My parents wanted me to be an engineer, because everyone in my family was an engineer. Engineering was a clear, comprehensible, and well-compensated profession. More accurately, it was a clear, comprehensible, and well-compensated profession for people who were unafraid of math and who had not blown a fuse in their physics classroom because they were passing notes during the explanation of what to do for the electricity lab. In other words, engineering was not for me.

English 10A, which covered English language literature from Beowulf through Shakespeare, required the purchase of volume 1 of The Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Department of English Style Guide. The Norton Anthology had a painting of Queen Elizabeth I on the cover and was the size and weight of a large brick. The Style Guide was a thin stapled booklet with a Hogarth engraving on the cover and terrifying injunctions about adhering to MLA style guidelines OR ELSE inside.

I lived in an off-campus apartment that year because I sent in my housing application approximately two and a half months after the deadline, long after the dorms had been filled with students who read important letters from the university and followed directions. My apartment building was on Landfair Ave., across the street from a row of fraternity houses that played thumping music on Friday and Saturday nights and smelled like stale beer and bad decisions on Sunday mornings.

The first assigned paper in English 10A—five typed, double-spaced pages—asked us to consider how the Old English epic poem Beowulf embodied a fear of the Anglo-Saxon people. I panicked. In high school English, I was routinely rewarded for last-minute, half-hearted, half-baked assignments, but this felt different. More consequential. I had a feeling that the professor—who spoke in a rich baritone with a vaguely British accent, who enunciated his words with intimidating precision—would see right through any last-minute bullshit, and so, for the first time in my life, I started writing a paper three days before it was due.

It was hard going. I started and re-started half a dozen drafts. I didn’t know what the Anglo-Saxon people were afraid of, because they were all dead. It was possible that they didn’t like being dismembered by a rampaging monster in the dead of night—I mean, who does?—but where was the textual evidence?

Nobody wants to read about the torment of writing a five-page academic essay, so I’ll spare you the details. I’ll just say that in my desperation, I pivoted from writing stupid shit in my notebook to writing out every quote from Beowulf that seemed even remotely relevant to my as-yet unformed thesis. The day before the paper was due, I found a way in.

The world of Beowulf is pretty straightforward. Think Game of Thrones, but more primitive—a fifth century Nordic kingdom ruled by King Hrothgar, populated with manly men who strap on their armor and fight by day and remove their armor and drink mead by the fire at night. There’s also Grendel, a terrifying monster who lives in a serpent-infested lake and, every now and again, visits the mead hall in the dead of night and murders some of the men.

Grendel—described repeatedly as a “rover of borders” and a “terrible walker alone”—exists on the periphery. He does not follow the custom of paying wergild—man price—for those he has killed, though he seems to know about it. He’s a perversion of what it means to be human; dark and lurking where the mead hall is warm and welcoming, chaotic and deadly where there is order. Recognizably human, but also not. That was the fear: to be neither here nor there. To be cast out.

Beowulf is an old text—the manuscript dates back to somewhere between 975 and 1025. The story itself is much older. But when you’re a young person (I was 18 that spring), all you see is the story in front of you, and the deadline, and your typewriter. It did not occur to me that I, too, was on the periphery, in my studio apartment on Landfair Avenue with the thumping music from the fraternity houses in the background. I did not fully recognize that I, too, longed for warmth and camaraderie, that I yearned to be with my own kind.

I would find my own kind eventually, in the messy, noisy newsroom of The Daily Bruin, with its ringing phones and clacking keyboards and occasional bursts of laughter, and at seminar tables in grad school, with others who loved books as much as I did. I would learn to look for pattern and symmetry, for repetition and variation. I would learn how to properly cite a scholarly article in volume 18 of a literary journal, how to footnote, how to title a paper in a way that was both arch and serious (My favorite, from junior year: “Take My Hand, Take My Whole Life Too: Dismemberment, Madness, and Death in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus”). I would come to recognize that Grendel might have been a fiction of the Anglo-Saxon imagination, but the fear of the darkness outside the mead hall, of belonging nowhere and to no one—that was timeless, both in literature and in life.

In the spring of 1987, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew was how giddy I was when I received an A- on my first paper in English 10A. The professor wrote “excellent work” and called my argument “rigorously constructed.” It would have been too perfect if he had called it “rigorously engineered,” but in my imagination, that’s what he did.

Updates:

Last Sunday, I was at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley to talk about road trips, pop tarts, and families with Kevin Wilson, whose new book, Run for the Hills, is out in paperback. It was so, so fun! Here we are in the green room at the Freight in Berkeley with our fantastic moderator, Julie Coryell.

If you’re saying to yourself, “Gosh, I wish I lived closer and could hear Irena talk about her new book!” fear not: you can come to a Virtual Book Club featuring Troika next Thursday, June 11 at 4 pm PT/7 pm ET. It’s free and open to the public! Register here: https://www.namw.org/june-2026-virtual-book-club/. And if by some miracle you missed my nattering about Troika for the past year or so, you can order it here.

—

Writing is also the worst because every time I sit down to write anything, including this Substack, I feel like I’ve never written a word in my life. This is not a good feeling, so I put off writing and go to the grocery store, or start a load of laundry, or turn to my old friend The New York Times Spelling Bee, because combining letters into words is much easier than combining words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs and figuring out which paragraph goes where. Also, the third book is about being diagnosed with ADHD in midlife, and I’m discovering that writing with ADHD is easier than writing about ADHD. Writing about ADHD feels like what I imagine what Leonid Rogozov felt when he performed his own appendectomy except that writing about ADHD with ADHD is more like doing your own brain surgery.

Also, not to brag, but Leonid Rogozov only removed his appendix once. He wasn’t promoting a newly released book and writing a Substack at the same time. He was just doing scienc-y things on an Antarctic expedition, so I win.

Just kidding. Leonid Rogozov is awesome and I could never.

Meanwhile, here’s a sneak peek at the intro to book 3:

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was fifty-four, after the strategies I had unconsciously devised to keep it together stopped working and I started losing it. By “it,” I mean my phone, my other shoe, my temper, and my sense of the world as a navigable place.

To be diagnosed with ADHD you have to fill out several questionnaires that ask you to rate how often you make careless mistakes, lose items, fidget, interrupt, or have difficulty getting organized to complete a complex task on a scale of “Never” to “Very often.” Then you meet with a psychiatrist who conducts a clinical assessment. The psychiatrist who conducted my clinical assessment seemed skeptical because my first book, a memoir about working as a college admissions counselor while raising three neurodivergent children, was in pre-publication at the time. He said that my ADHD couldn’t be that bad if I wrote a book, to which I said “Ask me how I wrote the book,” and that is how I ended up with a diagnosis and a prescription for methylphenidate, generic for Ritalin.

Being asked to quantify behavioral patterns over time is not dissimilar from writing a memoir. You look over moments in your past and go, Ah, that’s why I’m like this. Except that the questionnaires I filled out captured only a partial truth—that I struggled to be on time, to wait my turn, to sit still, to focus, to keep track of my belongings, to feel less sudden, blinding rage in seemingly innocuous situations. The questionnaires quantified the nature and frequency of the disorder—never, rarely, sometimes, often, very often—but not my efforts to manage it. And I’m sorry, but those efforts are also important, because aren’t we all struggling with, or against, something?

I personally struggle with the following: existential dread, figuring out what’s for dinner, my overflowing email inbox, aging, an inability to focus on a single task, and a disastrously cluttered Google drive filled with documents with names like “BOOK 3 LOLOLOL.”

Every day is a battle against entropy. Except I’m also the cause of the thing I’m fighting against, which makes determining the winner tricky, to say the least. It’s like the call is coming from inside the house but the house is a mess and the phone is nowhere to be found and it’s unclear whether the caller on the other end is a friend or a fiend or simply a wrong number.

Updates

BAY AREA BOOK EVENTS:

•Wednesday, May 27 at 7 pm: I’ll be talking about my new book, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip, at the Sunnyvale Public Library. More details here.

•Sunday, May 31 at 12:15 pm: “Taking the Long Road Trip Home” (in conversation with Kevin Wilson, author of Run for the Hills and Nothing to See Here at the Bay Area Book Festival). Details here.

If you’re not in the Bay Area, I do book clubs virtually, and both Troika and my first book, The Golden Ticket, make for lively discussions about parents and children, generational expectations, ambition, and success. Invite me! I’m very fun!

Other ways to show support: Comment! Subscribe! Tell all your friends! Restack! Hit the “heart” on this post so it reaches as many people as possible!

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The really good book is ’s Mothers and Other Fictional Characters—a memoir in essays that pulled me in from the moment I read the opening paragraph of the first essay, “Kate Chopin, My Mother, and Me.” To wit:

My mother smoked before she was a mother. In a sepia Polaroid from the early seventies, she holds a cigarette between two lacquered fingertips. She wears, improbably, a catsuit, and her hair falls over her shoulders in glossy waves as she leans into my father, squeezing his cheeks and grinning. He is in trouble—oh, is he in trouble.

I mean… right? The essays are seductive and serious, lyrical and joyful, and the best kind of smart, by which I mean that they weave a deep love of literature with reflections on what fictional mothers can teach us about public and private selves, desire, attachment, gender, and friendship.

The generosity part of the story is that last year, Nicole responded within minutes to my email asking whether she would be willing to blurb Troika with an enthusiastic yes. Which, considering that I was a total stranger, is pretty darn nice. And then, after she wrote a gorgeous blurb and I decided to push my luck and ask whether she might want to be interviewed in Personal Statements, she responded with another enthusiastic yes.

Below are her responses to my emailed questions. I know it’s customary to say that answers have been edited for length and clarity but I did not change a single word and when you read them, you’ll see why.

IS: What first prompted you to braid your own experiences with literary works? Did you begin with life and reach for literature, or did the literature give you a framework for writing about your life?

NGL: Nearly everything I write is sparked by a personal experience that has so confused or bewildered me that I can’t stop thinking about it. This can be something as small as a comment my four-year-old daughter once made while I was putting on makeup, or as large as trying to figure out what to do with the three frozen embryos left over from the round of IVF that created my son.

Then, because reading has been such a vital part of my life personally and professionally, it feels really natural to turn to literature to try to make sense of whatever experience I’m exploring. Maybe all bookworms and lifelong readers feel this way, but the boundary between my “reading life” and my “actual life” can feel really porous! Reading is part of living—a big part of it, for me. And so when I’m exploring a personal moment, it doesn’t feel like a big leap to pull in threads from the literary works that have influenced and shaped me.

