Upcoming Workshops

Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance [Online] Jan 7- February 11, 2027 [sign up coming soon]

Center for Fiction [Online] February 18 - March 11, 2027 [sign up coming soon]

Kripalu March 19th- March 21st, 2027 [Lenox, MA]

Southern Vermont Writers’ Conference April 4th-April 9th, 2027 [a few spots left!]

Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts August 2nd - August 6th, 2027 [sign up coming soon]

Madeleine Island School of the Arts October 18th - October 22nd, 2027 [Pacific Grove, CA]

Last year, I published a series here called The Permission Workbook, which was based on my book, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create; the workbook is an examination of creative, ethical, and moral questions surrounding storytelling, story ownership, permission, who gets to write what and why (and why not). Each installment includes questions that every writer and art-makers — seasoned and neophyte — face before and during the creative process, and ends with generative exercises that are meant to get your juices flowing, and to really think about the stories you need to tell, and why you need to tell them. (Revenge might be the answer, and while it’s fine for your journal, it’s not fine for your memoir, and you can go here to find out more.)

For the next month, I am taking the paywall down on The Permission Workbook so that everyone has access to it. Why now? The first answer: Because we are heading into the time of year when many of us are coming face-to-face with holiday get-togethers which often bring together masses of siblings, extended families, and — to put not too fine a point on it — the ghosts of those who have come before us, and whose myths still linger in the drapery and around the dessert tray. At some point, you or someone else will begin a sentence Hey do you remember when [fill in the blank: Daddy got drunk at Christmas in 1975, Grandma fell off the television while she was dusting the soffit, the dog made off with the cream pie, etc etc etc] and there will be vastly different recollections of whatever the memory is, and everyone will insist that they’re right, because that’s how humans are wired.

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At some point, the subject may be (mercifully) changed, or someone will cling to their version of a story like velcro and will say that theirs is the only true version, and that everyone else is wrong. If old grudges are involved, or someone’s had too much wine, the conversation might grow heated. But if the subject is respectfully changed following someone saying Well, you’re entitled to your memory, and I’m entitled to mine, you’re all ahead of the game. This, I am sorry to say, rarely happens.

I often tell this story to my students: After my parents divorced in 1978, my father and I spent every weekend alone together — we’d go skiing, or go to the movies, and when it was time for me to look at colleges, we’d spend the weekends driving up into New England. We were very close, and when he died in a car accident in 2002, part of the grief process for me was telling his stories, and sharing our escapades on those weekends after the divorce. During a holiday dinner shortly after his accident, I told a story about something that had happened to the two of us on one of those weekends when I was a teenager; I can’t even recall now what it was. But the important point here is that no one else at the table had been present to witness this thing that happened; it had just been the two of us. I finished telling this story, and a cousin held her hand up, shook her head, and said NO! You got it WRONG! That’s not how the story goes.

All eyes focused on me, and then her, and then me, and I felt my face get hot. For one thing, she was claiming narrative and historical ownership of something she hadn’t even witnessed. For another thing, she might as well have been calling me a liar.

This is an example of the game of telephone writ large: my father likely told his sister about this thing that happened, and she probably related it to my uncle, who possibly shared it with my cousin, who, at the time, was in her late twenties. At that point, it had been forced through the Play-Doh extruder of narrative truth: it had been stuffed into a different shape, cranked through the family machine, and emerged as a different narrative that somehow made more sense to them, and certainly to her. My cousin had fashioned her own narrative version of my truth, and then was willing to throw down the gauntlet to defend it, even though she hadn’t actually witnessed it.

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It had been a hard time for me: I had recently lost the one person in my life who made himself responsible for my safety while my world fell apart around me as a teenager, and I had somehow been stripped of my place as a recognized mourner because someone else demanded they be in that primary role, as though two people couldn’t mourn the same man simultaneously. Someone else wanted to be top dog. One of the few things I had left of him were his stories — our stories; the ones we’d shared for thirty-nine years — and to be told that I was somehow telling them wrong, or fabricating them, or otherwise misrepresenting them, by people who weren’t even involved in them in the first place was like killing him all over again.

So here we are, heading into the holidays, when scenarios like the one I shared above abound.

The second reason I’m dropping the paywall on The Permission Workbook for the month of November is because many of us are being told in larger and often more outrageous ways that our experiences as we live(d) them either don’t count or aren’t real. Gaslighting has become the protocol of the moment. Granted, this is not just limited to November in particular. But today is one of the most important American elections in my nation’s history, and the truth — you might have noticed — is at a high premium. People in the public eye are being paid off to change their stories, to tweak them, or to keep them quiet. At worst, cultural and legal institutions are burying stories that touch absolutely every one of us. One thing is clear, though, at least in my country: not even veneering everything in ersatz gold changes the truth, especially if the gold is made from cheap plastic.

