Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s

From May of 2024 to May of 2026, I have taken thirteen flights from Los Angeles to New York City. The best upside of split custody is that I get New York back.

I lived there from 2006 to 2016, and kept one foot in until 2018, when I left a mice-infested Chinatown apartment at 34 weeks pregnant and moved into a clean Spanish-style apartment in Silverlake.

No regrets. But when I left, I was mid-season shooting a television show. There was a solid possibility that I’d be back.

The show was cancelled in the summer of 2019. Then a second surprise pregnancy, the pandemic, you know the rest. And while I kept one foot out on being an “Angeleno,” I belatedly realized, somewhere in 2021 when I started visiting NYC again, that I was never coming back.

Which is to say, I was wrong twice.

In the heat of my divorce, I was up at 5am, sick and sleepless, texting with one of my best friends in New York. An hour later, she sent me a JetBlue ticket from LAX to Newark for that afternoon.

I threw very little into a suitcase, and by dinnertime, I was walking down Seventh Avenue to her apartment. When I came out of the subway at Christopher Street—a stop I know by muscle memory from my years working around the corner at Buvette—I wept.

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That began my NYC renaissance. It’s an odd position I find myself in - I am not a New Yorker, but I’m not a tourist. My boyfriend, Adam, lives in Williamsburg. We go back and forth between the cities. With him, New York is a city of appetites again. It’s almost regressive, as if I’ve turned back time. Indulgently long walks, drinks before dinner, sleeping late because no one needs breakfast at 6am.

I am delirious when I’m there, escaping the sometimes punishing pressures and responsibilities of my day to day life in LA, where I am almost always a solo parent with two very intense kids.

I’m well versed in the city’s shortcomings. I’m disturbed by how expensive it’s become, how homogenous it is - but those conversations have been happening since well before my time. I never stopped loving New York. I never became disillusioned with it. I never walked into the subway and thought, I’m so glad I don’t live here. Never, not once.

This idea was inspired by Ruby’s Recs, one of my favorite substacks. Ruby was a bookseller at Three Lives and rec’d me some of my favorite books over the years (The Body in Question by Jill Ciment, Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly). Her taste is impeccable. She has moved on from the city, but made a niche guide of where she goes when she’s back. What fun, I thought. Here is mine. These selections are not trendy. My New York is nostalgic, but that also means it’s time-tested, timeless.

EATING

Acre

This restaurant/gift shop, an anchor of the cluster of Japanese businesses in Greenpoint, is the only place I go every single time I’m in the city. It helps that it’s near Adam’s apartment and on a quaint & quiet street, but honestly, I would travel for that salmon bento box, the side of egg salad, the extra side of brussels sprouts. I am audibly moaning while I eat. In January, I sat in the heated tent in the garden as one of those huge winter storms rolled in, and I was completely enchanted.

Roman’s

The pasta is always perfectly cooked. The fava bean spread is unapologetically beige and fucking delicious. The food is unpretentious, the vibe crowded and casual.

When Roman’s first opened in 2009, I trekked to Fort Greene because I was a devoted Marlow person (RIP to Marlow/my youth), but my real relationship with Roman’s began when I was making Sweetbitter at Steiner Studios. My showrunner Stu and I would go there to work on scripts after we sent the other writers home.

Now one of my best friends lives nearby, and we take over a table for long Sunday lunches with her five-year-old. I can think of no other neighborhood spot that does everything this consistently, this exceptionally well.

Bar Oliver

On the block of my last Chinatown apartment—and oh, how I wish it had been there in my day.

I worked in Spanish food and wine for seven years (I was the beverage director at Tia Pol, which back then also meant Tinto Fino and El Quinto Pino), so I can say with authority: Oliver’s Spanish wine list is banging. So are the extremely expensive pintxos.

You don’t need to come for a full meal, but to sit outside on divine little Oliver Street with a glass of Ameztoi Rubentis (rosé txakoli) and a plate of anchovies—that is special.

Union Square Cafe & Gramercy Tavern

It’s not that I’m loyal. It’s that I was lucky enough to have my first job in New York at one of the best restaurants.

I love the “new” Union Square Cafe. It scratches the nostalgic itch without being trapped in it—to really go down memory lane, I’d have to walk into that strange old space on 16th Street. This is a perfectly executed glow-up. The corner location has incredible light, and somehow it still carries the timelessness of the original.

And honestly, New York City does not get better than sitting at the Gramercy Tavern bar during the inter-hours—3 to 5pm, when half the city has stopped serving—ordering a burger, or oysters, or something involving chicken liver, followed by a glass of wine and then an espresso, and watching service change over.

I want to be there in any season, but because my birthday is close to Christmas, and GT’s floral installation is arguably the best in the city, I especially love it during the holidays.

My hot take: only sit at the bar. I’ve eaten in the dining room once and found it forgettable, and I don’t love the tavern tables. Wait for the bar.

Via Carota

I think Jody Williams and Rita Sodi are two of the most talented people I’ve ever met. Full stop. In 2012, I was in graduate school and needed to go back to serving—after years as a beverage director and GM, I needed waitress money and flexible hours. I only applied to one restaurant: Buvette. I’d been following Jody’s career since she opened Morandi, and first had her brandade at a short-lived wine bar called Gottino. I literally followed the brandade.

Buvette is my platonic ideal of a neighborhood spot. Not one detail is amiss. You could have a café au lait there in the morning, then come back at 1am for Burgundy and coq au vin. I was a civilian by the time Jody and Rita opened Via Carota, but I was in awe—and frankly jealous of my friends who got to work there. It’s Buvette’s extremely sophisticated big sister. The vegetables, especially the charred leeks. The cacio e pepe. The branzino. I know it’s hard to get into, but I believe Via is worth it.

DRINKING

The View

Once, a man I was dating asked me to meet him at the rooftop of the Marriott in Times Square. There was a rotating bar. I said, This is some real mistress shit.

The bar was shabby, uncool, and slowly spinning through completely insane views of the city. It felt vaguely illicit, like you could be anyone making a bad decision. It was fantastic.

I went back two months ago—it’s been redone by Union Square Hospitality Group—and I’m happy to report it is still a mistress bar in all the best ways. You take the elevators through the behemoth of the Marriott Marquis, emerge into a banquette with the whole city revolving around you, and it still feels secret. It just has a better cocktail list now.

Bemelmans & The Nines

I love a piano bar. These bars are decadent and grown up. I will go to these places again and again, regardless of whether they’re trending or not.

Clandestino & Time Again

My sister lived on the corner of Essex and Canal for years, and before that my then-boyfriend lived on Ludlow and Canal—he had a store called The Hunt, which only recently closed. This was all before there was a restaurant called Dimes.

Back in 2006, after our restaurant shifts, a group of servers would head to the Lower East Side. We could see music at Pianos or Mercury Lounge, eat late at Les Enfants Terribles (where Le Dive is now), and then we’d end up at Clandestino.

That continued well into my thirties, when I’d go to Clandestino for a nightcap after my Buvette shifts. I’ve eaten at Cervo’s a dozen times, Kiki’s probably a hundred, had a great meal at Casino, plenty of late nights at 169 Bar, and yes, even Swan Room—but if I’m on Canal, what I really want is a cold tap beer at Clandestino.

Or—

I know Time Again can be an annoying scene, especially when it’s warm outside, but this past January, on a bitterly cold night, we had Adam’s birthday happy hour there, and I was reminded how special that space is. The view of the Manhattan Bridge in lavender twilight, the spinning traffic, the perfect balance between low-key and chic. I really love that bar.

LOOKING

Muji

Why are all the Muji stores in California closed?! Now going to one in NYC is like going to a museum. My kids are sick of the fact that I never get them souvenirs from my trips, I just get them pens and notebooks from Muji. I also stock up on Muji socks for myself, and the clear photo frames, which make great last minute gifts if you can print out a photo.

The Guggenheim Museum

If I have two hours between meetings or meals, I will sprint up to 89th Street and see whatever show is installed, even if I’ve seen it before. Some of the paintings in the permanent collection feel like childhood friends. The summer after my freshman year of college, I saw Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle and it changed everything I thought about art. A few weeks ago I was telling my children about Tino Sehgal’s This is Progress, where they had no art on the walls and you walked and talked your way to the top of the building. I remember Hilma AF, Agnes Martin, I saw Alex Katz twice - but honestly, the shows don’t totally matter. It is my favorite museum in the world.

The Queens Museum

Over a year ago, Adam and I went to see the Robert Caro/Robert Moses exhibit at the New York Historical Museum. Just recently, he took me to the Queens Museum to see The Panorama of the City of New York —an exact to-scale miniature of all five boroughs, frozen in 1965 when it was built for the World’s Fair. Robert Moses commissioned it to show off his glory (the expressways, the park systems, the LaGuardia airport). But when I looked at this 3D map of the city, I saw my first kisses, my sublets. My sister’s apartments, my first wine store. There was the High Line before it was the High Line, like it was when I worked on 10th Avenue and we could eat at Florent. There’s Williamsburg when it was an industrial flat land, no condos. There’s Five Points, there’s that ravine in Central Park, and so on forever. I was yelping in delight and could have stayed there all day.

SELF CARING

The Baths

I am historically an East 10th street Russian Bath purist, no matter the grime, the foamy scum on the cold pool, or the crowds. I even wrote the Baths into a script for Sweetbitter, and got to shoot there with a half dozen naked extras and toxic fog machines. I will always go there. But I have an embarrassing confession - Adam and I recently went to Bath House in Williamsburg and it was…so lovely. I cannot wait to go back.

Fishion Herb Center/senti senti

There is a constant social media stream of influencers revealing their hidden, hole-in-the-wall body work places in Chinatown. I’m sure they’re all special, but I’ll never know. I’ve been going to Fishion religiously since 2006. Yes, there have been some “just fine” massages, but honestly, the vast majority of the time they destroy me in the best way.

When I lived there, I went often enough that certain practitioners became part of the architecture of my life. There was Charlie, a true healer, who did a mixture of massage and cupping and unfroze my neck after no chiropractor could fix it. I would even see Charlie to address a cold.

There was Noriko. During my first pregnancy, I saw her every week. The manager was reluctant - they didn’t like working on pregnant women, too much liability and superstition - but Noriko volunteered to take me on. She had a plan. She turned me on my side and had me spoon a tempurpedic pillow they wrapped, very “fishion,” in a slightly dubious sheet because there was no pillowcase. The way Noriko touched me and cared for me - I used to cry through the massage. Fishion relocated down the block and has been cleaned up, too much for my taste, but it’s still the greatest deal in New York City.

I usually pair it with a trip to Senti Senti (formerly oo35), where my sister and I worshipped long before TikTok discovered Korean skincare. She was evangelizing ten-step routines in 2009, and I’ve been using a multi-step Korean based system for thirteen years. I still go to senti senti because I trust the women behind the counter.

The Strand & McNally Jackson & Three Lives

I used to touch all three bookstores every week so that is my goal on every trip to New York.

For a decade, my therapist was across the street from the Strand, 9:30am on Wednesdays, and like clockwork I walked into the Strand at 9am, touched all the books, then walked over.

During graduate school, I worked late on the weekends. On Saturdays I would sleep till ten am, (having closed Buvette the night before and had my 3am nightcap at Clandestino), then walk to McNally Jackson Books on Prince Street. I sat in the cafe with my laptop and worked on my novel until it was time to walk back to the West Village for my Saturday night shift.

Somewhere in those commutes to and from Buvette, I walked into Three Lives. I couldn’t even really afford to buy books regularly at this point in my life. I liked to chat with the booksellers (Troy Chatteron, a fixture of Three Lives, has opened his own culinary bookstore, Wild Sorrel and I cannot wait to visit). I wanted to see which books were faced out, make mental lists of what I’d read when I had the time and expendable income.

Years later, there was a brief period where bookstores made me anxious. They had become a part of my work. Though I felt - and still feel - deeply honored, I remember feeling exposed and embarrassed. That passed, thankfully. I never feel like an author anymore when I’m in a bookstore. I’m a dazed reader, a child who can’t believe her luck.

Citibike

I was never a biker when I lived in New York. But in this New York renaissance, I bike everywhere when the weather permits. I bike from Williamsburg to Fort Greene to work on a television script with one of my best friends. I bike over the Williamsburg Bridge to go to Clandestino before a concert. I bike over the Manhattan Bridge to go to Fishion.

But the very best days are when Adam takes the lead and we just keep going.

There was a day last October—luscious sunlight, cold in the shade—when he took me from Williamsburg through Long Island City, over the 59th Street Bridge, and up Second Avenue to the Guggenheim to see Jasper Johns paintings. Then we kept going: into Central Park, winding around Great Hill, up to Columbia University, and all the way to the George Washington Bridge.

We stopped to take photos of the Little Red Lighthouse - we had recently heard Susanna Moore read the final section of In the Cut, which perverts the lighthouse forever. Then we flew back downtown along the West Side Highway, wrapped around the bottom of the island, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, cut through Fort Greene to say hello to a friend, and wound back through the Hasidic stretches of Williamsburg until we landed at Diner for an early dinner with friends.

By then I was glassy-eyed with happiness and exhaustion, having spent myself completely on pleasure.

Whose life is this? Whose city?

Mine. Mine.

My mother, an excellent home cook who trained at Le Cordon Bleu, was obsessed with Alice Waters, Fanny’s mother. Alice named her daughter Fanny (after a Marcel Pagnol film), and somehow my mother got wind of this. After accepting my given name as Stephanie (not her choice, but that’s a story for another day), she became determined to call me “Fanny.” A true Francophile, she found a 19th-century signet seal at a flea market, with the name "Fanny” carved into the agate in reverse, and bought it for me. I’m sorry to say though I still have the signet, the nickname never stuck.

If my mother could see me now.

Fanny and I have been orbiting each other for years - fans of each other’s work, sharing an editor at Knopf, with half a dozen friends in common. Her first book, Always Home, is a treasure; it sits on my shelf alongside Laurie Colwin, Elizabeth David, Patience Gray, and Richard Olney (a deep cut, but iykyk). I’m also a devoted reader of her Substack, The Green Spoon, which chronicles the trials and small triumphs of feeding children. I’m especially fond of their banana bread recipe, and their column, “The Cub Street Diet,” where once a month a writer details a week in the life of their home kitchen.

I love these voyeuristic peeks into other people’s pantries and parenting - it’s lifestyle, aspiration, inspiration. But I’ve often been in awe of how chic, how unbearably elevated other people’s lives look: children happily eating anchovies and fancy “tuna” salad made with kippers and extravagant hot breakfasts. My life looks more like what Gabrielle Hamilton describes in her memoir: the demoralizing reality of birthing two humans who will eat nothing but the plainest food. It wasn’t until after my divorce, when I was thinking more than ever about cooking and logistics - about what a home even is - that I began to feel I might have something to contribute about feeding children. I realized I’d never seen a Cub Street from a single parent, or a split-custody household.

Then, out of the blue, Fanny texted me.

Below is the introduction to my “Cub Street Diet” for Fanny and Greta’s The Green Spoon. You can read the rest at their beautiful newsletter.

This is my tiptoe back into publishing here, finding my footing, writing about life as it is now. I told myself I had no business writing essays or newsletters with deadlines outstanding, a novel to finish, and my life in disarray. The novel is in. And my life is still in disarray, but for the first time in a while, it’s not total.

More soon.

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2-2-5. That’s a custody schedule. I hope whoever reads this never has to consider one, but if you end up on that side of the marriage line, I’m happy to dive into the lifestyle minutiae. In short, it means I have my two wildebeest children, Julian and Paloma, every Monday and Tuesday, and every other weekend. My weekends with them are Friday through Tuesday, and I measure that time in meals.

Divorce is an ongoing negotiation with heartbreak, but lately it feels like we’ve reached a gentler side of it. Matt and I are psycho in love with our kids and that undergirds everything. I’m hesitant to give advice or romanticize the process. My first caveat is that our schedule—our choice to live one block away from each other and still spend a lot of time together—is not prescriptive. Co-parenting is as private and temperamental as a marriage.

And while the pros of splitting up my life have presented themselves (Travel! Writing! Sleep! Exercise!), my children’s absence has not gotten easier to bear. But you know what has gotten easier? Cooking. Knowing that it’s all on me - every grocery run, every dirty dish, every meal and snack, no one coming to lend a hand - has made organizing my life easier.

Second caveat: my kids eat nothing and not the same kinds of nothing. J doesn’t eat any vegetables, hamburgers, bagels, or chicken nuggets outside the home. P doesn’t eat quesadillas, hot dogs, hamburgers, SANDWICHES, and says the smell of Annie’s Mac and Cheese makes her sick.

Which is a bummer because Annie’s Mac and Cheese is my favorite food.

Friday March 6^th begins our weekend. This week it’s not just a five day stretch because Matt is going to Japan for nine days (when he returns, I’ll go to Italy to teach at a writing retreat. I know, I’m sorry!) Matt and I keep things extremely flexible. We trade nights, “babysit” for each other, split the kids up for one-on-one time. They are in and out of both houses. But I just had two days to myself, so the fridge and pantry are stocked, prepped for this ten-day span of servitude where I present them with food from dawn to dusk.

Usually Friday is pizza and movie night, but tonight we’re having a little dinner to send their dad off on his trip. I saw a recipe for Japanese curry in the NYT and I had almost everything on hand. Except for the curry bricks, for which I ran to the Galleria Market in a mall in Koreatown. I shop here at least once a month and it’s a delight (fwiw, parking is free/easy). I can’t catalogue all the treats I’ve gotten in the past (cuttlefish, barley tea, their ready-made bibimbap is excellent) but today I grab the curry bricks, two kinds of furikake, rice vinegar, soy sauce, Kewpie (which makes up a large part of my son’s diet), rice crackers with seaweed, two bags of Japanese gummy candy, and kimchi. And a huge box of mandarins.

