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Exiled By Success

Reader Liam sent me this essay about homecoming by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s very good. Coates makes himself startlingly vulnerable, and I’m sure a lot of people are going to make fun of him, saying that he’s got First World Problems. But what he writes about is real, and it’s more than a little heartbreaking.

Coates writes about how shocked he was by the celebrity he suddenly had when Between The World And Me was published, and became a huge bestseller.  As you may recall, he, his wife, and their son moved to Paris for a while. Now they’re back, and decided they wanted to move to a neighborhood they lived in when they were poor and he was a struggling writer:

My partner—now my wife—loved our old Brooklyn neighborhood. We eventually had to leave after a dispute with our landlord, but we dreamed of moving back. We’d return to visit friends, and gentrification would always be Topic A. Prospect-Lefferts Garden was still black. But most of the young couples moving in were not. We didn’t have the money to move in back then, but that didn’t stop us from fantasizing. We imagined ourselves as aiding in the preservation of a black presence. But there more personal reasons, too. We wanted to be closer to our friends in the neighborhood. And I wanted, in some tangible way, to reward my partner’s investment in me. I think that had a lot more to do with my insecurities than with her stated desires. We all carry our stories.

With a small fortune in the bank, the Coateses bought a $2.1 million brownstone in the neighborhood. They were finally coming home, in quiet triumph. And they had earned it. But because property transactions are public, and because he is a famous author now, the media got wind of it, and suddenly there were articles everywhere about where they were going to live.

Some of my acquaintances went on Facebook and shared these articles. Other people called up my actual friends and joked about the purchase. Very little of this conversation was negative. Much of it was of the congratulatory “Nigga, we made it” variety. But all of it was premised on a kind of obliviousness, an inability to imagine how horrifying it would be to see all the details of your new life out there for the world to see. It is true what they say about celebrity—people come suddenly don’t quite see you. You walk into a room and you are not a person, so much as symbol of whatever someone needs you to be.

But the world is real. And you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety. That’s just the history. And you can’t really be a human being and not want some place to retreat into yourself, some place to collapse, some place to be at peace. That’s just neurology. One shouldn’t get in the habit of crying about having a best-selling book. But you can’t really sell enough books to become superhuman, to salve that longing for home.

They decided that it would be too risky to live there. And he is struggling mightily with his success:

I want you to know that I have been struggling, these past few months, to write about politics. I feel people, all around me, uninterested in questions and enthralled with prophecy. The best part of writing is the constant searching, the twisting, the turning, the back-and-forth, the things you think you understand, the things you understand more than you know. Prophecy has no real use for writing as discovery. And when people want prophets, they will make you into one, no matter your strenuous objections. If the world wants a “Writer Moves to Brooklyn Brownstone” story, it’s going to have one, no matter your thoughts. You are their symbol. This is all a very poor excuse for not writing. I find myself stuck in the past, pining for another time, blinded by nostalgia, longing for my old horde, longing for my old home.

Read the whole thing.  Seriously, do. And please, try not to be the person who sneers at the problems of a man who is a best-selling author, and now rich enough to buy a $2.1 million house. Granted, I think worrying about safety to the degree he expresses here is overwrought. Are people really killing black writers? Any writers? It sounds like he’s really rattled by the loss of privacy he had when he was much less well known, and I don’t blame him.

But it’s hard, at first, to feel sorry for a guy like that. He has found a degree of success that very few writers have, and he came from a childhood of more danger and difficulty (inner city Baltimore) than most writers — than most Americans — can even fathom. He has won the lottery of life! No, actually that’s not true, because that would imply that dumb luck made TNC rich. He earned it. As you may recall, I did not like his book, but my judgment was not the judgment of the book-buying public, and he earned his fame, his money, and his townhouse fair and square.

But now he can’t enjoy it. He wants a quiet place to live with his wife and son, and to be safe to live and to think and to write. But he can’t have it, not in New York, at least. And that is sad. It’s a writerly version of the person who wins the big jackpot, and suddenly has the means to fulfill their dream, but finds that all that money has made it impossible to be at peace.

Most people don’t ever have to worry about things like this, but politicians, actors, musicians, and other people in the public eye do. I have a friend who is a successful TV star. I once had lunch with her in her hometown, and was amazed by how many people barged in to tell her how much they enjoyed her in this or that, to ask for her autograph, and the like. I became aware that all eyes in the restaurant were on her. By the time we paid the check to leave, a local TV crew had set up outside the restaurant to film her leaving. It was nuts, just nuts. But she handled it with uncommon grace. This was normal to her. It’s part of the game.

I couldn’t imagine living like that. I have another friend, a writer who has found a degree of fame for writing books that touch people very deeply. He has told me how unusual it is when he gives a reading or something for complete strangers to come up to him and to share their problems, and to look at him in the eyes as if he were their deepest, oldest friend, and expect an answer that solves what bedevils them. He does the best he can, but it never fails to unnerve him. He has found at a much smaller level what Ta-Nehisi Coates has found: that when people decide you are a prophet, or need you to be a symbol, they don’t see you as a real person anymore.

Again, you may be thinking: I would love to have those problems. Would you really? Think about how it would feel to you to have grown up poor, and to have written a book that made you rich and famous, and able to provide for your family to a degree you never imagined possible, only to find that your good fortune has robbed you of the ability to be … you. Maybe most people could handle it. I don’t think I could, not as a writer. Writing is what I do. Writing is life. If I found that I was so rattled by the eyes of everyone on me, and fear for my privacy, that I couldn’t write, I would be in a real crisis.

Once, when I lived in New York City, I saw some celebrity walking down the street, mobbed by paparazzi. I can’t even tell you who it was, because the photographers’ swarm was so thick. I felt so bad for the person, whoever it was. What kind of fame is worth that? There were other times when Julie and I would be walking down the street, and she would point out a celebrity on the sidewalk, usually one dressed down, as if to disguise themselves. I asked her how she could tell that’s who it was. She said that when she managed an office for two paparazzi, she had to learn how to spot famous people on the street, in case she needed to let the guys know who was afoot in Manhattan where.

That’s never going to happen to TNC, at least I hope it doesn’t. But it’s the kind of thing he’s talking about.

He might have to move somewhere else, to a part of the country where he wouldn’t be as recognizable. You can get a hell of a house in uptown New Orleans for $2.1 million. But that’s not where he wants to be. He wants to be at home. But there may be no home for him to go to, not the home of his dreams. Not to the home he thought he would be able to have one day, if he made it as a writer.

I dunno, maybe you don’t say it that way. Maybe this is just me as a writer feeling bad for him, and imagining how I would feel in his shoes. And I hope that one day I do write a book that sells as well as his own! I would rather have his problems than my constant fear that I’m not going to have the money to pay for three kids in college. But the price of that kind of fame … it’s steep.

Walker Percy, who lived in a small Louisiana town, on a bayou not far from the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, said it was a very good place to be a writer. In the South, nobody cares much about writers. They think of writers as idlers. This is pretty much true, and it’s great. Because it gives you time and space to read and to write.

I recommend that TNC move to the South. New Orleans might be just the place.