Is the all-encompassing quest to become a self-sustaining artist worth the sacrifices it requires of us? Will a lifetime of prioritizing art above everything really lead us to fulfillment, and not regret?

While working on my first book – a 10-year endeavor that entailed learning Russian and Chinese and traveling throughout the Post-Soviet bloc – I fervently believed so, and sacrificed accordingly. But the question started haunting me post-publication, when I realized that I could either keep writing or I could pay rent, not both. The former didn’t subsidize the latter. Opting for art, I relinquished my New Jersey apartment and hit the road. AirBnB hadn’t been invented yet, so I became nomadic, crashing at artists residencies or any place else that was free (generally on a futon, with someone else’s cat). Rootlessness had its perks – the freedom, the adventure, the frequent flyer miles – but it was grueling, too. Subsisting on foods that required neither heating nor cooling. Limiting my possessions to what could fit in an overhead bin. Washing my clothes in the sink. Never knowing where I’d be staying more than a few days in advance.

Was this enough?

By age 36, I had published three books but still had no house, no spouse, no couch, not even my own cutlery. Airport eggrolls had wrecked my digestive system. My relationships had strained from cashing so many favors. Despite working like a maniac on my writing projects, I felt increasingly irresponsible. Then the stock market crashed, triggering the 2008 global recession and parching the publishing well. Watching contract after contract vanish before my eyes drained the last of my resolve. I returned to school for teaching credentials and became a creative writing professor. However grateful I felt for a new career that provided a steady paycheck, health insurance, and a 401(k), my inner turmoil persisted.

Maybe if I had worked longer or harder or smarter somehow, I would have become a self-sustaining artist. Why did I sacrifice so completely when the odds of success are so daunting? Is art a compulsion, a spiritual calling, or a stab at immortality? Is the infinity of hours it consumes ever worth forsaking so much else? 

These questions haunted me so thoroughly that, the year I turned 40 (in 2014), I started asking other women about their relationships with their art. Not just the triumphs, but the jealousies, the disappointments, the sorrows, the regrets. Was art enough for them?

My first stop was southern India, where I spent a month at the village of the classical Indian dance troupe Nrityagram, just outside Bangalore. These women danced from sunrise to sundown each day. Not only did their art satiate them, they referred to it as a “spiritual orgasm.” Clearly, I was on to something here!

Next, I traveled to Rwanda, where I met a playwright who navigated ethnic tensions as she attempted to bring about reconciliation through theater in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis. She used art to heal the wounds no one could see.

In Romania, I met a painter who had spent the last six years of the dictatorship toiling away at a clothing factory a two-hour bus ride away, but never relinquished her brushes. Painting was her resistance; her canvases, her dissent.

In Iceland, I met a novelist who overcame the trauma of rape by creating a tenth-century narrator who knifed her perpetrator after enduring the same violence.

Year after year and country after country, I met women who wielded their art as a vitalizing force. Ultimately, their stories backboned the book to which I devoted the entirety of my forties: Art Above Everything: One Woman’s Global Exploration of the Joys and Torments of a Creative Life, which Beacon Press published today. 

Throughout much of the research and writing of this book, however, my haunting persisted. Was art enough for me?

Then came the fateful morning I woke up bleeding. I’d been experiencing acid reflux and other weird symptoms for weeks, but the blood was a clear sign to consult a doctor. She pressed her hands on my swollen belly and asked, “Any chance you’re pregnant?” My left ovary had indeed grown something. Only, it wasn’t a child. A massive tumor filled my abdominal cavity. It was cancerous.

Prior to undergoing the hysterectomy and chemotherapy that saved my life but ended the possibility of becoming a mother, I experienced something wildly unexpected: a rush of euphoria. Words defy the sudden gratitude I felt for having fended off the pressure to abandon my artistic ambitions and get a “Real Job” in my twenties to squirrel away nuts that, it turned out, I might not be around to eat, while planning for a retirement I may never even reach.

I felt no remorse for being childless, either, despite having agonized over that decision throughout my thirties and early forties. Instead, I realized that if my life were to end at that moment, my books as well as my hundreds of students would live beyond me. I’d created a lineage based not on blood but on creativity– a lineage all my own. After wondering for years if art could possibly be enough to constitute a meaningful life, I finally had my answer. Art had led me there.

Art Above Everything is available for purchase now.