My father began to say to me a long time ago, and continues to say now, a comforting aphorism, something I’m sure he read as a quote some place, or in a biography: “They will say of you: ‘Her life was not the least of her art.’”
I can’t remember when he first said this or what action of mine would have compelled it, but it’s offered to affirm the way I have lived over the last decade or so when I am despairing of it, a life which has been so similar to his in some ways and completely divergent in others. He too is a writer and we both had other jobs we didn’t care much about until our late twenties, when we had the chance to become more fully dedicated to what we make and do.
Temperamentally, though, we are different. He remained in our hometown in Ireland and values highly the rewards of routine and unyielding structure. I have spent much of my adult life employing a magpie-ish approach to decisions about where and how I spend my days. I have lived in a number of countries and spent months at a time in others, a way of existing which was initially compelled by lack of money, but which I soon found I enjoyed for its own sake. I would leave London when I couldn’t afford rent and go someplace I had heard they may have need of a cat- or house-sitter. Once I had become a journalist, I would go on any press trip I got wind of, which is how I passed through central Portugal, Norway and Chornobyl in a single year.