Our most consumed dinner is “rice.” I ride hard for my cheap and cheerful Aroma rice cooker, we use it multiple times a week. Julian, seven, the extremely picky one, won’t eat vegetables. But he will eat seaweed. And he will put sushi rice inside seaweed with a whopping amount of Kewpie and make a roll. Sometimes he will put cucumbers in there too! But the key is the rice base we can adjust for ourselves. Paloma, five (and a half, she insists), is less picky, and likes her “special rice,” with soy sauce, Kewpie, and furikake. She and I usually have roasted miso salmon and cucumbers soaked in a little rice vinegar/sugar/salt, and steamed broccolini or roasted cabbage.

But this is Japanese curry & rice night. The recipe comes out looking like slop, tastes delicious. Paloma eats a bowl right up. A pleasant surprise…

The rest is at The Green Spoon. Happy eating.

I’ll be talking to Melissa Febos at The Strand about her latest memoir & masterpiece, The Dry Season, on June 10th. She’s one of my favorite writers and we share a lot of the same obsessions: desire, addiction, shame, sex, systems and identity. Did you already read Girlhood (if you’re rasing girl child you should)? Did you read Abandon Me, which is a kind of younger sibling to Dry Season? How is a book about celibacy so sexy? Melissa will tell us all.

On Thursday, June 12th, I’ll be at the 92nd Street Y talking with Griffin Dunne about the re-release of his late uncle John Gregory Dunne’s 1974 “novel,” Vegas: Memoir of a Dark Season.

I wrote about my love for this out-of-print book, which covers the months Dunne left his wife and child (that’s Joan and Quintana) to live in Las Vegas. Then, like magic, McNally Editions reached out to say they were reissuing the book and asked me to write the intro. I can’t think of a better use for my totally irrelevant, encyclopedic knowledge of the Didion-Dunne canon. Griffin Dunne is the author of the best “growing-up-in-Hollywood” memoir, Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir, and I’m such a fan—this is going to be very fun.

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I’ve been wearing my McNally Editions Ex-Wife hat for about a year now. It was one of my first purchases after my marriage crisis, to which my friend replied, “Too soon?” Probably. I just wanted to feel like being an ex-wife (twice) could be cool.

But the cool part about the hat is how your people find you. At the Red Dog Saloon in Joshua Tree, I waited for my drinks and a brunette in a sundress nodded to me. “I need one of those,” she said, just before her husband and two children descended on her. Then there was the person collecting signatures outside Whole Foods, who stuck up his hand for a high five: “Twice divorced,” he said. “Me too!” I slapped his hand.

I wore it to Disneyland on a slightly demented solo trip with my kids. The gray-haired, weathered popcorn vendor said, “I was married three times and finally got some sense. I take out the garbage myself now—never been happier.” And a mother, this time of three, who was across from us in line, laughed. “How do you get one of those?” she asked.

“It’s not pleasant,” I said. “But it’s a great hat.”

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Some recent reading standouts:

Like others, I’m finding this an extremely hard time in midlife/history to focus and see further than a foot in front of me. I was so impressed by Jia Tolentino’s latest about her broken brain. I think the essay will be a touchstone for a generation whose world has passed beyond what we were previously capable of imagining. This essay felt landmark to me, like The White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem. It expressed a collective feeling, moment, mood, that had yet to be articulated.

Talking too much about the writing of Jane Smiley works against the strange, submersive experience of reading her. It’s like, partway through a seemingly normal story, the floor starts to fall through. When I asked Rufi Thorpe (a Smiley superfan) what Smiley’s best book was, she said it was two novellas: Ordinary Love & Good Will. File each under marriage, parenthood (first one a mother, second one a father), and lost Edens. They’re just so good. At a technical level, they’re full of narrative moves I could never accomplish (all the scaffolding is invisible). At an emotional level, they will leave you a slightly different person than you were when you started.

And while the rest of you were watching White Lotus, I was Knausgaard-pilled. Oof, the way I judged all the Knausgaard fans. Yikes, that fuckboy and his relentless male gaze—seriously?? But a trip to Scandinavia last year inspired me to take on some of its native authors (I’m a big Tove Jansson fan, from Moomin to The Summer Book and my favorite, Fair Play), and I thought I could stand to read fifty pages about his daddy issues and see what it was about.

Good fucking god. A book about a father’s fall from grace and lonely, ugly death is both a little too close to home and divine timing. I was also awed by the youthful parts, the agony and awkwardness of adolescence. There’s a section toward the middle of Book 1 where teenage Karl Ove is trying to get to a New Year’s party, and it has so much humor, tension, and pathos—my high school experience could not have been more different, but I was him, he was me. Send help.

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Iced tea season is upon us and it’s an underrated delight. I do tisanes (mint or lemon verbena), hibiscus, matchas with coconut water, but I collect ultra-bitter decaffeinated teas for this very purpose. These teas look like coffee, taste like stems or roots or bark—hojicha is the classic. A few years ago, author Chelsea Bieker sent me a tea called Witches Brew, which is perfect: dandelion, burdock, and chicory.

Then, at my annual writing retreat in Santa Ynez, Jade Chang brought a sample of Hua Tea, made by her sister, and I lost it for the Goodnight Coffee—chicory, ginger, fennel seeds. Divine. The website posits it as a digestif, but I’ve been enjoying it in glass jars with tons of ice cubes, all day long.

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Other pantry hits:

This candy. I don’t even like candy! But I was peer-pressured into trying a piece of this extremely expensive Swedish candy—a kind of blackcurrant Swedish Fish—and I was humbled. I think candy and writing might go together spiritually—at least better than the tasteless rice crackers I usually eat.

And this sea moss. This is not seaweed. It’s dehydrated, roasted sea moss blended with sea salt. It’s like furikake if you kicked the umami up to max volume. I used it over roasted asparagus, on avocado toast, and, of course, 9-minute boiled eggs.

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Finally, Wi Spa, the legendary Korean spa in LA, doesn’t have an age limit. I took my four-year-old, Paloma, a few months ago, and it has changed our lives. I was in quiet awe of the way she threw herself into the culture. In each very hot room, she laid out her towel, laid back, and shut her eyes. We didn’t last more than three minutes in a room and went to the ice room between, but we did the circuit for hours. It included corn silk tea and aloe vera drinks, an ice cream for her, and a couple of games of Uno lying on the mats in the lounge.

When it was time for the wet rooms, she wanted to wear her bathing suit. Upon entering, she raised her eyebrows. So many naked women. Unselfconscious, chatty, naked women. And while at first she told me that all the bodies were “weird,” by our second time through, she was also naked—squatting on a little stool to shower, scrubbing my back, bossing me from pool to pool, and asking strangers about their nipples and tattoos.

If you don’t have a Korean spa near you, I can recommend a gorgeous children’s book: The Big Bath House by Kyo Maclear. It’s the story of the author’s childhood visits to Japan to stay with her Baachan (grandmother), and how, despite not sharing a language, she, her grandmother, and aunties all spoke the language of bathing together at the community’s big bath house.

We were at a wedding last weekend, and Paloma was asked if she wanted to get married when she grew up. She said, “No. I just want to live with my mom and go to the Korean spa.”

From her mouth to God’s ears.

In Naples, a neighborhood in Long Beach, the sidewalks along the canals are filled with tourists watching the boats strung with Christmas lights reflect on the water. My sister, Christina, and I were walking with our children and our aunt. There were high school kids performing carols on violins. One played “Silent Night” on a xylophone. Another had set out card tables with homemade cookies and hot chocolate. I’ve been bringing my kids here since they were born.

My year has been hard, and the holidays I anticipated being even harder. But my sister was in town from Saint Louis for a series of celebrations: Disneyland, my son’s birthday party that I was using as an excuse to host a cocktail party, and now this night in Naples. December in California thrills me—citrus blossoms overwhelming the evenings, an acute chill in the mornings, the woodsmoke and cloudlessness. Bringing my children here reminds me that I have been walking through this neighborhood—with its opaque waterways and exotic plantings of heritage roses, flowering ginger, hydrangeas—since I was child.

My half-brother, Jared, lives in Colorado. He had texted me earlier to call him, that it was about our dad but there was no rush. He is the only family member who has regular contact with my father, Stephen. I pulled back from the kids and called Jared back. Why? It was such a beautiful night. He had insisted it wasn’t urgent.

I held the phone to my ear. I listened to him speak. I watched Julian give his sister, Paloma, half a cookie. Zippy, my niece, peeked over a railing at the water. We were about to hit the house where the lights spelled out Mele Kalikimaka above a surfing Santa. My sister and I stared at each other. I said to Jared, “Okay. Okay.” In a way we haven’t been able to do since we were children, I spoke to Christina with my eyes. Her mouth opened slightly.

She turned to my aunt and said, “Oh my god. He died.”

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I published a piece on my father’s crystal meth addiction in 2015. I wrote about how he haunts my understanding of California. I wrote about the ways he hurt me in my memoir. I’ve written a lot about him. Too much, I often think, though another part of me wonders if I’ve even started. I’m thinking about Dani Shapiro’s craft essay in the Sewanee Review, about why she keeps returning to memoir, to certain life events, and how they keep reconsolidating into different shapes.

Why did I find myself turning to my own life, my own family history, again and again? The world around me was infinitely more compelling. . . . Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why, each time I thought I was finished with memoir, did I find myself, instead, digging around for more answers? Each memoir was a singular and satisfying excavation, but in the end, I was left with a powerful, incalculable longing. Why was I terrified so much of the time? From where arose the debilitating anxiety and panic that lived just beneath a carefully cultivated surface?

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In early spring of last year, 2024, I wrote an essay for this newsletter about my family’s impending move to Spain. We had decided back in 2022 to do it; I had sold a book off proposal about living in Spain, about food and wine. We were three months away from taking our one-way flight to Madrid. A visa lawyer had already been paid, along with deposits for the kids’ school and our apartment.

Days after finishing that essay, my marriage exploded. But I hadn’t realized that every single other aspect of my life had been stabilized by its foundation. This past summer I started an essay on my separation, the brutality of breaking up my children’s family, the manic highs and lows of split custody, but mainly questioning my own brokenness.

In November, I rewrote that essay, finishing what I thought that earlier piece was supposed to be. But I held off on publishing it. It invited a lot of scrutiny. A lot of my life is still in moving boxes. There were still too many things I couldn’t write.

I decided I would give up these essays, newsletters, whatever they are, permanently.

Then my father died.

*

Since 2005, when his addiction was discovered by his family, my father lived in a nightmare. Though to hear him tell it, he was doing great, in perfect health, highly evolved, and surrounded by friends. A master narcissist, impenetrable: spin, spin, spin.

There were bouts of homelessness, and too many trips to rehab centers to count. There were stolen cars, a half dozen car accidents, and twice that many menial jobs he was fired from. There were surgeries (unclear whether they were all necessary), blood infections, ambiguous hospital stays, and a case of gangrene so severe it led to a surgeon having to remove nearly all of the muscle of my father’s right calf.

But in the days after his death, I recalled that the nightmare didn’t begin in 2005. He had been a high-functioning crystal meth addict for at least a decade before that. For two years while I was in high school, his parenting of me was largely defined by wild neglect and occasional, though scorching, cruelty. He terrified me then. He never cared for my safety. On a highway in Missouri, driving while fucked up on meth, he lost control of the car, ran into the grassy center median, then swerved back across the highway. He then threw a water bottle at my head when I told him I wouldn’t let him drive anymore. He gave me, a seventeen-year-old girl, all the Percocet I could ask for, left me bottles of Tanqueray and tonic to drink at home. I could go on and on, and in the days after his death, I did. Texting my sister and friends: Do you remember? Did that really happen? How did I think it was ok?

That is what bothers me now: I thought his behavior then was acceptable. I thought the fact that he didn’t parent me meant he respected me, that he thought I was strong.

He never attached meaningfully to another person: not his siblings, his children, or his wives. Everyone, everything, was disposable. I told an EMDR therapist, after a session about my father that was so intense I vomited, and so disturbing I never returned to EMDR, that I could not be safe until he was dead.

So what is this amorphous grief, disenfranchised and confused as it is because it’s colored by relief? Why is it that I’m floored by this gift he’s given us?

*

This by Louise Gluck is always with me.

First Memory

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.

*

“He didn’t hurt anyone,” Christina said, as we continued our walk. Julian didn’t let go of me for the rest of the night. Paloma and Zippy remained unaware, begging for more sweets. I cautioned her against saying much more in front of them. But Christina was right—my biggest fear, for years, was that he might kill someone else.

I didn’t know then that in the previous six months he been in two wrecks. He had been charged with DUI (a meth pipe was reported to be in his car), had lost his license. He had been actively and self-righteously fighting it in court.

He did hurt people. He had three children. I can’t speak for them, but I can speak for myself, the only child of his that lived with him full-time.

He hurt me. Made me broken, just like him.

*

On my forty-first birthday, my father texted me. I was with a friend, and he asked if my dad always texts me.

I shook my head. “It depends on how sober he is, or if he’s like, in the world.”

“Are you going to text him back?” He asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to speak to him again before he dies.”

Six days later.

*

Maybe someday I’ll write about watching him go through withdrawals on a train moving through the highlands of Scotland. How gray he was, shriveled and sweating and convulsing, and although Christina and I were horrified, we also could not stop laughing. Forty-eight hours earlier he had blamed jet lag for nodding off at the dinner table, then blamed food poisoning when he missed Jared’s wedding, and then told a room full of people that he was nineteen years sober as he took a swig of scotch. We led him off the train in Edinburgh, placed his suitcase on the platform, and he couldn’t say goodbye because he could not form sentences. He also didn’t seem to know who we were.

As the train went on to London, I said to Christina, “We’ll never see him alive again.” Even two days later, over glasses of wine in Bloomsbury, ensconced again in our good health and good fortune, we laughed uncontrollably, hiding our faces behind our hands.

*

I’m thinking of Raven Leilani’s piece on grief in n+1, where she names it:

It was a kind of laughter that happened to me. . . . Humor, like grief, like poetry, is occasionally a language of dissonance: dissimilar things side by side reflect back on each other some surprise or shared meaning. But there was no apparent meaning in the adjacency of my mourning and erratic, often ill-timed laughter.

*

Last summer, as my family took on its new shape, as I watched my children suffer, and as the tragedy of that became increasingly unbearable until the tragedy became that all of it was bearable, Julian asked me one night as he was falling asleep:

“Don’t you miss your dad?”

“Not really,” I said. “He wasn’t around so I didn’t really know him.”

“But didn’t it make you sad that you didn’t have a dad?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was really sad. But I had a great mommy and I had Christina.”

“Do you ever want to go see him?”

“No,” I said, as gently as possible.

“Why?”

“He’s not a safe person.” I had no idea what else to say, though how would a five-year-old know what a safe person was.

“Does he know about me?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Someday when I’m older, I’ll go see him. He probably wants to meet me.”

*

There was a host of promises I made to my babies—in my arms, wet with the infant holy trinity of breast milk, tears, snot, their beauty so startling it disoriented me—but the main one was that they would not be raised in a broken family (made me broken, just like him). How retrograde and stilted I found myself once the stakes surged. The number of times I stared at the wall while they slept—weighted limbs atop me, unwashed heads burrowed into my armpits or rising and falling on my stomach—and wondered how much longer this idyll would last.

The reassurance I took from picking a good man who was the opposite of my own father. A man devoted to his children. A man who would never hurt me.

It’s difficult not to revise every statement, dream, sliver of triumph, to reread each as evidence of hubris.

Children are resilient, people kept saying to me in the months after. Sure, I would think. Look at Christina and me. We made it to forty-one and thirty-nine, and here we are, looking at holiday lights along the canals. Minutes after my phone call with Jared, an acquaintance of Christina’s from high school stopped her. Polite conversation, indistinct clusters of white lights, a nod, a smile. At the end she said to the two of us: “Your children are beautiful.”

The performance of ease. It photographs well. Our barely concealed bones absolutely rigid with control.

I know they’re resilient. But now I also live with being the one who is making them that way.

*

I am aware of how fresh my hurt is, how this writing wants patience to polish itself, wants time for precision, that it is seeking and circling a larger truth about grief and parents and abuse. But there have been many times in my life that I’ve relied on writing that was a dispatch from the blast site. And I’m not sure I want to keep circling this one.

I have been grieving the father I didn’t have for all my adulthood. I feel great pity for him: that he died alone, days after telling my brother that he was sober; that he was about to get a job; that he reunited with his friends at the hiking club.

In his room at the senior living center where he died, there were journals and papers. One was a worksheet from his last stint in rehab. It was a list of regrets. The first one was actually two: “Showing up on drugs to my son’s wedding and detoxing in front of my daughters.” He means that train ride in Scotland in 2022. There are people who find such efforts toward self-awareness moving. And there is something childlike, almost embarrassing, in thinking about his handwriting, the act of putting pen shakily to paper. The vulnerability of reading the words out loud to a group of fellow addicts, the only people in the end who had the tolerance to listen.

Perhaps I’m too hard.

I find that note alarming—I never knew how cognizant he was of his offenses, or whether he even fully perceived other people. But he knew it was us who helped him off the train. And it was the last time I saw him.

For my father, there were endless chances. So many near deaths. So many meetings, so much rehabilitation, therapy, cocktails of psychotropic medications. But he never apologized to me. I don’t need the apology. It was him. He needed to do it. Any kind of humility, and I might be telling a different story.

In my entire life, he never asked me a question. Not, How is high school going? Do you want to go to college? How does it feel to publish a book? Do you like being a mother? What do you do in your free time? Are you happy?

These are his losses. Or they were his losses.

*

I accepted that I would always be at war with my parents, combating their lethal sadness, the undertow of their self-hatred. I am long past believing that this is something I’ll move through or get over. But I have longed for a life with less fear, less hypervigilance against bad men, less rage for people who hurt children. And I had long thought just maybe, when they died, there would be space for something else. But I have lived for forty-one years in the shadow created by my father’s abandonment. It’s almost as if my own shadow conjoined with his. They’re both gone. So, what now?

