I’m traveling this week, and a loved one is back in the hospital, so I’m not at my best. I feel a bit like this woman on my office wall, painted by Sabrina Lloyd. The piece is called Weight of the World.

It seems like a good time to share some writing from Self-Assembly: An Unconventional Memoir, about a different tough time. This is called Because We Mu…

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Writing my book was really hard, as is most writing. You start out thinking you know everything and then you realize you know nothing. And then you have to keep writing until you believe that maybe, just maybe, you have something worth sharing. For me, AI can’t and shouldn’t do that kind of creative work for me. I didn’t want to end up with Slop-Assembly

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So how perfect that a folded piece of paper is the centerpiece of the cover of Self-Assembly: An Unconventional Memoir (She Writes Press, May 2027).

The talented designer at She Writes Press offered a few fabulous options for my book cover, ranging from a dismantled camera to abstracted shapes. But this one was by far my favorite, and I’m so grateful to her for capturing my story in a single folded image. The dress is fashioned from a map of Cambodia, one of several places where my life came apart and back together in a new shape. This self-assembly has happened again and again across the world: North Carolina, Vietnam, Madagascar, Ukraine, and Washington, DC.

I love the image of the dress because I’ve worn and still wear many selves: expat wife, single working mother, leader, wife again, friend, writer. Some shapes fit well (or so I thought), while others I’ve unfolded to start over.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about why I chose She Writes Press to publish Self-Assembly. The headline is that the book didn’t fit in anyone’s box, so I stopped trying to fold it into one. She Writes let me assemble the book I wanted without doing it alone.

The cover carries words from Jennifer Pastiloff, whose writing I admire. Seeing her say she inhaled every word of my book makes me a little breathless! She’s one of several reviewers I want to thank for their time and the generous words that appear on and in the book:

“Beautifully relatable, Katya Andresen doesn’t do tidy lessons. She writes with real honesty about what happens when life stops going as planned and becomes something you didn’t know you needed. I inhaled every word.”

— Jennifer Pastiloff, bestselling author of Proof of Life: Let Go, Let Love, and Stop Looking for Permission to Live Your Life

“Raw, vulnerable, and beautifully told, this is a story about the messy, complicated work of continually putting ourselves back together—and the hope that comes from realizing we can. Katya’s story is so relatable and ultimately empowering, reminding us that we are all works in progress.”

— Fran Hauser, bestselling author of Twenty Minutes Is the New Hour and The Myth of the Nice Girl, and owner of Bedford Books

“Self-Assembly is one of those rare memoirs that makes you feel less alone in your own life. Katya Andresen writes with wit and unflinching honesty about building—and rebuilding—herself through war zones and boardrooms, marriage and motherhood, divorce and reinvention. Reading her feels like sitting down with your most clear-eyed friend. If you’ve ever had to reinvent yourself as life changed shape around you, this book will feel as though it was written with you in mind.”

— Barbara Becker, author of Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind

Self-Assembly officially comes out May 11, 2027, but it’s available for preorder now. I know PREORDER MY BOOK NOW is a sales pitch, but hey, I need sales. Preorders help prove to booksellers and readers that a book has an audience. For this genre-defying book, that really matters.

You can pre-order at:

• Bookshop

• Barnes & Noble

• Amazon

• Apple Books

A publicist told me my book is best described as NOT a self-help book, but rather a self-discovery story. If someone you know is on a daunting journey inside themselves, please share this post. Assembling our growing community of self-assemblers means the world to me.

AI leaders have developed an odd sales pitch over the past few years. Sam Altman has said the worst-case scenario is “lights out for all of us.” Dario Amodei has cited a 25% chance of things going “really, really badly.” And Elon Musk offers the relatively happier forecast of a 10-20% chance of annihilation.

Here’s my take on whether we’re all gonna die. Not really—the odds of annihilation are silly math. Instead, I share some more practical thoughts.

1. Consider the source, including the business model

When I was a journalist, “consider the source” drove my work every day. It meant understanding what the source wants, not just what the source says. That applies to the AI debate too.

Jensen Huang leads a company that benefits when the world needs more computing power. Sam Altman and Dario Amodei lead frontier AI companies that may benefit if regulation raises the cost of entry for smaller competitors. (What, you may ask, is a frontier AI company? It’s one that’s pushing the boundaries of what AI can do.)

That does not make any of them wrong. But we have to acknowledge they have enormous commercial stakes in their narratives. Pay attention to what people say. Then ask what would happen to their business if everyone believed them. They may be sincere, but they also can’t help being biased. None of us can.

2. Be wary of the frame

I am particularly struck by the language of “rogue AI,” as if AI emerged from the woods one night to attack us all.

People built these systems and connected them to networks. People selected their objectives and decided what data and tools they could use. People released them while fully aware that there were things they did not yet understand. When the people building AI talk about it as a separate force that may escape, deceive or overpower “us,” I have real questions about the distancing pronouns. It’s true AI systems don’t always follow people’s instructions, but I don’t think losing control erases accountability.

