Today I left the job at which I’ve worked for the last two years, one of the more dysfunctional I’ve held besides the barbecue place boasting a back-of-house fight club, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended the last few weeks at the up-to-present job haven’t been pleasant, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended it was so for any reason besides the prospect of my freedom on the horizon, though of course I’d be lying if I pretended I wasn’t writing this in the afterglow of Chinese mai tais at my going-away dinner—

When I first started my job I gathered some quotes from various artists on the jobs they took on to support themselves early in their careers. For whatever reason, I had a harder time finding those same artists discussing the ecstatic moment of quitting their jobs.

One who stands out is Helen DeWitt. After seven years of beginning and abandoning novels, DeWitt left her job as a legal secretary (and employee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and a laundromat, and…) to devote herself to finishing just one book. “I thought, I just I have to quit until my money runs out… I’m going just to sit down and do nothing but work on this book, and I’m going to finish it in a month. Then I will have a finished book, and, see, it doesn’t matter what happens then.” And of course what happened then was the publication of The Last Samurai, her fiftieth manuscript, followed by two more books with New Directions and later this year her fourth novel, Your Name Here with Ilya Gridneff, about to see release through perennial favorites Dalkey Archive.

One of my favorite writers’ quitting stories belongs to Don DeLillo. According to John Duvall in his Don Delillo’s Underworld: A Reader,

In 1959, DeLillo took a position as a copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather, an advertising agency. This work experience finds expression in Underworld‘s portrayal of Madison Avenue office culture in Chapter 2 (the “December 19, 1961” fragment) of Part 5, where we see Charles Wainwright’s soul-killing work of constructing aesthetically pleasing misrepresentations of orange juice. While working for Ogilvy and Mather, DeLillo began to write fiction. His first published story, “The River Jordan,” appeared in Epoch in 1960. By 1964, DeLillo had his fill of corporate American and quit his job to become a freelance writer. Recalling this time, DeLillo says, “I did all sorts of assignments. One day I would be writing about pseudo-colonial furniture, the next day about computers.” …Such assignments supplied barely enough income to pay the rent on a studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York while he continued to publish the occasional short story in various literary magazines. As a struggling young writer, DeLillo lived a spartan existence, earning only around $2000 a year. In 1966 he began work on what would become his first novel, Americana… With the publication of this novel, DeLillo leaves behind his freelancing to devote himself to his fiction.

But DeLillo himself tells the story to The New York Times more succinctly: “I quit my job just to quit. I didn’t quit my job to write fiction. I just didn’t want to work anymore.”

That other steely stalwart of pop postmodernism, Paul Auster, collected in True Tales of American Life narratives submitted to NPR’s National Story Project. Among these: “Homeless in Prescott, Arizona” — surely a terrifying prospect disregarding even the opening adjective. Like DeWitt, the narrator of “Homeless” leaves her job as a legal secretary, sells her belongings and moves to Prescott to live in a tent while she takes classes at the local community college, goes to the library to access the internet and enjoys amateur theatrical productions “to further satisfy my cultural needs.”

“I also love reading all the books I want to but have never had enough time for,” our narrator declares. “I also have time to do absolutely nothing.”

Another famous office worker who quit his job to focus on literary pursuits: Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Nuwayrī first “mounted the stallion of reading” in 1316 when he left his post as a financial clerk under Sultan al-Nasir of the Bahri Mamluk dynasty, where “in this respect I was as brilliant as a fire on a hilltop.” But growing weary of accounts, al-Nuwayri quit to focus on composing his Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, or The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition, his 9,000pp., 33-volume encyclopedia of everything in existence. “When the steed became obedient to me,” he wrote, “I chose to abstract from my reading a book that would keep me company.”

Sandra Newman goes so far as to claim “I never did make a living until I gave up trying and just wrote books.”

In The Tao of Muhammad Ali, writer and former video store employee Davis Miller recalls a conversation with the boxer:

“I’ve wanted to write for years. Like you, when you threw your gold medal off the bridge, I threw my beeper in the river and quit my job so I could write.”

“I never did that,” he says.

“Did what?” I ask.

“Never threw my medal off no bridge. Just lost it, that’s all.”

“You serious?”

“Maannn, that’s a story I made up. I know what it takes to sell a story.”

For The Paris Review‘s “A Week in Culture,” Tim Small describes Day One of unemployment after leaving his post at VICE Italy: “Having just quit my job (well, not just quit, but still) to dedicate myself to ‘my own projects,’ I have the great luxury of being able to sleep until ten every morning. It’s disgraceful. I eat bread and butter and drink a cup of tea while I watch last night’s NBA highlights. I am in love with Kyrie Irving.”

And in the same series, Jeopardy! winner Tom Nissley declares

I am, in theory, living the dream: I made a lot of money on a game show and quit my job to write. In December, I won eight times on Jeopardy! and suddenly found myself the third-leading money winner in the history of the show (aside from tournaments and John Henry–style man-versus-machine battles). I left my job (as an editor on the Amazon.com Books store) in March, and ever since I’ve been trying to sort out how to get all the things done for which there still aren’t enough hours in the day: reading, working on a novel every day instead of once a week, blogging, umpiring Little League, writing another book that the world might want more than a weird novel about silent movies, saying hi to my wife more than I used to, and, crucially, preparing for the next Jeopardy! Tournament of Champions, which hasn’t been announced yet and which I haven’t yet been invited to, though it seems like a safe bet.

In the early pandemic days the restaurant at which I had been (miserably) working closed indefinitely, and with my newfound free time I told myself I’d have no excuse but to record and release music all day. Naturally, I completed one album and became consumed by a years-spanning depressive episode.

So there Junot Díaz was on summer break from Rutgers with a gig at a steel mill, “week after week, fighting it out, lifting my weights, writing my little half-romantic letters where I was too afraid to really say what I was thinking and feeling, and the loot was stacking up and up.”

And then it was over: last fucking day and no one at the mill said goodbye or baked me a cake; I doubt they even knew I wasn’t coming back or cared. I walked out of there like I’d survived something serious. My best friend picked me up in the parking lot and that night we had a little victory tour. I’d survived the mill, and would be back at Rutgers in a week.

(I can’t totally relate since, again, mai tais on my former employer’s account. Hell of a victory tour!)

As with my last work-related ramble, there’s no thesis here, just some scattered thoughts on working and what it means, particularly when one wishes to focus on just about anything else. Here’s one final quote from my current read, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Uncollected Essays:

I have always worked, but I never felt I was working hard enough. Fitfulness of ambition seemed to accompany the general anxiety, and yet to do something was an almost puritanical pressure, bearing down like the pain of a boil. This sounds agreeable enough, even with the image of the “boil,’ but it was not pleasant and soothing in the least. Creative and intellectual work is difficult, hard, and disturbing in the deepest way. You are up against the limits of yourself, your mind, your knowledge, your talent, your courage, your fineness, your energy.”