*

I started 2024 as the center of a family of four. I was the recipient of so much pressure and so much adoration. I spent every waking moment trying to keep it together.

My life today is unrecognizable. Matt and I have divided our days so that one of us can nest in our home with the kids while the other lays dormant in a studio we share.

I am also unrecognizable. I see my children half time and it kills me. I can’t write. I can’t read. I can’t keep on weight. I can’t stop booking plane tickets. I can see the other side, I think. I can’t stop sprinting towards it. I’ll be trying to understand this year, the incoherent darkness that overtook me, the vivid grace and clarity, the story it’s telling me, and how it changed everything, for the rest of my days.

The light is bright. Blinding, actually.

For grief support, related to the fires or not: My best friend Carly de Castro and the writer/therapist Claire Bidwell Smith just launched ELEGY, a space for conscious grieving. The website has resources for the LA fires (therapists, books, places to donate) and they are hosting weekly support circles via Zoom.

While I’m in the process of putting together a paid subscriber video (this one in conversation with another writer, very fun), I wondered if I couldn’t be of use.

It sometimes feels like the only audience for the surplus of writing advice on the internet is other writers - but I don’t want to make assumptions about this group. Maybe there are painters, accountants, architects, caretakers, retirees, or maybe just someone who likes to read.

What’s on your mind? Would you like reading recommendations? Fiction, cookbooks, poetry? Writing advice or encouragement? I’ve lived a few lives and it’s left me with an unusual database of expertise: restaurants, travel, publishing, film & television. Scripts, novels, nonfiction. The impetus behind this newsletter was to converse. Drop a Q below and I will answer it in a timely fashion.

Read more

Now, things that help me write…

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Last month I went on a retreat with five other writers, replicating a trip we did last year. It was a natural reflection point where we could take stock of our progress. Three of the group finished the books they were working on last year. One of them got a straight-to-series order from Apple (galleys of Rufi Thorpe’s Margot’s Got Money Troubles have arrived!). One of them published a novel, two of them sold novels.

None of those people are me. It appeared I did nothing.  

The fact that I am still telling people “Yeah, I’m just working on the novel,” or still saying I’m “nearly finished,” mortifies me. But while I’m inclined to abuse myself, call myself lazy or slow, the truth is that I did a fuck ton of writing in the past year. I rebroke and rewrote a pilot (which took writing three different scripts to figure out), finished a feature, started Write What, wrote these essays and a craft essay for The Sewanee Review. And every week, pages and pages of the novel. Now that I’m in the last days of this draft, I can take in some of that.

There’s an egoic impulse to protect the illusion that we writers do it all alone. It’s like Oz – no one can know the Wizard is a tiny, petty, insecure human. But I am tiny, petty, and insecure. I don’t do it alone. My friends are so generous with their time, homes, and resources. And, most importantly, I have an editor. 

That’s my first recommendation – An Editor. 

You might ask, Doesn’t a writer get an editor when they sell their book? Yes, they do. I’m lucky to count mine among my close friends and confidants. But I’m talking about a freelance editor, or developmental editor, one who doesn’t work for a publisher or a magazine. One who works for you.

I’ve heard the merits of a freelance editor debated at residencies and conferences: isn’t it a waste? Kind of a racket? Does it create too many cooks in the kitchen? I did not have a freelance editor when I wrote Sweetbitter (though I was in an MFA program, another kind of racket). For Stray I wanted to continue working with one of my Knopf editors who no longer worked there, and she was hired freelance. When it came time to start this newsletter, I knew I didn’t want to publish anything that wasn’t of equal quality to my books. I wanted a partner.  

When I found my person (someone I'd worked with before), there were the initial conceptual conversations. He asked big picture questions I would have blundered past. There was back and forth over what my strengths were, and a lot of “we’ve seen too much of this kind of craft talk.” He sees my work in a telepathic way. He can read a few paragraphs and say, “This is what you need to make it what you want it to be,” without my articulating what I want it to be. He has a feeling for my tone and obsessions. He’s so good at reading me it feels like cheating. At one point he cut something I wrote about writing and masturbation, and wrote: “I think this recurs enough in your work that it might warrant an essay of its own?” 

Not all writers have or need this. A lot have writing groups, or former teachers, mentors, trusted readers for early drafts of novels or essays. They’ve been doing this long enough that they’ve built up resources. An agent will read your work and give notes (my agent reads for me constantly, but I don’t think all of them have time) but it’s not their job to edit.

And what if you haven’t sold a novel yet? Or you don’t have an agent, or a writer friend with the bandwidth to read and note up a manuscript? What if you can’t afford an MFA, but want serious feedback, transparent marketplace advice, or just to be held accountable?

I might suggest talking to a few freelance editors and seeing if one doesn’t feel like your literary soulmate. It’s worth noting that it’s an expense - I don’t take that lightly. And if you’re fortunate enough to have sold a book, your editor at the imprint is most likely more than enough. But if you’re serious about your work and want to take it to the next level, a freelance editor can be a life-altering resource and I don’t see how it could be a waste. For me personally, the proof is in the pages. I can see line by line that I’ve become a better writer working with mine.

Other Things That Help Me Write

Scrivener – I was so annoyed right after I bought this program. After a lifetime of Microsoft Word, there was nothing intuitive about it. Certainly nothing that would make me proselytize. I googled, “Why is Scrivener so special?” and watched YouTube videos. Then, after two months of fumbling around, Scrivener and I clicked. We fell in love. How did I ever work without it? There are tons of praiseworthy features but these are the top two for me:

First, the toolbar. It doesn’t seem particularly innovative to have all your documents listed vertically, but what it means is that you can jump from your research documents to a character sheet, to your working draft, without opening or closing a file. Do you remember what it’s like to have fifteen open Word documents and be like, Wait, which one is the one I’m working on? Did I just write that brilliant thought on my old draft or new one? You can see here that I have my novel up top, then old drafts, character sheets, notes, then research. They all live together in harmony.

Second is the split screen. I can rewrite line by line (my preferred revision method), as the drafts are side by side. Or I can open my current draft and my research. See below where I have the working manuscript on the left, and my master draft (a dumping ground and workbook) on the right. When I figured this out my jaw dropped.

This reading light – It looks crazy but hear me out. You can use it for anything. Sometimes all the lights are on in my office, but the sky won’t lift and it feels like a cave. Or my kids are watching a movie in semi-darkness and I want to read in a chair. I’ve heard that people using it for knitting, grilling in the dark, or puzzling. The light stays with you, so you can move through multiple books or a newspaper without having to adjust a clip-on light. I take it with me everywhere, even the library. I know, I’m old!

A Library Card – “The third place” is a social setting that is neither the home or the workplace - spaces that anchor community interaction and social engagement, free from markers of socioeconomic status: parks, cafes, and of course, public libraries. I’m sure no one reading this needs convincing about the importance of libraries. I often set up shop in a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, and I’ve worked in a dozen branches of the NYPL (my favorite is Seward Park).

But when it comes to reading, I like to own my books. I mark them, dog ear and revisit. I love to stare at my shelves and let the spines talk to me – I’ve had real breakthroughs doing this. Whenever a new person comes into my house and makes a passive aggressive comment about the books, I call in my husband: “Tell them I use all the books! Tell them!”

However since working on this research-heavy novel, I need information, not a reading experience. I need to juice the book and give it back. Right now, I have the entire Pigeon series by Mo Willems, The Secret Garden, Gay New York by George Chauncy, Regards: The Selected Nonfiction of John Gregory Dunne, and Grace Hartigan’s journals. Soon I’ll have City of Night by John Rechy, and a book on Spanish-style architecture called Casa California. Every time I leave with fresh books, I’m a breathless kid - the entire universe feels knowable.

A Foam Roller – My foam roller lets me believe I might not end up a hunchback. I’ve had one in my office for years (as the writers who worked on the Sweetbitter series can attest), one in my room, and a travel sized one. I can’t live without it.

A Manicure - My friend Edan Lepucki got bright, shiny nails for our retreat, and I thought it was brilliant. Think about how often our fingers are in our frame of vision when we’re writing. Isn’t there such a thing as color therapy?

Ginger Juicer – My friend Jade Chang brought this mini-juicer along with what we thought was “plenty” of ginger. I have not been the same since. Did you know that taking a fresh ginger shot is a lip-numbing burst of adrenaline? Did you know that the bagged ginger tea I’d been drinking is trash compared to the wincing spiciness of ginger juice, lemon and honey in hot water? It’s not for the faint of heart, but if you like to party, I recommend a ginger shot in the afternoon. Now my husband is addicted and everyone I’ve served shots to has bought the juicer.

The Pomodoro Method – This time management technique is old news, but it’s a classic for a reason. Developed by an Italian in the 1980s, it uses a kitchen timer (ideally a cute little tomato or ‘pomodoro’) to break your work into 25-minute intervals, separated by 5-minute breaks. You could do this using your phone as a timer, but the audible ticking is supposed to externalize the desire to complete the task, then the bell is supposed to release you. Theoretically, the sounds will initiate focused states.

Regardless, this is a great one if you find that you’re scrolling against your will. If you can’t delete your apps (which we all should!) check them during your five-minute breaks. This is also a great way to remind yourself to stretch or sit in sunlight or close your eyes.

Psilocybin – Once I was banging my head on my desk trying to write a pilot and a screenwriter friend of mine said, “Why don’t you take some mushrooms and go to Malibu?” I was like, “Wait, is that a thing?” I did not go to Malibu but I did take a microdose and walk around the Silverlake Reservoir. I wrote an entirely new outline in two days, and the producers I sent it to…loved it?? Would I have had the same outcome without the microdose? Maybe. Maybe not.

Paid subscribers, I’m in the process of putting together a video series with other writers - in the meantime, look for an old-fashioned AMA coming your way…More soon.

Just outside the office of our principal, Sister Mary, was a long table. It was “the Brown Table,” and it was where you were sent when you were in trouble.

*

When being a child gets hard for my son Julian, he will ask me if I’ve ever felt that way before. He has been having a hard time with “consequences” at his preschool. He’s scared of them yet incurs them frequently, more than his peers, and this embarrasses him. I find myself regularly affirming for him that being a kid is really fucking hard. He asks me if I ever had consequences at school. “Oh yeah,” I tell him. “Major.” He asks me to tell him about one time. “A real story,” he says, nervous that I’m going to make something up to placate him. The thing is, I should placate him. He has just turned five. I should make up something that makes me seem like I figured out my behavioral issues, that I’ve conquered my big emotions. But I don’t, partly because I haven’t figured those things out and he knows it, and partly because I want tell him the real story. “At my school,” I begin, “there was a place called the Brown Table.”

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*

I pretty much lived there until I was encouraged to transfer out of St. Hedwig’s in sixth grade. I went to the Brown Table for lying. For saying hell, damn, and crap in second grade. For graduating to the big curse words in fifth. For forging my mom’s signature on my religion homework in first grade (I forgot the second N in my mother’s first name, Nancy). For telling my fifth-grade classmates I was an atheist, and then for trying to start a club for nonbelievers. For wearing eyeliner and for telling a kindergartener the details, as I knew them, of sexual intercourse. Because I snuck in chewing gum in second grade and because I violated the dress code by rolling up my uniform skirt in fourth. Because in third grade, at slumber parties I made out with my girlfriends, who told their parents, who called the school. For masturbating in first grade by sitting on the heel of my foot and rocking. For pulling the hair of the second-grade girl who said I was lying about my father working on satellites in outer space.

But the thing I was most consistently sent to the Brown Table for was reading. I regularly read books not assigned by my teachers, and I did so under my desk or inside my desk, or by saying I had to get something out of my locker and reading in the bathroom. In third grade, I took one of these bathroom breaks and snuck into the church to read, which caused a schoolwide panic and resulted in an in-person meeting with my mother and the principal. While I waited for my mother to arrive, I sat at the Brown Table.

“But what’s funny is that when they sent you to the Brown Table, all you got was a pencil and paper. You were supposed to write lines. Or you were supposed to be bored. That was the punishment.”

“What are lines?” Julian asks.

 “It doesn’t matter .”

*

My mother often leveled me in the process of raising me. But there were two things about me that were consistently validated as being capital-G “Good.” The first was that I was pretty. Little else mattered because my looks meant I could get married someday. The second was that I was a great reader. The family mythology is that I taught myself to read when I was three. But having recently had two children pass through that age, I find it unlikely. I did arrive at kindergarten knowing how to read and feeling that I had an edge over my classmates. I won all the reading and writing contests, and I was not humble. I remember feeling special. What confuses me now is how quickly it became a liability.  

In first grade, we had an assignment to write a book report on what we were reading at home. I wrote on Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins. I remember the horror (and the titillation) I felt when Karana’s little brother is killed by a pack of wild dogs. At the bottom of the book report was a requirement that a parent had to sign, verifying that their child had read this book. Mrs. G pulled me aside and took me to Sister Mary’s office, where we had to call my mother. The book, Mrs. G alleged, was too advanced. She did not believe I had read it. She said that I had forged my mother’s signature, which, as I mentioned before, was a fair accusation. But not that day. My mother was so mad at Mrs. G that she came in person (I see now that she must have had to ask to leave work early). Mrs. G, already an unkind woman, was furious when she had to apologize to me. I went to the Brown Table more frequently after that.

In second grade, I was sitting against a butter-yellow cinder block wall in a windowless room that they used for extended care, reading “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. It was so early in the morning that it was still dark outside. Mrs. T raised her eyebrows and said, “You’re not reading that.” I thought her statement referred to the content, so I said, “I’m not scared.” She picked up the book and pointed to a word on the page. “What’s that word?” she asked, amusing herself. “Deeter-mind-dead.” I said, sounding it out with an added consonant. She shook her head. “Determined,” she said, walking away. My cheeks burned. I put the book in my backpack. But, I wanted to say to her, I know what it means.  

In third grade I read the entire oeuvre of Roald Dahl (I dressed up as Matilda for Halloween). I read Katherine Paterson’s The Bridge to Terabithia and E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. That was the year of Fear Street, of Nancy Drew and the Babysitter’s Club, of Sweet Valley High, for which I had to receive consent from my mother to take out of the library. My mother also bought me a set of illustrated and abridged Shakespeare comedies, and I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream over and over again (I can still see each facing page’s illustration perfectly). I was never without my copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, and my sister and I played goddesses (she, Athena, me, Aphrodite). I stole my mother’s copy of Mists of Avalon, which felt like the biggest book I had ever seen. I don’t remember finishing it but do remember feeling like I had been let into a world of adult fairy tales. I didn’t want the kid’s stuff after that. 

In this ferment of great literature for children, I started writing a series of stories during my regular sessions at the Brown Table. They were about Guinevere (Gwen, for short), an orphan who was sent to live with her rich, beautiful, and perfect best friend. I stapled the loose-leaf pages from the Brown Table into a spiral bound Mead notebook. I kept writing. My third grade teacher, Mrs. F, took the notebooks away. “What’s seven multiplied by six?” she asked. I had no idea. “Then you can have them back at the end of the day,” she said.

Fourth grade was Catcher in the Rye. Again I was accused of (and exonerated from) lying. In fifth, V. C. Andrews (I think Flowers in the Attic scrambled my eleven-year-old brain in ways I’m still recovering from. At an event for her short story collection Ghost Lover, Lisa Taddeo talked about the impact Flowers in the Attic made on her, and I was thought, This is why we love each other). The book was confiscated and not allowed back due to its highly sexual content. Anne Rice was sixth grade and seventh was Wuthering Heights, which is entangled with my first French kiss. Both the boy and I were wearing rollerblades, he still had braces, and I couldn’t believe how wet it was, a blind swim against a rubbery wave.

I otherwise had no Heathcliff. My journals from then describe a girl who felt she had no one to talk to, who worried she was cold or dead inside. One who was too prudish, too bookish, and too flat-chested to command any kind of attention. That year I ditched school for the first time. I rode my skateboard alone to Super Saver Cinemas, tucked into the back of a strip mall on Seal Beach Blvd, to see the film adaptation of Great Expectations, a book I might have said was my favorite if anyone had ever asked me. The school called my mother because the voicemail I had left for them, in which I had practiced my deepest and most harried version of her voice, sounded suspect. Brontë, Dickens, Gwyneth Paltrow in green—I was getting grounded for everything.

In eighth grade I started going to the high school to get my books. I found Ariel there: an off-white paperback, the edges darkened and graying, the title set in bold black type. It was in the protracted afternoon lull between school ending and the expectation of being home. I was already reading poetry, mainly fixated on Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Oscar Wilde, poems whose music and meaning felt accessible. I must have had an awareness of the Plath mythology. I hoped to find something pithy and melodic. I took the book and sat on the ground in front of the stacks, in a way I still can be caught reading in libraries, as if hiding. I read up through “Lady Lazarus,” not really understanding anything except Plath’s urgency, the vividness of her lines and her fevered visions: flowers, mirrors, animals, all cast in a spooky fatalism. And that was it for me.

Brontë and Plath enveloped me in what I would now call a kind of literary tradition. Those two aching, gothic books (and the drama of the lives of the women who authored them) connected with my own experience of enormous, sometimes unbearable feelings and made me conscious of a lineage of women who worked through those feelings with words. When does one become a writer? I often say that we start out in mimicry and become a writer when make the leap into own voice or style. But that becoming also begins in these moments of connection to forbearers who we’re always in conversation with. There isn’t anything I write, even this newsletter, in which I don’t feel accountable to the books I’ve loved and felt loved by.

I was not exceptional or a prodigy. I was precocious, maybe. I read at the dinner table. I took a book to the dinner parties my mom dragged me to and read in a corner. I often walked between classes or to soccer practice while reading.

And yet, I was really bad at school.

*

There is a cavity between the child—who was by all accounts voracious for information, joyfully curious, and naturally creative—and the teenager who fails out of one high school, does barely passable work in another, and gets rejected from every single college she applied to. It’s only twenty-odd years on that I can look at those months before graduation day and take in the full scope of my humiliation. I wasn’t going to college. I had failed in all senses of the word.

