

AbstractThis article focuses on memoirs that grapple with how to resolve tensions between ‘work,’ labor performed for a wage or salary, and ‘the Work,’ a creative pursuit performed for reasons beyond material necessity. Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (1934) and Wake up and Live! (1936), like many self-help publications of their kind, position writing and other creative pursuits as acts of living that stand in opposition to the necessity of making a living. Recently, however, a number of publications on “the writing life” have begun to complicate this opposition. When considering works ranging from Annie Dillard’s 1989 The Writing Life to Deborah Levy’s Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) and The Cost of Living (2018) and Alexander Chee’s How to Write and Autobiographical Novel (2018), it seems that the dichotomy of work vs. writing life is not simply undergoing demystification but also reconceptualization. These contemporary literary-advice memoirs thematize dissolutions between work, personal, and writing lives, thereby also disrupting generic patterns in issuing literary advice. They push the literary advice genre away from technicalities and visions of artistic autonomy and toward accounts of creative production that is subject to the demands placed on creative workers throughout the white-collar labor market of late capitalism.