As writer and a single mom, when I really want to work, I go out to the garage. This isn’t because I’m an aspirational mechanic or home gym fanatic but because I’ve set my garage up with some bookshelves and a desk. It is a place I use for a certain kind of thinking, and I’ll even announce to my boys as I head out the back door that I’m “going to work.”
Understandably perhaps, given their young ages and my proximity, they find this boundary hard to respect. The garage is only a few steps from our kitchen, and it contains plenty of objects they don’t associate with work: spare paint cans, old Christmas decorations, an ancient bike. When I’m out there writing, the detritus tends to become magnetic, my presence signaling that previously peripheral objects are now fascinating toys. “Twenty minutes of quiet,” I once heard myself bargaining with them, only to be rewarded with a series of Post-it notes that narrated to me, silently, a litany of requests. (“Come qwik mom,” read one. “He is touching my tings.”)
Reflecting on their interruptions again recently, I’ve come to think that maybe their confusion isn’t related to age alone. Were one to install a hidden camera in my garage, a horrifying thought, it would show scenes of nail biting, doodling, internet browsing, and long stretches of me staring off into space. What must my writing look like to an outside observer? What am I doing out there? Why do I need, in those moments, to be so completely on my own? My assumptions are telling in this regard. “Room? Clean? Now?” I asked my younger child, recently, as he sat, like me, staring into space. “Ah I can’t, mom,” he answered. “I’m not done thinking yet.”
I wrote this book to understand how the invisible and often isolating work of reading and writing might coexist with my ability to have a communal, not-solitary life.
Our tipping point happened on the day before my oldest and I started school, which meant kindergarten for him and fall semester teaching and a new batch of college undergraduates for me. In the morning, their dad was there. In the afternoon, he was not. He wouldn’t be there for several years. What happened? friends ask. And then what happened? And what did you do? I either don’t have the answers, or the memories, or those questions invite a story I don’t know how to tell. I know family was three thousand miles away. I know I was lonely. I know this hasn’t been a story about coparenting until more recently, a new chapter with their dad that I’ve been happy to add.
But these chapters were written in the years before that, when our life as an unexpected trio caused me to reexamine my work habits and life choices, as well as my own childhood, my current lifestyle, and my approaches to moving on. What I realized in retrospect was how this personal trajectory—that sense of excavation, for the sake of understanding; the feeling of sadness and stuckness when working on something doesn’t seem to work; the subsequent experience of momentum, even hope—is one I live through, in microcosm, every time I write.
So this book tells that story, one about how a life lived in books—a life spent reading, writing, and teaching the written word—had prepared me for certain kinds of solitary work. I wrote these pages to weave together my own often contradictory thoughts on labor, literature, and companionship and to explore how books had taught me about solitude and also brought me closer to the people I most love. I wrote this book to figure out how writing relates to longing, and I wrote it to figure out how I could be both a writer and a mom. I wrote it to understand how writing and parenting could feel simultaneously like so much work and passion, and I wrote it to figure out what forms of work I felt I needed to do or resented doing in my life, on my own. Most personally, I wrote this book to understand how the invisible and often isolating work of reading and writing might coexist with my ability to have a communal, not-solitary life…
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Growing up, I was always aware that my family worked hard. There was my mom, up at five in the New England darkness to run before she went to work, and there was my dad, down in the basement at 2 a.m. working to finish something unresolvable during the daylight hours. There was my mom, the experienced physician with the call schedule of an intern, admitting patients to the hospital while the rest of us were asleep, and there was my dad, the English professor, commuting long hours to adjunct teaching jobs, grading papers after my bedtime, and working, always working, at finishing books.
The labor required by life seemed thrust in our faces, my brother and me. Yet that labor also felt overwhelming because so much of it transpired just out of sight. I had a sense of tasks lurking on the other side of dinner or of a frenetic motion vibrating through the predawn hours. I saw my parents as dual Atlases, that mythological figure who carries the world, and if they hid from us the full range of their efforts, they showed us, through this hiding, the effort that was in store. While we might be free from adult responsibilities, our childhood chores were clearly rehearsals for some vaster task.
