When I was 11, I decided to survey all my friends about my worst qualities. I was very serious about it. I sat down at the phone with a pencil and piece of paper and listed 4 girls and 1 boy, all of whom I’d been tight with from since 1st grade. I had recently moved away when my parents divorced. I’d chosen to live with my dad in another state, but after several months, he changed his mind, so I went to live with my mom (who was super not into me and my bad attitude) and my little brother, and we became a miserable, rabid pack of screaming, hair-pulling, getting-the-cops-called-on-us raccoons. I needed to stay in the orbit of the only reliable family I’d truly had — those little friends of half of my life. I wanted to ensure I’d keep getting invited to birthday sleepovers and family vacations, etc., even if I didn’t go to school with them anymore. So I dialed my best friend and asked her to name some things she didn’t like about me.

“Well, for starters,” she said quickly, “you complain too much.”

“Well, YOU try living my life!” I shouted into the phone. I didn’t call anyone else.

Since then, I just quietly assume what people hate about me, thus savings me from the humiliation of having it confirmed.

I root for underdogs. It’s a thing I love about my husband, too. He roots for the Mets so hard that if they start losing, he actually stops watching. Like, he just wants them to do well, even more than he wants to be entertained.

Recently, thanks to something that popped into my Substack Notes algo, I discovered Nancy Lemann. She published a novel, Lives of the Saints in her late 20s, and was uncomfortable with the attention, and her work continued to be “quiet” and strange and defy easy description, and now she’s back with a novel at 70 and, I gather, wary of the attention. When I was in my late 20s, I suddenly and urgently NEEDED to be published and went into lifelong debt to get an MFA, thinking that I’d graduate with a full draft of my memoir about a very traumatic thing that had JUST HAPPENED 30 SECONDS AGO and that it would take publishing by storm and Joan Didion would invite me for luncheon.

Never mind that I wasn’t remotely ready to write the book. I aggressively processed what went down, thinking I was this incredible artgeniuspoetrywarrior when really I was a 28-year-old codependent quivering with such evident PTSD that a fellow server at the restaurant I worked at was like, "Do you know what a ‘bottom-line behavior’ is?”

But if I HAD scratched out and published a book then, I think I would have imploded from the public attention. The first negative review of my book on Amazon (back then we called it Amazon.com) or, god forbid, the Times, would have smooshed me to death.

It took until I was 44 to truly be ready to write the book, and it’s taken me 5 more years to punch and kick my way through it, revise it, revise it again. Between 28 and 49, we had the trial, I got sober from love addiction (yesh?), fell in love (see: yesh?) and got married, moved to New York, had a nervous breakdown, got a big-people job, left the big-people job, moved back to Southern California, went ack! and left Southern California, got published a few times in places I used to dream about, and the guy got paroled and I changed how I felt about THAT four or five times…

Somewhere in all the warp and weft, I became more myself, and now I have what I always craved — what Bob Dylan said: I will know my song well before I start singing.

Still, few pills are bitterer than “it takes as long as it takes.”

Anyway, welcome back to whatever this is, Nancy. I’m excited to discover your voice, from 28 to 70.

In Greece, if you luck out, they might say “epiase lavraki” which literally means “you’ve caught a sea bass!”

That’s because sea bass in the Mediterranean have been over-fished and are therefore rare. Hi ho.

Speaking of things so good that they make me want to grab strangers by the lapels and scream, have any of you watched Adult Swim’s Ha Ha, You Clowns on HBO? Each episode is 12 minutes and you either get it or you don’t. Me, I really needed to see 3 beefy young men so full of goofy, innocent kindness that they transform situations and people around them like a sweetness ray. At the heart of it is a recently dead mother, and these boys care for each other and their grieving dad. And it’s funny and unhinged and weird and I don’t know a single person who has watched it, and yet everyone has.

That reminds me of something Yogi Berra once famously said about a restaurant: Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

Ha Ha’s creator Joe Cappa has an amazing Instagram and it gives me the same giddy, perverted sense I had when I was 19 and wanted to be an actor and all my friends were directors and jugglers and puppeteers and musicians and we were high all the time and had the best ideas but forgot them all the next morning.

Joe Cappa and Nancy Lemann. I wonder what each of them thinks about their own work while they are making it — I don’t mean what they might articulate in an interview. I mean the worries that slip like stealthy, silvery fish through one’s nerve. I am not a painter, Michelangelo famously said, while painting the Sistine Chapel.

I hope cacao nibs will help. I’ve been putting them on my breakfast for 3 or 4 days and I swear they give me energy and clarity and confidence. I am not working for Big Cacao and still I want to fill a trench coat with baggies full of the stuff and walk through campus. Doses, doses, the dealers would mutter, at San Francisco State. Do they still do that? Anyway, I’m telling all my middle-aged friends to try 1-2 tsp on your chia pudding or cereal or whatever floats your boat.

Man, am I glad to be myself. I’m grateful I didn’t stop complaining. I’m grateful I clowned around and contorted to make myself lovable. I’m grateful I can do, like, 11 things pretty well and nothing spectacularly. I’m grateful I didn’t get published at 28 or even 36 or 40. There is something those people were sprinkling on their breakfasts from an early age — adult parents, an invested writing teacher, money, a certain enzyme? — and I didn’t have that thing, whatever it was, and it used to make me sad and bitter, but not much anymore, because who has that kind of time?

And now if I fail, at least it won’t be because I tried to sound like other people.

Too long have I spent looking at everyone else’s sardines, embarrassed by the strange fish in my hands.

I wrote a small howl for Modern Loss. I say “howl” because it wasn’t as comprehensive as a personal essay, and it certainly wasn’t a think piece or even a “take.” I’d been sitting with the news that Rob and Michelle Reiner had been killed, and then I learned that their daughter, Romy Reiner, was the one to find them (just her father, technically), and then I learned she was 27 and this noise just came out of me because I too was 27 when I found my mother murdered.

Wolf heard wolf, and there you have it.

Sunday morning I found a dead ladder-backed woodpecker. It appeared to have died of natural causes. I’d like to think old age, and not avian flu, which is less likely for songbirds than it is for fowl and blackbirds, given how relatively solitary they are.