I recently read a newsletter by Anne Helen Peterson that talked about her relationship with her pastor, who was also her childhood friend’s father. She describes him as “One Significant Adult,” a person who is not within the family unit, whose care and attention alters a child’s life. I can pinpoint that moment of connection with my English teacher at my second high school, and I know that every other moment of professional achievement arises directly from that mentorship. He helped me in quiet and overt ways, no question. He took my attempts at fiction seriously and did not give up on me. I attribute that to getting waitlisted, then accepted at the eleventh hour, to Kenyon College.

But mostly I had locked adults completely out of my life. I made myself untouchable. I greatly frustrated some of my teachers; the rest, other than that English teacher, uniformly ignored me. I can see the enraged faces of a few of them, still radiating that desire to punish me. I became a target, an example. I was classified at various times as gifted, troubled, depressed, anxious, and learning disabled. I was written off and left behind. School was bad at seeing me, and I was one of the loud ones. I became the person I wanted to be by accident.

*

I want to end this piece saying that because I went through this, my own children will be fine. Because I am paying attention. In the background of my educational disaster were parents who were, well, not. But despite my self-assurance and my vigilance, there are many days when Julian comes home and doesn’t feel fine. We try to redirect some of the beliefs he’s internalized: that he’s a bad kid who’s always in trouble, that he’s unliked by his teachers. The school has assigned an occupational therapist to visit him, to help him with impulse control and social interaction. As of this writing he hasn’t seemed embarrassed by his “extra teacher.” But he notices, and he has questions. He knows that the way he absorbs information is different from his peers, as is his uncanny recall, and we feel that we’re doing a pretty good job of making him proud of the way he knits disparate ideas and facts into coherence.

But I also see everything he doesn’t say. I have sat across from his incredible preschool teachers at parent-teacher conferences where they explain, “Julian is extremely articulate and bright. He seems to have a kind of photographic memory . . . But.” And that but kills me. Maybe it doesn’t surprise the teachers that my eyes well and overflow. It surprises my husband. But then he has never made himself untouchable. I apologize to the teachers, then ask them to continue.

If Julian (or my daughter, Paloma, following close behind him) decides not to care about school, all of my relevant life experience will not get him to hear me. He is already learning that to master “consequences,” he only has to lose his fear of them. How soon did I learn that if I wasn’t afraid of the Brown Table, I could do anything I wanted? And how, from the vantage point afforded to me by these “mistakes,” can I say that this realization was a bad thing and not what saved me?

*

Last year, we read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory together, his eyes following my finger as it moved along under the words. After that, Charlotte’s Web, Comet in Moominland, the first two Harry Potter books, and his own copy of D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. On his fifth birthday, he received a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which we read in the evenings, even though it’s legitimately scary and occasionally he listens from under the covers.

He recognizes words, is right on the edge of pushing the phonics together. I don’t teach him or rush him. I just read. This is how we spend much of our time together. He never gets bored of the text-heavy pages, never seems to tire of my voice or lulls in plot. There is so much of these books that he doesn’t understand. So much too of the world. But he’s really good at reading.

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Books mentioned are available at my author bookshop. Even Flowers in the Attic. We use gorgeous illustrated editions of Harry Potter that are a bit more entertaining. And here’s the abridged illustrated Shakespeare. Someone please reissue this series!

When I was a girl, I read in Seventeen that a woman was her most beautiful at thirty-three. The idea was attributed to Elizabeth Taylor, and it was illustrated with photos of female celebrities at this ideal age. I think they meant this to be encouraging—you can be old and still be beautiful! You have so much to look forward to!

Throughout my thirty-third year I inspected myself to see if I had turned my most beautiful. Most of that year I was between New York and Los Angeles: in a writer’s room with people I still treasure, on set making my first television show in the city I love. I turned thirty-four on a toe-numbing December day of exterior shoots. Friends stopped by, watched a few takes, hugged me. The cast and crew sang “Happy Birthday” while I stood on Sixth Ave., facing north, the Empire State Building beaming.

But we were talking about my face.

In 2008, after a late night of drinking in Gramercy Park with a beloved friend, I gasped. My friend—who was, like me, twenty-four—had just had sex with a thirty-three-year-old woman. I was titillated and horrified. What was it like? Tell me everything. He smiled politely and then admitted, It was weird. I pressed him—Why? How so?—and then he said it: Her skin.

Thirty-three is so fucking young.

I have lots of friends turning forty. Or approaching it with ambivalence at best. The existential fear of aging out is not nothing. I catch myself mythologizing how it was to be young (I didn’t tell you that in the year we made Sweetbitter, I was caught multiple times sobbing in the bathroom at Steiner Studios). When are my friends and I going to stop texting each other photos of ourselves in our late twenties and saying, Man, we were hot. Forget about how epically fucked we are, trapped in a culture that grossly fetishizes our youth. I just can’t imagine spending the rest of my days looking backward at some imaginary pinnacle of physical beauty. I refuse. 

What if, as teen girls, we were told that we would be our most beautiful at sixty-three? I have friends in their sixties. Things look promising. Yes, there can be health issues. Yes, there can be money trouble, or the heavy task of caring for an elder. But my friends also have affectionate and wry relationships with their adult children. They’re learning French or Russian, growing calendula and lemon balm for their own tinctures, or obsessing over the Dutch Golden Age of painting. They entertain without strain. They still have sex if they want to. I recently read Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, about an affair she had when she was fifty-eight years old, with a married man twenty years her junior, and she is doing stuff that was so fucking hot it caused me to clutch my pearls.

Will sixty-three perhaps be my most beautiful year?

2.

In both of my pregnancies, I heard a lot of talk about “getting my body back.” And yes, I sometimes long for that body and how it only cared for itself. But that body is gone, all the cute little parts, bye-bye forever. Why beat myself up trying to reverse the lasting marks of pregnancy when, in fact, it would make no sense to have that body after carrying a human for nine months, and then another ten months later?

This remodeled body is partially mine, and very much theirs. It’s there to regulate fevers or tantrums, serve as an indoor play structure, absorb mucus, pasta sauce, vomit and wailing. It was made to carry their sleeping deadweight out of the car, up the stairs, into bed. This body is a pillow, reported to be quite “squishy,” and has the bonus of being a heating unit for ice cold feet. Falling asleep with my kids at 7:30 p.m. is like floating-in-warm-water bliss. A bliss only this body gets to know.  

3. 

As I approached forty, I thought I might finally be able to accept the advice I often see on lists like these: “Forgive yourself.” Maybe that will be on my 50 for 50 list.

4.

I rarely buy new clothes. But if I do, it’s probably a cashmere sweater.

5.

One thing I had figured out by thirty-three: When you don’t want to get drunk, drink Campari and Soda.

6.

And one I wish I had figured out: When you want to get drunk, drink champagne indiscriminately.

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7.

People tell me that they can’t understand poetry. I get that. I have been stumped and daunted by abstraction (I’m recalling the first time I read John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, or the semester at Kenyon I spent trying to parse The Canterbury Tales). I often still feel that way. But I don’t only read poetry for understanding, as if every poem is a one-to-one translation of an experience or feeling. Instead, I look for something like flight or uncertainty, some threshold in a phrase or a poem’s music. I bathe in the poem and try not to ask too much of it. How often have I been baffled by a poem and then after a month come back to it? How often then did I begin to see what wasn’t written?

I read poems to become a better writer. I know of few other ways to feel both the presence and absence of God. 

8.

My number one no question kitchen essential is my nine-quart Le Creuset Dutch oven. I have the round one, in white. I prefer it over every other pot and pan. It goes with me on road trips, on every writing retreat. I can roast a chicken, sear a steak, make a soup or risotto. If I had to bake in it, I could. Never in my decade plus with this pot have I thought, I really wish I had a slightly smaller size.

9.

In my twenties I did every cleanse marketed at me. (Sometime I’ll tell the story of doing Blessed Herbs, which gave me a hallucinating fever and completely emptied my intestines). At forty, I will never, ever, give up bread and pasta. I have a piece of Bub and Grandma’s seeded sourdough every morning - with almond butter and sliced strawberries, or peanut butter, bananas, and sesame seeds, or Vegannaise topped with avocado. And I go through boxes of De Cecco rigatoni every week: in the winter I favor Marcella’s bolognese, in the summer, Canal House’s hot spaghetti tossed with raw tomato sauce.

10.

I’m in a heterosexual marriage with two children. I honestly never saw it coming. I feel I need to scream out to myself at twenty-six, when my boyfriend asked me to marry him: Say you’re not ready. Instead, I thought at the time: Who could say no? Isn’t this what everyone wants?

The second time around I got married for what I consider the right reasons (love, children, health insurance). But I wish I could say to myself and my peers in our early and mid-thirties: You do not need to get married and have children. Did I do those things because I felt a guttural instinct? Because this was how I wanted to grow and spend my days? Or because I’m impulsive and wanted to see what could happen?

Dear God, the pressure, both ambient and explicit. Why do we still have such limited imaginations for what a woman’s life can look like? When I think about what I want for my daughter, it’s this pressure I want to remove first.

11.

Every single body, at every age, looks better in a tiny, tiny swimsuit.

12.

Every year I ask for patience, poetry, and posture. What I’m really asking for is discipline.

13.

It is nearly impossible for me to recover from losing or misplacing an object. A lip balm, an earring, a puzzle piece or one part of a 127-part plastic marble track. Or most harrowing of all, a book I own but cannot find. I keep lists of what I’m missing. I may appear present, but in truth I'm wondering where I put that baby doll’s fake diaper, or the lighthouse Christmas ornament that broke last year. This is a ridiculous waste of energy, but then again, better the anxiety landing there than on my loved ones.

14.

In my forties, will I be less annoying about how bossy I get about my friends’ life choices/creative endeavors/marriages/dating lives/vacations?

15.

I’ve found that what’s most stabilizing for my two children is not a specific routine, a house, a school, or a marriage. It’s unconditional love. I know that sounds obvious, but I’m still recovering from the explosion of well-meaning advice that detonated when I was postpartum and so fragile. This is what a day should look like. This is what sleep should look like. This is what structured play time should look like. In short, your infant/toddler/child will thrive only if you create these routines.

I ask my kids to do a lot of things that are technically destabilizing—we travel a lot, sometimes at the last minute, with irregular bedtimes or foreign sleeping arrangements. Even mealtimes are all over the place. When we’re in these new places, we ask them to figure it out for themselves: play with a stick, talk to the adults, or flip through a book. They are both insane so maybe there’s a correlation—but Matt and I are their constants, their routine. Our love for them, even if we were apart, is home. I torture myself about my parenting, but I feel good about this.

16.

I will never have a neutral, minimalist, spotless house.

17.

I take no credit for my daughter’s sophisticated palate, and no blame for my son’s refusal to ingest a vegetable.

18.

I love my acupuncturist. She was involved in both my childbirths, and I see her regularly for hormone and mood regulation as well as back and neck pain. I am always begging her to sell me herbs, which she does sometimes. Mostly she tsks me and says, Drink more water. She pats my hand, You’ll feel better.

Eight hours of sleep, on your back. Morning light. Rest after lunch, cut out caffeine. All of these things my acupuncturist says to me. I laugh about this with my friends—everything she recommends is free. And too accessible!

19.

As someone who loves to wax lyrical about the glories of the Loire Valley varietals (cabernet franc and chenin blanc, I’m looking at you), who once ranked the best Negronis in New York City, who built a career around her passion for wine and its history, I wish I could say to my twenty-year old self, to myself at thirty-three: Drinking alcohol isn’t good for you.

My younger self would slap me of course, but I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t certain.

20.

I’m also certain that my phone is more physically and mentally degrading than alcohol.

21.

But: we are sexless, joyless, emotionally anemic automatons without our vices.

22.

So, I’m forty. I’m curious about authentic sexual desire in women. If I want subjugation, is that valid or is it false consciousness, just conditioning? What parts of my relationship to my sexuality is a defense mechanism? Is it possible to remove power dynamics from sexual relationships? Is it possible that power dynamics are ever healthy, or non-abusive? Am I still turned on without them?

Certainty freaks me out. It’s partly reactionary—I grew up Catholic, after all—but certainty doesn’t reflect my experience of the world.

And while I resist it, I also believe in a moral code. I believe in lines that should never be crossed.

I find thinking through these questions difficult but pleasurable. Maybe that’s why I am still heavily involved with my contradictions. 

23.

There is a way to gossip without maliciousness, without an intent to destroy, and it is one of my passions.

24.

I’ve been in consistent, almost weekly, therapy for fifteen years. I know it works for me. But what does that mean?

One reason I’m drawn to psychoanalysis is because it emphasizes the ongoingness of talking. Sure, I have epiphanies. I am occasionally shocked by my therapist’s insight. And I make decisions using the information I gather during my sessions. But that’s not the bulk of it. I repeat myself. I bore myself. I cry. Why the fuck do I still feel so unsafe, like I’m standing on the edge of an all-consuming terror, every single day? I berate myself for not making progress (why am I still berating myself?).

But if I really believed it was about progress, about an imagined cure, I would have quit. I don’t believe that I’ll ever work through my past or my grief. I know therapists who dispute that. I do believe it’s possible for people to change. But not all of us. I’ll just keep returning to the room, secreted off from all my public selves, where I have no idea what will happen. The taboos aired, the exchange, the ritual. The value of therapy for me is the seeking.

25.

I’m a single-issue voter. Guess which one.

26.

I think about this line from Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror nearly every day: “Our world—digitally mediated, utterly consumed by capitalism—makes communication about morality very easy but makes actual moral living very hard.” I have to stop and check myself to ensure that I’ve not confused the action of reposting a meme with authentic political engagement. How often am I practicing communitarian values, or making myself uncomfortable in real life for the sake of something I believe in? I don’t ask this because I have this kind of integrity, I regularly don’t. My husband is one of the few people I know who is more concerned with civic responsibilities than his online representation of it. I admire that.

27.

If I could change one thing about my own ethical misalignment, and that of my family, it would be the waste we produce, and the nearly automatic consumerism that’s both embedded within a society that intentionally conflates what we buy with who we are, and within my own psyche which hums: I need, I want, It’s not enough. I am haunted by this, I’m always trying to amend it, and I feel totally powerless to stop it.

28.

Case in point: noise-cancelling Bose headphones are the best fancy thing I’ve ever purchased.

29.

My peers seem to have a lot of regrets about the sun. I have zero about how tan I used to get. My inspiration has always been and will always be those ancient Italian women, bronzed and sagging, resplendent and leathery in their jewelry and their bikinis, eating four-course lunches without a thought for bloating, then unselfconsciously displaying themselves on the beach.

30.

I am not a litigator. But sometimes in my marriage, I find litigating easier than empathizing. It is so much harder for me to be curious about his perspective, to give it as much validity as I give my own. I can’t believe how bad I am at it. I feel like I’ve been trying to protect my perspective for my entire life—why would I ever give a fucking inch? But I am not stockpiling evidence for a trial. There is no judge I’m performing for. I want to learn how to take better care of the people I love. 

31.

I’ll never do drugs again. They have a really solid marriage.

These are some of the things I don’t say anymore. Been burned too many times.

32.

I never tire of the NYC versus LA conversation. Despite it being one that’s riddled with clichés and platitudes, despite the objective fact that both are barely different versions of the same expensive small town, I will always be willing to pit one’s pleasures against the other’s and see which comes out on top.

What about those winter beach days, the concentrated, horizontal light bouncing off the Pacific? Yes, but what the spring lust that stirs through the city as the cherry blossoms tumble down? And what about driving across town on Beverly with the windows down while station 93.5 KDay plays “Backyard Boogie?” Yes, but what about being on the J train heading west over the Williamsburg bridge during the blue hour and watching each building light up?

It’s provincial to have spent my entire adult life in New York and Los Angeles. I’m the first to admit that I’m a calmer, gentler person when surrounded by trees, mountains, bodies of water. I could live a fulfilling life identifying wildflowers and constellations. But I’m addicted to cities. I always assumed this would change, that I would eventually settle down into a quieter life. But I’m starting to doubt it.

33.

If I wasn’t so scared of addiction, I would happily drink green NyQuil every night of my life.

34.

My friendships are as important as my romantic relationship. My husband asks when our date night is, and I have to tell him I’m booked two months out with my friends. And while I’m not perfect about always responding to a text, I make an enormous effort to check in or see friends regularly. It’s completely worth it. What are we doing on our dates? We are talking.

We’re telling stories of awful past relationships or despairing over the historical moment while walking around the Silverlake Reservoir before preschool pick up. We’re discussing every minute and perverted detail of our sex lives around a dining room table with take-out. We’re shouting gossip through the din at Musso and Frank’s or Via Carota, and on celebration getaways in the Southwest desert, Mexico, Kauai, or Palm Springs we’re talking about grief. Betrayal. Our dumb aspirations. What can I say? My friends are fascinating, complicated, and fucking funny.

How am I still meeting new people and falling so hard for them? How do I still love people who have known me through so many ages and selves? I have to prioritize them because they are the great loves of my life.

35.

When my children yell demands at me, or purposefully destroy something I’ve just cleaned, or pretend to be deaf, or refuse to walk or stand up or use words, I have to swallow my natural reaction, self-regulate, and try to not take anything personally. Of course, I want to treat my children better than my parents treated me. But I struggle to stay on the gentle-parenting script. And do I really want my kids to think I’m not a human being, that sometimes has overwhelming feelings? Everyone, even the most wonderful kid, is sometimes an asshole. And as often as I say, I see that you’re angry right now, and that’s ok, but I can’t let you throw the potty at my head, I occasionally find myself drawing a hard “asshole” line and standing by it. I hope when they’re older, they will be able to do the same.

36.

I’ve regularly wished I was more combative, more aggressive, less afraid of conflict. I long to be less pleasing.