Every one of us has a story that we must tell; we are the storytelling species. We are those creatures who, ten thousand years ago, stepped into a cave, held their hands up against the wall and blew out a mouthful of ochre dust to leave an image that said, as Rob Macfarlane said in his conversation with in , I was here; this is my story; remember me. Whether we intend to write a book or an essay or a diary entry meant for no one else’s eyes, permission looms large, even when the person we’re requiring it from is ourselves.

To begin reading The Permission Workshop, start here. Click on the link underneath the Poor Man’s Feast logo to read them all, in any order. To those of you who would like to join me in one of my ongoing workshops, I look forward to meeting you!

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I loved my mother.

God, I loved her so much that it was sometimes unfathomable, and unquantifiable. I loved her endlessly and wildly, and I thought that our emotional proximity to each other was completely normal. My love for her was outsized and colossal; some would have called it bloated with need. I am reminded of ’s essay The Love of My Life, which I carry around with me, and have since it was published the year after my father died in 2002. My mother and I did not have a relationship like the one Cheryl had with her’s, which was also ineffable, but in a different way; I wish we did, but we didn’t. Ours was obsessive, overwhelming, dangerous, brutal, filled with love, filled with loathing, and utterly frustrating on every level. And yet.

My mother had the same relationship with her mother, who was at the center of every decision she made from the time she was in single digits until my grandmother’s death in 1982, when my mother was in her forties. There was unwavering support of my mother’s abundant singing talent and her appearances on radio and television, and then, her troubled marriage to my father; when they were married in 1962, my mother gave my grandmother a key to their apartment, and she came and went without invitation or announcement, instantly driving a wedge between my parents from the very beginning of their marriage. But there was also physical and emotional abuse; prone to sudden rages, my grandmother called her daughter ugly from the minute she was born, which in part resulted in my mother becoming a model, because that’s often how these things work, in an I’ll show you kind of way. If my grandmother arrived at our apartment in a foul mood, the visit ended with my mother locking herself in the bathroom for hours. Eventually, my father demanded the key back, and my mother called him a home-wrecker.

But because it was all she knew — all they both knew — my mother thought that her relationship with her mother was typical and even normal, so she expected our relationship to follow the same course and for much of my life, it did: she was at the center of everything, every decision I made, everything I was and ever hoped or imagined I’d be. We were the grayed-out overlap on each other’s Venn Diagram, and it was impossible for me to fathom living a life that wasn’t tightly knotted to hers. I longed for her approval, and when she told me she was proud of me, it felt like being dunked in a vat of warm honey. When she was disappointed in me—You’re a loser, just like your father, she’d say, or she would cut off communication until I called her and begged forgiveness for something I didn’t even know I’d done — I wept. When I got older, I discovered the numbing warmth of alcohol, which helped, until it didn’t. Eventually, I considered disappearing completely, for the betterment of everyone; I didn’t want to harm myself, but I also just didn’t want the pain anymore. It was then that she’d try and comfort me, I would push her away, she’d call me ungrateful, and then she would cry, and then apologize, and the cycle would start all over again.

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I’ve lately been reading and watching a lot of conversations with David Sedaris, who always had a not-great relationship with his father, Lou, but it was only after he was gone that David began to talk about how patently, almost villainously abusive his father was. In interviews with Bella Freud and Elizabeth Day, he describes it, much to the horror of his interlocutors, and then he kind of brushes it off as normal. Oh, he shrugs in one conversation, it happened all the time. Is this what people like us are destined to say after the fact, as graduates of the Frog-Boiling School of Family Psychology?

There were the little things: She came to every school performance I was in from the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated from high school; if she were here she’d tell you that she put braces on my teeth and paid for my knee surgery, and not every parent would do such things. She was determined to make me love fashion as much as she did, and dressed me for my sixth grade prom in an adult outfit she purchased at her favorite boutique, and had the skirt shortened fourteen inches. She dragged me to Bloomingdales on a weekly basis, and made me have makeovers when I was ten, which once resulted in a severe topical allergic reaction to blush from a now-defunct company called Etherea that was so dangerous it made my throat close up, and required a trip to the emergency room when I started gasping for air; She thought I was doing it for attention, even while I was turning blue. I attended every one of her parties: the ones she had with my father when I was growing up in the sixties, the raunchy ones in the seventies, and the ones she had with my stepfather when I was in college, where, in my presence, she’d refer to me in conversation with her party guests as My kid. As in My kid — she don’t care what I’ve done for her — she hates me. And then she’d grab me and affectionately kiss the side of my head while I held a crystal Tiffany pitcher of Bloody Marys I was about to pour for her friends.