Fortunately, the trash pick-up was two days before, and so there were still bits of trash floating around on the street — because heaven forbid we manage to get all the trash into the truck. I grabbed a clean-looking plastic bag and made a glove.

He was so light, he almost wasn’t there at all, but for this perfect barred black-and-white pattern across his back and his little polka-dotted wings, the shock of tomato red on his head. Woodpeckers’ tongues wrap all the way around the backs of their skulls, to cushion them from the force of hammering bill into wood at almost 15 miles per hour, 30 times per second. This marvel of nature, this thready tongue protruded from the tip of his beak.

I’ve held many pigeons — fat, juicy birds whose weight you can really appreciate — and I had two big ring-necked doves as a kid. When the heart is full and sore, one wants a weight to steady it. A bird that is light in the hand makes the heart long to lean its heavy ache against something.

Attention can relieve it somewhat. I took several photos of his feathers, the bars, the dots, the red. I found an unbleached cotton bag from a long ago gift and wrote in Sharpie: Here lies a ladder-backed woodpecker. He seemed to have died of natural causes. We loved him and hope he is happy.

Like you perhaps, I am running out of room for the obituaries I’m inscribing across my heart day after day. I’m howling, sometimes on the page, sometimes to my partner, sometimes to a song on the radio, looking for relief. I lift weights, heavier and heavier, and say I’m trying to increase my metabolism or gird myself against the withering of age, but to tell you the truth, I like the feeling of muscle resisting, taking on, swelling, hurting, of spreading throughout my arms and legs and back and belly a pressure that my heart alone cannot bear.

We all want someone to tell us what to do right now — what to conclude, whom to blame, how to respond, what herbs to take and in which order, what sacraments and rituals will keep us safe, will stop the horrors and right the ship, will install a just and kind world.

Even now, I have to resist the urge to earn anyone’s time by offering them advice. Maybe I have already. Imagine this headline: Bury Random Dead Birds, Says This Grief Expert.

Here’s another offering, a quote from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D. In her assuring, fortifying, and wise “Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times” (which I refer to often and never in order, like religious text), she writes:

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

Many thanks to Rebecca Soffer and Modern Loss for amplifying my howl in the hopes that, if not Romy Reiner herself, someone else who was 27 when it happened, or who found the body of someone they loved, or who wanted to check their eyeballs for damage will hear it and know that, one day, it won’t be everything.

I get a letter every fifteen months or so from the California Board of Parole Hearings. At the top in all caps it says

NOTICE OF HEARING

and then the familiar information: his name, his prisoner number, the date of the hearing, which is usually 3 months away. And the participation deadline date, which is 3 weeks before that date.

When I first received this letter, in 2018, I hadn’t had to think of him much since the trial, which was in 2007. He received 16 years to life for murdering my mother. It would have been 15 years, but he got another year for using a knife. Someone had to come up with that algorithm, someone decided that murdering a person with a blade, versus all the other ways you could murder someone, would cost you another 12 months in the slammer. I never bothered to check how much the other weapons cost. Would it have been more with a gun? Probably, if you added “Illegal possession” to his charges. (It was in California, where they actually try to mitigate gun deaths.)

I wrote about all this in “And These Too are Defensive Wounds”, which was published in The Sun last summer (wonderful, considerate, human-centric Sun, whose founder and editor emeritus Sy Safransky is very much on my mind as he struggles with Alzheimer’s). You can read it there, the retraumatizing of facing it all again, finally ordering the trial transcipts, something I knew I wanted to do for my memoir (if not this one, then the next one) but avoided because I didn’t feel ready, and then being forced to face them when the next parole hearing came, in 2021. And at the end of that piece, the Deputy DA suggested this would come up again in a year and a half. And it did. And now again.

In the original draft, I wrote that I felt powerful because I’d been afraid of my rage but managed to hold it in my body and wield a pen and do something for my mother, for women. But that I was not so sure I could do it again and again. I hoped I could, and I envisioned a hero, weary and in a cave atop a mountain, watching the messenger come up the long walk with yet another call to action. Then I worried it was melodramatic, and I ditched the imagery but kept the sentiment.

The editors were right about it not landing with the same power the rest of the story had, and I love a good editor because they trust you to find your way to it. I believe he’d said something like, I often find that the answer lies somewhere in the beginning of the piece, and I’d laughed a little because: me too! It always works. And when I went back to the beginning of the piece, it was my mother. And so I ended the piece on her, because ultimately it’s about wanting something I can never have. It’s about wishing he would redeem himself, redeem all of us, redeem the world.

As I write this, an unchecked megalomaniac cult leader runs roughshod through our democracy, breaking the bones of the economy, beheading education and the free press, and therefore an informed and empowered citizenry, and shredding an already tenuous social contract.

I started and abandoned multiple posts about how certain Gen X friends and I compare the current catastrophe to the way our childhoods felt. Childhoods in which the roles were reversed and the children cowered or disappeared into video games and books or left the house while adults raged, indulged themselves, or chased fantasies and unmet needs elsewhere. There was nothing you could do so you avoided. You held a nugget of rage and defiance inside of you and trudged on, taking care of yourself, forging a dream for your future and a value system that prioritized equality and justice and social care because you had none of that as a child and it sucked.

But fighting? We didn’t learn to fight. We learned fighting was broken bottles held to throats, was a rock thrown through a window, was a threat, was getting arrested, was heart-shattering things said by the people who should have loved you and protected you more than anyone else in the world. We held our fingers in a peace sign and held a cigarette in the other and said “whatever.” We thought surviving was enough.

Surviving is enough, but it doesn’t end. I am so tired. I let this parole board letter sit on my desk for 3 months. Today is the deadline to participate. I sent an email, my heart pounding. I still don’t want to be on video, don’t want to be there live. Do I? I also once didn’t want to participate, but I did, and I survived it; I once didnt want to take a stronger stand, but I did, and I survived it. I didn’t want to face the trial transcripts, relive the trauma of finding out what her last moments were like, relive the trauma of finding her body, hear the neighbors give an account of a relationship I didn’t know had gotten so bad because I had to walk away at some point. But I did and I survived. But I am tired and I want not to have to do this anymore.