Any frame around this needs nuance. There is a big difference between a model generating an inaccurate answer, an agent finding a sneaky path to complete a task, a criminal using AI to attack a system and a machine scheming to conquer humanity. Those risks should not be collapsed into one scary category because they require very different responses.

So how can you decide what you think, free of the narratives of the extreme optimists and pessimists?

3. Educate yourself, then form your own opinion

Begin with four practical questions: Who is using it? For what purpose? With what authority? Who captures the value and who bears the risk?

Consider two examples. Is an author using AI to proofread her own manuscript, catching mistakes and improving her work? Or is a company acquiring authors’ books from pirated libraries to develop an AI system that can produce competing content? Both involve AI and writing. But who benefits, who bears the risk and who gets to decide are very different questions. (Full disclosure: I’m an author covered by the Anthropic copyright settlement involving books downloaded from pirate libraries. And I work in AI myself.)

So there is no single answer to whether “AI is good.” It’s about what’s good for whom, under what circumstances.

4. Focus on where you have agency

The extinction debate is darkly entertaining, if useless. Most of us lack control over whether nations create an AI regulator or individuals behave nobly. But we do control how we use AI ourselves.

I’m comfortable using AI as a brainstorming partner, critic and proofreader of my work. I use it for administrative tasks and as a personal assistant, including helping me manage book marketing deadlines. But I don’t let it write my posts and pass them off as my own. I don’t let it send emails without reviewing them first. And I haven’t entrusted it with my bank information. What principles guide these decisions? I want a helper, not a virtual Katya, and I want to retain creative control and judgment over how I express myself. Plus I don’t want anyone shopping on my behalf (yet) because shopping is already all too easy for me.

My view

I’m back where we started: the people building AI are asking us to trust their technology while warning us about its dangers. This is a cognitively dissonant time!

I am neither an AI doomer nor an AI cheerleader. Both labels ask us to outsource our judgment to someone else’s storyline. As for my own story, I think it’s always been people, not technology, that pose the greatest danger: how we use AI, how we consume AI, and how we choose to help or hurt each other.

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On the personal front, things have been bumpy. A loved one is in the hospital. Things suck.

But hey, there’s always ample inspiration from Sonesta, a hotel that is trying HARD to make me my best self, against all odds. Here I am in the gym, being told by the Sonesta Life Coach to PUSH HARDER. Anyone who knows me knows this is a horrifically bad idea. I don’t need help in that department. And believe me, the people around me do not want me to push them harder. IYKYK.

But that was mid-workout. Let’s backtrack, because I need to clarify that the Life Coach was with me from the moment I entered the gym.

Good news - I am now a success. But wait - I do need to push harder. At the same time, while I’m lifting weights, let’s remember: I am beautiful.

Leaving the gym, I was congratulated.

I’m shining bright, folks.

Exhausted by my self-improvement, I retired for the evening. But the sun never sets on the Sonesta Life Coach. The hotel had a journal prompt by my bed (but no journal, sadly - which would have won me over). It gave me tips to optimize my rest by putting down my phone. And told me to write down things I’m grateful for.

Fortunately, I travel with my own damn journal.

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AI is an umbrella term that covers a lot of things, but basically, it’s when computers do things that we associate with human intelligence. Hence “artificial” and “intelligence.”

Within AI, there are a lot of concepts and words bandied about. Let’s take them one by one. It helps me to think of them as building on each other, from computers that learn things, to computers that make things, to computers that can actually do things for us.

We’ll start with machine learning. That’s been around for decades, and it’s when we teach computers to learn from data rather than telling them exactly what to do. They can find patterns, make predictions, and draw inferences.

Then came deep learning. It too has been around a while, but it really took off in the 2010s. Deep learning is a form of machine learning that can recognize much more complex patterns, often learning from enormous amounts of data. The idea was inspired by how the human brain works, with its networks of neurons that process information. Deep learning uses artificial neural networks that process information through multiple layers. Each layer learns to recognize increasingly complex features or patterns. That’s why it’s called deep learning.

Deep learning helped make possible the advances in generative AI we’ve seen in recent years. If machine learning is the computer learning, and deep learning is the computer learning increasingly complex things, generative AI is the computer making things — images, songs, words, videos, computer code, AI slop in your Socials, and so on.

Generative AI actually existed before today’s deep learning breakthroughs, but deep learning took it to 11. That’s when ChatGPT came along in 2022 and everyone got very excited.

ChatGPT is powered by a large language model (LLM). These models are trained on enormous amounts of data and learn patterns and relationships in language. When you ask one a question, it generates a response by predicting the next small piece of text (called a token), one at a time. You've probably encountered LLMs through products like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, or Google's Gemini (that’s the thing showing up in your Google searches lately). Also, China's DeepSeek.

