People often say writing is a journey. To me, it’s a struggle, a process, a whole lot of pain and frustration, a veil of gloom that brilliant light will randomly pierce. Things brighten over time, but the struggle goes on. This September marks forty years since I embraced it, and there’s a whole lot to look back on, some good, some strange, and some that lends itself to reinterpretation.

My first published short story seems like a fine place to begin this trip down Memory Lane. “A Painful Shade of Blue” appeared in the Autumn 1995 issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review opposite a poem by Tess Gallagher. That was my first point of pride. The second was discovering that Ann Beattie’s first published short story also came out in the VQR. Closer to home, I soon learned that my father’s first academic essay as a graduate student in the 1940s did, too, which was unsettling because the story was about him, not exclusively, but he was a prominent character.

Another problem was that my father was dead set against me becoming a writer. I’d studied Economics in college, and got a Master’s of Business Administration right afterward, then abruptly changed career course. Though it wasn’t so abrupt a change. Writing possessed me from an early age, even as I studied to become a classical pianist, another path I wandered away from when I was seventeen. I was happy to have finally “found myself,” but my father thought I was wasting my time. Even so, years before that first acceptance, and in the face of my steadfast opposition and determination, he put me in touch with an old friend who’d been in the same graduating class at Cornell with his second wife, a nice guy named Mike Curtis. Mike happened to be the Fiction Editor at The Atlantic Monthly, and naturally I was thrilled to be introduced.

I sent Mike everything I wrote over the next eight years. His insights were invaluable. I was deeply grateful to my father, until I realized he’d hoped Mike would tell me to find something else to do with my life. This became apparent when my father asked Mike what he thought of a story I’d sent him and Mike said, with some surprise, “You know, it’s not bad!” My father clearly hadn’t expected that answer, but rather to be given a sympathetic remark about how sometimes our children get wrong ideas, or some such. It was on Mike’s advice that I sent my story to the VQR in the spring of 1994, nine years after I started writing and right after my daughter was born. Staige Blackford, the editor, took four months to write his letter of acceptance. It seems that the reader who’d been assigned my story had a summer job in construction that kept him pretty busy. When the season wound down, he turned his attention to my work and recommended it.

The story’s title refers to the color of Lake Cayuga, visible from the Cornell campus where my parents were professors, and centers on their divorce in the late 1960s. All the characters were drawn from my own experience and the only change I made was to the protagonist—instead of being ten, as I was in real life, she was fifteen.

The plot was simple: husband/father tires of wife number one and falls for a former student, fourteen years his junior who becomes wife number two. Wife number one is bitter and betrayed. Older daughter suffers from manic depression. Younger daughter (me) withdraws to a place of cynical and wry observation of the adults around her.

The problem was that it wasn’t true, even though I believed it was based on what my mother always told me. But contrary to her version, that wife number two “got her hooks” into my father, they maintained a pleasant, platonic relationship after she married, had two children of her own, lived down on Long Island, then divorced and moved back to Ithaca where she’d been happy years before. My mother also left out another crucial detail, shared with me two years after the story was published when my father flew across country to tell me in person that for the last five years of their marriage, she’d been in love with another man.

Oops. Game changer, that.

She admitted it when I confronted her, and it certainly altered my understanding of events. My father was heartbroken by her disaffection, and when he couldn’t take any more of her cold shoulder, left.

Now, back to why he didn’t like that I was a writer. I long thought it was because he’d once had literary ambitions of his own and didn’t pursue them. But it wasn’t that. It was seeing himself on the page, where nothing was held back, even if the central fact was wrong. My words gave me power. If I could write that story, I could write others in which he appeared. I never did, yet he kept trying to get me to focus my efforts elsewhere.

Now, take a look at that cover of the VQR and think about our current political climate. It’s certainly a case of what goes around comes around, or the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Not so, my writing journey. The only circles are my reflections and reconsiderations. Otherwise, the line has been fairly straight. May it continue.