If he would complete the domestic violence workshops, I would not have to do this anymore. If he would admit that he killed his girlfriend and had a pattern of violence against women before her, I would let this go. Hell, I’d be the first to say, Thank you, please go. It’s all right there in the essay, what I want. And until that happens, I have to show up and fight. For her. For the 1 in 4 women who have been severely harmed by partner violence in America. For the many, many more women unaccounted in this statistic because of fear, and for the many, many more women who are already being harmed by partner violence because they are trapped in pregnancies, in a country where hatred of women is being increasingly normalized because the president is a rapist and serial cheater who breezily called women “pigs” and proclaimed he could grab em by the we all know we all know we all know.

It’s okay to be tired, I’m saying. It’s okay not to want to pick up the letter, to type the email. Give it til the deadline, if you must, then see what your old instincts make you do. You might be surprised. Survival is exhausting. Holding hope and kindness and compassion in the same body where you hold rage and grief is exhausting. But it’s the good fight and I don’t do it because anyone tells me I ought to, I do it because I sleep best at night when I have no regrets. And because I’m lucky: what I must do is clear. The larger fight? Still unclear, but getting clearer all the time. Flood their phones, their inboxes. Send a shit in the mail. Or a dick. That’s very Gen X. Draw cartoons making fun of cybertrucks and wheatpaste them all over town. Resist in petty ways and in bigger ones. Gather ye good resources in the comments, while ye may.

Good heavens, are you still trying to win?

Perhaps it’s because I saw The Princess Bride in 6th grade (and 100 times since). Inigo Montoya, beaten back, exhausted, unable to lift his arms. The sword comes down and he manages one lift to defend. Then another. And then: he remembers his mantra. His purpose. He says it again and again it until he is swinging, a juggernaut, a golem unthinking and determined.

I want my mother back, you sonofabitch.

But I will settle for redemption. And keep showing up for it.

I would have loved social media when I was in my 20s. It would have made me feel less devastatingly alone. But as a writer in my 40s I am grateful to have felt devastatingly alone, and also that I was unable to publicly post a single fucking thought I had in my 20s.

Short story idea: A single woman with dating app trauma and whose job has been eliminated by AI falls in love with one of those Waymo driverless cars because it always uses its turn signal and there are no humans in it.

Tell me if this is too many prepositional phrases, but, 16 months into the first Trump presidency I was in a bar in the shadow of the hill where my mother had been killed by a man she was trying to leave.

I’d fled this town 14 years earlier, mindless and fast, like a dog in a thunderstorm, and now I was back to reckon with it. The bar was owned by a hard-ass woman who kept a baseball bat near the register, but she wasn’t there that day. I was joined by three female friends, all freelancers and artists who’d come for cheap lunchtime margaritas and tacos.

I knew what a bar was for women. Particularly a bar in this part of Southern California, where, long before my mother was murdered by her estranged boyfriend in a drunken fight, I’d grown up trying to make myself invisible, learning to deflect unwanted attention with—I must say—a rather impressive defense maneuver that involved both fawning and flight. But on this day, feeling still like a visitor, feeling immune, the sea breeze of my homeland smelled like salt and freedom, the jukebox was playing “Slow Ride,” and the bar had only my women friends in it: two in the back room playing pool and a third beside me vaping on a stool as we chatted up the bartenders, a couple of much younger women the owner had taken under her wing.

Then these men came in. One might describe them in a police report as Caucasian males, early to mid 40s, average height and build, regular street clothes. Indistinct is what they were. The men quickly put themselves between us, halting our conversation to tell us what they thought of our hair, our faces, our bodies … IN THIS, the year of our Lord 2018! Right away I went: Nope. I looked at the empty space between their indistinct faces and said it. Out of all my friends, I was the one who had left this place, had lived somewhere else, had lived in New York Fucking City. It was on me to show them how this would go down in New York Fucking City. I waved my hand, Not interested, move along.

The young bartenders had frozen, smiles plastered on their small, blinking faces. I’d worked in restaurants for 10 years, I knew that smile and what it meant, and I also knew that it wasn’t necessary, not anymore, but I was afraid they didn’t know that yet, being in this place where it wasn’t New York Fucking City, wasn’t even (apparently) the year 2018. One of the men swiveled from me to them and said, Oh this one’s nice, I like the look of her, what’s your name… was I in a terrible movie? This dialogue was unbelievable. The characters were over-the-top corny. But of course I was in a movie. The lens went fish-eyed, the men loomed unbelievably high, the periphery closed in until it was just me and them, and behind them, the hill where my mother fought back and was killed by the very weapon she’d been holding, and so I stood up and stabbed the air with my finger as I delivered not a calm, intelligible rebuke but an incantation. I spoke in tongues. Curses flew from my mouth, along with statistics about rape and femicide, I called them murderers, I said You’re why, you’re why, you’re why, and as I did this another part of me split off and opened my wallet, got out my debit card, put it on the bar, gestured to the bartender to close it out, you’re why you’re why, my friend beside me was melting into her phone screen, frozen, I’d later understand, as a memory in her body curled her shoulders inward where mine were exploding from me, had me ready to swing a bar stool, grab the baseball bat, break a bottle, and that’s what I ran from.

I was chased off my seat by the men, but I ran out the door from my own rage. I saw my mother’s face in it, her flaring dark eyes, her whiptail arm, and her tender throat housing a quivering voice that he wanted to silence and sometimes, god help me, so did I.

When I got out the door I heard one of the men shout, “Spell ‘misogynist,’ honey.”

I don’t want to be an all-powerful rage witch. I don’t want to strike terror into the hearts of bad men until I am one day captured and burned for it. I want to be the bear on a box of Sleepytime tea, nightcap tilting slightly to one side as my cat and I doze happily by the fire.

Short story idea: The Sleepytime bear is actually a trained assassin hiding from his traumatic past, until one day, it arrives at the doorstep of his tree trunk. A sigh rumbles from beneath his flannel nightgown. And we know what he’s going to do. And we know what it will cost him.