You write candidly about feeling trapped in pregnancy and early motherhood—a time when, as you write, a woman’s value is often perceived as biological rather than cerebral. Reading about your experiences resonated deeply with my own feelings of entrapment and claustrophobia, both during pregnancy and as a new mother, but I’m curious if you ever worried how writing about those experiences might be received, especially in a culture that still resists maternal ambivalence?

NGL: Honestly, I spent so many years of early motherhood ashamed of some of the feelings my new role aroused in me that by the time I began to write about them I was basically bursting. My shame had transformed, during those years, into anger at the many ways our culture fails to support mothers while simultaneously pushing us to interpret anything but a uniform, joyous embrace of motherhood as a character flaw. I knew that writing about my experience with unvarnished honesty—even if it made me unlikeable on the page at times—was absolutely crucial to the project of his book, both personally and in terms of the story I was trying to tell.

What motivated me to sit down at my desk day after day, no matter how tired or hesitant, was my belief that writing can be a way of cracking through the easy, surface stories we tell about ourselves and others—which are so often stories we’ve been handed by our patriarchal culture. As risky as it felt to do so at times, I was determined to try to normalize some of what we’re taught, as women, is aberrant or shameful, when in reality it’s just a normal, natural part of being human.

The book refuses the familiar binary of motherhood as either self-sacrificing nurturer or selfish shrew. Why do you think that binary persists so stubbornly? And what does literature allow you to say about motherhood that ordinary cultural discourse does not?

NGL: I think that the “angel/ monster” binary of motherhood is just one symptom of our culture’s denial that women are layered, complex, and multidimensional human beings. It shouldn’t be radical in 2026 to assert that women are full human beings! But over and over women are labeled and reduced in ways that obscure our complexity. I believe that the delicate, paper-thin boundary between “angel” and “monster” is a means of keeping women in line. Most of us don’t want to be monsters, and so we effectively become our own enforcers of patriarchy’s rules, monitoring and policing ourselves so as not to fall from grace.

Because literature gives us a portal into the consciousness of others—and because the consciousness of others is always messy and shadowed and layered—it can allow us to see human beings more fully than we typically get to see them in “real” life. There is this ironic way in which fictional characters can feel even more true than actual people, which is why I turned to them again and again while writing my book. I cannot know what the perfectly put-together and smiling mom I pass in the hallway during school drop-off truly thinks and feels, what pain or grief or anger might be concealed behind her appearance. But when I read a Kate Chopin novella or a short story by Alice Munro, I can see straight into the complex minds and hearts of these authors’ mother heroines.

IS: I was particularly struck by the chapter on female friendship, which doesn’t follow a conventional narrative arc. Was that structural choice deliberate? Do you think friendship, especially between women, resists the kind of teleological storytelling we’re taught to expect? (I’m thinking especially about your distinction between platonic and erotic/romantic love and the felt need to clarify that you don’t have “that” kind of relationship with your best friend.)

NGL: Absolutely, yes. I was trying to capture how the story of my decades-long friendship with Sara doesn’t follow the traditional Western story arc, in which conflict rises to a climax and then gives way to falling action. In the years we’ve been friends, there’s been hardly any tension or conflict between us whatsoever, and I was determined to try to capture all that’s intriguing and rich and fascinating about two women friends who care for and support each other. Period. One common narrative about female friendship is that women are wired for rivalry, and that our relationships are likely to devolve into jealousy or competition. Using a nontraditional structure was one way I tried to challenge this tired stereotype.

I was excited to examine what makes my platonic love for Sara feel so very different from my love for my husband, or for my children. My husband and I chose to commit to each other, and we love each other deeply. But I’m not sure the love between two married people can ever fully wrest itself free from its contractual origins—there’s a sort of constant underlying awareness that one must pull their weight and hold up their end of the bargain, and therefore a constant desire not to fall short. And while I love my children with every inch of my being and have spent hours of my life wishing I could literally ingest them, parental love always carries the weight of duty.

Female friendship, in contrast, is a completely voluntary dance between two humans bound by nothing at all but their mutual desire to be there for one another in life. There are ways in which it’s a freer and purer form of love.

IS: You write about moments of anger, exasperation, boredom, and the desire for autonomy alongside deep love. How did you navigate the ethical and emotional risk of including those truths?

NGL: Part of my purpose in writing this book—my main purpose, actually—was to question the invisible boundaries imposed on women. Shame is one of the tools our culture uses to pressure us into compliance. It teaches us to be ashamed of aspects of ourselves and to think of the very things that make us human as unspeakable. On the surface, sharing that I’ve found myself attracted to a man who isn’t my husband, for instance, or that I’ve longed at times to escape from my children, may seem deeply private--but are these things really that personal? What heterosexual, married woman and mother hasn’t felt both of these things at some point? I wonder if some of the feelings I share in my book feel private, in part, because we’ve been taught not to mention them, and so there’s tremendous taboo around them in our culture.

Because I believe that when a woman suppresses her own complexity, she suppresses her humanity, I tried to lay bare my own messy complexity on every page. Did this feel dangerous and frightening at times? Absolutely. But every revelation I include is there to serve a larger purpose, to move the needle in some small way in terms of what we consider acceptable for women to feel and think.

IS: As someone who teaches literature, you spend your professional life reading, interpreting, and teaching your students how to become skillful readers and writers. How do you see the intersection between teaching, mothering, and writing? Do they feel like competing or complementary narratives in your life?

NGL: I think the most vital element I bring to all three of these areas is attention. Raising a child—or teaching a high schooler—requires a near-constant attunement to another human’s physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Growing an essay also requires deep attention, both to the events and memories I’m working to capture, and the words and sentences and images I’m using to capture them.

Parenting and teaching have also helped me appreciate the value of patience and time. You cannot force a child to grow faster, or will a student to learn faster! I’m a very slow writer, and at times this has been really painful. But over time, I’ve come to think of my slowness as a crucial element of my work. Letting an essay accrue bit by bit—often over a period of many months—allows space for my thoughts to deepen, or for real-life experiences to occur that feel mystically relevant to what I’m writing about.

I do my best now to meet myself where I am as I’m writing—just as I’ve always strived to do with my students and children. There are ways my mothering and teaching have made me kinder and gentler to myself as a writer.

Three years and two days ago, my first memoir came into the world, and if you think I planned the 3-2-1 situation in the first half of this sentence, you don’t know me very well. I actually meant to post on April 18, when it would have been exactly three years since my memoir’s entry into the world, but I forgot.

Anyway, it’s been three years and two days since The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays was published. I wrote a Substack post on its first birthday, forgot to commemorate its second birthday in any kind of meaningful way, and am now re-posting the two-year-old post (originally titled “Birth and (after)birth,” because a) I’m a bad book mom and b) I’m still thinking about how complicated it is to write memoir—specifically, family memoir, which in some ways is every memoir. I mean, we’re all born into a family of one kind or another and we’re all here because of that family. Or in spite of that family. Or in spite and because of at the same time.

My memoir turns one today, which has me thinking a lot about the metaphors we use to describe how a book comes into the world. Gestation. Birth. Publication day is your book baby’s birthday. But a memoir is not a baby; it’s a placenta. Meaty, bloody, veined. If it tears from the uterus prematurely, the mother and baby die. If it stays behind after the baby is born, the mother dies. It has to come out, but only at the right time. What is the right time? I have no idea. The gestation period to make a human is about nine months. The gestation period to make a memoir, in my case, was 25 years, give or take.

Google “how to write a memoir about family,” and the word that comes up over and over again is “tricky.” All families are messy; everyone is entangled with everyone else.

Speaking of babies: my husband and I were 27 years old when our oldest son was diagnosed with autism. Our son was a baby—barely two and a half years old—and my husband and I were also babies, albeit gainfully employed babies with advanced degrees. When the diagnosing psychiatrist handed us a stapled, three-page to-do list at the end of our meeting, my husband and I looked wordlessly around the room for the responsible adult who would quarterback this enormous and terrifying enterprise. But of course the responsible adult was supposed to be us.

The to-do list was long—contact the regional center so our son could start receiving follow-up services, start working with a speech therapist, an occupational therapist, a behavioral therapist, devote as much time as possible to “incidental teaching,” which we would interpret as “devote every spare moment to setting up playdates, pointing out objects of interest, encouraging shared attention, and lying on the floor facilitating pretend play.” This was 1997, and we felt very much alone. We didn’t know anyone with an autistic child, and what most people knew about autism was informed largely by the film Rain Man. There wasn’t much longitudinal data about early intervention for children diagnosed with autism in preschool, and the data that did exist was grim and focused on all the things children and adults with autism couldn’t do, would never be able to do.

Both my husband and I were ambitious, educated people living in Palo Alto among other ambitious, educated people, so we almost immediately decided that with the right combination of unstinting effort, speech therapy, occupational therapy, behavioral therapy, and “incidental” teaching, our son would become indistinguishable from other children. From normal children, not to put too fine a point on it, because “neurotypical” and “neurodivergent” were not yet terms that had entered the common lexicon. It was not yet fashionable to come out as autistic on social media. There was, in fact, no social media to speak of.

So instead of doom scrolling, which was not yet a thing, we read books: the grim scientific literature, but also parent testimonials—accounts of autistic children who, through the power of prayer, or intensive behavioral intervention, or a combination of both, recovered. That was the term: recovered, like the children had been sick and now they were well. The parent testimonials were earnest. They were saccharine and simplistic. But the hope they offered was a lifeline, and I clung to it with both hands even as I scoffed at their artless prose.

And then two things happened. The first was that in the face of our full-court press (behavioral intervention, speech therapy, occupational therapy, playdates, incidental-but-not-really-incidental teaching), our son began to respond to us, to put together words, then sentences, to show an interest in other children. The second was that my friend Lila sent me a copy of Naked, David Sedaris’ book of essays. I wasn’t familiar with David Sedaris, but it was clear from the first page that he was my people. I had not known that kind of writing was possible: it started all comfy-cozy, like you were petting a dozing cat and suddenly the cat woke up and sank its teeth and claws into your hand, sort of playing and sort of not. 

I thought, I can write like this. This is what I sound like. Ironic distance, snark, sentences that start innocuous and end with a gut punch—that’s my language. I would be like David Sedaris, but straight and Russian-Jewish instead of Greek and gay. I would rewrite the autism narrative. I would tell our story as only I could. It would be a literate, snarky, dark, funny account of what it was really like to raise an autistic child. The subtext, of course, was that our extraordinary child would also recover, though I would never use that word. 