If you're still with me, here's another distinction: not all generative AI models are LLMs. If you’re not with me, skip this paragraph. Diffusion models, for example, are used to create images. They are wild! They learn how to turn random visual noise — imagine a television screen full of static — into a recognizable image. During training, they learn how images change when noise is added. Then they learn to reverse the process, gradually removing noise until an image emerges from a cloud of static. Very Poltergeist.

And now agentic AI is all the rage. If generative AI is the computer that can make things, agentic AI is the computer that can do things. For example, instead of asking AI to suggest a vacation itinerary, you could ask an AI agent to research flights, compare hotels, put together an itinerary, and potentially even make the bookings, with your permission. Last week I talked about Muse, which is this kind of agentic AI.

Here’s a visual I had AI make to explain itself to you.

So now you’re a master of the argot. Try this out at your next dinner party:

• Machine learning: Computers that can learn.

• Deep learning: Computers that can learn big time.

• Generative AI: Computers that can make things.

• Agentic AI: Computers that can do things.

An AI expert will tell you I’m oversimplifying because there’s some overlap here. But the basics hold: we’ve moved from computers that follow instructions to computers that learn, create, and increasingly act on our behalf. Learn, make, do - it’s that simple (and that hard)!

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When I wrote Self-Assembly: An Unconventional Memoir and queried literary agents, I got nothing. No one said yes but also, no one said no. No one even acknowledged the fact I’d pitched them. As a middle-aged woman, I often feel invisible, but this was a new level of unacknowledged—and how it goes these days, I was told.

Don’t take it personally, people familiar with publishing said. You’re not famous, so no one wants to hear about your life. Plus your book’s genre doesn’t fit into a nice, neat box, like self-help. Turn it into an advice book for working moms, I was counseled. The thought of that prospect sucked the soul out of me. Women don’t need more advice. They just need to trust themselves. That’s what I was writing about: shedding expectations to take the next shape that belonged to me. And the next after that.

The whole book was about eschewing someone else’s nice, neat little box. Contorting myself into the person who could pen Ten Steps to Being the Boss of You would be like writing a wellness book between puffs on a Marlboro Red and sips of a Big Gulp.

I could self-publish. But that level of DIY was daunting. Plus I couldn’t shake the old term for it: vanity press. Then my development editor told me of another way: She Writes Press.

She Writes Press (SWP) is an award-winning hybrid publisher, combining aspects of self-publishing and traditional publishing. I connected with co-founder Brooke Warner and learned about her vision to give her writers support while they invest to publish and retain their own projects and earnings.

I spent this weekend with Brooke and her team at a SWP writers’ conference in Palm Springs. In the opening keynote, Brooke told the story of how SWP was named. Gloria Steinem, upon hearing about the SWP founders’ concept years ago, asked what it would be called. The founders didn’t yet have a name. Steinem suggested “She Writes, She Reads, She Changes the World,” which was perfect in many aspects but too long for the name of a company. So it became She Writes.

At the conference, Brooke talked about how the tastemaker nexus has long since left Manhattan. (You can read her take on the event here.) “Readers know what they want,” she said. But it’s hard to reach them through the traditional taste makers, who still stand at the gates. As Brooke said, “Women get subcategorized to death.”

Exactly! And that’s why this hard-to-categorize writer resisted the categories. I wrote Self-Assembly to explore what happens when the lives we’ve built no longer fit us. I published it with She Writes when other options no longer fit my work. They chose me and I chose them. I got to self-assemble the book I wanted, but I didn’t have to do it alone.

The conference confirmed I’d chosen well. Brooke and Haley, who have shepherded my book, were even more compelling in person. The speakers at the conference were stellar writers like Christina Baker Kline and Gina Frangello. The couple hundred sister SWP writers applauded them and, with equal enthusiasm, encouraged each other.

Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is the New Black, spoke about her experiences teaching writing in prisons after she was released. Men take to memoir like fish to water, she said. They see themselves as protagonists the minute their pens hit the page. But the women in her classes are different. They hesitate to write from a place of agency and desire.

That made sense to me. It took me a few (unpublished) books to see myself as a worthy protagonist. She tells the women, “Do not be a cork floating in the water. Be a fish swimming in it.”

Exactly. Be the fish. Own your story, own its fate. Thank you, She Writes, for helping this oddball fish to swim as she wishes.

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Happy Monday! I write this as I fly home from the She Writes Press writers’ conference, where I got into a few conversations about AI. Editors and writers are understandably wary about AI slop, but AI can be a very useful personal assistant for the busy writer.

I was explaining this to my lunch table when someone tentatively asked, what is Muse? She’d heard a lot about it on the podcast The Daily, but didn’t know exactly where to find it. Others at my table wanted to know what it does. So I explained and helped.

AI is a big part of my day job, and I’m always happy to demystify it for others. I’m also happy to talk through the pros and cons of using it. I do NOT use it to write for me but as a writer, I find it very useful to do other things I don’t want to do. Or need help doing.

The writers at my table told me I should start a sub-Substack here at Self-Assembly answering questions people are embarrassed to ask about AI because they seem too basic. But no question is basic, not really, and we should be asking! I believe it’s better to understand AI through experimentation than to shun a force that’s already shaping our industry and our lives.

So welcome to AI Mondays, where I’ll answer your questions about AI (just comment with what you want to know).

This week: what is Muse and how do I find it and use it?

Here are four quick things to know.

1. WHAT IT IS: Muse is an AI assistant from Facebook’s parent company Meta. It’s an agent. What is an agent? Unlike a regular chatbot, which answers your questions, an agent can actually do things for you. Think of it as the difference between someone telling you how to book a flight and someone booking it for you. That’s what makes Muse “agentic AI.” Not to get too confusing here, but if you use Claude Cowork (a virtual colleague) or Claude Code (your own software engineer), those are agents too. Muse is more of a personal assistant that can do everything from ordering groceries to booking a Book Tour.

2. WHERE YOU FIND IT: Go to ai.meta.com/muse, or download the Muse app on your iPhone or Android phone. You just go to your iPhone App store or Google Play and download it. You can log in with your Meta credentials (Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp) and name your assistant and you’re set. It takes maybe two minutes. It’s free for now.

3. WHAT TO DO WITH IT: Start talking or typing and ask it to do stuff. You can communicate informally, like you’d text a friend. If you don’t know what to do, ask Muse to explain itself. This is one of the most important things people don’t understand about AI! You just ask it to explain how to use it. And if you don’t get it, you can tell the AI to explain it like you’re a five-year-old. This is how I learned to use almost all things AI. One person at lunch used Muse to check in for her flight. I used it to send her an email thanking her for meeting me and following up on action items from a previous email exchange months ago (it found it and took care of it all). My current project is I have it going through my 1.2 million LinkedIn followers, finding those most engaged with my content, and suggesting who would be good to engage in marketing my book. I’ll let you know how it goes! If it does something wrong, correct it. Give it more context. You can often get much better results that way. And you can double check its actions before it takes them. For example, I have it draft emails but I have to approve them before Muse sends them.

4. WILL IT KILL ME: I’m being silly. No it won’t. But to get it to do things, you have to grant it access to your stuff, like your email or LinkedIn credentials or other personal information. For example, to send an email, I have to let it use my Google email. If that freaks you out, I get it. Pick something you don’t mind sharing and see if it’s reliably helpful. If you don't like the tech overlords, I get that too. They already have a lot of our personal information, but you can decide what more you want to share. My advice: start small, pay attention to what permissions you're granting, and don't give an AI agent access to anything you wouldn't feel comfortable having it see or potentially act on. It can mess up, so keep that in mind!

I hope this was helpful. For my fellow writers out there, here are some ideas for your experiments:

1. Get Muse to teach you how to use it. Ask Muse: “I’m a writer and I’ve never used an AI agent. What are three simple things you could do for me? I am lost here so keep it simple and don’t throw any jargon at me!”

2. Find your people. Ask it: “Find five independent bookstores in my area that host author events. Give me their websites and suggest how writers can approach them about readings.”

3. Delegate something. Ask it: “Help me organize my upcoming book events into a calendar, including dates, locations, travel time, and things I need to prepare.” You can start by giving it a simple list rather than connecting your calendar. Or get more ambitious and have it plan a three-day book tour in New York, with independent bookstores, literary events, and efficient travel between locations. Have it buy your tickets and make reservations at nearby restaurants. See how it does and fact check things like contact info and availability. Remember, it can mess up.

FOR NEXT WEEK: What else do you want to know? Post in the comments.

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I had a nice little post queued up but with the news of Cornell and the experiences of too many of my friends and family, it just doesn’t feel right.

And so I shall quote another writer, Rebecca Traister. Mad doesn’t feel enough, but it’s what I’ve got.

“But I say this to all the women reading this now, and to my future self: What you are angry about now - injustice - will still exist, even if you yourself are not experiencing it, or are tempted to stop thinking about how you are experience it, and how you contribute to it. Others are still experiencing it, still mad; some of them are mad at you. Don’t forget them; don’t write off their anger. Stay mad for them. Stay mad with them. They’re right to be mad, and you’re right to be mad alongside them. Being mad is correct; being mad is American; being mad can be joyful and productive and connective. Don’t ever let them talk you out of being mad again.”

― Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

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It’s hard to see myself as a person who is not busy. Apparently this goes back to my childhood. My mother sent me this picture over the weekend. I look like a toddler in a hurry, with mail for the post office and a block to add to a tower somewhere. Those are the eyes of a determined multitasker.

To this day, my self-worth is tangled up in my productivity. But it goes even deeper than that. I have an acute sense of time passing, and I want to squeeze every minute out of my time on planet Earth. Of course, this backfires all too often. What’s life on planet Earth without taking a hot second to enjoy planet Earth? To be, not do, so I am present enough to savor the moment?

My hustle has a dark side, for certain. Perpetual productivity has proved addictive for me. Slowing down and doing less would make me feel both vulnerable and lazy.

