117: In Praise of Amateurism
On the benefits of making and sharing imperfect work, especially in a foreign medium. Also: calendars! Also: Book news!
A few months ago, back in September, I started my three-year-old on violin lessons. I studied violin myself when I was a kid, from the age of four through high school and college, and it has been very important to me over the years, if decreasingly so as I’ve gotten older. Yes, I share many folks’ uncontroversial opinion that playing an instrument from a young age offers a kid many benefits—a familiarity with, even a love of, music; a good ear; community; joy; a willingness to fail and fail again and then improve, slowly, over time, which is to say, discipline—but also I have a personal, emotional investment in it all. Violin has been a part of me ever since I can remember. I wanted to share that with him.
So I rented him a heart-meltingly cute 1/16-sized instrument. I enrolled him in a Suzuki program a half hour away and committed to driving him back and forth twice a week. I finagled childcare for his 15-month-old sister, who was too disruptive during his first lesson to be allowed back (!). It was going to be a schlep, but it would be worth it.
If the perceptive reader thinks, here, “I’m being set up,” well. You’re on to something.
As soon as it became clear that it would take months if not years for my son to be able to make actual music, he decided violin was not for him. If, in the car and during mealtimes, he often asked—still does, in fact—to listen to those tedious/meditative variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” in his mind, his relationship with the instrument itself was kaput. He put down his adorable 1/16-size and refused to pick it up again.
For a while I thought maybe I ought to lead by example, with the hope that, over time, he’d be inspired to try again. His teacher liked this idea. He brought more sophisticated music for us grown-ups to play. We worked our way through a couple of canonic duets by Telemann. They were easy and beautiful. I was in Heaven.
Except that, while his teacher and I played together, my son would: Empty the wastebasket. Use the wastebasket as a helmet. Walk into walls. Open drawers. Draw on the whiteboard. Draw with whiteboard markers on everything else. Roll around on the floor. Climb on the piano. Knock over my music stand. Pull on my clothes. Whine. Just, generally, do everything in his limited power to communicate to me, his adult, that he did not want to be there.
After a couple of weeks of this, I thought, okay, I hear you. Clearly this whole fiasco has been more for me than it has been for you. We can quit for now. We can try again when you’re four, if you want to. I canceled the rest of our classes. I received a refund in the mail. Our adorable 1/16-sized rental violin has been returned. And my poor overprogrammed three-year-old has a few more hours free, during the week, to do things he actually enjoys, like play with his trucks, jump on the couch, and knock over his sister.
They don’t call them threenagers for nothing. My son is amazing: he’s smart, funny, articulate, imaginative, naturally sweet-natured, and adorable to boot. He can also be difficult! Too often, I find myself hitting my limit with him far more quickly than I expect. Our altercations will escalate from zero to sixty—or eighty, or a hundred—seemingly without any warning at all. Only when I go back and postmortem a flare-up in retrospect will I realize that, wow, entering that situation, I was already depleted. From the get-go, I was coming in at a disadvantage. Some essential need was not being met.
Still, during this short period when I was playing violin again, one of these essential needs was outlined for me. I’ve missed violin. Playing my instrument feeds a wolf in me, as the saying goes, that’s been dormant too long, and that, asleep, has been slowly starving.
This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I’ve known a long time that I feel the same way when I go too long without writing. Irritable and easily triggered. Somewhere on the spectrum of off-my-game to bewildered. Generally low-key depressed.
That said, I am uncomfortably rusty, and can play only fractionally as well as I used to. Which is why it took me so long—took me, indeed, until my own child was somewhere in the range (read: on the young end) of old enough to start lessons himself—to pick it up again. I was afraid of my own mediocrity. Or, no: afraid not of the mediocrity itself but of what feelings it might elicit. When I was young and playing more seriously, and would go too long without practicing, it could send me into a tailspin of frustration and self-doubt not to be able to play with the facility I expected. Happily, I have found that, at forty, after many years of neglecting my instrument, being able to play it at all brings me joy enough to balance out my technical frustrations.
And the technical frustrations, they are real! As this was all going on, I was sent another little invitation from the violin spirits. A filmmaker friend asked my partner and me to record a few minutes music for a video he was making to support fundraising efforts around the beloved / beleaguered radical hippie summer camp where he and my husband met, in their teens. (Incidentally, this camp was the inspiration for the fictional summer camp in my forthcoming novel. It has been a special, even essential place, for generations of kids, and its demise, should it fail to raise these funds, will leave too many young people without a safe place to go, to feel free, to be who they are among peers that respect them.) At any rate, as my husband and I worked through various musical ideas together, I often found myself frustrated by the slowness of my fingers, the inconsistency of my intonation, the shakiness of my bow. It was exasperating, it was humbling, it was rewarding. (See the beautiful video, set to our music, here.)
Anyway. This is the pleasure of amateurism. Being able to do a thing not well enough to be a virtuoso, but well enough for oneself. Well enough to lose one’s ego in the sweetness of process. To help out a friend. To make something of value.
Speaking of amateur products of value . . .
Do You Want a FRUIT OF THE DEAD Calendar?
You can have one! Free! It is my gift to anyone who has preordered FRUIT OF THE DEAD. Just reply to this note with proof of your purchase (e.g. a screenshot of your receipt) and the address where you’d like me to send it. I’ll get it in the mail to you as soon as possible.
If you haven’t preordered the book yet, and would like to, click here for the US edition) and here for the UK). Preorder links are on the right-hand sides of both pages.
Lastly, should you feel moved to help offset the costs of printing and mailing these calendars, and to support this work I am doing more generally, I invite you to take advantage of this totally optional offer to join my paid subscribers for 20% off. The handwritten thank-you card I will send you, along with your calendar, will convey only fractionally my immense gratitude for your support.
Thank you. Let’s be amateurs together.
In Other News . . .
FRUIT OF THE DEAD has received a starred review from Kirkus! They write,
Lyon’s skillful and luscious prose encourages empathy for both Cory and Emer. The book gets to the visceral heart of Cory’s broken spirit, her fractured relationship with her mother, and the love that binds them together despite everything. Readers need not be overly familiar with the myth to enjoy the well-told story… An affecting novel with touches of the fantastical, weaving explorations of power, youth, wealth, and familial love.
Off The Shelf kindly included FRUIT OF THE DEAD among their 20 Most Anticipated Books of 2024.
The very generous Julia Kastner interviewed me about the book for Maximum Shelf, a weekly feature on Shelf Awareness.
And Madeleine Feeny included FRUIT OF THE DEAD as an Editor’s Choice pick for March ‘24 in The Bookseller: