The Liberated Writer: Carolyn Cooke

Carolyn Cooke, author of The Bostons

“Not every idea worth thinking can be thought in advance. That’s what sentences—by which I mean journeys to the depths—are for. ”
— Carolyn Cooke

Carolyn Cooke is a liberated writer. She’s real, and vivid, and joyful, and will take you with her on the journey to the depths, both as an author and a writing professor. Her work explores the awkward intimacies of life and is influenced by her experience growing up in New England and living on the East Coast.

She has been a TV writer for the South African soap Die Testament, is a professor at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), and is the author of The Bostons, Daughters of the Revolution, and Amor and Psycho: Stories. Her book The Bostons was awarded the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a first book and declared a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

We talked on the phone this week during one of the hottest days of the year. We bantered about our mutual love of film and writing, about how we could love writers like Bukowski even though he was really a horrible person. She thinks it’s because he was just such a truthful writer, and when reading his work, one can embody what it’s like to be such a person for a moment.

Cooke also writes to express the truth as she remembers it. She isn’t one to shy away from writing a steamy sex scene or letting trauma inform her writing — and suggests the same for her students.

I connected with Cooke long before I met her in person, thanks to the pandemic that was raging when I began graduate school. She was one of my first professors in my MFA program at CIIS. We met regularly via zoom in workshop class for over a year before finally meeting in person at the school’s MFA intensive weekend in January 2022.

Some people are different when you eventually meet them in person after zoom but Cooke was the same as she presented herself online: witty, smart, intense, and compassionate.

The novel she’s writing now is called Suffer Better. It’s about a middle-aged woman who works for a tech company where she allows herself to be imprinted with other people’s traumatic memories. It’s shaping up to be a dark, serious, and funny novel, and in true form for Cooke, it doesn’t shrink from the disturbing and uncomfortable parts of life. Nor does she lie about the hard part of being a writer — the writing.

“I was talking to Brian Swimme (author of The Universe is a Green Dragon) about how part of why it’s hard to write my book is that it’s so embarrassing. And what does it mean? And what does it mean to be liberated? To put something into words. It's exciting to tear off the mask and appear in real humanity that is more complicated. It's hard to undo the training.”

“I’m more interested in the truth I didn’t know. My favorite part is losing what I was trying to originally say and letting something else come through.” —Carolyn Cooke

Since I’m always contemplating how to pull truth out of our questionable memories, I ask what she thinks about how, as writers, we can do that.

“My writing process is 90% rethinking, revising.” she answered, “One of my early teachers, Gordon Lish, said, ‘It’s not hard to make a sentence, it’s hard to let the sentence stand.’ That’s because the truth is slippery, experience and memory are slippery. A lot of reality is wrong. Writing is a way to drill down into the sources of that wrongness. It takes you to something unexpected. I’m more interested in the truth I didn’t know. My favorite part is losing what I was trying to originally say and letting something else come through.”

That openness is an integral part of Cooke’s writing process, a discovery more than a plan. I can relate; I’d love to outline, but if I do, I end up totally changing it, so there’s no point. She has an idea why that might be.

“Not every idea worth thinking can be thought in advance.” she explains, “That’s what sentences—by which I mean journeys to the depths—are for. It’s the only way I know to figure out what it is I’m doing, or have done. It’s the opposite of planning.” she laughs, “We’re trained in grade school to outline and plan as if we knew in advance what story we want to tell.”

Cooke is quick to acknowledge that others may work better with an outline, but it’s just not for her.

“It’s like a coloring book,” she says of creating the outline, “and some prefer the freedom and the horror of the blank page —it’s dependent on that moment and thought and that day and how you feel. Writing is a form of thinking,” she elaborates, “the application of consciousness and time to a series of words. Energy moves from the head through the arm through the fingers to the page. This interaction of head and hand is my best definition of “the mind.” It’s thinking in words beyond thinking or words. The greatest adventures of my life have happened when I allow my fingers to speak.”

I ask why she thinks art and writing are important.

“Art and writing are important because intimacy is important—intimacy across time, geography, race, class, gender, species. We’re constantly invited to repress our primal existence and try to glow in our industrial identity. Making or experiencing art can be a liberation from that false, familiar ‘Reality.’”

“Although writing is the most primal thing I do, it isn’t private. Privacy is not a concept I fully understand. I’m interested in the possibility that experience can be shared.” —Carolyn Cooke

As a professor, Cooke pushed us to create that intimacy by adventuring into what she hoped would be uncomfortable territory with our work, and to find ways to talk about things that were supposed to remain unsaid or that were difficult to reveal.

“Although writing is the most primal thing I do, it isn’t private.” she says, “Privacy is not a concept I fully understand. I’m interested in the possibility that experience can be shared.” 

And yet the reading and writing itself is very private. Cooke is excited to talk about the privacy of reading and writing themselves versus privacy with what and how one writes.

“I remember in middle school reading Updike, learning everything about sex from this book from the library.” she says of her surreptitious relationship with the contents of her books, while relatives assumed she was a good girl reading library books on the couch.

We speak more about the odd nature of the reader-writer relationship. While a theater performer, for example, interacts directly with their audience, writers have no idea about what the reader’s experience might be once the book is out there.

“There is something artificial about the reader-writer relationship,” Cooke says, “because the writer isn’t there to share the experience.”

I just read in the Girls on the Page substack more about this artificial part of the reader-writer relationship, where Margaret Atwood says in her book, Negotiating with the Dead:

“All writers are double, for the simple reason that you can never actually meet the author of the book you have just read. Too much time has elapsed between composition and publication, and the person who wrote the book is now a different person.”

During my conversation with Cooke, we talk more about how written language is a kind-of game. How, for example, Hemingway is direct at the sentence level but a game he plays is not revealing the core thing. Withholding. “It’s like a puzzle you’re creating and solving.” she notes.

Growing up in New England, Cooke learned that there were things you were allowed to talk about and many more that were off limits —withheld. But early on, her grandfather illuminated a way whereby she could talk about anything, and in the process, sparked her desire to write.

“The paradox of language—the form in which the unsayable or the unspeakable can finally be articulated—shaped all my thinking.”
— Carolyn Cooke

“My grandfather was a prep school English teacher and was able to say anything through euphemism — the band of acceptable discourse was narrow and confined—but within that narrow band, there was an alternate universe in which you could say anything you wanted under the veil of language.” she explains. “The paradox of language—the form in which the unsayable or the unspeakable can finally be articulated—shaped all my thinking. For me reading and writing feels more real and intimate than other activities.”

It’s that intimacy and openness, and the self-consciousness of it, that make her work so compelling as we journey to the depths together.