I have been at work on breathwork and meditation for years. Breathwork is practicing different kinds of breathing to become more mindful. It’s come to this — breathing itself is something I need to add to my to-do list.

My Apple Watch occasionally alerts me that I should be taking a deep breath, and I wonder if it thinks I am dead or hyperventilating. It also reminds me to meditate.

In meditation, I wrestle my mind back to presence over and over. At first, I can hardly bear the oxygen and stillness. How hard it is to simply be instead of constantly striving to become.

Slowly, though, I have begun to find the place between the crest of my roving brain and the trough of my motionless body. On the precarious edge between surrender and effort, between not-doing and doing, I am finding a presence beyond the hustle. It requires practice to hold.

And even more practice not to hold my breath.

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In Kyiv, on a Tuesday morning 22 years ago, I discovered the marriage I thought I was holding together had already come undone. In shock, I spent a lot of time staring at the view from my bedroom. The windows were double paned, but no contest for the chill penetrating the layers of glass. I watched the weather perform an interpretive dance of my state of mind. Flurries circled the windows, with flakes that didn’t fall as much as swirl, spiraling and spiraling before dropping to the ground. I imagined myself inside a snow globe that someone never stopped shaking. It didn’t take much imagination.

Within 48 hours, I had gone from expat wife to single working mother with no permanent address, on the hook for a business book contract I’d just signed and no longer had the heart to finish.

This unraveling became the catalyst for Self-Assembly, which is not only the name of this Substack, but also the title of my memoir. Self-Assembly: An Unconventional Memoir is coming out in eight months! My publication date is May 11, 2027.

Self-Assembly is a memoir about the moment when the life you’ve built no longer fits the woman you’re becoming — and what it takes to pull yourself together into something new. The book lives in transitions: not a neat before-and-after but rather the disassembling, reassembling middle.

I’m also fundamentally skeptical of advice, including my own. I keep arriving at insights but with a parenthetical, a pivot, and an admission that I haven’t actually figured it out. If the reader trusts me, it’s not because I have answers. It’s because I won’t pretend the questions are settled. I want readers to finish this book and feel recognized as opposed to coached or armed with a daunting list of instructions.

My daughters Sophia and Katherine motivate me to evolve as a woman and mom. They read and commented on every page, and their critiques helped me strip this book down to its essence. Then they took the pen and wrote a powerful pair of pieces as the Afterword. It is my great joy they ended this story.

As the book wraps up the proofreading stage and goes into production, I’ll be talking about it more here since the process is interesting. I’m happy to answer any questions about it!

If you’re reading this, you are part of the community of people who inspire me through your connection. I hope you’ll support the book when it does come out. But more importantly, I hope it prompts you to share your own stories of reinvention. At any time, but especially at times like these, it’s good to be reminded self-assembly is our second nature.

That sounds like advice, but none of us, especially women, need more advice. It’s more of a wish. What gets me through hard days is the idea we have each other’s backs and find strength in each other’s stories, as people in progress.

A few days ago, my mother emailed me this photograph she found while going through old family pictures. Her subject line was “Four generations.” On the left is my great-grandmother Pearl, who was born in 1881. On the right is Pearl’s daughter, my grandmother June, who was born in 1911. My mother is in the center, holding me, at the end of the 1960s. The dresses are fabulous, and so is this assembly of women.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this picture and our four generations. When Pearl was born, women in the United States could not vote in national elections. When June was born thirty years later, they still couldn’t. By the time I arrived, women could vote and much more, but the women’s movement was highlighting the many parts of our lives still organized around men. For example, none of these women in the picture could get a credit card or a bank loan without a man—usually a husband—co-signing.

Pearl lived to be 92, and so did June, who died in 2004. By then, I was a mother to two daughters myself and well into a winding career that reflects my own mother’s journey of expansion and reinvention.

Pearl’s obituary says that throughout her long life, she watched many changes take place and met them with “cheerfulness, courage and an eagerness to experience new things and to meet new people.” I love that sentence. It feels like good advice for surviving 92 years of almost anything.

So much has changed, but also so much hasn’t. We all had—and have—in common the boxes into which we were born. They’ve changed shape over the generations, but they are still there.

My mother had a career at the EPA, served twelve years on her town council and has spent more than two decades fighting to protect a local creek and its watershed. Last year, in her eighties, she won a Governor’s Volunteer Service Award for her environmental work. The box she inherited was plainly larger. And she raised me to believe I could have a career, support myself, travel the world, have children, leave a bad marriage, marry again, lead organizations, write books and keep becoming some new version of myself.

I find myself in boxes. Some are true barriers. Others are constructs I’ve accepted, in the form of others’ expectations, a desire to please, or a need to apologize for just how huge my box has become.

I am so damn grateful to the women in this picture, who did so much within their own confines. And to two other generational greats we have lost, Gloria Steinem and Dolly Parton, who actively outgrew so many would-be constraints.

This past week on The Daily, New York Times Magazine writer Susan Dominus talked about the two women as representing different but complementary expressions of feminism. Steinem fought for structural, political and legal change. Parton embodied something else: financial independence, control over her own life and, in Dominus’s lovely phrase, an “unapologetic inhabiting” of the person she wanted to be.

Pearl and June each pushed through a near-century of change, winning space in their boxes. My mother and Gloria Steinem brought crowbars to their boxes, dismantling the walls. Dolly, magnificently, refused delivery of any box.

I’m trying to learn from all of them. Especially from Dolly, who said, “Find out who you are and do it on purpose, with purpose.” That mom and her baby in the photo are still at it.

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Yesterday my older daughter came through my front door and told me I needed to come outside right away. There was a man who needed help.

She’d been returning from a weekend trip when she found a huddle of people on our sidewalk surrounding a neighbor who had gone out to walk his dog and could no longer manage the half block home. Someone asked the man whether he had a wheelchair in his house. He didn’t. My daughter looked at our house and came up with the next best thing: an office chair with wheels.

She brought it out, and we lowered him into it. Two people pushed from behind while another person and I held his legs up so the chair could roll. And so our strange little procession began. There was the man with his four chair-handlers, followed by another neighbor who’d taken the dog, and then the neighbor’s daughter with her nine-month-old baby Sally in a stroller.

Sweat was pouring from the man’s forehead, and I worried for his heart. His bare legs were badly swollen. We bumbled along across the uneven bricks, trying not to let him fall. And we eventually made it the half block uphill to his house, a walking testament to the fact that grace is not always graceful.

When we arrived, the man’s wife answered the door. She had a cane because she’d fallen down the stairs. That’s why her husband had tried to walk the dog. It was all fine, she said. They had an elevator. Their helper was on vacation, but coming back. I wasn’t reassured.

I couldn’t imagine how the man was going to get around without the rolling chair, so I told them to keep it. And then we left, because they told us to go, and I worried over a situation I couldn’t fix.

I want to fix everything for everyone, all the time, and have things turn out so everyone is all better. It has never once worked, but I do not learn my lesson.

Helping is not a neat little three-act story: person needs help, people help, person is okay. This is not that story. And so I don’t know how to end this story when I left still worried about him.

I never do.

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On my birthday recently, I went to my happy place—Early Birds—and danced with my friend Allison and my daughter Sophia. Then we went to karaoke and got a VIP room so no one would have to listen to us sing-screaming out of tune. It was perfect.

At the end of the night, Sophia said it was interesting that if you leave women alone to party, they seem to especially enjoy group catharsis around cheating bastards. I guess sometimes you just need to enjoy your rage, and the fact that you’re not alone in it. Even if you don’t feel it as acutely anymore, you still have some remnants to exorcise on the dance floor or into the microphone. At least I do.

This is especially clear to me because my memoir opens on the day I discovered my first, now ex-husband was cheating. I thought I had come apart, but I also sensed, even that day, that coming apart had to become a form of moving forward. I was muddled in the head that day, but I was right. That’s worth singing and dancing about, am I right? If we’re all there to tell the tale, we can celebrate our rage-fueled resilience.

Betrayal, in the end, was the inciting incident, not the subject, of the book—or of my life. Every time I’ve felt broken, I figured out I was simply disassembled. That’s not so bad, because I had the essential pieces to compose into something new.

Maybe this nightclub ode to cheating bastards is our own modern, Homeric epic of returning home, to ourselves, after a shitstorm at sea. We’re together in the same boat, and I’ll take that company as very rich compensation for heartbreak.

Today is a day when the creative well is dry. I’ve been on video conference calls for eight hours, and there’s not even a puddle of groundwater at the rock bottom of my metaphorical creativity source.

I liked writing about taxidermy last week, so I asked two wildly creative family members if they thought I could make a metaphor of the upside-down canoe hanging from the ceiling of our cabin. They told me I’d sapped the trope. If they didn’t see juice in that idea, there was no hope.

They helped me brainstorm for a while. They said, “Why not just write about this place you love so much, where you come every summer?”

“I did that last summer,” I said. “It’s still the same.”

So here it is, still the same, published once again.

The comfort of old, unchanged places

My friends from college and I have been texting about how much we need nature these days. When the news is bad, we trade pictures of beauty from wherever we are. It might be a Montana mountain cutting a silhouette into the evening sky, a sunny beach in New Jersey, or ranchland crowned with pink clouds. The geography isn’t the point as much as the act of noticing a glorious view that has stood the test of time.

I just spent a week at the small lake in the Poconos where our extended family has vacationed for decades. Everything about our lives has changed over the years, is changing this very moment, but this place has not. Maybe that’s why we keep coming back. It’s rare to find a fixed perspective point anywhere on Earth. This is one of them.