I thought, I can write like this. This is what I sound like. Ironic distance, snark, sentences that start innocuous and end with a gut punch—that’s my language. I would be like David Sedaris, but straight and Russian-Jewish instead of Greek and gay.

Meanwhile, life got in the way of my masterwork. I taught freshman humanities and composition at Stanford, worked at the Stanford undergraduate admission office, had two more children, opened a private college counseling practice, did laundry, drove carpool, located shin guards and cleats for Saturday soccer games, tracked down lost goggles for swim team practices, ran the elementary school book fair, wiped down the kitchen counter. Our oldest son surpassed all expectations: he attended regular school, played soccer, swam on the summer league swim team, wrestled varsity in high school, got his driver’s license. He was funny and charming and determined. He was also volatile and impulsive. He terrorized his younger brother and sister. He slammed doors; my husband and I yelled and forced doors open. When he was in middle school, the vice principal had my number on speed dial. 

I was about three years into my college counseling practice at that point, working with tightly-wound, extravagantly accomplished high school students (and their equally tightly-wound, extravagantly accomplished parents). They measured success by an entirely different yardstick: AP courses, test scores in the 99th percentile, résumés that would make most adults weep with envy, and, of course, acceptance to colleges so selective that to be admitted was more difficult than for a wise man to enter the kingdom of heaven. (See: needles, camels.)

I no longer wanted to write the triumphing over autism story. We had done that, sort of. The story now was about living on both sides of a cognitive divide so deep it sometimes threatened to swallow me whole. Parents confided that they were in an absolute state over whether their child would get into Stanford while I was en route to a parent weekend in a wilderness therapy program in Utah. I have real problems, I wanted to scream. Also, the good schools that we all moved to Palo Alto for? The toxic achievement culture? The teen suicides that everyone talks about for 24 hours after they happen and then never again? This. Is. Not. Normal.

Is Johns Hopkins (most recent admit rate, 6.5 percent) a safety, a student wanted to know. Get over yourselves, people! I wanted to scream. Out loud I said, “No, it’s really not.” The student asked, “But what if I take seven APs my senior year?”

But then, who was I to throw stones? I was taking money from families whose extravagantly accomplished children would have, at best, a three percent chance of being admitted into Stanford. Stanford’s current 3.7 percent admit rate is an average; it means that half of the nearly 60,000 students who apply get in at a higher rate and half of them… do not. The ones who get in at a higher rate are recruited athletes, children of wealthy donors, national science competition winners, faculty and staff offspring, applicants from underrepresented parts of the country and the world. The ones who get in at a lower rate, or not at all? Average excellent students from Palo Alto and its environs. 

And yet: everyone’s college list looked the same. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the UC’s (but really, only UCLA and Berkeley), the other Ivies, MIT, Caltech. Tufts. Duke. Carnegie Mellon. Is Johns Hopkins (most recent admit rate, 6.5 percent) a safety, a student wanted to know. Get over yourselves, people! I wanted to scream. Out loud I said, “No, it’s really not.” The student asked, “But what if I take seven APs my senior year?”

I was not like them. In high school, I smoked cigarettes behind the auditorium and wore too much black eyeliner and got a C in physics my junior year, a development which pissed off my parents to no end and fazed me not at all. I could not understand this single-minded focus on getting in, on beating the odds. “I understand the chances are very low,” a parent would say to me. “But there’s a chance, right?”

Me, I was not a sheep, a slave to status, a try-hard. I did not think the sun rose and set on where my children went to college. My oldest son had gone to college—against all odds, I might add, to a school not commonly on the college lists of Bay Area students, and that was just fine with my husband and me, which proved that we were not like everybody else, didn’t it? Except that in his third year in college, our son developed suicidal depression and had to take a medical leave and was picked up by the Highway Patrol on the Golden Gate Bridge, where he said he was just sightseeing but we all knew better, and was put on a psychiatric hold, and our world unraveled completely, and suddenly it became blazingly clear to me that we were like that. We were exactly like that. 

The ancient Greeks called this peripatea—a fearsome reversal, a leveling realization that the problem is not other people. It’s you. You’re the contagion ravaging Thebes, your hubris led your agreeable-seeming wife to stab you in the bathtub, you scoffed at other parents enrolling their children in SAT bootcamp and thought, I’m nothing like them, while enrolling your own child in speech therapy and occupational therapy and spending all your free time on incidental-but-not-really teaching. You were the one who asked the diagnosing psychiatrist whether there might be a chance—yes, you said, you understood that the chances were low—that your son would be indistinguishable.

The stakes were different, sure—acceptance to Yale vs. acceptance, period, going to the best possible college vs. being able to live independently—but the fierce urgency was the same. We all wanted what was best for our children, or what we thought was best for our children. So did the parents indicted in Operation Varsity Blues. In an interview four years after her indictment, Felicity Huffman said, “I felt I had to give my daughter a chance at a future.” Read that again: had to.

I, too, felt like there was no other choice: push our son as hard as we could so that he could survive on his own after we were no longer around to help him. And it worked: he regained his equilibrium, he graduated from college, he works, he has his own health insurance. He beat the odds. We threaded the needle. But the aftermath of the decisions my husband and I made—to push him as hard as we did, to have two more children, each of whom struggled with depression, anxiety, and learning differences, to live in Palo Alto, with its excellent schools (though not, I should note, excellent for all students), to write and publish a memoir detailing all of the above—still haunts me.

Google “how to write a memoir about family,” and the word that comes up over and over again is “tricky.” All families are messy; everyone is entangled with everyone else. Take David Sedaris’ writing about his family: his loopy grandmother (“the fish, he have a suicide”), his chic, chain-smoking, alcoholic mother, his cheapskate father, his five siblings. One of those siblings, Tiffany, didn’t want to be written about, but he did it anyway. Tiffany struggled with mental illness, with substance abuse, with emotional swings so intense that “one day she’d throw a dish at you and the next she’d create a stunning mosaic made of the shards.” When she died by suicide, he wrote about that too. When you’re a writer, everything is material. Right? Right?

My children gave me permission to write about them, but who am I to hold their pain up to the light? Except that their pain is my pain too; their story veins my story, my expectations thread through their lives. My parents, who emigrated from the former Soviet Union when I was nine years old, placed expectations on me that run through the expectations my husband and I held when we moved to Palo Alto because of its tree-lined streets and its excellent schools. I wanted to tell the truth about our family. I wanted my children to feel seen. I wanted to say out loud what no one else would: that the fixation on prestige was destroying a generation of young people, that we need to reconsider how we quantify success, that our children’s path is not our own. More than wanted to: had to. For years, I lived a bifurcated life, soothing, knowledgeable college counselor at work, anguished, anxious, frenetic mother at home, helping other people’s children, midwifing thousands of college essays into the world, encouraging my students to be authentic, to be audacious, to tell difficult truths. I did this, and all along, the story I wanted to—had to—tell grew and swelled until I couldn’t keep it inside any longer. 

All three of my children were born by cesarean section; I’ve never experienced the urge to push during childbirth. But the urge to publish? That I know well. Between September 2020 and April 2021, over 70 traditional publishers said no to my manuscript. In October 2021, an indie publisher said yes; the earliest publication date was April 18, 2023. So I waited and edited and waited some more and freaked out quietly that I was ruining my children’s lives, that giving permission was one thing and having your most vulnerable moments splashed across the page was another, but by then it was too late to change course.

About a month before my memoir was published, my oldest son was visiting for spring break and asked if he could see an advance copy. It bears mentioning that the title of my memoir is The Golden Ticket, so called because the golden ticket is a complicated thing—an object of desire, a token of admission, an invitation to trouble, a be-careful-what-you-wish-for gilded rectangle. He started reading it that evening and then went to his room, continuing to read as he walked down the hallway. The following morning, he came into the kitchen disheveled and slightly wild-eyed. My husband and I were making breakfast. “I stayed up most of the night finishing your book,” he announced. We looked at him expectantly. My heart was pounding.

“It’s really good,” he said.

At 27, shell-shocked in a stupidly sunny doctor’s office (offices where bad news is delivered are often sunny), I could not imagine that our son would ever acquire meaningful speech, know that we were his parents, understand what a hug was, live independently. Crippling depression almost took him away from us. Raising him undid us and lifted us in ways we could never imagine. And now this child, this man—who exceeded every expectation—looked at us and said, “And I know what the golden ticket is.” A pause, a tentative smile. “It’s me.”

The world is a broken and beautiful place. There are no responsible adults. All we can do is make mosaics out of shards, tell the stories we have to tell before we bleed out,​​ try our best not to hurt each other. 

A version of this essay was originally published in Mutha Magazine under the title “Spilling Your Guts: Motherhood, Memoir, and What I Learned from David Sedaris.” That version does have a picture of a placenta, so consider yourselves warned.

Funny story: after all that ambivalence and anguish, I went and wrote another memoir. It’s about a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast with my mother and daughter, featuring family history, internet memes, Russian proverbs, Homeric detours, aggressive ostriches, and the second season of The White Lotus. More info here.

Also! If you’re in the LA area, please come to Book Soup in West Hollywood for a conversation with my very smart friend Lilya Kaganovsky, who is also a fellow Soviet emigre and teaches Russian and Soviet literature at UCLA. If that sounds daunting, don’t be intimidated—Lilya and I go so far back that our conversation is almost sure to touch on problematic ‘80s movies and other irrelevant but fascinating bits of nostalgia. I hope you can join us!

Henry David Thoreau famously wrote, “Beware of all enterprises requiring new clothes,” but the fact is he used to hightail it home from Walden Pond on a regular basis so his mom could do his laundry. I personally am not afraid of new clothes. In fact, I’m a little too unafraid of new clothes, and if you don’t believe me, just take a look at my closet. (On second thought, don’t.)

Ever since I can remember, clothes have helped me figure out who I was in the world. When I was a teaching assistant in grad school, my uniform was a long flowy skirt, size small men’s blazer from Goodwill, Doc Martens. Long flowy skirt for whimsy, men’s blazer for gravitas, Doc Martens for a soupçon of don’t fuck with me, I may be 22 years old but I totally know what I’m doing. Presumably this combo worked, because my 18-year-old students never gave me any trouble. Then again, that could have been because I held the grade book and they needed a passing grade in the Intro to Humanities sequence to graduate.

