Why We Write: Natasha Lewin
Read the newest submission from a 2018 Black List x WIF Feature Residency alum...
Why We Write returns with a new essay from Natasha Lewin, who was a part of the very first Black List x WIF Feature Residency. Take it away, Natasha!
There’s a verse in Jeremiah where he’s about to quit. He’s tired of being mocked, tired of delivering a message no one wants to hear. He decides he’s done. Then he says:
“But if I say I will not mention his word or speak anymore in his name, his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”
That’s why I write. I cannot not.
I was a voracious reader as a child. I still am. But it wasn’t just books that made me want to be a writer, it was the tiniest slices of story that pulled me in. Like the quick trailers before a film. A single shot of Scarlett O’Hara and her father overlooking Tara. Dorothy’s red shoes finding the yellow brick road. Spike Lee wearing a Dodgers jersey carrying a pizza box. Small, flickering moments that gave me the same joy I had watching the movie. I didn’t have language for it then, but I knew how it felt. I wanted to give that same feeling to someone else.
That’s also why I write.
My debut novel, SUBMIT, came from a place I never expected to write from: my own life, turned up to eleven, and handed to someone else.
I got married later in life, in my mid-40s, right when my body was staging a revolt I didn’t see coming: Early menopause. Almost overnight I gained twenty pounds. My libido was gone. And underneath all of it, a crisis of faith.
We couldn’t consummate our marriage due to pain. Plus, I hated my body. It was like being back in high school. I was drowning in societal pressure, spiritual pressure, and the particular silence around menopause that existed before culture caught up. I was certain I was going to walk away from my husband the year we got married. I didn’t know how to survive it. So, I created Dee.
Dee is not me, but she carries everything I was going through. She carries my pain and struggles further and harder and with less grace than I probably did, because that’s what fiction is for. You take the unbearable thing and you give it to a character who can bear it (or who can’t). I took all of it: the body, the faith, the desire, the shame, the silence, and I dumped it into Dee and turned every dial up to the extreme.
Writing SUBMIT was my therapy. It was my temple. It was my shoulder to cry on.
I didn’t write this book to remove the stigma around menopause and libido. I didn’t write it to have a message. I wrote it because I was drowning and storytelling was the only raft I knew.
But here’s what I didn’t expect: writing saved my marriage. Not because it fixed anything, but because it gave me somewhere to put the fire while I figured out how to live with it.
I’m happy to report I’m still married. I’m also still in menopause and the testosterone has done nothing for my libido or jiggly belly. But I’m still with my husband and my faith is stronger than ever.
That’s why I write. Because sometimes the story you make up is the only way through the one you’re actually living. The fire doesn’t go out just because you stop tending it, it just burns in you from the inside instead.
Thanks to Natasha!
Natasha Lewin was a participant in the inaugural Black List x Women in Film Feature Residency with her script FREEDOM RIDES. Her debut novel SUBMIT is about a Black woman navigating menopause, faith, and desire in the first year of her marriage. Learn more at natashalewin.com and stageofgracepress.com.
More Why We Write:
Jainaba M. Seckan on creating through loss and finding new purpose
Brandon Carbaugh on writing for his beloved brother
Ben Mehlman on the power of slowing down
If you’re not already a member of the Black List website, here you go:
Writers: Create a free Writer Profile and whenever you’re ready (and only then) upload your project, order professional feedback, and explore the various opportunities we have from time to time.
Industry Professionals Register for an Industry Membership to discover new material before everyone else.
See you in the comments.
So your book was autobiographical? Good fodder for one book. Two? Twenty?