Claire's Reviews > A Respectable Occupation

A Respectable Occupation is a short nonfiction narrative about becoming a writer and the necessity of reading. I came across this book in a photo on author Kerri ní Dochartaigh's Substack g l i m m e r s where she talks about her books of the year for 2023. She is the q u e e n of referencing reading creative nonfiction by writers. Her 2nd memoir Cacophony of Bone is full of literary references to enticing contemporary works of narrative nonfiction.

Julia Kerninon had a unique upbringing in many ways, not least because she lived in multiple countries, Canada, England, France but also it is as if she were raised to become a writer, more of an expectation than a desire, so she pursues it in the same way many others might pursue a career that has been held in high esteem by their parents. Only writing isn't like law, medicine or business.

I had an incredibly heavy electric typewriter my mother had lent me, and she had glued little labels with lowercase letters onto the keys because I found capitals confusing, and I wrote lots of stories about talking animals with my friend Pete.

She recalls a kind of bohemian childhood and the first six years where she was an only child and how her world tilted when they became 4 not 3.

An identical monument of books had saved her as well, thirty years earlier, from a hopeless childhood, and so she spread her secret before me, she explained what she loved most in the world, in a gesture that was also a potlatch, an immeasurably generous offering, which I might be expected to return one day with an even greater gift.

Her mother had been born in a small fishing village, the eldest of four, the only girl, she had learned Russian at ten in boarding school and read everything she could lay her hands on.

If I lost a manuscript and went crazy with panic, she would just shrug with no compassion at all and explain that in any case I would have to throw away or lose lots of books before writing a single good one. The best thing that can happen to you is a house fire.

At sixteen she had found a community of 'old poets' who met in an old biscuit factory in her hometown, a second education, after a house full of books.
At twenty when she was reading and taking too much notice of Gertrude Stein's ill-conceived advice: If you don't work hard when you are twenty, no one will love you when you are thirty, she confronted her father and told him she wanted to take a gap year from her university studies.

I thought that to be a writer, I had to train like an athlete, like a dancer, until it didn't hurt anymore, until I didn't ask myself any more questions. I wanted to possess that skill.

She takes herself off to Budapest for a year. Her life becomes a cycle of working hard, playing hard, then taking herself off somewhere for a year or six months to write. She becomes a waitress in the summers, so she can write throughout the winter. She decides that to be poor is acceptable if she can be free instead and that she would learn to live alone, to be alone, to work alone, during those productive times of her life.

Though she figures out how to live like this herself, she attributes to advice given to her by a much loved man:

the main thing is to have free time - you'll obviously work out how to earn a crust somehow - but free time is something you'll always have to scavenge, he told me earnestly.

It's a wonderful little book, a digression of sorts, a reminder that the writing life comes in many shapes and forms, that the sharing of the various experiences can also provide inspiration to those who are on that path and that the pursuit of the occupation can also be a subject that people like reading about.

I write books because it's good discipline, because I like sentences and I like putting things in order in a Word document. I like counting the words every night and I like finishing what I start.

A short introduction by Lauren Elkin is equally compelling, another writer whose book Art Monsters : Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art was in the photograph in Kerri Ni Dochartigh's end of year essay.
I will leave you with one final quote from Juia Kerninon, one that applies as equally to reading as it does to writing.

I've been striding through literature like a field, where my footsteps flatten the grass for a moment, just long enough to see the path I've taken and the immensity of what is yet to be discovered.