Before graduate school, I worked as a camp counselor. After graduate school, I became a mom. After that I worked as a humanities lecturer at Stanford, then as an admissions officer, then as a private college admissions counselor. Now I’m a full-time writer. What all those jobs have in common is a loosely defined dress code.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, when my mother worked as an engineer, she was usually a sole woman in rooms full of men. She dressed in tailored skirts and blazers and blouses with the thing at the throat that looks kind of like a tie and kind of like a bow, which signaled that you meant business but were also feminine. My mother is short, like me, and she invariably wore three-inch heels, because women the size of fifth-graders tend not to get taken seriously. There was no dress code at her work—her male coworkers wore khakis and short-sleeved button-down shirts—but she had her own dress code and it worked for her in that it jibed with her sense of herself as a professional, no-nonsense, highly competent person.

When you work with words instead of circuits and motherboards, dressing is trickier. At least it was for me. You’d think it would get easier as I grew into my power and confidence with age, but you would be incorrect. Oscar Wilde once quipped that with age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone, and I am living proof.

In part, I suspect that this is because in my mind, I am lithe, graceful, bohemian, and free spirited. In my mind, I’m eternally young, insouciant, clever, and tall (but not too tall). I look good in whatever I throw on in the morning, even a burlap sack. In my mind, I look like this:

In reality, I… do not. I could make a case for clever, but not for any of the other things. I’m too anxious and insecure to be insouciant. I occasionally buy layered chiffon skirts I think will make me look like a former ballerina but end up making me look like a middle-aged stocky Russian peasant woman who murdered a countess and stole her petticoats. Wool shawls entice me with promises to transform me into young Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but I catch the dangling ends on drawer pulls in our kitchen and almost decapitate myself. I don’t know how many of you have experienced the dissonance between the you that you imagine in your head and the you that you see in the mirror, but that dissonance is brutal, y’all.

When you become a full-time writer with no set schedule and no set workplace other than, like, your house, it gets worse. You (by which I mean I) wake up in the morning, put a long cardigan over your pajamas, and go look at your computer in case something wonderful magically materialized overnight, like an unsolicited book deal from a Big 5 publisher or an invitation to be featured on Fresh Air or Oprah’s Book of the Month club. Failing that, you check your Substack stats (y’all should really subscribe if you don’t already, and if you do, tell all your friends to subscribe) and your book stats (buy my book if you haven’t already, and if you have, it makes a great Mother’s Day present, just saying). You think about writing, but writing is scary and hard, so you try to get to Genius in Spelling Bee and take a quick peek at your social media just to see if anything interesting is happening and three hours later you look up and you haven’t done anything and you’re still wearing your pajamas and long cardigan which is definitely not a bathrobe, a fallacy I will hold onto until the day I die.

And then, one day (this past Tuesday, in fact!) your book is published, in spite of all your efforts to sabotage yourself by avoiding writing and staring into your computer while dressed in your pajama and long cardigan ensemble at 2 pm. Yes, friends, Troika is out in the world! On Wednesday, I did a Zoom book launch with and , and we talked about our books and how and why we wrote them, and Ilene performed an original song she composed called “Bittersweet,” which gave me chills because it was so full of beauty and yearning and elemental truth, and the Zoom room was full of palpable, exuberant, supportive energy, and I am still buzzing from all of it.

A Zoom launch is easy to dress for because people only you from the chest up so you can get away with a black t-shirt and what some snobby people might call sweatpants but I call “soft pants.” An in-person book launch is a different story, and I had one of those yesterday at our local bookstore. Dressing for an in-person event is different because there’s no flattering ring light. There’s no “touch up my appearance” slide bar (mad props to whatever genius at Zoom came up with that). There’s just you, trying not to look like a short insecure middle-aged lady, hoping that people will like you and the book you wrote.

To completely conflate myself and the book I wrote, I decided to dress like my book cover, to which end I wore a stormy blue button-down from Zara and a red leather cuff. Did anyone notice that I was dressed like my book? Only when I pointed it out by holding my red-cuffed wrist in front of my stormy blue shirt for emphasis, which took all the fun out of it.

But can I tell you something? It was SO FUN. It was so fun I didn’t even care what I was wearing. David volunteered to be my in-conversation partner and he practically wallpapered his copy of Troika with sticky notes and asked thoughtful and thought-provoking questions, and then the people who came asked thoughtful and thought-provoking questions, and then I signed copies of my book, which is now out in the world finding new readers, and now I’m coming around to thinking that maybe the words I put on a page matter just as much—maybe more—than the clothes I put on myself.

To which end, please order Troika, if for no other reason than the color scheme is GORGEOUS.

It's pretty AND fun to read!

Updates:

Bay Area folks! I’ll be talking road trips and homecomings with authors Kevin Wilson and Tomas Moniz at the Bay Area Book Festival on Sunday, May 31. Come join the red car club if you can, or check out my other events here.

Huge shout out to my book launch besties, and , whose books are suffused with grace, sorrow, sweetness, and practical wisdom and who are genuinely good people (in addition to being fantastically gifted writers. And musicians. And advocates. And so many other things).

That’s right, not as often as you should. I know this because when I asked people (specifically, my friend Tracy), she raised her eyebrows at me in a very “SAY WHAT NOW?” kind of way. I’m guessing this is because venery is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the pursuit of indulgence in sexual pleasure, and we all know what sometimes happens in the aftermath of such indulgences. But get your mind out of the gutter, because I’m referring to the second definition of venery, which is the art, act, or practice of hunting. Yep, the venison you might have ordered at a destination restaurant is just a fancy word for deer, derived from the Latin venari, to hunt.

In medieval times, noblemen invented their own jargon for a grouping of animals: a swarm of bees, a pride of lions, a murmuration of starlings, a skulk of foxes, a murder of crows, a shrewdness of apes. No one knows when these terms were originally codified, but they’re believed to have made their first recorded appearance in 1486 in The Book of Saint Albans, which details gentlemanly pursuits such as hawking, hunting, and heraldry. I would like to call your attention to two items about The Book of Saint Albans: its authorship is traditionally attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, a 15th century prioress, and the Wikipedia entry showing a photograph of the book (currently located in the Cambridge University Library) notes that there is an “obscene drawing in pencil added below text.” The obscene drawing is of unknown provenance, as far as I can tell. Both those items make me inexpressibly happy.

I went down this delightful and absolutely unnecessary rabbit hole because I recently stumbled on a book a student gave me years ago called An Exaltation of Larks.

The subtitle of An Exaltation of Larks is The Venereal Game, because the author, James Lipton, wants to share existing terms of venery as well as to invite you, the reader, to come up with your own. To get us started, he gives us a Persistence of Parents and an Ingratitude of Children, an Unction (or Extreme Unction) of Undertakers, a Hive of Allergists, and a Transplant of Suburbanites.

My edition of The Exaltation of Larks was published pre-internet, a dark time when going down rabbit holes was far more labor intensive and time consuming than it is now. We all know that the internet has caused chaos and pandemonium significant changes in the social fabric, but on the plus side, the internet directed me to Penguins International, where I discovered that there are no fewer than five (maybe more) terms for a group of penguins, including Raft (on water), Waddle (on land), Colony or Rookery (large breeding groups), and Crèche (a group of chicks that band together for safety when their parents hunt).

Speaking of penguins, you probably remember Alfred Date, Australia’s oldest living man who, at age 109, knit tiny sweaters for injured penguins. I would call that a bundle of benevolence, or maybe a skein of sweetness.

The one problem with the venereal game is that once you start thinking of names for collective nouns, it’s hard to stop. So far I’ve come up with “a distraction of cell phones,” “a futility of anti-aging creams,” “a disappointment of Mallomars,” and “an obstruction of seniors” (in reference to the large group of senior citizens who take over all the TINY tables at my favorite coffee place by pushing them together into a large amoeba-like shape which is clearly NOT HOW THE TINY TABLES ARE MEANT TO BE USED).

In conclusion, we should all be spending more time thinking about terms of venery. Please share yours in the comments!

Updates:

Only 15 days before my second book, Troika, hits the bookshelves! If you haven’t preordered your copy, one click will take you to every conceivable purchasing option! If you’ve already preordered, thank you! If you haven’t, you should! Or tell your library to order it! Or annoy all your friends and tell them to order it! Apologies for this extravagance of exclamation marks!

Preorder Troika

What is Chaos Book Club, you ask? It’s a conversation space for paid subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I will be posting periodically (today’s question is about a popular book you disliked; mine was Fredrick Backman’s My Friends), but feel free to start a bookish thread anytime

Join chat

Read more

However! All is not lost because I have news to report, so gather round and I will tell you about something that happened just last week:

I’m at Town & Country Shopping Center, an upscale outdoor mall across the street from Stanford University in Palo Alto. I’ve snagged an outdoor table on the flagstone terrace in front of Peet’s Coffee. I have my americano with steamed almond milk in a for-here mug instead of the paper cup that will leach microplastics into my coffee and therefore into me, because who needs that? I have my fountain pen and my notebook. The fountain pen is one of three, because I keep misplacing the other two. Sometimes I misplace all three, which is a catastrophe because I can’t write longhand with anything other than a fountain pen, full stop. The notebook is one of five or six, because I can’t stop buying notebooks and because it’s fun to see what I’ve written in whichever one I’ve grabbed. I was going to write “from my desk,” but the notebooks are rarely on my desk. They’re usually on the breakfast bar, or in one of my many oversized totes, or on top of the dryer. This particular notebook says STRANGE IDEAS AND IMPURE THOUGHTS on the cover.

I brought the notebook and pen so I can make progress on my third book, but there are two middle-aged men at a table next to me and they are talking loudly about someone one of them thinks is stupid and dishonest and then they mention a cybertruck for some reason so now I hate both of them.

The middle-aged man in the button-down shirt is telling the middle-aged man in the polo shirt about his divorce, and now I can’t not listen, but there’s too much noise and I can’t hear everything. Polo Shirt says, “You gotta figure out how to give her [unclear].” Give her what? What??

From further snatches of their conversation, I come to understand that for her—presumably Button-Down’s wife—to get a gig is going to be really hard, but can’t tell if that’s a good or a bad thing. Polo Shirt tells Button-Down that he understands this business better than anyone. “I’m here for you,” he says. “If you ever wanna get a beer and talk or whatever…”

Then he adds, “The most important thing is not to let her have the money.”