I’ve seen so many men curse at each other or belittle the people who work under them. I’ve been on calls where grown men hang up on each other. I’ve watched them duck blame without blinking. And about ninety-five percent of the time, I’ve seen them rewarded for that behavior.

But at my core, I don’t know, man. I sleep easier knowing that when I’m working with someone, the experience of working together is as important to me as what we make. I don’t want people’s fear. I hope people think or say, That was nice working with her. I have to believe that counts for something.

37.

I’m afraid of: planes, snakes, random acts of violence. Of course, earthquakes and fires. I’m afraid of dogs and I run from the chickens at my children’s preschool. I’m afraid of being in the Holland Tunnel and the subway if it pauses for too long. I’m afraid of underground parking garages and other people’s driving on the freeway. Those fears have inhibited me many times over. But I’ve never been afraid of starting over.

38.

Reading books taught me how to write them. Talking to, arguing with, and listening to people taught me how to think like a writer. I guess I’m saying that living counts as much as reading.

39.

I can’t keep up with the fiction new releases and bestseller lists. I prefer the company of the dead. (There are brilliant books released into the world every Tuesday, and I believe the ones I need will find their way to me). But contemporary publishing is a marketplace, and I often want to read outside of its vernacular. At the end of my thirty-ninth year, I’m reading Alien Hearts by Guy de Mauppasant in Richard Howard’s translation. 1890’s Parisian aristocracy; a bored, empty dilettante’s decision to conquer and fall in love with a liberated and jaded young widow; who wouldn’t enjoy watching a decade end with such a wild and psychologically penetrating account of their love affair?

40.

At thirteen I couldn’t imagine living past thirty. When I thought about being an adult, I ran into a dead end. This inability to imagine the future made me a terrible planner. But I’ve gotten good at taking what comes. I am perpetually and continuously surprised. I can’t believe I’m forty.

I cannot wait to be sixty-three.

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In nearly every review of my memoir Stray—even the positive ones—there was mention of my privilege. That didn’t surprise me. I remember reading a piece in N+1 back in 2014 about the way privilege had become the primary lens for literary criticism, and that particular form of scrutiny has only increased in the years since. But I was also aware from everyday social interactions that my life didn’t appear to warrant a memoir. I struggled for years thinking my story did not contain enough pain, deprivation, or event. I didn’t survive a natural disaster, or even weather a capitol-T trauma. There was no car crash, no illness diagnosis, no literal fight for life. Yet I knew from publishing short pieces that I had something to say about neglect and abuse, an experience that was much more universal than I ever imagined as a child. I also knew that my life was irredeemably charmed. But I was surprised that reviewers and some readers wanted clarity on my class and general socioeconomic standing, which I believed was embedded in every single detail. What, in telling my own story, had I left out?

There was a point during the writing of Stray when I considered writing about money: how its presence and lack shaped me and my ambitions in not so obvious ways, how I went from defiantly not caring about it to feeling like it is the only thing that will protect my family. But money felt so disruptive—the issue is fucking enormous, all of its scars made up of a thousand tiny cuts. And Stray, whatever else it is, is small. It’s the prism of a single moment through which I see my past and potential future: my parents’ addiction and abandonment, my awful love affair, my own alcohol and drug abuse. I never intended to write, nor did I know how to write, about all of it. I didn’t write about my years in the restaurant industry or my years as a wine buyer. I elided most of college and my first marriage. I didn’t write about the selling of Sweetbitter or my sexual coming of age. Stray was not—couldn’t be—about those things. And while I did not write overtly about money and privilege, it is undoubtedly at the center of what shaped Stray, because it is, just barely above sex, the idea that has most obsessed me.

*

I am almost physically attracted to old houses, with their quirks and inconveniences. Ours is a Craftsman built in 1906, and it’s full of turn-of-the-century weirdness. The one bathroom is tiny, storage-less, and the shower rigged in the cast iron tub feels makeshift. The kitchen is also weirdly cramped, and the ancient Chambers stove needs repairs at least quarterly. We have no closet in our bedroom and share with our children. Matt and I often talk about what the city must have looked like when the house was built. In 1907 they started construction on the Silverlake Reservoir, hoping to create an emergency water supply (a dream that died on the vine as the growing city quickly outstripped its natural resources). The house was probably surrounded by farmland (maybe lima-bean fields or citrus groves or vineyards). Nearby, the Los Angeles River would have had riverbanks covered in willows and sycamores, as opposed to its current concrete. The city had an extensive trolley network at that time, and one ran next to the house on a single lane of packed dirt that was eventually paved and named Sunset Boulevard.  

When we got home from the playdate in Los Feliz, I reminded my kids about our house’s specialness: its stained-glass window panes, its ornate built-in bookshelves, our large front porch, all of which the owner, Julie, had lovingly restored. She had lived in it in the early nineties, renting it from an owner who left it trashed, rat-infested, with holes in the walls that the winds whistled through. I point out to my kids the way afternoon light grazes the nicks in the dark wood staircase, the way the house stays cool on hundred-degree days. We are constantly harping on the idea of being good stewards of Julie’s magical house. We are lucky to be able to live in Silverlake, holding onto our stabilized rent while our friends all push east. When we drive up after time away, we look at each other and say, “Can you believe we live here?”

Who had I become that I would cry over a wealthy person’s house? When I said all of this to Emily, she talked about an exercise she had done in a social justice workshop. On the first day, the participants had gone around in what the workshop called a “story circle,” and each person told their class story. The intention was to center the personal story within the conversation they were about to have about identity politics. She had expected to talk about racism, activism, and socioeconomic issues, but not necessarily herself: “I had a fairly normal childhood, and I’m so privileged,” she started. And while she might have assumed her story was straightforward, upon telling it revealed itself to be complicated. She said to me, “ I was rocked by telling that story. I couldn’t stop crying. I realized for the first time how much this was a part of my identity. The shifts I went through as a child impacted the way I see everything.” 

*

A class story. We all have one. And I suspect many of us are not in touch with the ways we were hurt by it, or by our ambivalence—even at times our defensiveness—of the privilege that counterbalances our hardship. How aware are we of how our class story still informs our aspirations and decisions? How are we unconsciously projecting it onto our loved ones?

I kept coming back to the phrase: class story. I toyed with writing one for myself. I haven’t done it yet (though this might be one of many first fitful starts). But what I did do was write one for the main character of my novel-in-progress.

I would argue that there is not an observation a fictional character can make that isn’t informed by the material reality of how they grew up, and how they in turn present a coherent identity to others, how they choose everything from their hairstyle to their politics. If I’m honest with myself, my values are grossly entwined with what my parents wanted and what I couldn’t have. It makes sense then that the same is true for the main character of my novel.  

If we can imagine more fully the class story of our characters, we can better inhabit their point of view. We can better load up the details they’re tracking, intuit their responses, project their hopes, and move from their conscious motivations to the unconscious. For my novel in progress, my protagonist (let’s call him H) returns to Los Angeles anxiously. I thought he was anxious because of a tragedy in his past—though that’s certainly part of it—but he’s primarily anxious about his proximity to a certain class of people and circumstances that we now call the 1 percent. How his milieu intersects with his personal tragedies is one of the main threads of the novel. Can intimate, trusting friendships develop across class lines? Can marriages that cross those lines be equitable, or is someone always the guest, the help? Do we unfailingly experience schadenfreude at the humiliations and undoing of the elite? Does H want power because he has suffered or because he finds its execution alluring?

I don’t want to oversell the exercise—it wasn’t a critical breakthrough for my book. But I understood so much more clearly what H notices (and the first-person voice is entirely constructed by what the character notices) especially as it relates to what he wants. Character development is understanding what undergirds those wants. For that kind of discovery, this exercise is hugely helpful. I mean, hugely. When writing, we are often talking about stakes. We do so because stakes turn a want into a need. A character can want money—but what specifically will turn that want into a need?

Emily shared some prompts from her workshop (I’ve shared them below). They felt revelatory and uncannily familiar, like something dredged up from a dream. I shivered when I read, “Have you ever been able to take an unpaid internship?” The summer after my sophomore year in college, I moved to New York City along with a small group of friends, some of whom took unpaid internships: at Random House and the New York Times. In the celebrity-frequented office of a naturopath doctor downtown. At 42West and the Second Stage. And five mornings each week, and occasionally overnight, I wore an industrial back brace and unloaded pallets in the bowel of Borders Books in the Time Warner Center. (I had a friend there, Samara, and we ran a racket where we tore the covers off the expired pornographic magazines and pretended to return them, but we actually traded them to the cooks and dishwashers at Per Se. She asked me once, “Why the fuck do you want to move to here?” I said, sarcastically, “Because I love Sex and the City.” When she laughed at me, I wondered if I was joking.) At the time I would have told you I didn’t care—about my job or Samara’s laughter or my friends’ good fortune. My friends (mostly their parents) were generous: I got to see Broadway plays, raided stocked fridges in their townhouses, spent weekends at second homes in the Hudson Valley, Vermont, Fire Island. I enjoyed a veritable buffet of hand-me-downs. I was impervious to being different from my peers. Yet now, as an adult, the words unpaid internship make me involuntarily grimace. It’s clear to me now that I was so, so ashamed.

*

As I thought about these class-story questions, I felt like scenes, even entire short stories, could fall into my lap with each answer. But the exercise also made me imagine the class story my children will be telling someday. Dear God, it can’t be that I cried in the driveways of rich people’s houses! But those thousand tiny cuts I mentioned do linger: maybe if I hadn’t had to work thirty hours a week in high school, I wouldn’t have failed so many classes. Maybe all those times a friend covered me because we had gone to the ATM and my balance was near zero had left me with the impression that I am always both in debt and undeserving. Maybe if my mother hadn’t been so focused on our perpetual lack and berated herself for it, I wouldn’t cry over a child’s toy collection. When my son asked me that question, it took me back to being small, scared, and confused as to why other people’s homes seemed lighter than mine.

What is surprising about your own class story? Perhaps you straddled two classes, or moved up or down in ways that felt inexplicable to your younger self. Or you had one class experience with one parent and a different one with another. Perhaps you didn’t grow up in a two-parent household (I didn’t), and that was part of your story. Did your parents own their home? Did they graduate from college? Or maybe your parents held upper-middle class jobs that gradually stopped providing a corresponding lifestyle (I’m thinking of what Barbara Ehrenreich called the “professional-managerial class” like academics and social workers, nurses and middle managers who, as she explains, are “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production”).

Do you know what was especially surprising about asking my main character to tell his class story? I had judged him. His proximity to wealth, ease, and vanity had allowed me to ignore what should have been obvious tensions. He appears, especially when we meet him, charmed. Though I know he has suffered (I made him to suffer), I didn’t realize how much my character hates the citizens of Beverly Hills (where the novel is set). Hates that they didn’t earn their money. Hates the bizarre and flimsy excuses they use to justify cruelty. He hates that they are not subject to the same rules as others. He hates that his own worth is inextricably tied to theirs—they gave him his power and can take it away. He would give anything to be them.

Don’t ask me how I know.

*

I don’t hate the couple who own that house in Los Feliz. But I don’t know why some people are born into shapes and spaces designed to inoculate them from discomfort, let alone hardship. I say I don’t know how I became a member of the creative class, but it has something to do with being born into a place where, despite financial precarity, it was even possible to conceive of being an artist. An artist—how outrageous is that? It feels random, careless, and confusing to navigate. And still, I can’t assuage that feeling of material envy for the cosseting and armoring that luxury objects perform .

As I can see my college-aged shame so clearly, I see I shouldn’t have hidden my tears from my children. I should have said, It’s ok to feel envy. It’s not a sin or a sign of greed. It’s just human. And it will pass. In the months since, I’ve remembered the episode and laughed. I’ve wondered what made me so sensitive, is it having children, or maybe the book I’m writing is dominating me in unexpected ways. And though I feel restored to my senses, it will happen again. I will wonder why I feel like I can’t make “enough” money, and I will be angry at myself when my children eventually compare themselves to other children and find what they have and who they are lacking. It hurts me. That’s part of my class story. If I hadn’t spent so long trying to bury or conquer my envy, I might have seen sooner that this is an old hurt. I’m not seven, or twenty, or twenty-nine. I’m nearly forty, and if I won the lottery—which in many, many ways I have—things would look mostly the same. Maybe I would get another master’s degree, or another five. I would probably make an offer on Julie’s house.

And while an aggressive pride in my “class story” was a defense mechanism against the affluence around me, that pride wasn’t totally misplaced. I smile when someone compliments me on my slightly deranged work ethic. The smile is not about endurance or hours logged at a desk. I smile because I really believe I can find a job anywhere, even if I find myself unloading pallets again. It’s those jobs I sometimes resented, not my education or my books, that gave me a resilient core. Would I really want to deny my children the same experience? Amid all the gross uncertainty of living, how fortunate would they be to have the rock-solid knowledge that they can take care of themselves?

Like all homes, ours is an expression of values. Dust. Piles of tiny dirty clothes in each corner. Mismatched table settings. The furniture is all secondhand. Books swallow up rooms. Organization is loose at best. The art that hangs is made by friends. We spend our time and money elsewhere: traveling when we can, simply existing in California. We have friends to visit in Los Osos, Joshua Tree, Santa Barbara, Santa Ynez, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, and Sea Ranch. No one will say we didn’t take advantage of this stupidly expensive and beautiful place. We spend too much on produce, eggs, and bread at the farmer’s market. We spend a lot on therapy. I can’t see these things when I look at my life, the way one sees art, watches, purses, or cars. They are invisible markers of a wealth I wasn’t raised to value. But as I mentioned before, I’m no longer being raised. I’m not a child (mostly not a child). This is where I get another chance. On the far side of these hang ups and obstacles, there has been—for me, when I can get there—an evergreen pasture of gratitude. I expect my children to meet me there.

Here are some class story prompts, based on those from Emily’s workshop:

Where did your family’s income come from? Investments? Public assistance? Salaries? Hourly wages?

What did the adults in your social circle do for a living?

What was your first job? Why did you get it?

Have you ever taken a break from paid work? Or taken an unpaid internship?

Think about the neighborhood and home you grew up in: Did most people own their homes and property? Were there public spaces in the neighborhood? Green spaces? A sense of community? Was it suburban or urban or rural? Who lived around you?

What did your leisure time look like? Did your family travel? Eat in restaurants? Did you go to summer camp? What were your sources of entertainment? Or hobbies?

Who cared for you when you were a child?

Did you have health care?

Did a family separation (death, divorce, imprisonment) impact your access to resources?

Compared to your parents or grandparents, what was your education like?

Was your family in debt? What were the sources?

Did your family have inherited wealth? Do you? What made that wealth possible?

What other identities (race, gender, dis/ability, sexual orientation) impacted your experience of class?

What do you appreciate about your class experience? And likewise, what has been hard?

 While I’ve been at work on this essay something was in the ether: the podcast Classy by Jonathan Menjivar dropped. I devoured it, highly recommend. You can follow it up with Anne Helen Peterson’s interview with Jonathan on her substack, Culture Study.

The mood I put myself into was panic. What the fuck was I thinking? A lot of these writers are seasoned teachers, academics or scholars, the kind of people who have accumulated an electrifying and rich wisdom. While trying to put the essay off, yet again, I said to managing editor Eric Smith, “I don’t know what I have to offer”. He said, “You have Stephanie Danler to offer.”

And I was like, “Um. Ok. Not sure what that is but I’ll try.” Partly that’s Eric being a good editor and nudging me along. But what he said is something I think most of us should be reminded of: if we are to be original thinkers, develop an honest style, write something sticky, that leaves a mark, we can’t rely on imitation, or even competition. We can only rely on our own stunted, strange, and racing minds.

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So I leaned into myself. Hard. I wrote a craft lecture I hadn’t seen before. It is a diagram of my brain. It looks like this:

Panic, anxiety at Whole Foods, SSRIs, Money, poetry by way of Elizabeth Bishop, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Basho, some thoughts from Lauren Berlant, Barthes and Cixous, the form of elegy, funeral readings, graduate school, the success of Sweetbitter, Clarice Lispector, and my very annoying literary tattoos.

The essay is live over at The Sewanee Review. I’m emotional every time I see myself in print, but even more so with the Review. This is my fifth piece for them (!), and not only are these among the best things I’ve ever written, I’m in mind-blowing company.

I know paywalls are a hurdle but that is how these precious magazines survive. For your money you receive an incredible (& portable) resource: a library of work from some of the best writers on the planet.

I’m so indebted to Adam Ross and Eric Smith, and everyone who touches the pages of The Sewanee Review. And thank you to Kevin Young and Knopf, who gave us permission to reprint his glorious poem “Rapture” in full.

Though I’m always saying this, it’s for good reason. Thank you so much for reading. Spending your time with a writer’s work is pure generosity. It means more than you can imagine.

Sending love & panic.

SMD at TSR

Engrams, California

Stoned Fruits

Her Kind: A Reaction to Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women (free to read)

Corona Correspondence #9 (free to read)

Stray (free to read)

In Praise of Panic

When I fell for Freud in my junior year of high school he was already unfashionable. I was reading Camus’s The Stranger for the first time, and my English teacher directed me towards the ego, id, and superego. The idea that there were distinct parts of my psyche that didn’t necessarily agree with each other really appealed to my adolescent mind. I moved on quickly to The Interpretation of Dreams. And while I nursed a fetish for him through college, graduate school, and beyond, he remained outdated, if not outright disdained.

Imagine my delight when I saw an episode on my beloved Know Your Enemy podcast entitled “Freud and Politics.” I had no idea what to expect, how those two ideas would align. Their episode guest was Patrick Blanchfield, a writer and professor with training in clinical psychoanalysis, and I was blown away by his take on how Freud informs the current moment. I googled, “Freud Seminars with Patrick Blanchfield.” Nothing came up.