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In the autumn of 2015, I read in O Magazine about the Dinner Party, a series of meet-ups across the country for people in their 20s and 30s who were grieving the death of someone close to them. The idea being that people in their 20s and 30s are not typically grieving a personal loss (in modern America, anyway), and we tended to find ourselves feeling isolated within our social circles. The Dinner Party was a place to gather with a community of those who, whether they were talking about it or not, had a broken thing clanking around inside of them, and these people would understand that we could still be funny, interesting, and good friends, even if (or especially because) we had a broken thing clanking around inside of us.

The Dinner Party walked a fine line, the way it billed itself, which wasn’t as a support group; you weren’t gathering TO talk about the people you’d lost, but just to be fully yourself in all your clanking, messy, grieving glory:

The dinners are a welcome antidote to traditional support groups—"We've all been given cheesy grief books with a white dove on the cover," [Dinner Party co-founder Carla] Fernandez says—because they value honest conversation above all else. (Their manifesto reads, "We will abstain from bullshit.") The goal is to encourage more open expressions of grief and foster discussion of the way that loss continues to impact everyday life.

– “A Refuge When Nobody Understand Your Loss,” O Magazine

In the article’s photo, a group of stylish bohemians smiled around a fairy-light-strewn barn (I want to say — this memory is 8 years old now) with a gorgeous spread on a rustic giant dining table (again: in my memory), looking serene and cool and found.

I was far from serene and cool and found. I was still weathering the aftershocks of a panic attack that differed from my other panic attacks in that it seemed to go on for several days, burning a path through my body and brain all through the night, not letting me sleep, not letting me eat, and not abating with walking, box breathing, talking to my husband, or hanging out with friends. I call it “my nervous breakdown,” because I don’t know what it was, and frankly, reliving it now in order to describe it is making me feel a little buzzy, so can I stop? Just… I’ll say this: at some point I told Nat to look up inpatient mental hospitals in the tri-state area and see if they took our insurance.

Eventually I got in to see a therapist my friend recommended, and within 15 minutes, the combination of his soft brown couch, palo santo incense, and completely unalarmed—even slightly amused—smile, calmed me way the fuck down. He gestured in a way that said, you’re not going crazy, then told me anxiety comes from anger that has nowhere else to go but inward. It was like some kind of spell. (He also happens to be a practicing witch, so it might have been one.) I felt myself begin to come back, as if I’d fled my own body, barefoot and mindlessly running, and was now cracking open the front door to see if I could come home.

So things were still a bit touch-and-go when I signed up for the Dinner Party. I was quickly contacted by the very kind organizers and asked if I’d be interested in hosting. It turns out that a city full of people living in 500-square-foot apartments makes it hard to find a few who are willing to host several guests for a meal. Like most New Yorkers, we had to store our kitchen stuff in the living room and we ate dinner on the couch. Where would people sit?

“Don’t worry about that,” the organizer assured me. “All our New York hosts have small places, it can be very cozy and intimate.” To sweeten the deal, they said I could co-host with someone else, so we could take turns stuffing our tiny apartments with people. I was game, and they introduced me and Cheryl over email, and we made a coffee date so we could meet each other and see how things felt.

Cheryl was just 21—technically young enough to be my kid, I couldn’t stop thinking. And her birthday was the day before my mom’s. And our little brothers’ names were the same, with different spellings. These things made me feel immediately and unexpectedly tender toward her.

Cheryl worked as a graphic/UX designer for NASDAQ. We briefly bonded over our corporate servitude, and then got right into it. I told her my mother had been murdered by her boyfriend 11 years earlier and that I had found her body. She told me that when she was just 16, her own mother ended her life. She had to find this out from an uncle because her mother had gone back to Taiwan, and then she disappeared. I don’t remember how long it had been since she’d seen her mother. I don’t remember if Cheryl thought her mother had gone back expressly to do this, to end her life the way her own mother had. What I remember—what has stayed with me all these years—was Cheryl’s anger. How she hummed with it. As she spoke, she spoke fast, gesturing like an animated character or a comic. It reminded me of the way I used to get amped up whenever I talked about my trauma, rehashing what happened to my mom or in my childhood. Her energy at first made me a little nervous, which made me think right away of the mission of the Dinner Party, which was to give all of us grieving weirdos a place to be grieving weirdos, and I thought of the gift that being a grieving weirdo is to the world, which is that we can sit with you, push the immediate discomfort aside that comes from being triggered, from having your own deeply troubled beast see its likeness, and instead give those deeply troubled beasts a space to roam around and sniff each other and just be.

Cheryl and I bonded over our love for the city—even the dank subways and pee smells! And like me, she was a geeky goofball who named her plants: Stanley and Star Child and Severus. I never asked why the first two were named for members of Kiss. I remember this, too: She was adamant that she was “fine.” That she was processing her trauma and grief. She was seeing a therapist weekly which had helped her accept that her mother’s death was not her fault. And that this did not need to be her story, too. She had a loving partner and a younger brother to look after, and she reminded me so much of me in that way, that way that stands with fists clenched before a swirling hellmouth and says, “Not me. I’m going to beat you. Look at me, I’m beating you right now.”

I was still like that, back then. I’m not going to die like her! Look at me: I have a corporate job, I make enough money to live on the Upper West Side! I have a 401(k) and a loving, stable marriage! I can choose not to drink! I got so far away that now the sun doesn’t set over my ocean, it rises over it!

I think it’s a step in the right direction, that certainty. That defiance. I also think that much certainty can be a sign of shock, an indication there is road to hoof yet.

Cheryl and I decided: let’s do this. The organizers were delighted (relieved) and assigned us people. Seven invitees accepted (including Cheryl’s brother), one declined, and three never responded—I wondered if these four had signed up in a moment, then pulled back into themselves, unready.

Our first potluck dinner, in early November, was nice. We sat in a circle in my living room and warmed up to each other. I made “enchilada-flavored” quinoa-stuffed bell peppers. We talked about our losses and where we were in our grieving and what helped and what didn’t.

We reported back to the organizers that our Dinner Party was a success, and they were so thrilled. I will say, these organizers were outstanding—they took pains to make sure we were all comfortable and supported through this process. They even held a happy hour on the Upper East Side that Cheryl and I attended, so all us hosts could meet the organizers and each other.

On December 6, Cheryl sent an email to our Table inviting them to our second dinner at my apartment on December 13. She reiterated the goal of Dinner Party gatherings, which was to “talk organically about whatever comes to mind” and that no one was obligated to talk at all. She wrote: “There are two ground rules: 1) all of our stories are different — don’t judge or feel the need to censor yourselves, and pay the same courtesy to others. And 2) everything shared around the table stays at the table1.”

She ended with: “We look forward to having the safe, open space we've created grow, as we each continue to grow. See you soon! Warmly, Cheryl and Erin.”

Here’s what I remember: only about half our party responded that they could make it. It being so close to the holidays, I guess things were hectic. Then, on the day of the dinner party, all but one person emailed or texted us to say they were ill or had to work.

You know that feeling when you really want plans to be cancelled but don’t want to be the one to do it? And then the opportunity comes and you’re SO grateful and relieved. That was me. About 80% me. The other 20% was bummed out we didn’t have a more enthusiastic group. I kept picturing that smiling, serene bunch around the gorgeous farmhouse dinner table, thinking how much I wanted to make that moment happen for these fantastic, hurting people. But now it was going to be just me and Cheryl and one other person, and it was freezing out and getting dark so early, which makes everyone just want to burrow. So she and I checked in with that person: since everyone was bailing, we were postponing dinner until after the holidays, but she was welcome to join Cheryl and her partner for dinner that night, or text me to hang any time. She was cool, the new person said, she’d wait until January.

Cheryl and I wished each other a happy holiday and reiterated we were there for each other if we needed anything at all. We were excited about the forecasted blizzard, about the citywide pause it would bring, about playing in the snow.

According to my photo library, Nat and I wedged a Christmas tree into the bay window of our apartment and walked up and down Broadway and Sixth Ave, relishing the lights and the windows at Bergdorf’s. We did Christmas Eve at one friend’s apartment and Christmas morning at another’s. We did New Year’s in Long Island City, on the 22nd floor of a friend’s building with a crystalline view of Manhattan. We snuggled our friends’ new and gloriously chubby baby, to whom we were made fairy godparents. We saw Picasso’s sculptures at the MOMA. On a weekend trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I stared for ages at a painting of the Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner. I’d never seen anything like it. Most depictions of Mary have her highly stylized as something inhuman, porcelain-white and two-dimensional. An innocuous dove is always coming in through the window, symbolizing the supernatural injection of a baby into Mary’s teenage body. She also doesn’t look like a teenager in any of those dozens of paintings I’ve seen. Or remotely Levantine. Or remotely concerned.

Here, by contrast, is Tanner’s painting:

It gets me, even now. In my memory, it was massive, engulfing half the wall, though I know that’s not true. It lit up the room the way this incomprehensible presence lights up Mary’s room, which is astonishingly realistic: the rumpled rug, the stone floors and walls of a humble, ancient abode. And Mary, clearly young, clearly unconvinced. She’s listening, but I see fear in the light wrinkle of her brow. I see the humbling of an event beyond her understanding, beyond her control. This brilliant presence, this impossible and blinding occurrence — in spite of her fear, she looks directly at it. Traditionally, it’s supposed to be the archangel Gabriel telling Mary she is going to bear a child, the son of God, but Tanner has made this blinding light so disembodied, so unspecific, that it allows room for it to be anything that is too much for her earthly senses to register. It allows room for the realistic, complicated, and human experience of the legend, and therefore it allows room in the legend for us.

I have many favorite works of art, but this is the one that makes me understand what I need art to do.

Mid-January, I emailed Cheryl about planning another Dinner Party. Ten days later, one our Table messaged me. Had I seen Cheryl’s Facebook?

Since I last talked to Cheryl, she had posted on her Instagram some art that she liked, and a photo of two friends in the neon glow of a small-town Chinese restaurant, and pictures she took of Cayuga Lake at moonrise. On her Twitter, she posted that she’d completed a 10K, her first ever. And at some point, after these posts, her partner shared that Cheryl had ended her life.

How was this possible? I couldn’t absorb it. Cheryl was brilliant and funny and talented and outraged and grieving and generous and kind and wholly—electrically—alive. She was just beginning to share her story and work with suicide prevention organizations. After our first dinner party and before our second failed attempt, she’d written on Medium: “My mother made a choice in 2010 that I hope none of you or your loved ones ever consider.” Why had she, then? It didn’t make sense. I reeled, I worried that maybe it was because I had not done or said the right thing. Was it because we didn’t have our second dinner party?

I did this after my mother’s death, too: I should have protected her more, been more forceful about her staying away from her estranged boyfriend, I should have told her every day that I loved her and needed her and I should have kidnapped her and driven her out of state… but the truth is, I did do many of those things, spread out over years, and I have this sense now that there was a certain force I could not compete with. An ever-widening wound with its own gravitational pull.

Cheryl had written that her mother’s suicide “influences every aspect of my life and I miss her constantly. I have had to be strong. I have had to hide this important part of my experience.”

And her mother before her made the same choice. What it is, to be faced with the tragic lives of your mother and grandmother, to curse their choices and declare you’ll be different while also being secretly uncertain that you’ve escaped their fate. I know the feeling of the gravity pulling you somewhere dark but familiar, and I know how hard you have to burn the jets to get clear, to take the parts of your mother you admire and mourn and love and reject the rest, to work at becoming that new mother for yourself. I wish Cheryl and I could have learned it together.

Two years later, I was in a bar in the shadow of the hill where my mom was murdered, having decided to move back to that town and deal with it. I got day drunk and ended up shouting at a couple of men who interrupted me and my friends to tell us what they thought of our faces and bodies. I ran out of there, alone and ashamed and shaking with something awful and wordless, memories of all the times my mother threw knives at windows, flung her fists at people, screamed at cops, boyfriends, her own parents—she wasn’t wrong to: the world was out to screw women over, and she had to live among people who either perpetuated it or refused to see it. A Cassandra driven mad, gaslit until she choked, told to calm down and “go along to get along.” Her last words to me were, “I’m just going back with him to keep the peace.” At the trial we learned she’d hit him in the head with the cutting board as they were making dinner, and that’s when he “lost it” and stabbed her. After months of him threatening her, removing parts from her car, not letting her answer the phone. Was I going to die like her? Lashing out at last against a world that wanted me to keep the peace while it snuffed me out? I really thought I might. And it terrified me. It made me want to just get it over with. Sometimes, I still do.

Is there a number to call for this? A walkathon, somewhere to donate? Is this it? Is the answer in the defiant telling of our stories when we, especially women, feel like we should say less about ourselves and focus on making everyone feel happy and comfortable and safe?

Fuck that, as Cheryl would say.

She wrote this of the age she would not see: “I see myself now at 22 and my life is taking off. I see my mother’s life at 22 and her life is taking off. I don’t want a crash landing, like hers, like her mother’s before her.”

She wrote: “I see myself turning into my mother in beautiful ways.”

Oh, Cheryl. Me too. Cheryl, we might have done this, side by side. We could have sent each other things we wrote, things others wrote. We could have dinner and list all the tiny details we remembered about our mothers. We could tell each other the dreams they appeared to us in, the uncanny Tarot cards we just pulled. We could trade self-care tips and describe what we wanted our lives to mean, and I could have sent you this, which I just read:

You gotta resurrect the deep pain within you and give it a place to live that’s not within your body.

Let it live in art. Let it live in writing. Let it live in music. Let it be devoured by building brighter connections.

Your body is not a coffin for pain to be buried in. Put it somewhere else.

– Ehime Ora, Ancestors Said: 365 Meditations for a Peaceful Year

The organizers of the Dinner Party were really good here—they, too, were stunned and they organized a memorial with Cheryl’s partner, which I don’t remember going to. They planned to come to my apartment for a special dinner where we could talk about how this affected us. But again, in the days leading up to it, everyone but two people canceled. That summer, I had to admit that I didn’t have it in me to keep trying to host dinners. The organizers kindly reassigned us all to other Tables. I went to my new one once or twice, and they were lovely, but something had started to shift in me. I developed a sudden and almost supernatural obsession with going home, back to California, to contend with my mother’s death and start working on my book.

I almost wrote here that it had nothing to do with Cheryl’s death, but writing a memoir teaches you that all the events and choices in your life are traveling together, linked and long, like a train in the desert.

All this time I have wondered if it was my mother calling my name in the middle of the night, waking me from a deep sleep; my mother putting songs that we both loved in my head, on repeat, driving me crazy with them, making me sob on ladders, in subways, on park benches; my mother who flashed images of cacti and bleached cow skulls and serape blankets, the sun setting over the blue, blue Pacific. Go west, all these things said, go home.

But maybe it was Cheryl—or what I unconsciously learned from her, anyway. I believe that whatever we need to contend with in this life comes for us, comes through in our dreams, our encounters with people, our instruments of divination. We can try to suppress and deny it. We can tell ourselves we don’t deserve to contend or share, which means we never inspire others to contend and share, but it would destroy me to give in to that urge to stay small and quiet, and I don’t know if someone somewhere will kill me one day, but I do know I will not go down by erasing myself.

I went home to figure out my story and I had that scene in the bar, where I became my mother momentarily, when I always said I would not. I get it now, Cheryl.

Grief sends a brilliant and terrible messenger into the room with us. The artist, Tanner understood, is divinely tasked with looking directly at it. Maybe it’s the combination of fear and willingness in his Mary’s face that just guts me. I see the hope in it; hope that what the messenger offers is not blindness but illumination. And hope that whatever is asked of her, she will be up to it.

You can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) and the Samaritans Statewide Hotline (call or text) at 1-877-870-HOPE (4673), or call or text 988 or visit https://988lifeline.org/.

And:

Donate to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in Cheryl’s name. Her partner created this years ago and I’m so moved to see it’s still here.

The Dinner Party - If you or someone you know is grieving the loss of someone close to you, at a time of life where that’s not so common (before age 45, their website now says), I do highly recommend this.

Imagine you’ve asked someone to wrap you head to toe in cellophane—tight, like a mummy—then roll the whole thing in duct tape and tie it up with rope.

After lying there for several years, acclimating to your new shape, muscles atrophying, you no longer can tell where your body ends and the cocoon begins. Your arms and legs—and all your senses—have become theoretical, not real.

Now try to get out of it.

Wiggle your enfeebled fingers and toes, trying to remember what they are. Let them explore the small field around them until they find purchase and make a tiny, hopeful tear in the plastic. (Or is that your leg?)

Wiggle and tear, wiggle and rip while a voice yells insults at you about how poorly you are doing it, that no one is waiting for you to get out, that you have been forgotten and may as well stay in your cocoon.

The metaphor is a physical one, but it’s exactly how the intellectual mechanics of writing a memoir feels to me. You have to see the shape of your life — or a part of it anyway — and to do it you have to remove yourself from your husk and step away. But the husk is you.

It’s somewhat of a Zen koan. See inside your own eyelid and report back.

Let’s assume you successfully remove yourself from the husk. Now you have to sort through All Its Wildly Important and Beautiful and Overwhelming and Awful Wonders, and choose, say, 10 moments that tell the story you wanted to tell.

As the frogs say: Gulp.

Get ready for metaphor #2:

If you’re an artist (or maybe any sensitive person), your life might seem to you like a wildly important film on fast-forward that repeats again and again, each time getting several scenes longer as you get older. The last scene is the present moment, and then it starts over. You carry the entire movie with you into the present moment.

Most of us have to close the door on this eternal movie just to get anything done (or not feel overwhelmed with longing, grief, anger, nostalgia). To write a memoir is to stay in the room and watch the cursed film over and over, pausing and rewinding, trying to find the stories — out of the film’s thousands of possible stories — that you think best tell the overarching story of the memoir, which is contending with something you are only JUST NOW ready to face fully, and which you still don’t completely understand. That’s why you’re writing a memoir in the first place: To understand what happened. (Who gave you this counterintuitive, awful job?)

And that’s assuming the film is even reliable. Or intact. Whenever I re-read my old journals, it’s almost unbearable at times—the bald self-deception!

“I need to relax—why the hell can’t I just relax??” (My diary at 20, while living with a man I was addicted to and couldn’t stand.)