I hope they can’t tell that I am transcribing their conversation in my STRANGE IDEAS AND IMPURE THOUGHTS notebook and judging them as hard as I can. I’m not exactly in a position to judge anyone since I am shamelessly eavesdropping on a private conversation but maybe they shouldn’t be sitting outside yelling about cybertrucks and the soon-to-be ex-wife, who, according to Polo Shirt, is “very pull-backy,” as opposed to his friend Button-Down. “You’re incredibly…” he says, breaks off, restarts. “You like to look at your future, and your future’s incredibly bright. Don’t worry about all the shit she’s putting in the kids’ heads.”

Then one of them says something about a million being good enough, and then they leave and I feel bereft because what am I supposed to do for entertainment now?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I live for moments like this. Snatches of conversation, glimpses of other lives. Weirdly, I’ve been on a reading run of books that mirror this kind of fragmentation—bits of dialogue, brief scenes, random facts, and archival material juxtaposed in surprising and beautiful ways. (More beautiful than the conversation I overheard, for sure, but similarly fragmented.) Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, Miriam Towes’ A Truce That Is Not Peace, Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin, Beth Ann Fennelly’s The Irish Goodbye, all in quick succession, like the universe purposely put them my way, one after the other.

Can I just share a quote I loved from A Truce That Is Not Peace?

I can’t imagine your sorrow. I can’t imagine your pain. Yeah, you fucking can! You can fucking imagine it. Go ahead and fucking try.

Speaking of sharing quotes: because I have been overflowing with thoughts about all these books that I just read, I am announcing the creation of Chaos Book Club for paid subscribers. Here’s how it would work: no set book, no set meeting day (because honestly, who has time?), just good book-related chaos, by which I mean anyone who is dying to talk about a book they read or are reading can start a thread whenever and other people can chime in. Or exchange book recommendations. AND, to take the edge off upgrading your subscription, which I’m sure at least one or two of you has been contemplating, I’m offering a Daylight Saving Special of (brace yourselves) 50% off a monthly OR annual subscription. That means you can be part of Chaos Book Club for the low, low price of $2.50 a month or $25 a year, and that’s even before you factor in the deep satisfaction of supporting my creative work and my eavesdropping habit. Grab your discount here!

Daylight Saving Savings!

As always, comments are welcomed and encouraged and sought after, by which I mean I compulsively refresh Substack after posting to see if anyone said anything. ❤️

Updates:

If you haven’t preordered Troika, you should totally preorder Troika. It comes out on April 7, and if you preorder now you will a) help boost the book’s visibility and b) be among the first to read about mothers and daughters, terrible weather, ill-tempered ostriches, the second season of The White Lotus (yes, the one with Jennifer Coolidge!), Greek mythology, Russian superstitions, and California history. Ordering info is here, but you can also support the book for free by recommending it for purchase at your local library and/or suggesting it to your book club! Or to your aunt Janice! Or to strangers in the street! You do you!

I’m reaching full overwhelm, y’all, which might be good news because there’s a high probability that when my overwhelm cup overfloweth, I’ll snap into Ninja Hyperfocus Mode™ and become ruthlessly efficient. But that day is not today. Right now, I have approximately 29 tabs open on my computer, I can’t find two of my three fountain pens, I have a book I need to return to the library before they bill me for a replacement copy, and also, terrible things are happening everywhere at an inconceivable rate and I have to keep checking on them to prevent more terrible things from happening. Oh, and my second book launches in 34 days (obligatory preorder the book if you haven’t already because preorders make a big difference link!), so there’s all kinds of pre-publication stuff I should be doing. Am I doing the stuff? Sort of, but probably not as much as I should because the focus, she eludes me. I mean, someone has to keep checking the news and also get to Genius in the Spelling Bee!

Ironically, one of the open tabs on my laptop is a new project—a collection of essays about being a middle-aged woman with ADHD. Right now it’s a very short and very disorganized document called (and I am not making this up) BOOK 3 LOLOLOLOL. I’m supposed to get the first 50 pages to my publisher “sometime this spring” (her words), and boy, was that phrasing a big mistake on her part because what she should have said was I NEED THE FIRST 50 PAGES IN MY INBOX BY MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 5 and I guarantee you they would be there at 11:59 pm on March 4.

Also, wanna hear something funny? I was thinking it would be so cool if my book of essays about being a middle-aged woman with ADHD came out in October of next year because October is National ADHD Awareness Month. But then again, every month is National ADHD Awareness Month if you’re a person with ADHD, so would my target audience even notice if it came out in November? Or, you know, whenever?

But I’ll tell you what was really nice about being a person with ADHD and teaching a writing class for people with ADHD: a lot of nodding.

Like, a lot. Nobody batted an eye when we talked about making lists (so many lists!) as a way to avoid actual writing, or about doing research (so much research!) for the same reason. Everyone understood about the guilt and the shame and the panic that ensues when someone (my husband) tries to organize 29 open tabs. Yes, I told the class about the tabs, and everyone nodded, because of course they did. Some of them have more open tabs than I do.

I also said something in my class I’m pretty proud of: that right now, my students didn’t need a finished book. They needed a next step, however small, that made sense for them. And everyone nodded! Because a journey of a thousand miles really does begin with a single step! Because nothing big gets done in one fell swoop, or one foul swoop, as my son once said when he was in elementary school. Because sometimes you need to sit in a room with brilliantly creative people whose wiring occasionally get in the way of their writing. Because it’s easier to take a step when someone is nodding alongside you.

If you’d like a sneak peek at the first few chapters of Troika, you can find them here. Also, I have EVENTS!!! I’ll be updating them as more are added, but if you’re in the Bay Area or in LA in April, I’d love to see you!

There’s no particular logic to what or when I write in these notebooks, or which notebook I use on any given day. They’re not organized thematically, chronologically, or even chromatically. The only remotely organized thing I do is write down the date before each entry, sort of like a diary, even though the notebooks are not technically diaries. I like flipping back through the pages, occasionally jotting down responses to something I’ve written in the margins, which feels like being in dialogue with my past self, or which might be less generously construed as talking to myself on paper.

Anyway, in flipping through one of the notebooks I came across something I wrote down late last year with no context or explanation. What I wrote was “To write about anything is to make it a spectacle.”

Where did this oracular observation come from? I have no idea. There was no attribution, and googling it did not yield any leads. As much as I would like to take credit, I’m pretty sure I didn’t come up with it on my own. The only other person I know who might have said such a thing is my cousin Masha, who routinely drops startlingly astute observations during our frequent Zoom chats, but she doesn’t remember saying it. It’s good though, right?

To write about anything is to make it a spectacle.

Those of us who write creative nonfiction make a spectacle of ourselves on a regular basis. Maybe not in a notebook, which is private, but certainly anytime we publish a book, or a Substack post about writing in a notebook, or about anything really. I am currently using the first person plural because the first person plural is a lean-to where I shelter with other writers. Safety in numbers. We make a spectacle of ourselves on a regular basis is not nearly as scary to say as I make a spectacle of myself on a regular basis.

My long-dead grandmother might have asked, “This is what you do for fun?”

I wonder about that sometimes. About the push and pull of it. I have things I want to say and I’m afraid to say them. I’m afraid that no one will read my writing and I’m afraid that my writing will provoke rage, or derision, or, worst of all, an indifferent shrug. I’m afraid of being called privileged, self-indulgent, self-dramatizing. I’m afraid of whatever it is in me that compels me to keep making a spectacle of myself. I question why I have to drag other people into my stories—my parents, my children, my husband. I don’t live in a vacuum, after all. One day I’ll write about how I took our first cat to the vet for the last time. No one is safe, not even the cat.

“Again with the whining? Just go back to your fancy job as a college counselor for fuck’s sake,” my long-dead grandmother might have said, if she swore and was still alive.

Truly, no one is safe. Not even my long-dead grandmother, with whom I am currently having an imaginary conversation.

This is the thing about writing. Put some words together and you raise the dead. Suppose I were to tell you that my grandmother collected miniature shoes, loved shopping at Ross Dress for Less, hid Hershey bars in her purse and gave them to my kids before dinner even though I asked her not to. For a moment, she becomes real, doesn’t she? This is what writing does. Tell someone not to think of a white elephant and suddenly it’s all they can think about. There’s probably a technical term for this, but I prefer to think of it as magic. Abracadabra—something from nothing. A white elephant. A sentence of unknown provenance in a notebook.

This is why I write things down. Because you never know what treasure you might find later—your past self handing a gift out to your current self, your current self typing these words, holding them out to others, hoping they will be well received.

Updates:

•In case you somehow missed my 848 earlier exhortations to preorder my book, please preorder my book! It’s about three generations of women (me, my mother, and my daughter) on a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast, featuring terrible weather, family history, Greek myth, Russian proverbs, internet memes, the second season of The White Lotus, and aggressive ostriches.

•It’s not too late to sign up for my three-part virtual class for neurodivergent adult writers (particularly women with ADHD, of whom I am one)! If you’re stuck mid-project or simply can’t get started, this class will provide a supportive community to help you build a writing practice that actually works. Our first class is this Sunday, March 1!

Ha ha, just kidding. There is so much to worry about. Will people like my book? Will we still have a functioning society by the time it’s published? Is it bad form to be like, “Hey, I know the world is on fire and all but guess what? I have a book coming out and you should buy it!”

My husband David tells me that both things can be true: the world can be on fire and I can be excited about my book. He says stuff like that because he is a grounded and sensible person and I am not. I keep things chaotic exciting. David keeps calm. He once quietly and competently ushered a baby raccoon out of our house in the middle of the night, during which time I fidgeted anxiously in the hallway, periodically emitting little shrieks and asking whether he wanted me to get the broom.

The thing that is currently making me anxious (okay, there are many things, but this is this week’s thing) is how to navigate the publishing marketplace without selling my soul to the devil.

Last month I wrote about preorders and how important they are for increasing a book’s visibility, especially on Amazon, and that even though I consider Amazon the devil’s engine, buying books on Amazon does actually help authors. Same with Audible, which, together with Amazon, is where most readers get their books and audiobooks. As it happens, I have an audiobook of my first book on Audible, and I just finished recording the audiobook for my upcoming book, which I assumed I was also going to upload to Audible, but then on Sunday published a post called Jeff Bezos Is Not Good for Books and now I’m not so sure.

By “not so sure,” I mean that as soon as I finished Brooke’s post, I screeched into our kitchen like a small but very angry fire engine, startling David, who was peacefully drinking tea and minding his own business, and announced that I was not under any circumstances going to upload my audiobook to Audible. I was going to upload it to Libro.fm because fuck this shit.

Then David and I had what our friends Jarvis and Tina call a “fighty chat,” which is a term for a mostly civil and only slightly heated discussion, informed in part by the fact that David did not enjoy having his tea-drinking interrupted by a screed about soulless billionaires and late stage capitalism.