I experienced this parental effort as that which protected me from ambiguous hardships, but it also communicated to me a sense that what my parents were doing was barely keeping the world at bay. One must work very hard, in our family model, not necessarily to succeed at life but merely to keep up. Success must mean moving even faster, the kind of doubled-down effort that the Red Queen explains to Alice in Through the Looking Glass, that childhood novel by Lewis Carroll. “Now, here, you see,” the Red Queen asserts, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” My family lived in looking-glass land, always running, it seemed, but never quite getting to where we wanted to go. I just figured we must not have been running fast enough.
Rereading the tales of Alice recently, I find that the tasks of life are confusing to Carroll’s heroine, too. “Are we nearly there?” asks a tired Alice, only to reveal that she has no idea what she had been running toward. Running very fast means you are likely to get lost, especially since looking-glass land is a place in which it can be hard to see. Alice is first drawn into her parallel universe because parts of it are beyond her sight. “I can see all of it when I get upon a chair,” Alice exclaims, looking in the mirror room reflected over her mantel, “all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit!” In her efforts to visualize what is down the passage, behind the fireplace, on the back of the reflected clock, she finds herself pressed up against the glass, pressing upon it, and stepping through.
As a child, I was also drawn toward what I could not see. The adult world was lurking, though unlike the desirous Alice, I was lured forward by trepidation as much as desire. Curiosity, the buzz word of the Alice books, can take on many additional valences, and the adult world seemed important to explore preemptively, so that I’d be strong enough to handle it once it was mine.
The work of writing always hides itself and its writer, regardless of where it is done. Maybe the work of writing keeps us at our most solitary, our most alone.
But in looking-glass land there are also books, and I like to think the books are part of what draws Alice in. They are odd books—“something like our books,” Alice states, “only the words go the wrong way”—but books nonetheless, and they provide an element of familiarity in a world that is yet unknown. If the child can recognize but not (yet?) read those other words, she still has the security of knowing that these objects exist. For me, too, books were not only a part of my childhood but also promised to be a part of the otherwise mysterious experience of growing up…
But as a child, I had always already known that books were magic. After all, sitting silently in front of a book and moving one’s eyes was doing something, and those still and silent postures somehow caused stories or information to be transferred. The secret, I figured, must be in the physical motions, so I, too, would sit in front of books, sometimes big ones, and scan my eyes while turning pages at what I perceived to be the correct pace. “I’m reading to myself,” I’d announce, though I would have been lost had anyone asked me what I’d read. I watched grownups carefully to see when and how the act of silent “reading” occurred. I watched my dad sometimes in his study, from a quiet distance, by himself typing, pausing, typing again.
Still, that mysterious spark, and the nature of such labor, always eluded me. There was nothing beside the physical motions I could emulate, nothing that gave me a sense of the internal machinery that told a reader when to turn a page or told my father to hit the keyboard now but not then. What was he doing in there? Why did he need, in those moments, to be so completely on his own? No wonder Frankenstein was early on one of my keystone texts, that novel about a protagonist who similarly yearns to understand the spark of life, an invisible secret that he thinks he can locate by viewing, repeatedly, anatomy and gravesites and decay. There must be something he can learn by looking. There must be a way for such learning to lead to creation, companionship, some vital bond. And in the fiction of the novel, there is.
Yet in pursuing that secret, Victor Frankenstein also finds, for a time, all the companionship he needs. The character Walton announces on the first pages of the novel that he has no friends and then immediately sets out on an expedition to the uninhabited North Pole. “I’d just really rather stay home and finish reading my book,” I’d announce regularly to my parents throughout my preadolescence, once I did know how to read and write, myself an allegedly lonely school-aged kid.
And so back to my garage or my armchair, my school office, a car dealership, a doctor’s waiting room, my dining room table filled with stuff. I don’t always need to hide myself to write, I’ve learned, since if it needs to the work of writing can take place in many locales. And I don’t need to worry about loneliness, either, connected as I am to my potential readers and those invisible friends, my thoughts. Or maybe what I mean is that the work of writing always hides itself and its writer, regardless of where it is done. Maybe the work of writing keeps us at our most solitary, our most alone.
It is like those parts of looking-glass land that Alice can’t quite see, and so it draws me toward it, toward the words of others and the spaces between their words.
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Excerpted from Shadow Work: Loneliness and the Literary Life by Emily Hodgson Anderson. Copyright © 2025 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