It’s hard to sit in the room with the film of yourself betraying yourself, and then decide whether or not to include it in the work. To write a memoir is to be a ruthless editor of your own past. What parts of this ongoing, devastating, and Most Important film should you leave on the cutting-room floor? I chose scenes that wouldn’t leave me alone.

My mother bending to pick up a crab claw on the beach, the salty wind blowing our hair as she opens and closes the claw like a mouth, doing Señor Wences: "You want to talk to my crab?” she asks in his Spanish accent. “S’alright? S’alright.”

Me sitting on a playground swing, telling the kids at my new school that we left my mom because she was a drug addict and a slut, trying on these words, this anger. The scandalized kids run away, and I sit alone making my right hand into a puppet, imagining two dots beneath my knuckle for eyes, and sliding the sad mouth of my thumb up and down. “Mom,” the puppet cries. “Mom. Mom.”

Wanting and rejecting. Reaching out and being denied. If these were the constant currents beneath my life, then of course they’re the currents that compel my work, and the way I come to the work.

I meant this to be about avoidance. I was frustrated with the Rube Goldberg devices I set between myself and completion of the work, all my diaries I think I have to read and annotate first, all the furniture-moving I have to do to “free up the creative energy” in my space, the 13 open tabs I need to finally read and process and close before I can think clearly.

And gods, the amount of time it takes to write anything that might live up to my potential!

Oh that I could swallow a pill that would convince me that people want to luxuriate in an indulgently long, beautiful, and neurotic haze with me. I can’t entirely blame my abandonment issues—there’s a well-documented disdain for memoirs, especially memoirs by women, even by other women memoirists.

(For an antidote, I turn to Melissa Febos’s “The Heart-Work: Writing About Trauma as a Subversive Act”.)

Those of us who grew up reaching out and being rejected, having sometimes and starving sometimes, will want to avoid writing our memoirs as much as we long to write them. I used to torture myself about this, but I’ve learned something: Avoidance is one half of the whole motion. The other half is advancement. I avoid until I feel an anxiety that compels me forward, even a little. And that little advancement feeds further advancing for days.

Avoid/advance/avoid/advance. Over and over, until I had a 300-page book.

There can be peace in it, like the ebb and flow of the tide. The ebb draws the sea into itself, gathers what stones and shells it can, then offers them back, changed.

Sometimes I tell people “I’m working on a pearl,” meaning an irritant is gumming up my works and I don’t know what it means yet, and I can find out by writing, yes, but I can also find out by not writing. Not writing can be better because once I start writing, I become a little committed to the idea and can no longer accommodate other ideas that might complicate and enrich it. If I put my old diaries down in disgust and shame, and then walk around with that grit of self-betrayal and shame in my oyster, not writing, just working it around in my body, I can produce something resilient and beautiful about our capacity for self-betrayal and shame.

Not all avoidance is avoidance, I’m saying. Sometimes avoidance is advancement.

Much already has been written (or memed) about late capitalism’s effects on art; about how to move slowly and try to make meaningful and lasting art when it feels like we’re on the factory floor, being watched from above, punished or promoted based on output.

Instead of repeating those things here, I’ll end with one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, which I hope will underscore your periods of ebbing and pearl work:

Softest of mornings, hello.
And what will you do today, I wonder,
to my heart?
And how much honey can the heart stand, I wonder,
before it must break?

This is trivial, or nothing: a snail
climbing a trellis of leaves
and the blue trumpets of flowers.

No doubt clocks are ticking loudly
all over the world.
I don’t hear them. The snail’s pale horns
extend and wave this way and that
as her fingers-body shuffles forward, leaving behind
the silvery path of her slime.

Oh, softest of mornings, how shall I break this?
How shall I move away from the snail, and the flowers?
How shall I go on, with my introspective and ambitious life?

LMK if you’re working on a pearl right now. Also, James Baldwin has been there.

Take a pear and move the bulbous part down so there’s a long waist between it and the stem. Maybe it’s more a spoon. No, Mrs. Incredible, who is middle-aged Elastigirl.

Owing perhaps to this disproportionate shape in which my core muscles have to yoink my unruly lower half to my spine, my hips are screaming. All the time.

As a writer, I sit A LOT. And I become so rapt with whatever I’m writing or editing that I don’t even notice how long I’ve been sitting on a hard cafe bench or sinking between the cushions of my floppy old couch, until I stand up and morph into the Tin Man.

In yoga class, the teacher starts by asking what we want to work on or pay attention to. I’m Captain Hip Opener—give me pigeon, give me lizard, stacked logs. Oof, hurts so good. Throw in revolved triangle because fuck you, IT band.

Hip openers: I hated them and then I loved them while also hating them, and now I need them and love them and sort of hate them but mostly need them. This is a rough diagram of my relationship, over the last 20 years, to everything that’s good for me.

And it’s not just me — everyone in my class asks for hip openers.

You might have heard that hips are where we store anger, trauma, and/or connection to family. That tracks. My family was always so angry; I was always angry at them but I couldn’t do anything about it. So we just all stayed in our corners, fuming, waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, then we would let decades of resentment out in a volcanic burst. Now some of us are gone and those who are left are older and tired. What to do with the anger? Send it down the elevator to the basement for storage.

My massage therapist, a wonderful earthy hippie somewhere between my age and what would have been my mother’s age, pointed out how much the pelvis endures—period pain, digestion issues, life-making, baby-growing. I refused the services of my pelvis to human children, but I did once give birth to a dog.

After my mom died, my mom’s dog, Chloe (whom I picked out at the shelter and bonded with before giving her to my mom—dog I loved and worried about for years) came to live with me. For the first few weeks, I’d lie on the couch with her between my legs and imagine birthing her. I did this kind of a lot. I’d put the blanket over us and roll it back so I could see her pointy brown head coming out of the tent and I’d feel like she had just slid out of me.

Email that one to your Jungian podcast.

Years later I finally acknowledged the grief I had packed away in my cavities. And even later, I acknowledged the rage. But my hips… they knew before I did.

Would you believe? My massage therapist shares my mother’s name, a name that’s in danger of passing out of existence when all the Boomers are gone. I swear that’s not the biggest reason I need her to lay hands on me once a week, but it helps.