Now imagine my elation when I learned that Blanchfield and his wife Abby Kluchin (a professor of philosophy and religious studies) started their own podcast about psychoanalysis. The phrase “Ordinary Unhappiness” is what Freud felt he could promise his patients through his treatment. Not transcendence, but a chance for regular, everyday, ordinary unhappiness. May we all be so lucky.

My prayers for a Freud seminar have been answered. There are episodes that are deep dives on basics (“Transference” is a favorite), and there are Patreon episodes that walk step-by-step through The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Listening to Kluchin and Blanchfield converse and lecture turns me into a puppyish, over-eager student. For those who find philosophy a bit dry, or are not into psychoanalysis per se, there are pop culture episodes: Oedipus and Succession, Barbie, a “read” of David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, which includes the real-life story of Sabina Spielrein as a groundbreaking psychoanalyst and wild genius. It’s a step up from being the Kiera Knightly love interest in the film.

Recently they put out a jaw-droppingly great episode on drugs and the death drive, with guest Benjamin Fong talking about his book, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. The talk is excessively insightful, ranging through American Exceptionalism, the fantasies contained within different drugs (see the amphetamine dream: thinner, peppier, smarter), and how our obsession with prohibition goes hand in hand with numbing ourselves and escaping our egos. If this episode were a book, I would have underlines on every page (and I did in fact order Quick Fixes – I will report back).

If you need more convincing, here’s The New Yorker write up on Ordinary Unhappiness.

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Empire

It was nine pm on a school night. I was about to sweep and Swiffer my kitchen floor, but I had run out of podcasts. I googled, “great story, not scary, no murder, gripping, gossipy podcast.” I was thinking of HeidiWorld, a podcast by Molly Lambert about the rise and fall of Heidi Fleiss. It is, in my opinion, perfect, and the benchmark by which I judge all podcasts.

There, on a list, was Empire. Until then I hadn’t been interested in straightforward history podcasts. But I saw that their first season was about the British in India, as told by two engaging, utterly charming historians, and it clicked. I had just finished this absolutely harrowing essay by Ratik Asokan on the conditions of India’s sanitation workers (unsurprisingly, it’s really about caste) which I could not stop reading. I’ve also been thinking about India by way of Sri Lanka since reading Michael Ondaatje’s memoir, Running in the Family. And I’m always thinking about Susanna Moore’s historical novel of the British in India, One Last Look. It’s fashioned as the diary of a British aristocrat who travels with her brother to Calcutta in 1836. The diary is an onslaught of smells, flora and fauna, fevers, fabrics, and weather, mostly heat and rain. It left a taste in my mouth.

I started with Empire’s “The East India Company” episode and I knew my floor would get cleaned. I had known next to nothing about the 17th century Mughal Empire, which dominated manufacturing and was the largest economic power in the world. Nothing about the cursed Koh-i-Noor diamond, or how the East India Company, a private corporation with about thirty full-time employees, throttled an entire nation. It is just as horrifying as you would imagine, but it is one hundred percent crazier. You can’t make it up.

Barbie

For reasons mostly related to having no time, I haven’t seen Barbie yet. However, I do live in the world, so it’s been impossible not to feel the magnitude of Barbie or swim through the sea of opinion it created. It’s cheating to engage in discourse from the periphery, but I’m nonetheless recommending Leslie Jamison’s New Yorker piece. It’s about being a mother and a woman, and most dangerously, a girl with a Barbie. I haven’t stopped thinking about this quote:

Some part of me was already chasing the false gods she spoke for: beauty as a kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and self-destructive tendency.

Oof.

Diaries

This novel I’m writing (and will be writing forever, thanks for asking) has me reading diaries. I’m striving for that level of granularity in the first-person voice. I love how petty they are (full of ordinary unhappiness!). And because they tend to be episodic and meandering, the plot doesn’t interfere with my work. I’m steeped in them. Goncourt. Alice James. Christopher Isherwood. Susan Sontag, Annie Ernaux. Tina Brown, of course. Ned Rorem’s were new to me (he was a composer and gifted writer), and I adore them. The Paris Review Daily’s series “Diaries” is my treat during the workday. If I’ve written hard for a solid period and need a break, I get to read one. If you’re diary-curious, it’s a great resource. Maybe start with “I So Love being Old and Not Married” by Helen Garner or Bernadette Mayer’s “Unconditional Death is a Good Title,” in which every entry is nearly a poem:

july 2, memory is running, that’s the only july i remember, i mean that July is the only, are the only things i remember, don’t have time for more, i mean room, red sorrel, popover, joel schumacher, time is a room, you could say time was anything; about MEMORY, stop time is a curtain blowing in the wind, i remember what’s in the pictures but not what’s in the words, the words could be any words, maybe i should’ve memorized memory.

Bathing

I have always been a bath person: one of the few things my mother told me about my infancy is that if I was crying, she put me in the tub. During my teenage years, I walked straight from the dinner table to the bathtub and spent the rest of the evening in there. I used olive oil in the water and thought I was extremely sophisticated. My most cherished Brooklyn apartment had a bathtub in the kitchen, and I used it daily. It’s a hard stance to take in Los Angeles where I have a small existential panic every time my shower goes over five minutes. But when I’m sick or feeling broken - or when the kids are sick or feeling broken - into the tub we go. I mostly leave product recommendations to the experts (the Strategist and my sister) but my sister sold me on Esker’s Magnesium Bath Enhancer. Instead of bags of Epsom salts, I could use a couple pumps of this. It is better than I expected - truly a WOW. Not only does it replace the salts, but the scent is something I have strived for with my essential oils but could never quite get: eucalyptus, lavender, palo santo. If you are a bath person, you’re welcome.

Books mentioned are available at my author bookshelf.

Now onto solo writing retreats…

It’s not surprising that given everything she’s written, Virginia Woolf’s most enduring contribution is the oft-quoted “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

I believe we recall this, and not Septimus’s suicide or the colors in Lily Briscoe’s painting, because the social and material condition of women is a topic still hot to the touch (Woolf goes on to say, in the same sentence, “that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of women and the true nature of fiction unsolved.”) I love to talk about the bind of money and art (and I have a piece coming out soon that touches on it), but I’m going to focus on why I need a room. And why occasionally I need not just a room but another house, another county, occasionally another country.

*

Periodically, I want to leave my marriage. I love my husband deeply. We have a relationship that I’m proud of. We have, and always have had, the most fun. I love parenting with him. I value his insight, his totally foreign brain, his opinions on what I see, hear, and read. When I wake up and find him next to me, or look at him in the middle of some epic family meltdown where everyone is screaming, I think, “I’m so grateful it’s you.”

But I do not feel built for marriage. Every piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written is about the ambivalence I feel inhabiting prescribed roles and carrying responsibilities therein. I am always, always fighting the desire to flee.

I brought this urge, which had consolidated into a trapped, claustrophobic despair, to therapy recently. I explained to her that I felt like my work was being swallowed whole. Like I was being consumed by everyone else’s needs. That I couldn’t be the writer or mother I wanted to be unless I had my own space. My therapist said, almost smiling, “You don’t need to leave your husband. You need to go away and write.”

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Here’s what’s on my mind this month. Paid subscribers, a new piece on solo retreats is coming soon.

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Listen: In every parent’s quest to find adult songs that can pass as kids songs, there’s a miraculous moment when the child says, “Mommy, can you put on X,” and you’re like, oh my god, I’m going to make it! But it takes a lot of trial and error. I’ve been creating radio stations based off different Annie Lennox songs, and I’m here to tell you that there is a playlist that starts with “Walking on Broken Glass,” and goes on to “Jump for my Love” by The Pointer Sisters, “SOS” by Abba, and “Radio Ga Ga” by Queen. The kids are obsessed, and most importantly, so am I. I hope this inspires a break from Frozen.

Eat: “Jammy Summer Squash Pasta” from Arty Parties. I can’t overpraise the work of my friend Julia Sherman. She’s a true artist: photographer, sculptor, bon vivant, iconic hostess, plant nerd, as well as the author of two beloved cookbooks, Salad for President and Arty Parties. Someone should write a book about her, maybe it will be me. In the meantime, I’ve made this pasta eight times this summer – it’s dead simple and sublime. One time I served the jammy squash on goat cheese toasts. She says the key is the basil. Thank you, Julia, for letting me reprint the recipe, and for feeding me.

Rigatoni with Jammy Summer Squash and Tomato (Make it Meat Sauce!)

Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

Yield: Serves 4

I learned this recipe from an Italian family friend, who wowed us all with his wizardry with only four main ingredients. This is a stupid simple sauce, but the extended cook time transforms the squash into a sweet, jammy delight. It can be served on its own as a vegetable side, or tossed with pasta as a main. 

Use the larger squash/zucchini, and their water content reduces down with the longer cook time. Look for really juicy heirloom tomatoes - orange makes for a really nice colored sauce. If you’re not up for pasta, this can be served on its own as a vegetable side or on top of toast. Make this in large batches at the end of the summer when tomatoes and squash abound, and freeze for the darkest days of Winter. 

1/2 cup (120 ml) high quality extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for pasta

6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

3 pounds (1362 g) medium/large heirloom summer squash (about 4), cut into 1-2”” thick chunks

2 teaspoons Kosher salt, plus more for pasta water

1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, plus more for serving

2.5 lb ripe heirloom tomatoes (about 4-5)

1 pound (450 g) Rigatoni

1 1/2 cups (20 g) Genovese basil, roughly torn

Parmesan cheese, to serve

Optional Add beef

1 1/4 lb (? g) ground beef (optional)

1 1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt

Cracked black pepper

2 teaspoon olive oil 

Set a large Dutch oven over medium heat. When the pan is hot, add olive oil and the garlic, and sauté for 30 seconds until fragrant but not brown. Add the squash, salt, and pepper flakes, and cook for 12 minutes, until you start to see some color on the skin of the squash. Stir regularly to prevent garlic browning on the bottom of the pan. 

While the squash cooks, prepare the tomato. Slice and remove the butt end of each one, and grate the flesh into a mixing bowl against the large holes of a box grater. Discard the skin when you get to the end. Add to the squash and cook for one minute on high, then reduce to medium-low, cover and cook for fifteen minutes. Remove the cover and cook at an active simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, or until the tomato juices have cooked down and thickened and the squash is soft and jammy. Stir every 15 minutes or so, scraping any caramelized bits from the bottom of the pan, stirring more frequently towards the end as the sauce reduces. Add one cup of the basil and stir to combine, cover and remove from the heat. 

If adding meat, season the beef with salt and a few cracks of freshly ground black pepper. Heat a 10” cast iron pan over medium heat, and add olive oil to coat. When the oil is hot but not smoking, break the meat up in small clumps across the surface of the pan. Cook, without disturbing for 5 minutes until brown on one side, then stir and flip, breaking up large clusters. Cook for an additional 2-3 minutes until just cooked through. Transfer meat to a separate plate to be added later.

Fill a large pot with heavily salted water, and bring to a boil. Cook the pasta according to package instructions, and just before draining, set aside about a cup of the pasta water. Drain the pasta, transfer to a serving bowl and toss with a glug of olive oil. If the sauce feels too thick, add ¼ cup of the reserved pasta water to the sauce and stir to thin, adding more if needed. If using beef, add to the sauce and stir to combine. 

Garnish with the remaining ½ cup of fresh basil, a pinch of red pepper flakes, and an optional grating of parmesan cheese.

Here’s what I’ve read this summer, briefly reviewed as if we were having drinks: that is, hyperbolically and with no qualifications.

Leaving Cheyenne by Larry McMurtry – The saddest book I’ve ever read. My poor heart. As was the case with Lonesome Dove earlier in the summer, I spent the first twenty pages being like, “Is this good? It’s not that good. Oh, it’s kinda good.” By the middle (Molly’s section, if you’ve read it), I was once again thinking, “Jesus, I am being handled by a master.” My husband and I were both reading in bed when I finished. I quietly lowered the book to my chest. Shut my eyes. And sobbed. I don’t think Matt will ever stop laughing at me.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley – I can’t be alone in having a serious grudge against Pulitzer Prize-winning books. I know my grudge is beyond petty, but I’ve felt allergic to them most of my reading life. In that late aughts I read Olive Kitterage and Tinkers and I was like, all right, these are good books. Every writer lives in New England knows how to make a moment. I still think about scenes in both books from time to time, so it’s not that they didn’t leave a mark (Tinkers more so). But I did not feel that they were seismic, totemic, ones I would read and reread.

In a vacation rental on Cape Cod, after deliriously lovely days of going from the ocean, to the pond, to the bay, I was just starting Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family (more on that in a moment) and I saw A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley in the house library. And I’m like, “Oh yeah, Jane Smiley, I haven’t read her since high school.” I glanced at the back summary. “A farm in Iowa? Shakespearean? Wait, what?” I opened it, fell into it wide-eyed, put down the Ondaatje (!), and enjoyed every second. I’m still in awe of Smiley. It’s Great American Novel stuff: compelling, rich, transportive. And Smiley really takes her time. I learned a lot about writing women who go insane (not a spoiler—it’s based on King Lear). I’m not sure I will ever reread it, but Lord I’m glad I read it this once.

Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season by John Gregory Dunne – This is the book in which JGD recounts having a nervous breakdown, leaving his wife (Joan Didion), and moving to Las Vegas for a summer. There he performs the role of depressed and pervy voyeur/journalist. He chats with prostitutes, criminals, and show girls. He threatens infidelity, then goes home without betraying his marriage. He calls the book a memoir but makes a note that it’s partially invented. Its delights go beyond the Didion-Dunne of it all—Vegas (the city and the book) is full of the grotesque, seventies sordidness, as well as some indelible crazies (Artha, the prostitute who keeps a ledger of every customer and every sex act performed, is a favorite). Dunne has a flawless ear for dialogue. I have no idea why it’s out of print (Hello, McNally Editions! NYRB? I have sent you DMs about this).

The Complete Poems 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop – I took very few poets with me out to the desert in June, but I’m having a Bishop Summer (is there anything less sexy than a “Summer of Bishop and McMurtry?”). While making my way through the poems of A Cold Spring, I started listening to Kamran Javadizadeh’s Close Readings poetry podcast. He did a wonderful episode on “Over 2000 Illustrations and A Complete Concordance” with Gillian White that I highly recommend you check out. Read the entire poem if you’re interested, but I’ll quote the ending below—tell me you aren’t in the presence of wild greatness:

Everything only connected by “and” and “and.”

Open the book. (The gilt rubs off the edges

of the pages and pollinates the fingertips.)

Open the heavy book. Why couldn’t we have seen

this old Nativity while we were at it?

—the dark ajar, the rocks breaking with light,

an undisturbed, unbreathing flame,

colorless, sparkless, freely fed on straw,

and, lulled within, a family with pets,

—And looked and looked our infant sight away.

“The dark ajar?” “Looked and looked our infant sight away?!” Another great joy was discovering John Ashbery reading the poem, but a warning: you will tear up at the end.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje – Fuck, I wish I had read this before I had a written a memoir. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Ondaatje travels back to Sri Lanka, the place he was born, and what follows is a mix of the imagined and historical as he traces his family’s story through the land. Like most memoirs, the subject is memory itself. It’s the kind of book that feels alive in your hands – impressionistic, writhing, liberated (& liberating). I’m a Skin of a Lion, Billy the Kid, The English Patient kind of girl, but I don’t love them all. Divisadero was a big miss, and Warlight I couldn’t get into. I’m only in the middle of Running in the Family, so I might change my mind. But this is his best book.   

Go: Last summer was our first trip to Maine, a place that had taken on mythical proportions in my mind. The trip was alright. Rainy, cold, and I was sick. I came home disappointed and confused. Clearly it was beautiful, but why couldn’t I crack it? This year I was on a mission to fall in love.

It turns out it was super easy! All I needed was sultry weather, my bearings, a game-plan, and my in-laws traveling with us. And fall in love I did - Maine imprinted a spruce-scented memory in me that screams peak-summer dreamscape. I can’t wait to go back.

Both years we were based in the Midcoast, around Rockland/Camden. It goes almost without saying but I’m not an expert on Maine (LOL), just a woman with a list and desire to enjoy travel despite having two small children. Both years I crowdsourced Maine recommendations from Instagram and my friends who live there. I know it’s late in the season for travel guides, but here’s what I loved:

I think everyone recommended McLoons Lobster Shack on Spruce Head Island. It was my first stop on both trips and to be honest, I didn’t eat lobster again for the rest of the time because I knew it wouldn’t be as good.

My kids love lighthouses. I know why I like them (drama, romance), but I’m not sure what they get so excited about. Owl’s Head and Marshall Point Lighthouse are favorites. I’ve brought picnics to both and after seeing the lighthouse (still unclear why it’s an activity, but ok) we passed afternoons on the beaches.

In Candem, The Place is a exquisite bakery that sells out of everything so get there early. Oyster River Wine Growers for a glass of wine. Long Grain for any meal. wolfpeach, Tinderhearth, Lucky Betty’s came recommended but we didn’t make it.

Our favorites beaches were outside of the towns. Crescent Beach State Park and Birch Point State Park in Owl’s Head. Drift Inn Beach in St. George, a great stop after the Marshall Point Lighthouse. Further south, Pemaquid Beach in Bristol had it all - fine white sand, ice cream, french fries, and great facilities.

Everyone recommended Primo. The first year we couldn’t get in and I was cranky about it. This year, not only did we get in, but who should be walking towards me in the honeyed sunset light but a beloved face from my past. Kellie Brooks was the former assistant general manager at Union Square Cafe (the woman who helped hire me). She’s now managing Primo and has built an enviable life in Maine. Matt and I had an exquisite meal sans children: the calabrian chili pasta with mussels was bananas. The next night it was Matt’s parents turn to go, and we took the kids over to see the pigs and the farm. We found out you can order a pizza for take out and eat it at 0km, their barn/bar where they do dollar oysters on Sunday. A top experience. If you can’t get a reservation, show up at 4:50pm and wait in line to put in your name at 5pm. Worth it!

