The other day, I watched a little gem of a movie, Starting Out in the Evening, that won numerous film festival awards and critical praise.  It stars Frank Langella in a career-defining performance, as an aging, ailing literary author named Leonard Schiller, long past his prime, who is struggling to finish his last novel before he dies.  Since he's already been working on the thing for ten years, the odds are against him.

Also against him are the changing times.  In one painful scene that had me--a fellow wordsmith--squirming, Schiller approaches an editor he knows at a New York literary event.  After first hearing, belatedly, that the editor has changed houses, Schiller says, "I'm just putting the finishing touches on my latest book.  I'd be happy to send it over to you."

And the editor tells him something to the effect that, "Look, I don't wanna lie to you.  The business has changed.  The market for literary fiction is all but dead.  It's all gone Hollywood now.  All anybody cares about anymore are celebrity biographies and self-help books."

It's not just the book business that has changed for Schiller, it's the whole world.  He is a courtly, old-world gentleman of quiet habits and sophisticated (but not pretentious) tastes.  His four landmark books once set the literary world on fire and apparently, sold enough copies to enable him to live in a book-lined upper-West Side apartment.  But now, they are out of print.  An entire generation of readers has not even heard of them.  Publishers he once worked with have now died out or moved on to putting out diet books.

Enter Heather Wolfe, a bright and beautiful young graduate student who wants to write her master's thesis on Schiller's work; wants, in fact, to reintroduce him to a new generation of readers.

Schiller doesn't know what to make of this, or of her.  He is rather overwhelmed by her youthful energy, her relentless pursuit of his cooperation, her feminist independence, her in-your-face sexuality, and by her disarming habit of asking probing questions in a fearless manner even when he makes it clear he finds them rude and disrespectful.

Though there are other subplots involving Schiller's daughter and Wolfe's ambitions, this movie shines in the intimate moments when Heather challenges Schiller to explain himself and his work.  She shakes him up, and ultimately, causes him to re-examine what it is that would cause an author to write on a book for a decade that he can never finish.  And in so doing, her influence does finally give Schiller the courage to simply start over, not just with the book, but with his life--even though he may not have time to finish either one.

There was a great deal about the conversations between Schiller and his young companion that I found thought-provoking, even poignant and beautiful.  But one remark stood out in my mind.

After pointing out that his books were, indeed, out of print, that most new readers had never heard of him, and that he'd already been rejected by publishers he'd approached, Heather asked, "What is it, after all this, that keeps you going?  How is it that you can keep writing, day after day?"

He could have answered any number of ways.  Could have accused her of being disrespectful and heedless of the accomplishments he'd had.  Could have been defensive or even mean-spirited in his response. 

Instead, after a moment's thought, he said, "I suppose it's the madness of the art."

There is, indeed, a certain madness in pursuing such a heartbreaking profession.  It takes most authors years and numerous rejections to finally break into New York publishing, and every single book is a roll of the dice at the craps table.  (Which is one reason I've never had any interest in gambling.  My whole life is a gamble; nothing entertaining about THAT.)

Things can happen to shipwreck a writer's career that have nothing to do with the book business.  Many of us can remember newscasters, in the days following 9/11, mentioning a nameless author who'd just put the finishing touches on a novel--that morning--about terrorists flying planes into the Twin Towers.

I knew right then the book was doomed, because the same thing had happened to me.  I was 400 pages into a manuscript about right-wing extremists considering themselves to be at war with the federal government and attempting to blow up a building to prove it, when Oklahoma City happened.  I'd been working on that book every day for almost two years, and when I sent it in to my then-publisher a few weeks later, they rejected it, saying, "We don't want people to think we're trying to take advantage of the bombing."

It happened again several years later.  I'd spent three years working on a book with a retired CIA agent.  It was a thriller involving Middle Eastern terrorists who'd smuggled something we described as a "dirty bomb" across the Texas/Mexico border in order to kill the president, who was a former governor of Texas.  We'd invented a secret counter-terrorism group from all the alphabet agencies, known only to the National Security Director and the president, to stop the terrorists.

This was 1999. 

New York publishers told us that the plot was "too far-fetched," and my own literary agent at the time, said, "Nobody cares about what happens down on the border anymore."

And so it goes.

It does, indeed, take a certain madness to carry on in the face of such frustrations, and many authors--as any student of literature can tell you--do go mad from it.  Alcoholism and mental illness and suicide run rampant through the literary community.

(I like to say that, given a choice between alcoholism and madness, I chose madness, because booze was just too fattening.)

But a few years ago, I set aside my career as a thriller-writer.  Part of it was the frustrations such as the ones described.   My last book was a true-crime--that way, the events had already happened.  I couldn't be punished for being, as it were, a prophet.

But mostly, what happened to me was war.

It wasn't just that I knew this war, and the reasons given for waging it, were bogus.  It was, as my readers know, because my own family was going to be so intimately affected by it.

The stress of sending my own child, and several nephews, off to risk their lives to fight in a war I could not support did lead, I think, to at least a touch of madness--an obsession to end that war before any other sons or daughters could die in it.

I turned all my talents and gifts and experience into fighting against this war, submitting op-eds and magazine articles and even a book proposal to my agent, called Ghost War, about the agonies of sending a child off to a war you don't believe in.

He said it was some of the most powerful writing I had ever done but, "There's just not a market for it."

Apparently, he was right--as witnessed by waning interest in the war, my mounting op-ed rejection pile, and dwindling news coverage.

But I kept writing--never so arrogant as to think that my words made any difference in the greater scheme of things--but hoping that they would add to the critical mass that was forming of voices raised in protest and that, eventually, SOMEONE would hear.

Most every day, I threaten to quit.  I make no money for this.  The paperback version of my last book, Faces of Evil, was just released in January of this year, but there isn't another one at the publisher's in-line behind it.  I haven't been working on another one.

I thought, for several years, that I might do a memoir.  A collection, for one thing, of newspaper columns I wrote for the local paper for sixteen years, about raising kids in the country--but also the story of how a city girl wound up married to a cowboy, living a hundred miles from a mall--horses, cows, and all of it--and then turned to writing suspense thrillers, of all things. 

Kinda unique, I thought.

And, like Schiller, I started several versions of my story, but never managed to turn out more than a couple of chapters before setting it aside to collect dust while I fed the obsession with ending this miserable godforsaken endless war.  For five years, it's dragged on, and we've had a Mills family member over there all five of 'em.  My son and one nephew not only deployed numerous times between them, but both completed their military service and left the Marine Corps.  And yet we STILL have family in Iraq.

Household clutter has piled up.  Tasks begun are left unfinished.  Books on how to write memoirs go unread.  Instead, I buy more books on the war, and its warriors--searching somewhere, somehow, for some kind of answer to this bloody unanswered question:  WHY?

At times, I question my own sanity.  What makes me think this serves any purpose?  Who really cares?  What difference can it possibly make? 

And then I hear from other military families and active-duty servicepeople and war veterans who tell me, Keep speaking out.  We need you.

But every day I quit.

Next day or so...I go back to it.

And then yesterday, my TPM Cafe friend, "TheraP" sent me a link to a YouTube video she thought I needed to see.

It's eight minutes long. 

If you don't have eight minutes to watch this, I urge you to minimize this page and come back to it when you do have time.  If you've got the time, watch it now.

I'll wait.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46vYZFU1Dew

After I watched that video, it all came clear to me.  What drives me, I mean, against all odds, to keep fighting for the fighters, even as my own career drifts as far away as Schiller's, even as my accountant shakes his head, even as I doubt my own sanity at times.

It's not the madness of the art, after all.

It's not even my own personal madness.

It's just madness.