Anne LeClaire

You're a writer. You enter a bookstore, stare at the shelves.

“Don't compare,” a tiny voice advises.

Too late. You're already lost.

A colleague's novels are stacked in their own flashy display unit. Obviously her advertising budget totaled more than your last advance. And what's this? That novelist has another book out. Does he produce a novel every three weeks now or what?

You reach for a book, read the cover blurb. Clearly the author is brilliant. Magnificent. You pick up another book, study the jacket photo. Lord, lordy. What is she, in middle school? Maybe.

You're a writer. You go to the bookstore. You look at the books. You might as well go down to the morgue and dance with the bones.

Sooner or later all writers confront the beast, the unholy ghost named Envy who dwells in the soul. No one escapes. Not even writers like Buddy Nordan.

Buddy is the only living author I know who has an entire week named for him. For a fact. February 7-14 is “National Lewis Nordan Appreciation Week.” Reviews of his books are so outrageously enthusiastic you might think his mother wrote them. Critics say things like “greatness in our midst,” “storytelling genius,” and “the best prose writer in the United States.” So one might imagine that Buddy wouldn't have to contend with envy.

One spring, during a writing residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Buddy and I went over to Sweet Briar College to hear Lee Smith give a reading from “News of the Spirit,” her collection of short stories.

Lee is a funny, generous-hearted and wildly talented writer and all Southern charm. When she is on the stage, she owns the audience. For more than an hour, in the cradle of the Blue Ridge Mountains during a theatrical thunderstorm, Buddy and I and several hundred fans sat in an overheated room and, completely enthralled, gave ourselves over to the magic of Lee.

Later, on the way back to the residence hall and still high from the evening, I turned to Buddy. “Listening to Lee just makes me want to run to my studio and write,” I said.

Buddy gave me this hangdog look. “It makes me want to shoot myself,” he drawled.

Well, I thought, if Mr. National Appreciation Week, Mr. Storytelling Genius himself can be silenced by envy, I might as well pack up the tents and go home.

That is what envy does. It silences us. And at one time or another we all wrestle with it. We compare ourselves to another and come up short. Our admiration is mutated into envy.

Several years ago, a good friend's book was surfacing on The New York Times bestseller list and she appeared on “The Today Show” and “Oprah.” “I'm so happy for you,” I said each time Jackie phoned with the latest news: the ascent on the list to Number One, the movie sale, the terms for her new two-book contract, the Oprah Book Club Selection.

“Doesn't it make you a little envious?” another friend asked.

“No. Not at all,” I said. This was my friend, after all. Surely you aren't jealous of a friend's great good fortune. Surely you celebrate rather than covet.

Yet these calls corresponded with a personal dry spell and after each conversation I felt a little bit more like a failure. I wanted to take up residence in a closet and eat shoes.

“I'm so happy for you,” I'd say. But secretly the Maurice Sendak creature that was rooming in my liver wasn't so happy. Secretly this fanged and furry critter hoped my friend would get fat.

It took nearly four months of battle with the corrosive emotion named Envy before I could release it enough to genuinely rejoice for my friend.

That summer I asked her if she was ever envious of other writers.

“Only constantly,” she said. “When I'm writing a book and go into a bookstore and look at all the work, I am sick with grief and envy. And I can't read any work – even of writers I don't admire – if it is remotely graceful. When I am writing I can only read botany.”

Hmmmmmm.

“And,” she continued, “I'm ill with envy when another writer says, ‘I'm having such a good time at it. It's like I'm taking dictation. My characters just tell me what to write.’ Meanwhile I'm slugging through the dirt and my characters are eating chips and getting acne and not helping me out at all.”

That's when I felt safe enough to confess that maybe I'd felt the teeniest bit jealous when her book came out. Just the teeniest bit, you understand. I didn't mention anything about how I'd hoped she'd put on a pound. Or thirty.

In our culture, we're trained to feel ashamed of emotions like jealousy and envy, to disown them.

The Tibetan Buddhist nun Pema Chodron has a different take on it. She teaches that emotions like envy need to be regarded as wisdom in disguise.

If we are willing to sit with it, she says, to begin the queasy business of going deep inside, there is much we can learn.

Easier said than sat. Who wants to sit quietly while a beast chaws at your liver? Better to run. Better to deny.

But, instruct the Buddhists, by becoming quiet, we grow to understand that envy is the lodestone that brings us back to self-knowledge. After a while we grasp this truth: When we experience envy, it means we've undergone a lapse of faith in our own work, our own lives. We've gotten off track. We've gotten caught up in the poisonous game of comparing. We've come to the false belief that there is only so much success to go around. We've given in to fear.

Gradually, we come to comprehend that the experience of envy and the belief in one's self cannot exist in the same space any more than love and fear can, and this knowledge pulls us out of the pit. We go on. And we find that because we can't inoculate ourselves for life, envy periodically surfaces like a virus that sleeps inside.

Over the years, as we sit with our beasts, we learn to foster compassion for ourselves when they assault. We learn to sustain ourselves. We grab on to our lifeline, return to the writing, which nurtures.

We tutor ourselves to hold firm to our belief in our own path.

This is good practice. In writing and in life.