David is not pro-Amazon, just to be clear. Nor is he pro-soulless billionaires or late stage capitalism. He is, however, a fan of thinking things through. And his thinking was that my upcoming book is already on Amazon in paperback and Kindle versions, and that uploading the audiobook to Audible would mean that it would be easily discovered and downloaded by people who only listen to audiobooks. Uploading it to an ethical indie platform with a dramatically narrower reach would be a principled stand and also the publishing equivalent of cutting off my nose to spite my face.

That’s how they get you.

By “they,” I mean the soulless billionaires who have effectively cornered the market on how books get discovered and read.

So here are my questions: where do you get your books? (Your local bookstore, Amazon, the library, from a well-read friend?) If you listen to audiobooks, what platform do you use? How likely are you to switch to a new audiobook platform if it directly benefited independent bookstores and treated authors like actual people and not like indentured servants?

Please let me know in the comments. Also, if there’s anything else I should be worrying about, let me know that too, because you don’t know what you don’t know, amirite?

Updates:

•In case you somehow missed my 847 earlier exhortations to preorder my book, please preorder my book! It’s about three generations of women (me, my mother, and my daughter) on a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast, featuring terrible weather, family history, Greek myth, Russian proverbs, internet memes, the second season of The White Lotus, and aggressive ostriches.

•If you read this entire post and found yourself thinking, You know what would be great? Taking a writing class with this woman!, you’re in luck, because this March, I will be teaching a three-part virtual class for neurodivergent adult writers (particularly women with ADHD, of whom I am one). If you’re stuck mid-project or simply can’t get started, this class will provide a supportive community to help you build a writing practice that actually works. The early bird registration rate ends this Sunday!

•

First of all, THANK YOU. Second of all, I’m sorry it took me this long to put words to how incredible it is that you’re all here.

I started this Substack in November 2023. My first post went out to 30 people. One person signed up as a paid subscriber. The fact that anyone would pay money for my writing was mind-boggling, even though I had published a book by then. It made me feel like this was serious. Publishing a book was serious too, but I hadn’t been doing much writing after the book was published, and I was having serious doubts about whether I was truly a writer or simply a person who had published a book and tapped out. Having a paid subscriber—even the one, especially the one—meant I had to show up and deliver the goods, which meant that I could no longer I say, “Eh, I don’t feel like writing this week.” That kind of accountability was life-changing.

Then more of you signed on. And as …

Read more

If you’ve been reading my Substack for any amount of time, you know that my parents and I emigrated from the Soviet Union and came to the US as political refugees when I was nine. The story of our journey is one of several plot lines in my forthcoming memoir, Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip. Other plot lines include a road trip to California’s Central Coast, the second season of The White Lotus, terrible weather, Greek mythology, and aggressive ostriches. I’ve been putting up previews of the chapters over the past few weeks, but I’m pausing those for the time being because several people whose opinion I trust have pointed out that if I am giving away free milk no one will buy the cow (aka my book, which, by the way, also features cows!). So please preorder the book, because preorders are a huge deal (they’re cumulative and every single one of them counts toward the first day of publication and the more of them there are the more likely it is that the book makes a splash when it comes out and I WANT TO MAKE A SPLASH DAMMIT).

You may be wondering at this point what a post about trip to Palm Springs has anything to do with any of this (believe me, you wouldn’t be the first person to get lost in one of my tangents), but the connections are there. In fact, they undergird almost everything I write, because I keep circling around the same questions: how and where we live and where we find shelter.

Please be forewarned that there’s a manifestly unserious photo at the end for which I will not apologize.

I am the butt of many jokes at our house. Apparently, I am the most eccentric person my husband and children have ever met. I eat standing up at the breakfast bar. I consume nothing but twigs and leaves (otherwise known as cereal that doesn’t look like an evening in Las Vegas). I make overly acidic salad dressing. When we travel, I make people go on house tours.

All of this is slander. I may occasionally eat standing up at the breakfast bar (I also do most of my writing standing up at the breakfast bar, and SO WHAT), I enjoy a varied diet, my salad dressing is tart and delightful in spite of what David says, and what is wrong with going on house tours in architecturally significant cities?

In 2014, David and I took our two youngest children to New Orleans for spring break. We saw aboveground cemeteries and listened to jazz in Preservation Hall and ate chargrilled oysters and went on a swamp tour and everything was great. Until I signed us up for a two-hour walking tour of the Garden District and even though that was 11 years ago I have still not heard the end of it.

It may have been a little warm and also a little humid but OMG the houses! The history! The opportunity to see how people lived in a city and at a time so different from ours! And what did I get for all my efforts? “Historic house tour” is now my family’s way of saying “Mom wants to do a stupid boring thing and also she’s a weirdo.”

Well, last week this weirdo went to Palm Springs and dragged her husband on an architectural house tour (of just one house, and it was small) and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Also, excuse me for being curious about how people live.

The house we saw was in the hills above Palm Springs, and by “in the hills,” I mean actually built into the mountain, and by “built into the mountain,” I mean there’s a huge boulder that’s partly in the house and partly not.

Albert Frey, the Swiss-born architect who designed and built the house in 1964 and lived in it until his death in 1988, spent five years selecting the site and a year measuring the movement of the sun with a 10-foot pole. The bed is positioned to catch the sun as it rises; the roof is pitched to keep the sun out as it traverses the sky; the house is 800 square feet and stripped down to essentials—glass, metal, stone. Oh, and Frey spent most of his time walking around naked, so there’s a cowbell hanging near the steps up to the house that would let him know visitors were on their way up and give him a chance to throw on some clothes. If you want to geek out (I did), there’s more information here, including a fun tidbit about Palm Springs City Hall calling the house design “crazy” before approving it.

I am not a minimalist (just ask David about the throw pillows in our house, I dare you), but I was fascinated by the spareness of the house, its severe elegance, its clean lines, the way it foregrounds the contrast between the work of human hands and the harsh ruggedness of the landscape. And I was also fascinated by Palm Springs, where I had not been before, and by the way it too foregrounds the contrast between the work of human hands and the harsh ruggedness of the landscape in a way that I can only describe as surreal. Like, the mountains are right there, and they are serious mountains—not gentle foothills, like we have in the Bay Area, but the straight up, imposing kind—but also, here’s a building. Or, like, a larger-than-life statue of Marilyn Monroe.

Of course people lived in the shadow of these mountains long before midcentury modern architecture and Marilyn Monroe. They just lived in a way that acknowledged the vastness of the mountains and the desert and the smallness of human beings. I don’t mean to rhapsodize about a simpler, sparer, more harmonious way of life (see the part about throw pillows and also my general fondness for modern conveniences, like coffee and high-speed internet). But being in such close proximity to the mountains and the desert makes you think. Specifically, it made me think of “Ozymandias,” the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem about the ruins of a statue built as testament to the might of a king of kings, a statue now in pieces, surrounded by “boundless and bare / …lone and level sands.”

The desert is like that. The desert is boundless and level and doesn’t care about kings or Marilyn Monroe or bottomless mimosa brunches or the passage of time. When David and I visited Joshua Tree (by mutual agreement—we both like hiking), we ate our sandwiches in a cave with smoke-stained walls where indigenous people found shelter thousands of years before. We took pictures of Joshua trees and rock formations and decided that the landscape—again, surreal is the only word I can think of—must have inspired the art for The Flintstones, which, for the youngsters among you, is a cartoon about a couple based on Ralph and Alice Kramden in The Honeymooners but set in the Stone Age.

Fred and Wilma Flintstone (and their friends, Barney and Betty Rubble) live in a charming town called Bedrock and do all the things people did in the early 1960s—go to work, mow the lawn, listen to music, get their hair done, cook, go bowling—except all the conveniences are either made of stone or involve creative use of prehistoric animals. Which seems preposterous and stupid, but is the central premise of the show really wrong? Didn’t human beings always try to dress up their surroundings and themselves? Didn’t they play games? Didn’t they eat? Can you not imagine them here, among these insane rock formations, bickering about whose turn it is to sweep out the cave?

Also, because I don’t want you to think that all I do is sit around all day contemplating human vs. geologic time and obsessing about historically significant architecture, I also took a picture of a rock that looks like a butt.

Part of the fun of recycling old writing is that you notice things you didn’t notice before—in this case, that this post begins with “I am the butt of many jokes at our house” and ends with AN ACTUAL ROCK BUTT. Which I just noticed five minutes ago and which has made me disproportionately happy because inside I am a 12-year-old child.

He’s not, though.

The Spelling Bee on January 25 seems to intuit that the world is off-kilter. The first word I come across is PATRIOTIC. It makes me wince. When I was six and living in Moscow, my father showed me a drawing he had made of an American flag. He was giddy, and he’s not normally a giddy person. He explained the 13 stripes and the 50 stars; he said everyone in America was equal and free to do or say whatever they wanted, even if what they wanted was to criticize the government. It sounded like a fairy tale. Then he tore the drawing up because we lived in the Soviet Union, where even a drawing of the American flag was dangerous.

My next word is PATRIOT. Then CRAP. Then TROOP. Then TORPOR.

I find other words—TAPIOCA, APRICOT, PART, PARROT, RAPT, RAPTOR—but those are not the words I focus on. I’m drawn to APART, AIRPORT, PARATROOP, TRAP, APPARAT. By “drawn,” I don’t mean I like them. I mean “drawn” the way the tongue is drawn to an abscess on the tender part of the cheek. It hurts, but you touch it anyway.

The Spelling Bee has nine rankings: Beginner, Good Start, Moving Up, Good, Solid, Nice, Great, Amazing, and Genius. The more words you find, the higher you go. There’s a secret tenth ranking—Queen Bee—which you get only when you guess all the possible words. I usually try for Queen Bee, because I’m an overachiever. Because my parents and I came to the United States when I was nine and worked hard and did all the right things and moved up the rankings. Don’t stop till you get to the top. That’s the American Dream, right?

On January 25, I don’t have it in me to try for Queen Bee. I barely get to Genius, and even then, I don’t feel very smart. I’ve found over 30 words and I’m not even remotely satisfied. I just feel hollow.

JANUARY 2026

•Friday, January 23: Fireside Books, Redwood City, in conversation with Ginny Kubitz Moyer

APRIL 2026

•Thursday, April 9 at 7 pm: Books Inc., Palo Alto Troika launch. More information here.

