F Lori Carson’s novel depicts two scenarios for her main character, Lisa. In the real story she decides to have an abortion, in another scenario she has the child. (Photo courtesy Harper Collins)
When it comes to a career, the spiritual life centers on two things: the call and gifts.
The call (often used as a term for clergy, but we all have some kind of calling), is an overarching purpose God has for our lives that connects us to others and a larger meaning. Often we’re unfulfilled when we’re out of touch with it. The call is often centered around using our natural spiritual gifts. These are skills and talents that often benefit others, give us a sense of peace and originate from a deep spiritual source.
But there’s a potential problem: these gifts can sometimes be twisted and distorted. They can be all-consuming. When does a calling/career turn into an idol (especially when society values success so much)? Does a calling mean career at the expense of all? The well-known question Jesus asks in the Gospel of Matthew comes to mind in a culture that values career success: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”
In the modern era that may come down to exploring some important questions: how do you keep your life in balance? What if your career or your partner’s career is so important that it comes before children? Or can you even realistically have both a creative career and children?
The journey from indie band queen to author
Carson’s novel possesses a sad wisdom of middle age regret over being childless and sacrificing too much to explore an artistic career. It also is an examination of a dichotomy that some women may feel that they must either pick an artistic career or have a family.
These questions are at the center of a thoughtful novel “The Original 1982” by Lori Carson. It’s the first book by the singer of the indie superband The Golden Palominos. Drummer Anton Fier put together a shifting ensemble of musicians under the banner of the name The Golden Palominos in the 1980s and 1990s. Michael Stipe, John Lydon, Syd Straw, Richard Thompson, Matthew Sweet and Bob Mould were just some of the musicians who contributed. Carson joined in 1992.
Carson left the band in the mid 1990s and recorded several solo albums and her songs were used in films like “Stealing Beauty,” Strange Days” and “Waking The Dead.” She may have been lodged in the precarious middle ground of the artistic life: successful enough to continue her career so she didn’t quit and settle down. But also not ultra-successful that it provided the opportunity to comfortably settle down and have the best of both worlds. She achieved a fair amount of success for a certain period of time. And she remained childless.
At mid-life being childless seems to have made Carson reflective. This comes out in “The Original 1982,” which rings so true that much of it must be autobiographical.
The novel goes back to a decision the central character (Carson’s alter ego named Lisa), a musician, made when she was 20: to not have a child after becoming pregnant. The father was a famous Latino musician who encouraged her to have an abortion. He didn’t want children, he had difficulty being faithful to any one woman, and his career was taking off. So she relented and didn’t have the child.
Imagining taking another path
Lori Carson released several solo albums after leaving the indie band The Golden Palominos. She now is an author and her first novel is a poignant look at how sometimes one decision can shape our destiny and who we are.
In the book Lisa imagines what would have happened if she decided to have the child instead. The book avoids a gimmicky side-by-side comparison of Lisa’s life with or without the abortion. Instead Lisa occasionally makes an aside to what really happened as it compares to the fictional rewrite of her past. It must have been therapeutic for Carson to write about a vicarious pregnancy and raising a child that she didn’t get to do in real life. Although she doesn’t always make the best choices and it isn’t economically or emotionally easy, the Lisa with child narrative seems a reassurance to the childless Lisa that she would have been able to properly raise the child if wanted to.
In her alternate history storyline, Lisa still lives a semi-bohemian life. She still has problems with finding the right relationship. She has many of the same foibles as the childless Lisa. But what makes this book so interesting is the mid-life laced sense of regret that arises at points throughout the book and particularly in the ending section. With or without a child, Lisa’s life is a kind of prolonged dorm party. She travels, fools around with guys, hangs around in New York City like it’s a playground — she lives kind of a hipster version of HBO’s “Girls” or “Sex and the City.”
But in her fictionalized rewriting of her life, having a child fills Lisa with a nurturing nature, a sense of responsibility, and a purpose that she doesn’t have in the author’s real life. She’s sweet and creative, but also sometimes immature and narcissistic. Much of her basic nature remains the same in both narratives. But while reading we realize that raising a child makes Lisa a better person. She is less self-centered. In this storyline she sacrifices career for child, but it seems more satisfying to her than the storyline of sacrificing children for career.
This isn’t a romanticized daydream of having a child. The author realistically depicts the problems and challenges raising a daughter. But there seems to be more of an emotional challenge in the counter-narrative of not having children. In that scenario, there’s a crisis of meaning when the illusions of ongoing success and an extended bohemian lifestyle stop.
Lori Carson was in the hip indie band Golden Palominos during one of the band’s most successful phases. Some of Carson’s musical experiences are contained in the character Lisa’s story in Carson’s novel “The Original 1982.”
But the book is about more than the ramifications of having children or not. It’s about how a career can dominate your life. It’s not the workaholic career of an executive, but on some levels the artistic life seems just as consuming — and at the same time keeps the characters in a state of extended adolescence. The characters have interesting artistic jobs. But even limited success runs its course. The musicians and actors in the book don’t become as successful as they’d like — or their limited fame fizzles out. And in the relentless pursuit of that success a void surfaces. Despite the friendships and the joys of being an artist, something is missing. The characters who seem most grounded are the ones who decided to have children.
Challenging the illusions of the artistic life
Carson is on to something important here. One of the central components of The American Dream is a successful career. But even that mythology also requires having a home life. In the romanticized bohemian artistic lifestyle, an artistic career is often as its center. And in the extreme version of this lifestyle, there’s no room for conventional relationships or being held back by raising children. The false belief that one must be childless to be an artist is lamented by one character:
“We felt we needed to be alone to be artists,” she says. “That we had to be selfish to in order to get any work done. We thought they were little monsters who invaded our favorite restaurants and disrupted civilized conversation.”
The concluding section of this book is something I probably won’t ever forget. It would be giving away too much to reveal too many details about its setup, but the entire closing part has a sad wisdom to it. In many ways this is a book I wish I read in my 20s. It shows the artistic life with both its benefits and its shortcomings — not the glamorized version we see in entertainment magazines or TV shows. The downside is a life of too much drinking, too much detachment from secure relationships — and the pitfall of possessing a gift and a calling: that you’re never far away from having it consume you. When you’ve crossed that line then you probably aren’t doing all the things God would like you to do so — and your life is out of balance.
By midlife our lives can be fraught with two words: ‘what if.” If we had taken a different path at a critical time how would we be different? Options to change may be more limited by middle age. We think about things that are missing and what decisions created that void.
The book has a haunting line Lisa says at one point:
“I’ve made choices that can never be rectified.”
For her it means choosing the illusion of freedom of following the artistic lifestyle in an immature and all-consuming fashion. But it also makes the reader ponder the issue of abortion. The author has regrets about it — particularly because at her young age she was coerced into it by a commitment-phobic boyfriend. I don’t necessarily see this as an anti-abortion book. It’s more about seriously questioning a somewhat selfish lifestyle of following creativity and avoiding responsibility. It offers a glimpse into a void that can occur when one is consumed with career — even as interesting a job as being a musician in a cool indie band.
Here’s a clip of Lori Carson reading the prologue to her novel “The Original 1982” with its wonderful concluding sentence: “And since I’m the writer of this story, and can do whatever I want, that’s what I’ll do. Go back to that day in 1982.”