Fernald’s Neck Preserve. We did a 2.5 mile hike (with children, it took hours), found wild blueberries, and jumped in the lake. The was our favorite freshwater swimming. We stayed on a Hosmer Pond and there are good spots on the Megunticook River for kids, but this felt the easiest and most pristine.

When you drive through tiny Wiscasset you might be inclined to line up for lobster rolls at Red’s Eats (you can, it’s very good), but you must must stop at Treats. Buy whatever: sandwiches, fresh focaccia, candies, wine, specialty foods. It’s a sophisticated bakery and market where everything was top-notch and left a craving. Then stop at Angelo Santo, a jewelbox of a shop run by artist Maria Vettese, filled with unexpected books, pottery, art, and flowers.

For Midcoast food shopping, Jess’s Fish Market, Fresh Off The Farm, Megunticook General Store, Lincolnville General Store (which has surprisingly good pizza). For wine, you really really should stop at Maine & Loire in Portland, one of my favorite wine stores in the country. You can also see above and get wine at Treats. In Damariscotta, Rising Tide Co-Op had lots of goodies.

The Boothbay Region Land Trust is a park and nature preserve that deserves a more romantic name. It’s dreamy. The walk was actually walkable with children. My in-laws got to bird watch. There’s a playground in the woods that looks like a fairy kingdom (there were also twig and flower fairy houses built throughout the walk). It was one of those activities that everyone genuinely enjoyed. The Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens and Boothbay Railway Village Museum also came recommended.

After that walk, I highly recommend Glidden Point Oyster Farms. Sit outside right above the oyster beds and gorge yourself.

I went to three different locations of Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shops (Rockland, Boothbay Harbor, and Damariscotta) and each one endeared me. I always head straight to the local interest section of any bookstore and Maine books is one of their specialities. Last year we bought Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder, and this year I got Direction to Myself by Heidi Julavits and a Maine wildflower guide. There are so many lovely used bookstores (Stone Soup Books, Lobster Lane Books, Skidompha Secondhand Books come immediately to mind) but Sherman’s scratched the itch for my children as well: they have a great selection of non-obnoxious toys.

I hope you’re on vacation, resting, and reading. More soon.

Books mentioned are always available in my author bookshelf.

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Watch: Jeremy Irons. I admit he’s been on my mind because I listen to “Be Prepared” from The Lion King almost every day. But Irons has always been it for me. During a stretch where I was alone and writing, I made a plan to watch movies that were “related” to my book. I started with Reversal of Fortune, based on the famous Claus Von Bülow murder trial (linking to Dominick Dunne’s wickedly gossip-filled Vanity Fair piece). Then came Damage. Then came The French Lieutenant’s Woman. And finally, Adrian Lyne’s much-derided Lolita. I’ve seen it more than once but for various reasons couldn’t stomach it. I do appreciate how pathetic and plainly sociopathic Irons’ Humbert is. Also, it’s shot so gorgeously, it looks like it’s printed on silk.

At that point I was far away from my book. I wanted anything with Jeremy Irons as romantic lead. Sinister, lusty, erudite, dishonest. I wanted his face to take up the whole screen, his voice to narrate my dreams. In college, my boyfriend acted in a school production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, a classic adultery story told in a formally inventive way. The boyfriend and I used to stay up late eating Papa John’s pizza and reading the play out loud. I’m no kind of actor, but I knew Emma’s part by heart. We went to the library and rented a VHS of the film version with Jeremy Irons and Ben Kingsley. We then rented a VHS player (I’m not that old). Irons plays Jerry, the weakest of the three parts in my opinion, but he was irresistible, a lanky, rakish foil to Kingsley’s compact power. Maybe Irons’ long-standing relationship with Pinter - a playwright I read over and over - adds to his allure for me. I recommend it, both reading the play and the film, though I have no idea where you can watch it.

All of these Irons movies are adaptations of excellent books. I’m not going to rank them . But if you haven’t seen Damage, it’s a pleasantly strange and sensual way to spend two hours. The much-hyped sex scenes are a bit flat but watching Jeremy Irons go crazy-in-lust over his son’s fiancé (peak Juliette Binoche) is just the right amount of twisted. Plus, pitch-perfect cottagecore set design. For what it’s worth, I’ve been hearing for years that the book is even better than the film.

Watch: I loved this wholesome twitter thread on lake house movies. I just rented a lake house and it came with shelves of VHS tapes. My children were enthralled by them. Is it a book? A toy? Julian fell asleep staring at the Jurassic Park video cassette, studying the back cover like it was a hieroglyph. My ideal lake house pick? True Lies, baby!

Read/Watch: Something is happening between me and “the West,” and it’s confusing. I confess a previous distaste for its reductive narratives: cowboys and Indians, the untamed frontier. But this recent confusion began with Susanna Moore’s The Lost Wife, the story of a white woman abducted by Sioux during the Sioux Uprising of 1862. I was so engrossed I read at stoplights. The experience sparked a dormant fascination with a certain kind of American mythology. What was a “pioneer?” The “frontier?” What did slogans like Manifest Destiny or terra nullius accomplish, given what happened to the Native Americans at the end of the nineteenth century?

Cities repulsed my father. He was infatuated with all the libertarian ideals that the West promised to a serious hunter, gun owner, and outdoorsman. Other than The Wall Street Journal, he read Louis L’Amour westerns exclusively. Living with him in semi-rural Colorado only made me more skeptical of nationalism and stories men have created in its service. (I’ve always been suspicious of men in general.) I have tried to watch Deadwood a handful of times but never could summon a genuine interest. The same with Cormac McCarthy. I’ve never visited a ghost town. Recently, while on a writing retreat in Santa Ynez (an area of rural ranchland in Santa Barbara county), I walked into a restaurant and saw men dressed like cowboys at the bar, hats tipped down towards their drinks. When I got home, I told my husband that it creeped me out. How could people wear those clothes, how could they signal like that? In his usual straightforward manner, he reminded me that those clothes aren’t a costume for those men. That’s just what they wear to work.

During the writing retreat, my friend, novelist Edan Lepucki, was reading Larry McMurtry’s All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers. I was surprised. Knowing her work, it didn’t feel like a natural fit. But over dinner it seemed many of my writer friends are devoted McMurtry fans. I suppose I am too if you count the film The Last Picture Show. But can you count that? I bought Lonesome Dove, and it arrived looking like a doorstopper full of dudes not talking about feelings. I thought, This better be on par with Steinbeck or I’ll never read it. (It was more than on par. I’m not ready to talk about it. My most recent text to Edan was: Will I ever read a book this good again? She responded: No. But Leaving Cheyanne is perfect.)

I’ve been reading about Los Angeles for years. I call it research, but honestly, it’s a plain old obsession. Unsurprisingly, there are whole swaths of California history that I somehow missed. (I say somehow, knowing full well there are no accidental omissions in American history). A few years ago, when I read C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Are Gold—I love that book, and if you’re looking for immersive, literary historical fiction, I think you will too—I realized I knew very little about Northern California. During this year of writing my novel, which has demanded its own research, California history has been a not totally irrelevant side project. I love these few episodes of Citations Needed, especially the one featuring Benjamin Madley, who talks about his book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe. I have admittedly not read it all the way through, but the heart of the matter is chilling: from 1846 to 1873, California’s Native population went from 150,000 to 30,000. It wasn’t disease (or it wasn’t just disease). It was slaughter. The violence against Native Americans, the justifications given, the way dehumanization was written by newspapers, by governments at local and federal levels - it’s unconscionable. I realized that my lean into Joy Harjo the past six months is connected to a desire to read other histories. I’m also rereading Natalie Diaz (I’m partial to When My Brother Was An Aztec, as it involves addiction, a perennial favorite topic), and Layli Long Solider’s Whereas.

On a recent flight back to Los Angeles, I tranquilized my kids with their tablets and tried to write. I could not write. I scrolled through the in-flight entertainment options. There was Yellowstone, a show I had heard so much about, all of it excessively polarized. It was the worst, and it was amazing. The most-watched show on television is one that almost no one in the industry watches. So I put on the pilot. It was great—old-fashioned, compelling drama. A true soap opera, emphasis on the opera. Sure, there are weak spots. Lots. The plotlines are bonkers. A lot of the dialogue is tough. If I turned in a script with the line, “All the angels are gone, son. There’s only devils left,” I would be embarrassed. But if Kevin motherfucking Costner delivered the line, then I would think I’m Shakespeare. Also: Cole Hauser’s hot cowboy Rip Wheeler? Are there really men like that out there? I spent a month hiding Yellowstone from my friends—even the two friends who had admitted to me their love for it—wondering what was wrong with me.

It seems clear the sentimentality and sweep of Lonesome Dove is seeping into my viewing of the show. But we know better: these heroes are the villains. How does one empathize with a nineteenth century Texas Ranger (in the case of Lonesome Dove) whose life’s purpose is ridding the continent of indigenous people? McMurtry himself struggled with this:

I’ve tried as hard as I could to demythologize the West. Can’t do it. It’s impossible. I wrote a book called Lonesome Dove, which I thought was a long critique of western mythology. It is now the chief source of western mythology. I didn’t shake it up at all. I actually think of Lonesome Dove as the Gone With the Wind of the West.

I’m still in the process of working this out for myself.

We recently drove through the foothills of the western Sierra Nevada, which is one of the places my husband grew up. The landscape gave us cause to explain to the kids why California is called the “Golden State:” brittle, sepia-steeped hills punctuated by stands of oaks; surging ice-cold rivers; swaying, rolling views. As we passed through the gold towns of Sonora, Auburn, and Placerville, and went by Tuolumne Rancheria (a Native American reservation), I asked Matt: “How are we going to explain this place to our children?” We kept looking out the window at California.

For a start, I’ll have them read. What would you have me add to their lists, and mine?

from “Whereas” by Layli Long Solider:

WHEREAS the word whereas means it being the case that, or considering that, or while on the contrary; is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector. Whereas sets the table. The cloth. The saltshakers and plates. Whereas calls me to the table. Whereas precedes in invites. I have come now. I'm seated across from a Whereas smile. Under pressure of formalities, I fidget I shake my legs. I'm not one for these smiles. Whereas I have spent my life in unholding. What do you mean by unholding? Whereas asks and since Whereas rarely asks, I am moved to respond, Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Without an exchange of questions, without the courtesy of answers. It is mine, this unholding, so that with or without the setup, I can see the dish being served. Whereas let us bow our heads in prayer now, just enough to eat;

Books mentioned are always available at my author bookshelf.

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Before I was a professional writer, the idea of a writing residency sounded as magical and rarefied as going to Mars. I had read so many writers’ memoirs that included knowing mentions of Yaddo and MacDowell, places that I sort of knew existed, that I had heard mentioned by my peers and professors, but that seemed beyond reach, tucked away on their high hills in Tennessee and Vermont and upstate New York. The idea that a bunch of artists got together, wrote books, made paintings, drank, and cheated on their spouses while someone else cooked and took care of the dishes sounded so fantastical that it must be fake.

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I was supposed to be in New York City this past weekend on one of my beloved solo jaunts, but plans changed in my family and it became clear that I couldn’t go. Matt was on a surf trip, and alternative caretakers weren’t available. I told myself to be a grown up about it. Yet time went by and I didn’t cancel my ticket. I made plans for us in LA: dinner, babysitter, children’s birthday parties. I had it at the top of my list, “Cancel NYC” and I did not cancel a thing. Such denial. I kept dreaming of the city in June (literally I had dreams about running in Williamsburg, and getting off the subway at west 4th and peeking into the Waverly Diner), and seeing my friends there. Then one of them suggested I just bring the kids.

Bring the fucking kids???? A four-and-a-half-year-old and nearly three-year-old? On a plane? By myself? For 72 hours in NYC? And what…all of us sleep in one bed? And what, I just find a double stroller and like…push them around the city? The suggestion did not strike me as “fun.” It struck me as delusional. Unnecessarily difficult, exhausting, terrifying. I have my way of doing the city, and it’s not kid friendly.

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But after that initial response (“lol ha ha yeah right”), the idea had its barb in me. The Monday before my potential weekend I was on a rollercoaster: back and forth, go or stay. Finally, another friend hyped me over the edge and tickets were booked with points. This was Tuesday. For Thursday departure. Wednesday night I woke up in such a panic, I almost threw up. Why was I so stupid? I told Matt it was proof that I was a selfish, irresponsible mom (the impetus for a trip was, it must be said, a party). He told me that this trip - the spontaneity and desire for the world it implied - is why I’m a great mom.

My 72hrs in New York City was a living example of that “mommune” piece in The New York Times. I stayed two nights with a friend who has a two-year-old - she gave us her bed, made her home my home. I stayed one night in a friend’s apartment (six-year-old and three-year-old) that came with a stock of toys. I was rescued mid-day by a friend with a five-year-old, whose apartment was an oasis of Joe’s pizza, raspberries, and Legos. The same friend messengered over a left-behind dinosaur figurine. Mothers shared babysitters, strollers (we used a Yoyo with a jump seat and I was happy not to have a traditional double stroller), travel car seats (the Wayb was amazing), airport recommendations (“red light green light” was a big hit to get their energy out). They shared their seaweed snacks and yogurt pouches. Strangers rolled our suitcases to the curb. They talked a melting child off a ledge by explaining the “thestrals” from Harry Potter. Flight attendants gave wing pins and extra cheese plates. At the Bleeker Street playground, mid-push at the swings, I realized I had forgotten to put in a tampon and was heavily bleeding into my white shorts. I yelled out to another mom: “Can you watch my kids for two seconds, I got my period!” and when I came out of the public restroom, she was pushing them on the swings.

I did not take my children to New York City alone. I took them to a village of parents, to friends I love deeply. I only wish I had more time there.

It was so hard. My back is throbbing from carrying shit. It’s a special horror to see your child lying face down on a New York City sidewalk, screaming. Or to have your child up in the middle of the night, jet-lagged, sobbing, “New York is not a beautiful city!” and “Why did you make us get so tired?” Or to get home from the aforementioned party at 1:30 am, still very high on mushrooms, and have a child tap you at 6:30 am asking to go on the swings.

You can imagine the highs. If you love any place the way I love the city, then you understand that bringing them onto the subway, unleashing them into the green of Central Park, being out on the sweaty, filthy streets all day, no naps because there were too many playgrounds to see, left me in actual tears of wonder/joy/gratitude. All the lives I’ve lived there. To live this one too.

I’m home. Though I’m always leaving New York with a hangover, this one included a delayed flight and was particularly brutal. I feel more capable than I ever have as parent. I feel more like myself than I have in years. I chafe against a lot of the motherhood racket: packing the lunches and drop offs, the organization required, the performance of gentle parenting, the idiocy of bounce houses (when has a child ever emerged unhurt?). I twitch at the constant yelling, whining, crying. I’m a selfish creature. I want everything and I don’t want to compromise. I have an unhinged appetite for travel and movement. But four and a half years in, I’m not trying to pretend those things aren’t true. I’m trying to marry those parts of me with the stability Matt and I created for the children.

For various reasons I’ve been doing more caretaking for my own mother. When I’m with her, all I see is death. I’m turning forty in exactly six months and have never been more desperate to live. To do that living with Julian and Paloma.

So what the fuck is my recommendation? Embroider “do something that scares you everyday” on a pillow? Heed every reckless urge in the name of “experience?” Make your children’s sleep schedule second to your social life? No (maybe?). This isn’t for everyone, and neither is the camping we’ve been doing with them since they were born. But if you are interested in what happens when you’re uncomfortable…if you can’t stop thinking about going, despite all the reasons you can’t and shouldn’t…I really believe you probably can and should.

The strangest part of my career in screenwriting is that I never knew enough about it to want it. I didn’t really watch TV. When I did, most often with friends or when I was sick, I was like, Yeah The Sopranos is good. Or, Yeah, Mad Men is so well-written. Or, I want to move to New York City and be Carrie Bradshaw. It’s not that I’m immune to mania. But I am an obsessive only in one area of art, and that is literature.

In 2016, in the middle of Sweetbitter’s launch, film and television adaptation was increasingly a topic of conversation. My agents at CAA (hi Olivia, Michelle, and Tiffany!) strongly believed I should try writing the pilot myself. I didn’t know exactly what a pilot was, but they sold me on the idea that trying was low-risk. I said I would take a shot but maybe I needed some help. I got a lot of help. Impossible to overstate how much help. And that was part of the draw of it. I’ve said this many times, but how often do you have some of the most brilliant filmic minds offering to give you a free PhD? Not only free, but they would pay me to learn. I signed up greedily.

It wasn’t until my agents sent me a selection of other people’s pilots that I began to care about television. I would read a pilot, then watch it. I did this over and over. I had never seen Girls. Never seen Orange is the New Black. Transparent, Atlanta, The Affair: it was the most television I had ever watched in my life. And I started—barely—to understand visual storytelling, to become—barely—aware of what was possible on TV. But my way in was—and still is—reading.

Much later came the writer’s room, the actors, the location scouts and sets, the 5am call times, darkened editor’s rooms where it feels like hours last years. Then there was another season and stepping back into a writer’s room: blank dry-erase boards, empty corkboards, stashes of Cheetos and La Croix, fresh piles of sharpies and stacks upon stacks of index cards. I could feel my own taut and eager competence. I kinda got it.

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I have one additional regret about the piece, which is that I mentioned Joan Didion up front. Moore and Didion were old friends - Didion appears in Moore’s memoir, Miss Aluminum, and Moore appears in Didion’s biography, The Last Love Song. A lot of Didion fans first heard of Moore when she spoke at the former’s memorial. I know it’s natural to make comps, but Susanna Moore’s novels are so much better than Joan Didion’s, the comparison feels like a slight to Moore (Is she going to bitch about Didion in every newsletter?? Who knows! Stay tuned!). Moore’s novels are masterful, full of pauses, detail, menace, violence, femininity. Some with striking eroticism. You can start - as many do - with In The Cut, but I think her latest, The Lost Wife, is bananas, and her novel of World War Two, The Life of Objects, is singular and haunting.