It’s the psoas (so-az) muscles, says the internet’s relatively new wealth of trauma resources. I’d never heard of a psoas muscle until a few years ago, and now it is (like trauma resources on the internet) everywhere. Apparently this muscle, which holds my (large) ass to my (small) torso, is where we keep a lot of stress and trauma. To release the hips, you have to also release this muscle, which for me is tight and contracted from sitting like a shrimp and being shaped like a cartoon.

Recently I have been thinking of cord-cutting. Letting go of the family I love and need and am hurt by over and over, family who never calls, never asks me how I am. We’ve had our moments—when badly wounded, I’ve loped back to each of them for nourishment, but it’s pretty much stone soup. You know that children’s story? Or like getting blood from a stone. Something with stones. Or a well. That well is dry. I keep going back to that dry, stony well, like a good and codependent child. Or one who believes in magic and is thirsty enough to try.

But now I have gut stuff. I’ll get into that another time. And the guts in my pelvis are screaming and my hips are screaming and my navel keeps me tied to something that isn’t there, rolling me inward when outward is the way I need to be.

Read my interview with The Sun about my essay, “And These Too Are Defensive Wounds” to hear about some of the things that really tighten my psoas.

I was being interviewed by The Sun, which just published my essay, “And These Too are Defensive Wounds,” when I started dissociating. One minute I was in the middle of answering a question about my motivation for writing the essay, and the next minute, I was staring up at the corner where my plum-colored wall meets the white ceiling.

What was I saying?

What was the question?

“Sorry, I'm dissociating,” I said to the editor interviewing me. “Can you ask me another question or say something—anything—so I can jump-start my brain?”

In case you’re like, Give her the gold medal in self-care, you should know this is all a new language for me, a new technique. For years, my MO was to ignore the sudden spaciness and feeling of disconnection and just press on until I was a jabbering, wild-eyed beast. Apparently ignoring a terrified child is a form of abuse, and I have been trying to parent myself better.

The editor graciously offered to change the subject, but I wanted to answer his question, I really did—it’s just that I’d lost it somewhere on the ceiling.

The essay we were discussing is largely about dissociating. In it, I describe having to write a letter to the parole board, 18 years after my mother’s boyfriend killed her, declaring whether or not I felt he should be released from prison. Writing the letter required deciding where I truly stood on that, which in turn required facing head on the worst parts of her death, which I’d suppressed after learning of them at the trial.

So doing a thousand-yard stare during my interview seemed pretty on-brand, and I hope that my being honest about it will appear in the published version of our interview.

Animals and our defenses—I’m fascinated. Horned lizards shoot blood from their eyes, sea cucumbers expel their intestines, and octopuses (that’s right, “-puses”) squirt ink. I, part of a highly evolved species, vacillate wildly between Fighting, Fawning, Freezing, Fawning, and Fighting again. The genius of this response is engendering a sort of “ew” feeling in people until they leave me alone.

That’s not great. I mean, am I going to do this when Terry Gross has me on Fresh Air, as has long been my dream? Am I going to do this when I’m asked to speak at conferences or at book signings, or any of the other parts of publishing a book that I’d be so flipping honored to have to do? Can I just count on myself to sabotage my career by going tits up like a possum in the street?

I wasn’t always like this. I majored in Theater for fuck’s sake. I was a quick-witted, sassy, Oscar Wilde-quoting thing who came alive when I was talking to a group of strangers. But also: it was easy to be Always On because I was avoiding.

How long did I shove my worst experiences into the basement, label the box “IT’S FINE THIS STUFF IS FINE,” and turn up the music so I couldn’t hear it banging around down there?

But you can’t avoid AND write a whole book, not if the book is about the things in the scary box. That’s the trade-off, that’s the wonderful devil’s deal—you get command over your story and the incredible feeling of having wielded it and made it artful and having joined your voice in the ongoing human song of existence… but also you’ve let the thing out of the basement and now it’s stalking your hallways and making you spend way too much on massages and anxiety blankets.

To be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes, said Kurosawa. I’ve taken this advice seriously since my early 20s. And to never avert your eyes, but still show kindness to yourself? That’s the work of my 40s.

Does anyone else here dissociate when talking about their art, their writing, their work? Do you have any tips n’ tricks? Also do you know any modern authors whose social anxiety I can learn from?

I’m thinking next time, I’ll try a grounding practice like guided meditation before any interviews or public events, and—this is critical—have talking points in front of me.

So: Trauma for Dummies. I actually started it over on Wordpress a billion light years ago, and some of the older writing is… oof. But I leave it up like performance art, a public record of a younger me contending with PTSD, trying to write about it, trying to avoid writing about it, and so on. Besides, next to my Livejournal posts from 2004-2007, which are also still out there, these posts aren’t nearly so cringe to me. I’m a big fan of cringe, anyway! It’s the stink of life. Suck it up your nose hairs, roll in it. Cringe lets you know you’re close to something vulnerable and real and human. Cringe is not always high art, but it is artistic. I’ve never been interested in a cringe-less person, story, or existence.

I decided to resurrect TfD here after spending a little time flirting with Primrose Path, a Substack that’s weird and sporadic and focused on one strange pattern at a time. Like the pattern from finding a squirrel skull in a leaf pile, to the Surinamese Cockroach I saw rooting around in it, to a Surinamese poet who wrote a poem about death that featured bones. It’s how my mind arranges events and information (when it isn’t shutting down mid-answer) and I wanted to explore its weird subliminal wisdom.

TfD is something different. For 15 years, I’ve been circling, avoiding, and finally writing a memoir about some truly mind-warping things, and in spite of an MFA program, multiple online workshops, and a wonderful community of writer friends, I often feel so alone in this process. It’s also Gen X nostalgia! Birds and weeds I like! Disaster movies!

I suppose I am creating the Substack I need when I am writing about trauma or trying to write in spite of it.

If you’re writing through something hard, I hope you find something in this leaf pile that crystallizes something for you, or anyway makes you less afraid and alone while you do it.

We haven’t got much time, kids. We’ve got to sing our lives. Sing it messy, who cares.

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