•Friday, April 10 at 7 pm: Fireside Books & More, Redwood City, in conversation with Ginny Kubitz Moyer.

•Wednesday, April 15 at 5:30 pm : Book Passage, San Francisco Ferry Building, in conversation with Masha Rumer, author of Parenting with an Accent. More information here.

•Friday, April 24 at 7 pm: Book Soup, West Hollywood, in conversation about post-Soviet literature and displacement with Lilya Kaganovsky. More information here.

•Sunday, May 17 at 1 pm: Reading and signing, River House Books, Carmel-by-the-Sea

•Sunday, May 31 at 12:15 pm: Bay Area Book Festival, Taking the Long Roadtrip Home, in conversation with Kevin Wilson

•Friday, June 26 at 10 am: In conversation with author and journalist Sandee Brawarsky, Bob’s Well Bread, Ballard, CA

If you would like to start at the beginning, you can do so here.

I insist

“You know what they say about children and fools,” I say to my father after I finish the story of that long-ago uneventful road trip. I make my voice extra jaunty, because inside I don’t feel jaunty at all. “Anyway, we have cell phones now,” I add. “And I’m pretty sure I’d be just as inept at figuring out the CB radio now as I was in 1987.”

The three of us—my mother, my father, and I—are still standing in our entry. I’m itching to get going, but my father lingers, as though hoping that I’ll change my mind if he finds the right words. My mother, who has been twisting the shoulder strap of her purse, says, “I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

My father has a rueful smile and a half shrug for occasions when he gives up trying to convince my mother or me of something. He smiles, half shrugs, and tells us to drive safely. Then he nods for emphasis and walks out into the rain.

If you’re not home, you’re in danger

Two months after my father was born, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and two months after that, my grandmother Tsilya and my four-month-old father boarded a train crammed with refugees headed to Kirov, an industrial city over a thousand miles to the northeast. My grandfather was sent west to fight. My grandmother’s parents, her two sisters, and her nieces and nephews were going to take a later train.

Then they disappeared. I always thought their train was bombed en route, but my father told me recently that no one actually knew what happened to them, that the train being bombed would have been the best possible outcome. He didn’t say what the worst possible outcome was. One of the sisters had a newborn.

But on the train to Kirov, my grandmother, who was not yet my grandmother, didn’t know any of that. She was preoccupied, I’m guessing, with breastfeeding and diapering and keeping my father from crying. When the train stopped, she washed out the diapers and strung a rope between the train cars and hung the diapers to dry. One night, the car to which she had attached the other end of the clothesline was uncoupled and went elsewhere, snapping the rope and taking all the diapers with it. After that, she claims, she trained my father to pee in a tin can. Whenever she talked about the war, which was not often, she talked about the indignity of that broken clothesline, the triumph of my father’s early toilet training.

This is a story about a three-day road trip, and also a story about broken threads. A real-life clothesline snaps in the distant past and becomes family legend. Grandma Tsilya passes it on to my father, to my mother, to me; I pass it on to my children, this story about loose ends.

When I was growing up, Grandma Tsilya kept tabs on everyone’s whereabouts. She liked it when we were home and worried when we weren’t. If she called and no one picked up the phone, she would leave a plaintive message on our answering machine. She always said the same thing: “This is Babushka. Where could you be in such weather?”

It didn’t matter what the weather was. It could be raining or it could be 72 and sunny with a light breeze. Weather stood for something else: unexpected catastrophe, chaos, people vanishing. “Where could you be in such weather?” had nothing to do with the weather. It meant If you’re not home, you’re in danger.

And yet

And yet it was Grandma Tsilya, who worried whenever any of us weren’t home and who fretted about cold drafts and sewing needles getting into the hands of small children (needles were sharp and children were soft and vulnerable), who told my father to emigrate. My parents and I were visiting her in Odesa in the summer of 1975, and over tea my father launched into a litany of complaints about anti-Semitism, corruption, ignorance, stagnation, lack of opportunity—all the usual hallmarks of Soviet life in the 1970s. Grandma Tsilya listened, looked him in the eye, and said, “Then leave.”

In 1975, her words were tantamount to inviting my father to walk off a cliff. There was no knowing where he and my mother and I would land, only the hope that it would be someplace better. If my parents applied to emigrate, there were two possibilities: Their application would be refused or it would be approved. In either case, they would lose their jobs and their Soviet citizenship as soon as they applied for an exit visa. The waiting period between application and permission to leave ranged from several months to several years, and permission was not guaranteed; some families were refused after spending months or years in limbo. Some were arrested. In the event that my parents’ application was approved and we made it to the United States—an entity almost entirely unknown apart from carefully couched descriptions in letters from relatives who had emigrated earlier—there were also two possibilities: Our American lives would either be better than they were in the Soviet Union, or they would be worse.

Thank you so much for reading! If haven’t preordered, you can choose your favorite retailer here, and although I’m a huge fan of ordering from local bookstores or bookshop.org, I will note that Amazon pre-orders are actually one of the most powerful ways to support authors because the more pre-orders, the more visible a book becomes. Not the most ideal setup, I know, but neither is late-stage capitalism.

If retail isn’t your thing, you can still support Troika by suggesting it to your local library as a new acquisition or recommending it to your book club or to a friend.

Bay Area folks: please mark your calendar for Thursday, April 9 at 7 pm for Troika’s launch at Books Inc. in Palo Alto! More details to follow.

This month’s theme was “My Body, My Rules,” and the story I chose to tell was about an IUD insertion that did not go as well as one might have hoped. (If you don’t enjoy stories about things being inserted into uteruses, feel free to stop reading now. Otherwise, you can listen to the story right here:)

I would like to think the story is funny. I made it funny on purpose because humor is my favorite coping mechanism for dealing with pain. I made it funny because having the IUD inserted hurt in a way I still find it difficult to describe 24 years after it happened, and it was doubly hurtful because I had asked my OB-GYN (who was female) whether it would hurt and she told me I might feel a little pinch, which was accurate in the same way as “a little pressure” is an accurate description of what it feels like to be stepped on by an elephant. Oh, and guess what else? After all that, my unruly uterus took and spit the damn thing back out a month later.

It shouldn’t matter that my OB-GYN was female, except you would think that a person in possession of a uterus might have warned another person in possession of a uterus that an IUD insertion might feel like being shredded from within by the hounds of hell. But I had been told by a woman in a white lab coat that it would feel like a little pinch and when it felt less like a little pinch and more like an agony so consuming that if I were a cartoon character I would be a cat hanging from the ceiling by its claws, I assumed there was something wrong with me and I quietly hobbled home and took three ibuprofen and cried on the couch.

See? Funny story. A little pinch. LOL.

Several years ago, I came across a social media post that called for normalizing pain relief for IUD insertions. There were hundreds of comments, many of them with stories like mine. It was so painful I blacked out. My doctor told me most women don’t experience pain with insertion. I was told it would feel like menstrual cramps. I stared at the comments for a long time. I had not realized that I could have received pain relief. No one told me that was an option.

Just a little pinch.

After I told my story last Saturday, a friend messaged me to say that her IUD insertion, too, was unbearably painful. “I could have sworn the doctor was hanging a picture in my cervix,” she wrote.

A question: why is women’s pain considered normal, but pain relief has to be normalized? Why do we smile through period cramps and tie sweaters around our waist when we bleed through pads and pretend we’re fine during the first few weeks following the expulsion of AN ENTIRE HUMAN BEING FROM OUR BODIES when those first few weeks are actually not fine, not even remotely?

I think about my IUD insertion and wonder why I didn’t say something, why I didn’t scream, just gritted my teeth and clenched my fists so hard my nails dug into my palms and left marks. Maybe if I said something, the next patient would have suffered less. But I didn’t, because when a person in a white coat tells you you might feel a little pinch you believe them, and if the pinch doesn’t feel like a pinch you assume it’s your problem, not theirs.

The medical establishment has a long and sordid history of minimizing or ignoring female pain. J. Marion Sims, widely considered the father of American gynecology, practiced surgical techniques on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, because it was widely believed that Black women were not as sensitive to pain as white women. J. Marion Sims died in 1883, but Black women continue to suffer significantly more pregnancy complications and a significantly higher maternal mortality rate than white women. Regardless of race, the United States is the only industrialized nation in the world with a rising maternal mortality rate.

We’re supposed to believe people in white coats, people in uniform, people in suits and ties, people in positions of power, but what do we do when they betray us?

I don’t have a solution to any of this, by the way. This started as a funny story. I did not expect to feel so much rage in the aftermath. Or so much sadness.

The story I told at the slam ends with me finding a new gynecologist. I don’t know how this other, bigger story ends. I usually try to add a funny twist to the stories I tell, like haha, see, it’s not so bad. But it feels, increasingly, like it is that bad. There’s no funny twist. But there is still talking and writing. There’s still laughter, right alongside the pain. We still, for the time being, have the chance to say, This doesn’t feel right. This fucking hurts. To tell the story out loud. To find others who are like, Yep, same.

On a lighter note: if you’re in the Bay Area, please come hear me in conversation with my friend and fellow writer Ginny Kubitz Moyer this Friday, Jan. 23 at 7 pm at Fireside Books in Redwood City. Ginny’s book, The World at Home, is a vivid and powerful evocation of San Francisco during the second World War, and her protagonist, Irene Cleary, is a pure delight.

Reservations

My father calls me the night before we’re scheduled to leave. The rain is coming down in sheets. The roads are flooded. He thinks driving almost three hundred miles in a storm of this magnitude is a terrible idea and asks whether my mother and I might consider postponing the trip until the weather settles. I say no. He asks me if I’m sure, and I say yes, absolutely positive. We have hotel reservations, in Solvang for the first night and in Paso Robles for the second. There’s a spectacular outdoor light installation in the hills near Paso Robles, and we have tickets for that too. I’ll drive slowly and carefully, I tell him. Then I ask him to put my mother on the phone.

My mother and I make a plan: She will take an early morning train from San Francisco, where she and my father live, to Palo Alto, where my husband David and I live. That way, she won’t have to drive in the rain, which makes her nervous. I’ll swing by the train station to pick her up; from there, we’ll drive thirteen miles south to Cupertino to pick up my daughter, and then the three of us will continue south to Solvang.

But on the morning of our trip, my phone buzzes. It’s my mother, calling from the train station. The trains aren’t running because earlier that morning, heavy winds knocked over an eighty-foot eucalyptus tree whose trunk is now blocking the train tracks. It occurs to me that this is a bad omen, but before I can say anything, she tells me that my father has offered to bring her to Palo Alto—an hour-long drive through a torrential downpour—and I say, “Great, see you soon.”

