Writing a column for The Boston Globe is both a privilege and a pleasure. It’s the realization of a dream that began as a high school and college kid, reading David Broder, William Safire, Mary McGrory, George Will (still!), and the duo of Jack Germond and Jules Witcover. And the Trump administration certainly offers a panoramic tableau for columnizing. One never need ask, hmm, what’s happening this week that might make for an interesting topic?
So it may seem strange that I’m taking a break at this point in our national narrative. But there’s something else I’ve always longed to do: write novels. I’ve had a little belated luck on that front and I’m now at a point where I want to devote more time to that pursuit.
As far as careers go, I only ever had a few things in mind. As a kid, I never dreamed of being an astronaut or an Air Force pilot. I did briefly think it would be glorious to be a hydroplane racer, a flight-of-fancy born of watching those boats roar around Coeur d’Alene Lake, Idaho. That notion lost its charm just before my 10th birthday, when the local favorite, Miss Eagle Electric, crashed on the Detroit River, causing injuries that claimed the life of its driver, Colonel Warner Gardner.
My family regularly went hiking, camping, and huckleberry-picking in the national parks of the west, and a love of the outdoors made me think it would be fun to be a forest ranger. Then we moved back east, and that notion faded after a summer of hauling pulpwood out of the blackfly-infested Maine woods.
That’s about the time my two enduring aspirations took hold. I wanted to be a newspaper columnist. And I wanted to write novels.
I loved reading my favorite columnists because they explained the political strategies, schemes, and poses at play in politics. But in my teens, I also spent hours lost in the fictional worlds that writers created. Sometime in high school I stumbled upon “Cakes and Ale,” by W. Somerset Maugham, the British author who wrote from the late Victorian age to the early 1960s. I became a huge fan of his short stories and novels because of his insight into human nature, delivered with a closeted gay man’s observational distance and dry wit. At about the same time, I read Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men” and discovered the transporting power fiction can have. Reading it as a teenager, you didn’t just understand why Jack Burden loved Anne Stanton. You loved her yourself.
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In my early 20s, Edith Wharton’s novels, particularly “The Age of Innocence,” “The House of Mirth,” and “The Reef,” transfixed me with their character-testing dilemmas, while “Roman Fever” delighted with the artistry of a story inimitably resolved in a three-word rejoinder: “I had Barbara.”
During my decades as a political journalist, I’ve usually been working away in catch-as-catch-can fashion on a novel. In time-consuming campaign years, I’d usually leave that effort in limbo, and returning to read it over later, sometimes abandon it in favor of a different idea. It’s been a long journey, filled with enough rejection letters to wallpaper the living room. Part of that traces to a mistake I made, one that stems either from vanity or modesty. I’ve argued it both ways with myself — and come down on both sides. That tale is too long to get into here, but I learned a belated lesson about writing fiction that I’d be happy to share if you email me.
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Anyway, in 2023, I finally got a novel published. Readers have liked “Just East of Nowhere” enough to ask if I’m writing another, and honestly, the fiction-writing bug now has me inescapably in its grasp. I have a solid draft of another novel, tentatively titled “You’re the Swimmer.” The manuscript is now at the point where it needs months of steady work, not just some scattered time on weekends.
So I’m going on book leave for the rest of the year, in the hope that I can write and wrestle this story into shape. For those readers, Democrats and Republicans, with whom I have a regular correspondence, don’t be (completely) deterred by my auto-reply. I’ll be checking my email periodically, though it may take me longer than usual to respond.
Thank you all so much for reading my column. I’ll be back next year. I hope you will, too.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.
