“Every book has its own life.” 

This is the writer’s mantra, what we say to each other when we’re freaking out about book sales or lack-thereof, publicity or lack-thereof, the future of the publishing industry or...  well, you get the idea.  I hate to admit it, but releasing a book into the world is more stressful than it is celebratory, mostly because I have this gnawing and omnipresent worry that I should be doing something.  Something other than obsessively checking its rank on Amazon, anyway. 

Sure, I show up at the bookstores and give the readings; I smile for the pictures and answer the interview questions; I tweet the Tweets (okay, not so much, but I’m a regular updater of the Facebook status); I guest-blog.  Ultimately, though, I have a hard time believing that any of this does much good for the future of my books.  Not in the long-run.  Not really.  Not when I think about authors like Jacqueline Susann, who drove to nearly every bookstore in the continental US, flirting with booksellers so they would put her novel on their front tables and hand-sell it to their customers (I should probably confess that I’ve never read Valley of the Dolls, but the fact that I know this story anyway indicates that her methods were successful). 

A deficiency of this brand of get-up-and-go means that I have to rely on more faith-based methods:  I wrote that book, I think to myself, and now I wish it luck.

Besides, all I have to do is look at the lives of the individual stories to know that you can never predict what kind of journey a piece of writing will have, that just because you were present when the story was born doesn’t mean you have any control over where it goes or what happens to it. 

Of all the stories I’ve written, “Allegiance” has been the greatest lesson in reserving expectations.  It’s the story I receive the most emails about, and many come from overseas.  Readers have questions about the themes and symbols, about the power dynamics and the Pledge of Allegiance (people from other countries think the Pledge is super-creepy), about the mother, the mother, the mother.  Of all my stories, “Allegiance” has been translated into the most foreign languages (Uzbek and Arabic, just to name a couple) and has been the most widely anthologized.  Also, “Allegiance” was by far the biggest pain in the ass to write.

The first story I started after graduating from my MFA program, “Allegiance” was my debut attempt at writing a story with no due date, no finish line, no one waiting to evaluate and critique it and buy me a beer afterwards.  This was life after grad school:  I wasn’t writing for money and I wasn’t writing for grades.  Now I was just writing for... Fun? 

Well, it wasn’t. 

I was broke and scared and something about spending my days making up stories and writing them down suddenly felt kind of deranged and dangerous.  I worried that I should apply to law school. 

“This is the period of time that matters,” my best friend from grad school told me.  “This is the time that separates the boys from the men.”  So certain were we of our ranks as men, not boys, that we vowed to finish new stories and exchange work in two weeks.  Two weeks, I thought, was forever. 

In the two years (yes, years) that passed while I tried to finish “Allegiance,” I kept waiting for the epiphany, the aha! in which the story would come crashing together and I could pull an all-nighter and be done with it.  But the epiphany never came, and I trudged through draft after draft after draft until I simply couldn’t stand the sight of it anymore.  In the end, it took longer to write that story than it took to write my first novel.  Then, it took nearly as long to sell. 

I can’t remember the exact number of rejections, but before “Allegiance” sold to Ploughshares, it was turned down by close to twenty other journals and magazines.  I figured it was a sign that I should let the story die.  All the others had given me a buzz when I finished them.  All the others had sold.  Maybe this one was just a dud.  Editors said nice enough things about it, but no one wanted to publish it.  They all thought it was too dark, too long, too quiet. 

I never thought they were wrong:  “Allegiance,” is the only story in the collection that I’ve never read aloud.  It’s too long, and it’s too slow, and the characters are British, which means that I might accidentally start reading in an accent and sound like a jackass.  Also, “Allegiance” is the meanest story I’ve ever written.  None of the characters are especially likable to begin with, and as the story progresses, they all get worse.  Everyone betrays everyone.  No one is redeemed. 

The family in “Allegiance” was inspired, in part, by the family of my first college roommate.  Clara had moved from London to attend school in the US.  Her father was American, her mother English.  I loved Clara for the same reason I loved most people when I was eighteen:  I thought she was more interesting than I was.  Clara was wild and hilarious with a fantastic accent and a little petty theft problem.  “Look what I stole!” was her common salutation, followed by an unveiling of some sort--several layers of sweaters, tags still attached; an arm’s length of bracelets; a backpack of ice cream sandwiches.  Where I said, “Huh?” Clara said “Pardon?” and though she swore like a sailor, she always sounded elegant doing so.  Clara knew more about drugs, more about sex, more about David Bowie.  She smoked cigarettes from our dorm window and made out with our RA:  I wanted to be Clara. 

Sometimes Clara’s boyfriend would call from London, and if she wasn’t around, I would do my best to communicate with him.  He had a thick cockney accent and try as we might, we could not understand half of what each other said.  “She’s at the gym,” I would say, or, “She’s in her Goddess and Meditation class.”  Then he would rattle off something about dogs or bones while I shook my head helplessly, “Huh?”

Clara missed her boyfriend, missed London, missed her friends.  But she liked being close to her father, who spent most of his time in the US for work.  A quiet, mild-mannered man, he showed up once every few weeks to empty the contents of his wallet into Clara’s hand and take her out to dinner at the Olive Garden.  Her mother came from England only once.  When she arrived, she rushed at Clara—to hug her, I thought—then pinched a non-existent layer of fat near Clara’s waistline and told her she’d better lay off the cheeseburgers. 

Clara and her mother had never gotten along, she told me.  Well, almost never.  When Clara was ten or eleven, her father had moved their family from England to America--“The America Year,” Clara called it, though it lasted only a few months.  The move was meant to be permanent, but Clara and her mother banned together in protest--refused to assimilate or participate or eat.  At school, Clara wouldn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance or study American history.  At home, her mother didn’t unpack.  Eventually, her father gave up and sent the family back to London. 

I have no idea what happened to Clara.  I dropped out of college a few weeks before the end of our first semester, and I doubt she lasted much longer—when I left, she had yet to remove the cellophane wrapping from her textbooks.  I never saw her again.  But I thought about her family for years after.  About those few months they spent in their own private war zone. 

If you’ve read “Allegiance,” then it probably goes without saying that Glynnis is not Clara, and Glynnis’s parents are not Clara’s parents.  The week I started writing “Allegiance” was the same week the Abu Grhaib story broke, and that probably had more influence on the development of the characters and the plot than anything.  The school became a representation of America as I saw it at the time, a cruddy, rundown wreck of a place populated by the ruthless and self-serving, a place where the weak and wounded were tormented or, at best, ignored. 

Ultimately, I’m much more of a character writer than an “issue” writer.  Don’t get me wrong, I care about issues, but what draws me to stories, as both reader and writer, is always rooted in character.  In retrospect, I think part of the reason “Allegiance” was so difficult for me to finish was that it took awhile for me to realize that I was telling the story of a family, not a country. 

I’m still surprised by the life “Allegiance” has had, the places it’s been reprinted, the emails I continue to receive about it.  I don’t think it’s the best story in the collection, and it’s certainly not my favorite, but it’s taught me that my experience writing a story—positive or negative—is no indication of what kind of experience people will have reading it.  I can stress and worry and obsessively Google myself, but every story has its own life, and I could save myself a great deal of heartache by stepping back and trusting that each of them will find its way.  Whatever that might be.