Four-Year Writer’s Block (1994–1998)

The Four-Year Writer’s Block (1994–1998) is the prolonged creative paralysis that follows Michael Noonan’s completion of All the Way from the Top and ends his professional writing for four years. It turns the tools of his work into triggers for physical distress, while grief for Johanna remains inseparable from his longing to write again. Its brief apparent lifting on New Year’s Day 1998 collapses into panic; by March, Michael can face the desire to write, but not yet the act itself.

Beginning and concealment

After typing The End, Michael saves his final line of copy, transfers the manuscript to floppy disks, and makes backups. He raises what should have been Johanna’s champagne glass to her, says that he wishes she were there and misses her, and drinks the Taittinger. Apart from notes, grocery lists, and checks, it is the last writing he does for four years.

The silence is not known to his publisher, his editor Debra Weinstock, or his agent Harold Oblowski. Even Frank Arlen, who had urged Michael to let him be a brother for Johanna’s sake, does not know. Michael phones Frank every couple of weeks for ordinary conversation, but avoids asking for help in the elemental sense Frank had offered.

Michael admits that he lies when Frank asks whether he is working on a new book. He claims that the work is going well, while privately he cannot manage two paragraphs without an episode of intense distress: his heartbeat doubles and triples, he becomes short of breath and pants, and his eyes feel as if they might bulge from his head. He describes the sensation as being a claustrophobe in a sinking submarine. His insistence that he does not call for help makes the block both a failure of writing and a condition he actively conceals.

A life organized around avoidance

By March 1998, Michael is seldom entering his office. When he wants to play Scrabble against the computer or work on a tournament-level crossword, he uses his Powerbook at the kitchen table. He has also placed a framed, uncashed fifty-dollar check from the New England Crossword Challenge in his living room; the writing certificates that once filled his office walls had been Johanna’s phrase, Certificates of Triumph.

The avoidance is not a lack of attachment to writing. When the Word Six icon appears among the crossword programs, Michael feels sadness and longing rather than frustration or anger. Looking at it recalls the photographs of Johanna in his wallet: he thinks he would sell his immortal soul to have her back, and that day thinks he would sell it to be able to write a story again. The parallel makes creative work another object of bereavement, desired with the same intensity as the lost person.

The failed return

On the first day of 1998, clear, cold, still, and beautiful, Michael looks out the bedroom window over coffee and suddenly believes he can write again. The new year seems to mark a change, as if a rock has rolled away. He goes to his study and turns on the computer. At first his body appears calm: his heart beats normally, his forehead and neck are dry, and his hands are warm.

Opening Word Six brings the crisis back. The program’s pen-and-parchment logo appears, and Michael suddenly cannot breathe. He feels iron bands clamp around his chest, pushes away from the desk, gags, and claws at the neck of his sweatshirt. The wheels of his chair catch on a small rug Johanna found in the last year of her life; he tips backward, strikes his head, and blacks out. He believes that if he had remained upright and staring at the logo and the blank screen, he might have choked to death. The return of writing is thus interrupted not by a considered decision but by a bodily emergency.

The block’s continuing force

In March, Michael opens the Powerbook’s menu and moves the cursor past the crossword puzzles until it highlights Word Six. He does not open the program. Instead, he drags it to the trash and drops it there, bidding farewell to his old companion. The gesture turns avoidance into a deliberate, if painful, choice: desire has returned, but he knows that trying again will not make the underlying condition disappear.

Across the four years, the computer screen becomes a point where professional identity, grief, and bodily fear converge. Michael’s temporary New Year’s confidence does not resolve the block; the March scene confirms its persistence while showing that his response has shifted from panic to recognition. His longing to write survives, but so does his inability to ask for help or yet resume the work.