Is there hope for me yet?

I've been reading A Three Dog Life, by Abigail Thomas. It's a personal memoir about Thomas' life in the years after her husband was hit by a car and suffered irreversible brain damage. I started reading and in the beginning thought, "I won't be able to relate to anything in this book." For one thing, she didn't write enough about the dogs, IMO. However, it is the kind of book I could see myself writing. A memoir/personal experience type of book surrounding a particular subject.

Reading it reminded me once again of how envious I was when I read about the publication of Julie and Julia ( http://tinyurl.com/3dt67u ), in which the author, Julie Powell, sets out to cook all of the recipes in Julia Childs' famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In a year. In a kitchen even crappier than mine. At the time I was heavily into cooking as a hobby, learning new things and experimenting on an almost daily basis. I once spent a whole weekend and several dozen eggs making (and ruining) souffles. I had discovered foodie writers like MFK Fisher, Ruth Reichl, Michael Lee West, and Laurie Colwin (I liked Colwin best because she seemed so "ordinary"). As I spent time goofing around in the kitchen with different things, I even began drafts of a handful of essays, with the idea of coming up with a collection of 30 or so to try and sell as articles or publish as a book.

But something was missing. I couldn't come up with a good "hook." In addition to a killer hook, J&J had a number of other themes running through it, too, such as Powell's attempt to get pregnant, her job as a temp at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks, her online blog about the cooking project, and frequent dramas involving her friends. Plus, the whole thing was hysterically funny. Without some other thread of readerly interest running through it, I couldn't imagine that anyone would want to read about my souffle experiment or anything else I had written. And I certainly had nothing notable going on in MY life.

I also did too much research. The more I researched, the more discouraged I became about my potential for getting anywhere without some sort of formal culinary training or restaurant experience or connection to someone in the publishing world. Even Julie Powell had a kind of "connection," her husband is the editor of a national magazine (Abigail Thomas, I just discovered, is the daughter of Lewis Thomas, a science writer whose works I've read and enjoyed immensely).

Eventually my enthusiasm for my idea waned, and I drifted off onto something else, some other pastime. I still cook from time to time, but nothing like I did during that year. I guess my problem is that I don't really have any one subject that I'm passionate about or an expert on, nothing that has held my interest over the long haul. I flit from hobby to hobby and I usually bail out at the point when I could actually get good, or progress beyond the novice stage.

Anyway, last night, as I was finishing A Three Dog Life--it's short, a small book of less than 200 pages, I came to the part that I SWEAR was written just for me. Thomas wrote: "I didn't start writing until I was forty-seven. I had always wanted to write but thought you needed a degree, or membership in a club nobody had asked me to join. I thought God had to touch you on the forehead, I thought you needed to have something specific to say, something imortant, and I thought you needed all that laid out from the git-go. It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your shoulder. You idiot, I would say to myself after half a page. What makes you think you can write, and then I'd crumple it up and aim for the wastebasket....that's the voice I need to banish every morning."

If I can keep that in mind, maybe there is hope for me yet.