tall, affable workaholic I’d just married had also blown his book deadline, having been so caught up in registering voters that he’d managed to turn in only a partial manuscript. We got home from California to learn that the publisher had canceled his contract, sending word through his literary agent that Barack was now on the hook to pay back his $40,000 advance.
If he panicked, he didn’t do it in front of me. I was busy enough shifting into my new role at city hall, which entailed going to more zoning board meetings and fewer senior citizen picnics than my previous job had. Though I was no longer working corporate-lawyer hours, the city’s everyday fracas left me spent in the evenings, less interested in processing any stresses at home and more ready to pour a glass of wine, switch my brain off, and watch TV on the couch. If I’d learned anything from Barack’s obsessive involvement with Project VOTE!, anyway, it was that it wasn’t helpful for me to worry about his worries—in part because I seemed to find them more overwhelming than he ever did. Chaos agitated me, but it seemed to invigorate Barack. He was like a circus performer who liked to set plates spinning: If things got too calm, he took it as a sign that there was more to do. He was a serial over-committer, I was coming to understand, taking on new projects without much regard for limits of time and energy. He’d said yes, for example, to serving on the boards of a couple of nonprofits while also saying yes to a part-time teaching job at the University of Chicago for the coming spring semester while also planning to work full-time at the law firm.
And then there was the book. Barack’s agent felt sure she could resell the idea to a different publisher, though he’d have to get a draft finished soon. With his teaching gig yet to begin and having obtained the blessing of the law firm that had waited a year already for him to start full-time, he came up with a solution that seemed to suit him perfectly: He’d write the book in isolation, removing his everyday distractions by renting a little cabin somewhere and drilling down hard on the work. It was the equivalent of pulling a frantic all-nighter to get a paper done in college, only Barack was estimating it would take him roughly a couple of months to get the book finished. He relayed all of this to me one night at home about six weeks after our wedding, before delicately dropping a final bit of information: His mother had found him the perfect cabin. In fact, she’d already rented it for him. It was cheap, quiet, and on the beach. In Sanur. Which was on the Indonesian island of Bali, some nine thousand miles away from me.
* * *
It sounds a little like a bad joke, doesn’t it? What happens when a solitude-loving individualist marries an outgoing family woman who does not love solitude one bit?
The answer, I’m guessing, is probably the best and most sustaining answer to nearly every question arising inside a marriage, no matter who you are or what the issue is: You find ways to adapt. If you’re in it forever, there’s really no choice.
Which is to say that at the start of 1993, Barack flew to Bali and spent about five weeks living alone with his thoughts while working on a draft of his book Dreams from My Father, filling yellow legal pads with his fastidious handwriting, distilling his ideas during languid daily walks amid the coconut palms and lapping tide. I, meanwhile, stayed home on Euclid Avenue, living upstairs from my mother as another leaden Chicago winter descended, shellacking the trees and sidewalks with ice. I kept myself busy, seeing friends and hitting workout classes in the evenings. In my regular interactions at work or around town, I’d find myself casually uttering this strange new term—“my husband.” My husband and I are hoping to buy a home. My husband is a writer finishing a book. It was foreign and delightful and conjured memories of a man who simply wasn’t there. I missed Barack terribly, but I rationalized our situation as I could, understanding that even if we were newlyweds, this interlude was probably for the best.
He had taken the chaos of his unfinished book and shipped himself out to do battle with it.