In the lodge overlooking the lake, a pair of bearskins hangs on the wall, sticking out their preserved tongues at me, just as they did when I first visited in 1970. The cottage owners on this lake rarely dabble in renovations. One summer the mid-century stove in our rental set a peach pie ablaze. We shut the gas off and the pie kept baking in the overheated appliance. It somehow came out perfectly. The lumpy mattresses are less redeemable, fossilized in the shape of guests past. This summer’s century-old rental featured a convenience from another era: a sink in each bedroom.

The best part of this spot is the unchanged lake. No motorboats are allowed. It is dotted with lily pads and fringed by primordial ferns and moss. The clear, dark water is fed by invisible underground springs you can sense when swimming, sudden cold patches bubbling from below. The lake’s outlet leads to a towering waterfall that tumbles into a rocky pool.

This is a place of temporal refuge, a sanctuary synchronized to older, slower rhythms measured in lake-years. I sleep more deeply in this place. My nervous system rests from tracking constant change. My heart rate slows, except when I run the hilly road that circumnavigates the lake, which gets harder to do each summer.

It reminds me of the Yeats poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore… I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”

Someday, if I’m lucky, I will be visiting the lake when I am too old to run or maybe even to swim. I will sit and enjoy the view that matches my memories. I will take a picture, and it will be impossible to tell what year that might have been.

A year later, I stand by my words.

I’m in the Poconos, where I travel each summer to be with my extended family. This year, on the lake where we’ve gathered for decades, we rented a house rich in stuffed animal heads. There’s an elk with a trio of deer (said elk plus two deer pictured here) as well as a black bear with a permanent grimace.

The elk hangs over the dining table, its critical eye on what’s being served but also on me, on the sofa, typing this post. It looks very much alive.

So of course I spent my entire morning researching taxidermy. And hunting trophies. And found metaphors galore.

Taxidermy combines two Greek roots, and it literally means an arrangement of skin. In other words, in my mind, it’s a morbid manifestation of my philosophy of self-assembly. I believe we can always recompose into something new. The elk suggests a good taxidermist can extend this faith forever.

The preservation of animals originates in ancient times, when it had spiritual significance. The contradictory Victorians, forward-leaning when it came to science but socially backward, pursued taxidermy as a means of collecting and categorizing the natural world.

But mounted heads - like those that adorn my cabin walls - are a different matter. In the 19th century, taxidermy was the stuff of elite trophy rooms celebrating conquests far and wide. And then, like all things trendy, those heads were no longer status symbols as much as everyman’s recreational hunting memory. And then, like all things mass market, enough time has passed to bring a second wave of popularity, based on an ironic appreciation of past obsessions. This rented cabin’s hanging dead suggest one generation’s trophy is another’s charmingly dated decor.

But for me the sharp-eyed elk, so eternally emotive in his gaze, says more: his arrangement of skin is a testament to something once living. And a reminder that he won in the end. He may have been shot dead, but no one possessed him alive.

Except, I suppose, for me — arranging his skin into a metaphor, mounting him over my words. He knows my type, always looking for a way to keep things from disappearing.

My older daughter and I were stressed about her upcoming surgery, so we sought something cozy and comforting on TV: the new Little House on the Prairie series.

I grew up reading every Laura Ingalls Wilder book, and my daughters grew up reading my old copies. I loved Laura, hated Nellie, and worshipped Pa. I don’t remember much about Ma. As for Laura’s sisters, I only remembered that Mary was blind from scarlet fever and Carrie was a baby.

But the series was not what I expected. For starters, it was neither cozy nor comforting. And the character who stood out was Ma, who reminded me of myself for the duration of my first, failed marriage.

In the first episode, Ma - aka Caroline Ingalls - follows her hot, fiddle-playing husband from the House in the Big Woods to a rough spot in Kansas. Soon enough, they have to ford a raging river. Charles leads the horses while Caroline tries to ensure her daughters don’t drown. She succeeds, though their dog is swept away and she sustains a deep cut to the head and vomits on the far shore.

After more misfortune, Charles and Caroline arrive at their dubious destination, and he enlists her in building a cabin with massive logs. One huge log drops on her foot and crushes the bones. When she sees a doctor, who amazingly exists in the nearby town, she learns not only is her foot in bad shape, but she is pregnant. She’s had multiple miscarriages, so I am deeply anxious for her.

Toward the end of the episode, Charles starts having doubts about their new home. He tells Caroline that if she wants to go back home, he’ll turn back with her. And she gives him a pep talk based on how they fell in love in the first place. He could have had any girl, but he chose her, “And I knew, in that moment, I would follow you anywhere,” she says. “What if this is where we finally become who we were meant to be?”

And here is where Caroline and I merge into one. No, I did not migrate West in the wake of the Civil War to land belonging to Native Americans. But, I did marry and two days later move to Cambodia. And I followed my ex-husband from there to Africa and Eastern Europe, because that is where he wanted to go. And I had two miscarriages. And all along, I kept gritting it out for “Pa.” I went from country to country, having never been to those lands before, and I homesteaded for my daughters across three continents. I did not break my foot, but I had dysentery multiple times. And, though my ex didn’t even play the fiddle, I pep-talked us around the world.