He could have refused. He could have said, “This is ridiculous.” But he ferries my mother to our house, and the two of them hurry to the front door, their heads bowed under the pelting rain. A wet gust of wind blows inside when I open the door to let them in, and they’re barely through the door when my father hands me the CB radio.

How to get from Northern to Southern California

The first time my father tried to give me a CB radio was on a perfect summer day in 1987, when I was about to leave on a road trip to Los Angeles with my friend Leslie to spend the weekend with several high school friends who were subletting an apartment near UCLA. We were eighteen. We had just finished our freshman year of college, and Leslie and I were back home for the summer—she from Boston University, I from UCLA. Home was Sunnyvale, California, where we came of age in ranch houses built in the 1960s and attended Homestead High School—the high school in neighboring Cupertino that graduated two world-famous Steves, Jobs and Wozniak. Between the two of us, we had four years of driving experience, most of it navigating the few blocks between home and school, home and the nearby mall, and home (or school) and the Denny’s at the intersection of Homestead Road and Foothill Expressway to have coffee and gossip and smoke. The latter was strictly forbidden at my house and passively tolerated at Leslie’s.

We thought we were adults, but we were, in effect, babies. We were full of collagen and unearned confidence. We were irresponsible. We thought nothing bad would ever happen to us. We had no idea that catastrophes sometimes lie dormant for years, or decades, biding their time. We didn’t know that we would drift apart, take different paths, become different people.

There are two major routes from the Bay Area to Los Angeles: the fast way and the scenic way. The scenic way (Highway 101) winds through some of the most beautiful scenery in California—the rolling hills along the Central Coast, the palm trees lining the absurdly blue ocean along Avila Beach, Pismo Beach, Santa Barbara, and Ventura County. The fast way (I-5) cuts through sun-parched, dusty Central Valley, mile after mile of farmland and pasture and desolate clusters of gas stations and fast food outposts. It’s bookended by Pacheco Pass on the north and the Tejon Pass (which everyone calls “the Grapevine”) on the south. In the middle, it’s monotonous and soporific, the monotony broken up by flashes of terror while passing 18-wheelers at high speeds. Pacheco Pass was known to us as “Blood Alley,” rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of the victims of head-on collisions and massacred Native Americans. The Grapevine was not known for anything except its long, relentless uphill stretches where cars overheat, its severe winter weather, and its ubiquitous semis.

When Leslie came to pick me up, my father carefully explained which buttons on the radio we needed to press to call for help and how to tune it to the same frequency that truckers use so that we could hear updates on road conditions. In the car, Leslie turned to me and asked, “Did you get all that?” I had not. I had, in fact, gotten none of it. Leslie hadn’t either. We tossed the CB radio in the back, popped a cassette into the tape deck, backed out of my driveway, waved enthusiastically to my parents, who were standing forlornly by the garage, and lit cigarettes as soon as we were out of my parents’ sight.

In the Iliad, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis hoping for a favorable wind that will allow a thousand Greek ships to sail across the wine-dark sea to Troy. He tells Iphigenia that she is to marry Achilles, and as she approaches the altar in her wedding finery, he slits her throat. Unlike Odysseus, who wanders for ten years after the fall of Troy, Agamemnon returns home smoothly and without incident. His wife Clytemnestra orchestrates a hero’s welcome, spreads sumptuous purple tapestries along his path into the palace, ushers him into a bath, and stabs him to death.

I had not yet read the Iliad or the Odyssey or the Oresteia when Leslie and I hurtled down I-5 past mephitic cattle herds and fields of lettuce, smoking and blasting OMD and Springsteen and the Beatles. I didn’t yet understand that going too fast could be dangerous. We didn’t cover hubris in my AP Literature class, or maybe we did and I didn’t remember. In any case, our safe return justified our extravagant carelessness.

Thank you so much for reading! If haven’t preordered, you can choose your favorite retailer here, and although I’m a huge fan of ordering from local bookstores or bookshop.org, I will note that Amazon pre-orders are actually one of the most powerful ways to support authors because the more pre-orders, the more visible a book becomes. Not the most ideal setup, I know, but neither is late-stage capitalism.

If retail isn’t your thing, you can still support Troika by suggesting it to your local library as a new acquisition or recommending it to a friend.

Early praise for Troika

Smith crafts a story of a middle-aged mom, her daughter, and her elderly mother, but it’s also the story of their family’s history of fleeing from monsters, and how each of them has internalized that history, for better or worse. -BookLife Prize

Because I don’t know what to do with my surfeit of nervous energy and can’t possibly wait until April 7, I’ve decided to share several chapters of Troika every week until publication day, kind of like Charles Dickens did with Oliver Twist and Great Expectations or like Aaron Spelling did with Dynasty. I’m doing this for two reasons: one, because I’m so excited to introduce you to what I’ve written and two, to encourage you to pre-order Troika if you haven’t already. “But I’ll buy the book after it comes out,” you might be thinking, and that’s fine, totally fine (sob!) except that you should know that pre-orders drive a book’s visibility and let virtual as well as brick-and-mortar booksellers know how many copies to order. You can choose your favorite retailer here, and although I’m a huge fan of ordering from local bookstores or bookshop.org, I will note that Amazon pre-orders are actually one of the most powerful ways to support authors because the more pre-orders, the more visible a book becomes. (And yes, I know that Amazon is the devil’s engine. Except for this one thing.)

If retail isn’t your thing, you can still support Troika by suggesting it to your local library as a new acquisition or recommending it to a friend.

The chapters aren’t numbered in the book, but I’ll be letting you know the chapter numbers in the title of each Substack installment so you can follow along (the chapter titles themselves are bolded in the text). I hope that what you read piques your interest enough to follow me along on this journey.

And now, without further ado, the first two chapters of Troika!

Nothing natural or interesting goes in a straight line. As a matter of fact, it is the quickest way to the wrong place. And don’t pretend you know where you are going. Because if you know where you are going, that means you’ve been there, and you are going to end up exactly where you came from. -Naomi Newman, Snake Talk

The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear you’ll be the same person when you go home, and the fear that you won’t. Then there’s the fear… that you won’t make it home at all. -Kate Harris, Journey on the Silk Road

Safe travels

The second time my father tries to give me a CB radio is in January 2023, right before I go on a three-day road trip to Solvang and Paso Robles with my 77-year-old mother and my 22-year-old daughter in the midst of an epic storm. The storm knocks out power, uproots trees, floods streets, and brings down a pier in Santa Cruz. Meteorologists describe it in apocalyptic terms: bomb cyclone, atmospheric river, gale-force winds. A hiker films a water tornado off the Sonoma coast, a swirling wall of water rising from the ocean.

The storm shows no sign of abating on the morning we set out.

I saw a meme once where Odysseus announces to his crew that they’re embarking on an odyssey. A sailor raises his hand and asks what an odyssey is, and Odysseus tells him it’s a dangerous journey named for the only known survivor, and the sailor says oh okay, wait what? This is like that, but all three of us made it back. I was the only one who drove. I’m also the narrator, so I get to tell the story. The two are not necessarily related, but they’re not not related.

If you already know we survived, the question is no longer did they make it? The question is, how? The question is, what are the stakes? The question is—or rather, the questions are— where are they going and what’s so important about this trip that it can’t be postponed and what’s up with the dad and the CB radio?

Red sky at morning

My father hired himself out as an apprentice electrician when he was 13, after his father drowned on a beach picnic with coworkers. We almost never talked about my grandfather, but my father often told stories about working on huge ships and about growing up in Odesa, a colorful port city on the Black Sea where the neighborhood hoodlums relieved passers-by of their watches by having a young child run up to them and say, “Mister, can I have your watch?” If the passer-by refused (and the passer-by always refused), a hulking man would step out from around the corner and inquire why the passer-by was bullying a little kid. The hoodlums in his stories were comical and clever and only a little frightening.

He taught me to identify different kinds of clouds—nimbus, cumulus, cirrus—and to swim parallel to the shore until the current slackened if I was ever caught in an undertow. He taught me to ease up on the gas and steer into the skid if a car ever slid on a wet road. For as long as I can remember, we had a barometer hanging in a hallway or in the study wherever we happened to be living, and he monitored fluctuations in barometric pressure attentively. Once, a barometer fell from the wall and we joked for weeks about falling pressure.

My father loves maps and compasses and shortwave radios. He owns an extensive library of tools. He drops expressions like “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning” into conversations. I always assumed that he learned them while working on ships in the port while rubbing shoulders with sailors and seafaring merchants, but when I recently asked him if he learned “red sky at night” while working at the port, he said no. “Then how did you learn that?” I wanted to know. “By osmosis,” he replied, and didn’t offer any additional details.

In writing about my family, I have to resist the pull of what I assume is true, the siren call of what makes a better story. What makes a better story is not always true. Or sometimes it is true, but people don’t want those details in the story. Or they don’t want to be in the story at all.

Troika: Chapters 3 and 4

Early praise for Troika:

In a voice at once fiercely honest and exquisitely tender, Smith explores what we inherit from our foremothers, what we pass down to our daughters, and the power we hold to forge new stories together. Like the best of road trips, Troika winds through shimmering vistas and surprising detours, delivering us, ultimately, to the possibilities that lie in our hearts. A wholly delightful journey from beginning to end.

--Nicole Graev Lipson, USA Today bestselling author of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters

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Washed and blow-dried my hair but it’s rainy and humid so the effect is less sleek blow-out and more… whatever the opposite of a sleek blow-out is.

Made arm warmers from thigh high socks by cutting off the feet (follow me for more fashion tips!)

5. Wrote this Substack, which I’ve been dragging my feet on writing because I’ve published 99 thus far, and this makes one hundred. One hundred posts seems significant and momentous and I kept thinking I need to write something significant and momentous to mark the occasion and then I was like, you know what? 2025 was hard. Let’s set a low bar for 2026. Who’s with me?

   

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   Updates:

   It’s not too late to sign up for my four-part webinar on writing travel memoir, which starts on January 11. Keep in mind that “travel” is loosely defined and can encompass anything from an around-the-world voyage to a trip you didn’t take to a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast in a severe winter storm (which happens to be the premise of my new book, Troika, out on April 7 of this year!). In other words, travel is anything involving movement—through physical as well as emotional spaces, through time, or through relationships. I hope you’ll join me—and meanwhile, here’s to a gentle start to 2026 for all of us. ❤️