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Eat: Condiments. Now that I’ve written two pieces (this and this) about how I don’t cook, let me tell you what I do cook. After years of being anti-single-use-appliances, I noticed that every time I had a house rental with a rice cooker, I was thrilled. Someday when I grow up I’ll get the Zojirushi, but in the meantime, I use the cheap and cheerful Aroma rice cooker almost every day. Then I put stuff on top of the rice (you can imagine, but just case, thin sheets of cucumber or carrot, avocado, handfuls of arugula, eggs in any form, sheet-pan roasted cabbage, beans, edamame or peas, steamed asparagus & broccoli, leftover roasted sweet potatoes, and so on forever). Then I put the really good stuff on top of that. If you – like me – are barely hanging on to your palate, I highly recommend these fancy condiments to inspire:

-       Sambal Goreng – two sisters run Bungkus Bagus, a Balinese food truck, and these shallots/chilis/garlic are the best thing I’ve ever put on rice. Brought into my life my dear Julia Sherman.

-       Chili Crisp – The writer Jade Chang recently turned me away from Fly by Jing and onto Kari Kari. I stand corrected.

-       Cap Beauty + Botanica The Magic Spice – all day on avocado toast, in salad dressings, and especially in my salsa verde.

-       Tart vinegar – My all-time favorite is the rosé, but the lavender is perfect in soda water. Next up is the celery.

-       Furikake – this one, or any of them.

-       Miso Tahini Butter from Carla Lalli Music’s first book Where Cooking Begins. Your sweet potatoes/steak/fish will never be the same. Linked her wonderful newsletter.

Read: Short Books. On a recent stopover in London, I asked my UK editor for the one bookstore I should visit in my extremely limited time. She did not hesitate: Daunt Books. Upon arrival at this absolutely divine slice of bibliophilic paradise I asked the bookseller, “What is the best short book you have?” He did not hesitate: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These. It rocked me. Moral, but not moralizing. A Christmas fable, but not reductive or saccharine. Its premise sent me down an internet rabbit hole. I texted a friend who was also brought up Catholic, saying it was the most Catholic thing I’d read in ages. But what does it mean to be Catholic? I wondered. There’s the oft-quoted guilt, built off the premise of original sin, there’s the emphasis on service and community. Then there’s something about obedience to an order, the rigidity of a hierarchy, that makes the institution particularly sinister to me. A church that promises salvation while meting out abuse. All the hypocrisy. This tiny book captured it.

I also bought a few Fitzcarraldo editions of Annie Ernaux’s books: Happening, A Simple Passion, & Getting Lost (the last of which I haven’t read before). This is in praise of the first two, both essentially long essays & short books, one about an unwanted pregnancy at at time when abortion is illegal, the other about waiting for a married lover to call. I reread them during a few days of jetlag, completely awake at four am. The two hours until morning felt impenetrable and dense, like reading with a flashlight under a blanket. Ernaux is too good. Her stripped, unfiltered prose is bracing. Makes the rest of us look like we’re trying too hard. Linking to Cusk on Ernaux, an inevitable pairing.

Watch: Palm Trees & Power Lines. In the same week, Hannah Fidell and Lisa Taddeo were both raving about this film. If you are a person who heeds trigger warnings, it’s probably not for you. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m not going to say more. I went into it blind and was, appropriately, blind-sided.

Look: Virgo Skin. My sister is kind of crazy. In an obsessive, detail oriented, planned to the minute, perfectionist kind of way. So Christina Strauss’s beautiful skin is not an accident. While a marketing executive by day, skincare has always been her passion. Her new IG, virgo__skin, with her product and routine recommendations comes after decades of research. There are no $$$ products. She has never used an injectable or even a laser. But she will be the first to admit, what she does is not simple. If you have the time and inclination, I can attest to the ten-step routine, and say that when I do it, I notice a difference immediately. However, I will also attest that this bitch has been wearing sunscreen, drinking buckets of water, eating vegetarian, and generally been a psychotically disciplined Virgo since she was a child. There is only so much the rest of us can do now that we are forty, parched, & neglected ourselves for decades.

Lastly, if anyone is looking for information about the WGA strike, I recommend this article, this podcast, and this tiktok. Coming from the no man’s land of being a server and an author, being in the Guild has been a blessing from day one. Onward.

Books mentioned are always available at my author bookshelf.

This piece spoke to me at every level. I often wonder about the monstrosity of motherhood (Lisa Taddeo and I talked about it when Animal was released), the monstrosity of artists, their intrinsic narcissism, and if you’ve read Sweetbitter or Stray, I’ve used monsters in both. Tess is called a “baby monster” as her appetites take over, threaten to undo her. In the memoir, my semi-affectionate name for an ex who deeply hurt me was The Monster. As an adolescent I had a fondness for Nietzsche’s monster, and later for Clarice Lispector’s. I think it’s that I aspire to monstrosity, with its totalizing needs and wants, and find myself disappointingly soft, human.

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One housekeeping note, thank you for reading my last essay about cooking and my mother. I was hesitant to publish it, and I’m grateful to my editor, friends, and sister who urged me forward. I don’t know what viral is, but over fifteen thousand people have read it. That means some of you sent it to a friend. Thank you.

Next week, your April recommendations, then paid subscribers will get an in depth look at Beat Sheets. Sending love to you and yours. Now over to Claire Dederer…

Am I a monster? I’ve never killed anyone. Am I a monster? I’ve never promulgated fascism. Am I monster? I didn’t molest a child. Am I a monster? I haven’t been accused by dozens of women of drugging and raping them. Am I a monster? I don’t beat my children. (YET.) Am I a monster? I’m not noted for my anti-Semitism. Am I a monster? I’ve never presided over a sex cult where I trapped young women in a gilded Atlanta mansion and forced them to do my bidding. Am I a monster? I didn’t anally rape a thirteen-year-old.

Look at all the awful things I haven’t done. Maybe I’m not a monster.

Even so, I’ve bumped along through life, like any human, totting up at least my fair share of bad behavior. And moreover I’ve done this: Written a book. Written another book. Written essays and articles and criticism. And maybe that makes me monstrous, in a very specific kind of way.

The critic Walter Benjamin is said to have stated: “At the base of every major work of art is a pile of barbarism.” I wonder: At the base of every minor work of art, is there a, you know, smaller pile of barbarism? A lump of barbarism? A skosh? (Further investigation reveals that what Benjamin actually wrote was closer to this translation: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” This tightens the noose a bit, I think.)

There are many qualities one must possess to be a work- ing writer or artist. Talent, brains, tenacity. Wealthy parents are good. You should definitely try to have those. But first among equals, when it comes to necessary ingredients, is selfishness. A book is made out of small selfishnesses. The selfishness of shut- ting the door against your family. The selfishness of ignoring the pram in the hall. The selfishness of forgetting the real world to create a new one. The selfishness of stealing stories from real people. The selfishness of saving the best of yourself for that blank-faced anonymous paramour, the reader. The selfishness that comes from simply saying what you have to say.

I have to wonder: maybe I’m not monstrous enough. I’m aware of my own failings as a writer—indeed I know the list to a fare-thee-well, and worse are the failures that I know I’m failing to know—but a little part of me has to ask: If I were more selfish, would my work be better? Should I aspire to greater selfishness?

Every writer-mother I know has asked herself this question. I mean, none of them says it out loud. But I can hear them think- ing it; it’s almost deafening. Does one identity fatally interrupt the other? Is your work making you a less-good mom? That’s the question you ask yourself all the time. But also: is your mother- hood making you a less good writer? That question is a little more uncomfortable.

As a child, I believed there were four kinds of person you could be, and I had them not-quite-consciously ranked in my head:

man

boy

girl

woman

I dreaded being a woman. And maybe I was onto something. Almost all the grown-up women I knew were mothers, and even then I balked at the selflessness that motherhood seemed to call for. Motherhood seemed to me a dead end, a death of the self.

As an adult, I’ve found the unselfishness of motherhood one of my great trials and my great gifts. The erosion of the self that comes with motherhood has been very difficult on every meaningful level—personally and politically. (What a world of pain is contained in those cool words.) But it’s also been the making of me. It’s taught me how to be a person who is for something other than myself. I’m not saying the childless don’t learn that lesson as well—I’m saying that, in my case, it was motherhood that taught it to me.

The exigencies of motherhood are inexorable. You will be forced into selflessness, once you’ve become a mother.

But what if you also happen to be an artist?

For the everyday kind of artist—not your groupie-fucking rock star or what have you—the drama of selfishness gets played out within a particular context: the context of the family. What the artist or writer or musician needs desperately is time. And what the family needs is time. This conflict is not necessarily solvable. In her aphoristic memoir 300 Arguments, Sarah Manguso writes: “It can be worth forgoing marriage for sex, and it can be worth forgoing sex for marriage. It can be worth forgo- ing parenthood for work, and it can be worth forgoing work for parenthood. Every case is orthogonal to all the others. That’s the entire problem.” The art/family problem is, or feels, orthogonal. (Though that word makes me feel a little like I’m a project lead at Microsoft.)

The truth is, art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.

All writers struggle to find our way into that blessed place: a room with a door that locks from the inside, against the family. The writer alone, in a space with a door that closes against the world: that’s the very picture of happiness. Some imagi- nary ideal mother-writer might not mind a knock at the door, but most of us don’t have beautiful natures and we really mind being interrupted. Doris Lessing wrote in her memoir Under My Skin: “Very few people—perhaps one in fifty?—respect women’s privacy. If you say, ‘I spend my mornings writing’ that will not prevent the furtive knock on the door, and then a moment later, the guilty, embarrassed, smiling face appearing around the edge of the door. ‘I’ve just dropped in for a second.’ ”

Philip Larkin gets at this ideal state of pure selfishness in his poem “The Life with a Hole in It.”

. . . the shit in the shuttered chateau

Who does his five hundred words

Then parts out the rest of the day

Between bathing and booze and birds

Larkin shows us the ideal writer’s life: the (male) author whose needs are tended to, whose emotional connections are secondary to his work, whose selfishness is unquestioned, whose freedom is total. I mean, it sounds heavenly, right? From the point of view of a regular well-adjusted member of society, you would think that loneliness would be a serious problem. If you retreat from the world, and serve only your own needs, you’re bound to get lonely, right? The thing is, writers don’t really get lonely. Liking being alone—even liking loneliness itself—is part of what makes a writer a writer. After I had children, I was an almost full-time mom, working about a quarter time at freelance writing. I thought to myself, how lucky that I am a writer, so that when I am working I get all this lovely restorative alone time. It was years before I realized: Oh. I became a writer so I could be alone all the time. It wasn’t a by-product, it was a motivator.

The kinds of lives that are typically thought of as nice by non-writers, lives that involve things like unending vacations; things like never having to work again—these kinds of lives don’t sound nice to writers. Not really. Writers want to be left alone to write, and be waited on.

The female artists and writers I know yearn to be more monstrous. They say it in offhand ha-ha-ha ways: “I wish I had a wife.” What does that mean, really? It means you wish to aban- don the tasks of nurturing in order to perform the selfish sacraments of being an artist.

What if I’m not monster enough?

In a way, I’d been asking this question privately, for years, of a couple male writer friends I believe to be actually great— including the Manhattan-admiring man of letters I mentioned earlier. I write them both charming emails, but really I am always trying to find out: How selfish are you? Or to put it another way: How selfish do I need to be, to become as great as you?

I made friends with these men, flirted with them . . . for what? For thrills of course. I’m not a nun. But also I wanted details of how they got their work done. How did they arrange their lives?

When one described working through Thanksgiving and Christmas, I made a note of it. When another described leaving his wife with their child so he could work while they vacationed in Nova Scotia, I said to myself, hmm. It turned out, of course, that they in fact didn’t arrange their lives. That was the essential point. They had someone else, a wife, to do it for them. In the main.

Of course, to have someone arrange your life, you must believe in yourself, in the value of the thing you are making. Many years ago, at a smoky drunken party, I was chatting with a pal who recently published a novel. “You should buy it,” he drawled. “It’s a very important book.” (Unwittingly, the novelist was echoing Gauguin and his near-lunatic self-confidence: “I am a great artist and I know it.”)

For years thereafter my artist friend Victoria and I tried in vain to copy the novelist when we talked about our own work: “It’s a very important book,” I attempted. “It’s a very important paint- ing,” she tried. We couldn’t make ourselves do it, with a straight face, in public. We collapsed in laughter.

But, really, what’s so funny about saying your life’s work is important?

And if you can’t say your work is important, how can you, well, do it?

Ambition and self-confidence are all bound up together. Ambi- tion is the thing that men have. In my usage here, “ambition” is an entirely positive word. Ambition is the key that turns the lock of art. Ambition simply means this: I’m not just trying to make something . . . I’m trying to make something great.

It turns out this is not such an easy word, for women. When the word is used about a woman, it is a pejorative. An ambitious woman is to be castigated or mistrusted. An ambitious woman is severed, perhaps tragically, from some essential feminine softness. (In my inmost child-of-the-eighties heart, the idea of an ambitious woman always makes me think of Leona Helms- ley, hair high, lipstick dark, screaming at her underlings.)

When the word is used by a woman, it’s seen as hubristic at best, and possibly a sign of total madness.

A few years ago I told my (former) male shrink I was trying to write an ambitious book. I said it falteringly. I was, in fact, afraid to say it. This is just the kind of thing you’re supposed to bring to your shrink, right? Not just your ambition but your shame and embarrassment about your ambition?

Me: I want . . . to write . . . a very . . . ambitious? Book.

Gerald, my ancient Jungian shrink, from underneath his shrinky nimbus of white hair, his antennae almost visibly prickling: Talk more about that.

Me: I just want to write something that attempts greatness. I want to be more       ambitious in my work.

Gerald: I think we should talk about that. Where does this ambition come from?

Me: I guess from being a, um, writer?

Gerald: I wonder how we can address this issue of ambition.

Me, confused: By trying to write a great book?

Gerald: Do you think it has something to do with your father?

The idea that my ambition might be a virtue and not a symptom—that didn’t occur to Gerald. To be fair, not every man pathologizes every woman’s ambition. One day, while out for a walk with a male writer, in the midst of a very serious heart- felt conversation about my memoir, I screwed up my courage and blurted: “I want to write a great book.” Without breaking his stride, he said expressionlessly, “Welcome to the Thunder- dome,” and we continued our walk, with me feeling secretly buoyant, as if I’d swallowed a balloon.

Another scene: One evening not too long ago I sat in the cha- otic, book-strewn living room of a younger writer and her husband, also a writer. Their kids were tucked into bed upstairs; the occasional yawp floated down from above.

My friend was in the thick of it. Her three kids were in grade school and her husband had a full-time job while she tried to carve out her career freelancing and writing books. A cloud of intense literary ambition hung over the house like a stormy little microclimate. It was a work night; we all should’ve been in bed. Instead, we were drinking wine and talking about writing. The husband was being very charming to me, by which I mean he laughed at all my jokes. He was also tightly wound and overly alert, perhaps because he was not having success with his writing. He reminded me of an avid dog. The wife on the other hand was having success—a lot of success—with her writing. She was also completely exhausted—if he was a dog, she was a pile of laundry with a woman residing somewhere inside of it.

She mentioned a short story she’d just written and published.

“Oh, you mean the most recent occasion for your abandoning me and the kids?” asked the very smart, very charming husband.

The wife had been a monster, monster enough to be ambitious, monster enough to finish the work. The husband had not.

This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always. The female monster is Doris Lessing leav- ing two children behind to go live the writer’s life in London. The female monster is Sylvia Plath, whose self-crime was bad enough, but worse still: the children whose nursery she taped off beforehand. Never mind the bread and milk she set out for them, a kind of terrible poem unto itself. She dreamed of eating men like air, but what was truly monstrous was simply leaving her children motherless.

Maybe, as a female writer, you don’t kill yourself, or abandon your children. But you abandon something, some giving part of yourself. When you finish a book, what lies littered on the ground are small broken things: broken dates, broken promises, broken engagements. Also other, more important forgettings and failures: children’s homework left unchecked, parents left un-telephoned, spousal sex un-had. Those things have to get broken for the book to get written.

Sure, I possess the ordinary monstrousness of any real-life person, the unknowable depths, the suppressed Hyde. But I also have a more visible, quantifiable kind of monstrousness—that of the artist who completes her work. Finishers are always monsters. Woody Allen didn’t just try to make a film a year; he tried to put out a film a year.

For me the particular monstrousness of completing my work has always closely resembled loneliness: leaving behind the family, posting up in a borrowed cabin or a cheaply bought motel room. If I can’t detach myself entirely, then I’m hiding in my chilly office, wrapped in scarves and fingerless gloves, a fur hat plopped upon my head, going hell for leather, just trying to finish.

The ambition and the finishing: These are what make the artist. The artist must be monster enough not just to start the work, but to complete it. And to commit all the little savageries that lie in between.

My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant.

It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.

As a memoir writer, it’s my job to answer the question: What is it that I am feeling, exactly? Not what am I meant to feel, or what is it politic to feel, or what is it convenient to feel. As Hemingway says in Death in the Afternoon, the greatest dif- ficulty in writing is “knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel.” And when I am honest, when I really examine what’s actu- ally going on, I have to admit that I have felt like I’m a terrible person when I shut the necessary door on my children in order to work. I’m not accusing women artists of being terrible people, only of feeling like terrible people. This is important because it affects how and when and if we make work.

When women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel like terrible mothers. Oops, slipped into “we.” When I do the writing that needs to be done, I some- times feel like a terrible mother. And because motherhood is so close to the core of me, I feel like a terrible person. Like a monster.

Hemingway’s wife, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.

But the question has to be asked: Are all ambitious artists monsters? Are all finishers monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]

Adapted from Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma © 2023 by Claire Dederer. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.