I’ve spent a lifetime relating to Laura in my memory. But all along, I’ve been Ma. Did those books compel me to sign up for this role? Or was I subconsciously turning my daughters into Laura so they could become feisty women and gifted writers?

I don’t know, but I can say this: I’ve seen enough. Yes, I was Ma and Ma was me. But in real life, I eventually resigned from being Ma. I got a different ending. And I’m grateful there is no need to go back in time. The rest of Little House is fiction.

I know how this bike feels. It’s been everywhere, bumping over grass, rolling over hot asphalt, accepting payment, and then doing it all again. It needs a rest. So it’s splayed in the dirt with clear body language that says, no more.

This street lamp is limp with exhaustion. The light has gone out of its face.

And these traffic cones are sick and tired of taking a stand every day.

If it’s not obvious, I tend to anthropomorphize objects. And how I feel any given day is how I regard the world around me. My environment is one big pathetic fallacy.

I was feeling burned out the other morning, and this is what I noticed: the surrendered bike, the drooping streetlight, the trampled cones. I was them, and they were me.

I tend to power forward, accelerating the more exhausted I become. That morning, it was easier for me to feel sorry for these things than to admit I didn’t much feel like staying upright myself. But one by one, as I felt compelled to photograph them, I got the message. A dented, collapsed traffic cone was not just a cone, it was a diagnostic instrument.

When I got home, I listened to my daughter, who told me to cancel a trip. And I took her up on her offer to fix up my home office with new paint, some beautiful midcentury furniture she helped me find, and art she would paint herself. I would try to take care of myself and my environment a little better.

This is the chair and TJ, who sold it to me. He explained that Finn Juhl’s design was inspired by Japanese simplicity and echoed the shape of a temple door. My hope is when I sit down in it, my insides will take the hint.

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When I lived in Madagascar, people would open the tombs of their dead relatives every few years, pull out the cloth-wrapped corpses of their loved ones and dance with them held aloft. They would party all night with their dead, catching the spirits up on family gossip, asking them for advice, and then wrapping their remains in new shrouds before placing them back in the tomb.

The season for death-dancing, or Famadihana, is winter, which is May to November in the Southern Hemisphere. My house had tombs on two sides of the yard, and so I got to see and hear the festivities up close. The raucous parties featured the drinking and blaring music that you’d expect from any serious throw-down.

One night, lying in bed wide awake from the noise, I thought about the relationship the people outside my window had with their ancestors. They seemed to view the line between the living and the dead as permeable. The past and present were states that intermixed. In Madagascar, it seemed, neither people nor history is ever fully dead and gone.

I became obsessed with the concept that night, and I continue to write about death-dancing in one form or another even now. I feel that our histories with those we love are never really behind us. They are part of us, whether in the form of people who are physically gone, events that are long past, or memories that mutate over time.

While the concept of digging up the dead may seem strange, I do it all the time, metaphorically. Sometimes it’s just an imagined conversation with someone who died. Or a search for the origins of old wounds. How did addiction, narcissism, wounded hearts get passed down? Why was all this trouble in the marrow of their bones, so powerful it hopped from soul to soul?

A song gets stuck in my head.

The hip bone’s connected to the back bone
The back bone’s connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone’s connected to the head bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!

Sometimes I want to shake them all, all those ancestors. And sometimes I want to embrace them and reminisce. I keep taking them out, to argue and to ask. And tell them how much I wish they were here for one more conversation where I wouldn’t be the only one doing the talking.

And then it’s time to wrap them up and carry them with me, because that dance is never done.

In the Journal piece, a psychiatrist writes about a 90-something friend who came back from a Caspar David Friedrich show at the Met describing "a major mood change which seemed beyond happiness," and contrasts her with the patients who can recite their glucose levels and heart-rate variability but can't remember the last time they were excited about anything. A University College London study lends scientific support: regular arts engagement was associated with slower biological aging, with the most culturally active participants about a year younger biologically, which is a difference associated with exercise.

I was in Spain recently, and I felt this “major mood change which seemed beyond happiness” after four hours at the Prado, the national art museum. It is so packed with delights, I only made it through about a third of the exhibits. But it was enough to feel like a woman who might live forever.

This painting by Juan van der Hamen y León made me feel the world is beautiful. It is of Flora, goddess of spring and abundance.

Hans Baldung Grien’s allegory of Harmony put me in touch with creative power and music and poetry as paths to a kind of immortality, even as mortality creeps in around the edges.

And this painting by Guido Reni, Hippomenes and Atalanta, thrilled me with the fastest (if distracted) woman runner trying to outpace her fate.

In interacting with art, I think we see ourselves and the world, so invisible to us in the familiar everyday, in new ways. Art is a sharp implement that punches a hole in all we take for granted to reveal a world we forgot was so immense. It makes us vastly more vital.

I hope this post, with its paintings, adds at least a day to your own beautiful life.