This is a revised and updated article based on one from 2002 when I first read “Learning to Drive: A Year of Unexpected Lessons” by Katha Pollitt, published in The New Yorker magazine. I hope you’ll read the essay and go on to read my discussion of it, which includes an excerpt of review of the film (now available streaming) based on the essay.  Next, enjoy a writing idea inspired by Katha Pollitt’s strategy.

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“Learning to Drive” is an engrossing and humble piece of writing from a leftist writer of renown, who refused to shy away from using very personal material. Her essay narrates her driving lessons with an instructor named Ben, a gifted teacher from Manila.  As he offers her advice on why she is having trouble driving well, she takes these lessons to heart and in so doing exposes her own heart. When Ben says she does not observe well, she lists a string of important behaviors she had failed to observe: that her mother was a secret drinker, for instance, and that her live-in lover was a philanderer for many years showing signs she somehow overlooked.

As the learns to drive, she grows in her conviction to get her license, get in her car, listen to the rumble of the engine turning over (the anger she feels?) and then drive well–a metaphor for thinking on her own again and reuniting with her self-determination.  She drives with Ben and allows herself to examine the anger she feels toward her lover who said he left because she was not enough, sexually, politically, and otherwise. She realizes that he was having enough sex with at least two other lovers to believe he didn’t have to bring much to her bed and she wonders why it is she who is supposed to have brought more to the relationship.

The author tells us she sometimes starts to meditate on rain blurred street lights and think about how romantic and sad they look and how this notion of romance couldn’t have existed before electricity and so even though it seems old-fashioned it is modern. She realizes this thought itself is one her ex-lover would have, and she wonders if she will ever get her mind back wholly to herself.  Even though she sometimes leaves her hands in her lap at intersections and isn’t ready with them on the wheel when the light turns, she is learning to drive and, as she does, purges herself of a failed and angering romance.

In fact, even as she decries the faith she put in her ex-lover, she is putting her faith in another man, her instructor. She believes in Ben, her third driving teacher; he will be there for her even after she takes the driving test and he will help her learn to drive the freeways.

I find it interesting that within the cocoon of a good learning situation, where the author can build trust and comfort, comes embodied learning about how to do what she needs to do to make a clear passage to new stages in her life.  It is also interesting that this is her third attempt to learn to drive, but she won’t strike out because she is highly motivated.  Learning to drive will raise her esteem in her daughter’s eyes and in her own eyes now that she is unpartnered and coming to terms with her loss and her ex-lover’s deceit.

Here is a list from the essay of what Katha Pollitt learns for making her life passage as she learns to drive:

“Observation, Kahta, observation! This is your weakness,” Ben exclaims and the author writes, “This truth hangs in the air like mystical advice from a sage in a martial-arts movie,” going on to recount the list of negatives she failed to observe her whole life.

In describing Ben as the perfect man in her life right now, Pollitt writes, “…his use of the double-brake is protective without being infantilizing, his corrections are firm but never condescending or judgmental, he spares my feelings but tells the truth if asked.”

“He’s a big improvement on my former lover,” she realizes drawing a lesson from her own description of Ben in comparison to the former lover.  The ex-lover had, she writes, “told a mutual friend that he was leaving me because I didn’t have a driver’s license, spent too much time on e-mail, and had failed in seven years to read Anton Pannekoek’s ‘Workers’ Councils’ and other classics of the ultra-left.”

“Ben would never leave me because I didn’t have a driver’s license,” Pollitt posits, “Quite the reverse.”

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It seems that by using our engagement in practical life situations as the basis for our writing, we may be able to learn more quickly than by merely “working on ourselves” without the benefit of writing about the events in our lives.

The essay became the basis for the film “Learning to Drive,” starring Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson. You can read about it in Deep Focus.  The reviewer, Michael Sragow, reminds us at the end of his review that:

It used to be a reviewer’s cliché to say “the book was better.” In our supposedly more sophisticated age, it’s now considered de rigueur to “take a film on its own terms.” But the only upside to Coixet’s movie is that it captures just enough of Pollitt’s crisp material to make you want to read not just the title essay but all the mini-memoirs collected in Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories. The downside is that the movie pales in comparison.

Well, those are words that should inspire some good writing! And more inspiring reading from Katha Pollitt’s collection, including “Webstalker,” “In the Study Group,” and “Sisterhood.”

Your Turn

See if you can brainstorm a list of things you are currently learning to do.  Then brainstorm problems you have that perhaps have no clear-cut solution or have solutions you haven’t been able to put into motion yet.  Pair one of the problems with one of the things you are learning to do.  Let the process of what you are learning to do become a subject that you will take on for an “outer story” in your writing.

Write a narrative about learning this new process. Be detailed. Let the details call up associations to your “problem” and see how this leads you to a way of being that helps you through the difficulty.

If you don’t think you are learning anything new, go out and sign up to learn something new—a new language, a new way to garden, scuba diving, etc.  Or, force yourself to visit somewhere near your home that you haven’t visited, and write about that journey while also letting the new sights, sounds, difficulties and easy patches conjure up elements of the problem you are working on.

Writing is a tool for promoting self-growth.  What we do in the outer world helps us contemplate our inner world if we are watchful in the way that writing asks us to be.