Our breaks from each other came during the summer, when I went to sleepaway camp for eight weeks as a camper and then, a counselor; during my first time at camp, in 1972, when I was nine, she developed nervous shingles the day after I Ieft and I cried hysterically around the clock because I couldn’t stand being away from her. It was as if we had been velcro’d to each other, and someone had ripped us apart. She didn’t understand why I needed to go to college — I didn’t go, and I wound up okay, she said to my father — and during my freshman year she fell into a rage one Saturday night, calling me ten times in two hours until it occurred to me that I actually had the option of not answering. Rarely given to fits of logic, she figured out that if my number ended in 8834, my next door neighbor’s might be 8835, and the one after hers, 8836. I sat on my bed listening to every phone ring in each of the other twenty-nine dorm rooms on my floor until she got to the end, and started over again with mine.

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At college, I made close friends and even had a serious boyfriend, but I did not know how to be a good friend, even though I thought I did; I assumed that constant contact was normal — wasn’t it? —and of course, it wasn’t. It was just constant, and obnoxious, and it pushed away people I loved and cared about deeply. Fuck them, my mother said. I’m the only friend you need.

At a time when the people in my life were beginning to consider who they might be and what they might do in the world, I didn’t; I couldn’t. I could only tread water in service of my mother’s needs, her desires, her wants, and who we were to each other. She was my job and, I believed, the reason I was here. Four years later, I graduated and moved home to the Manhattan apartment she shared with my stepfather, who I loved. He stood watching, helpless, while our fights were epic and dangerous; my blood pressure skyrocketed and after bursting a series of ocular blood vessels, my doctor handed me a written prescription that said MOVE OUT OR YOU WILL DIE BEFORE YOU’RE THIRTY, and so I did. But still, there were no boundaries: she showed up at my doctor’s appointments and bounded into the examination rooms. She waited on the couch in the lobby at my office until I emerged for lunch or to head home, and she once rifled through my work bag when I stepped into her guest bathroom after coming by for a visit. She quietly unearthed a bill from my therapist and I came home later that afternoon to a phone machine message saying I don’t know how she got my number, but your mother just called me wanting to know if I was turning you against her. She said she’d have me disbarred.

And yet. When I moved into a small apartment that we bought together with pooled resources, she waited for me in my lobby for hours until I came home from work. She’d engage me in a furious fight, drive me to tears, and then we’d have dinner together, or go shopping, and she’d tell me how beautiful I looked. If I lost weight, she became concerned that my hair would fall out, and took me to an endocrinologist who put me on high dose birth control pills that caused pre-cancerous cervical erosion and another drug that sent me into ventricular tachychardia. If I gained weight, she decided I was eating too many carbs and not enough protein, and sent me a $200 monthly order of meat from Lobel’s: lamb chops, veal chops, strip steaks, and filets, each wrapped individually in brown paper, and meant for my freezer. When I moved out years later, most of them were still there.

Did I ever think about saying No—stop?

I didn’t. I couldn’t. I loved her. I feared for her safety, and when she threatened suicide if I did something she didn’t like, I believed her, because why wouldn’t I, even though my therapist said She has NPD; narcissists don’t kill themselves — they kill other people.

When I finally met Susan in 2000, my father said Don’t tell your mother. Keep your relationship from her for as long as you can. And I did, until nine months later, when we decided to move in together and I had to tell my mother that I was leaving the city and leaving my job, and moving to Connecticut because I’d met someone and fallen in love. At thirty-six, I needed to begin my life as an independent adult, before it was too late. But being two hours away from her meant nothing, and almost everything I did still centered around her. Job choices, wardrobe choices, hair styles, diets, car colors, moving plans, serious health issues requiring surgery, the adoption of pets, vacations, the decision to have a baby: if she didn’t approve, I changed my plans. I wanted to keep her happy.

Over the years, Susan and I nearly bankrupted ourselves paying my mother’s medical bills because she refused to be on traditional Medicare, since it meant carrying a card that instantly identified her as a senior citizen. When we finally got her onto traditional Medicare after an accident in 2016 resulted in a $180,000 Medicare Advantage copay, we paid for a top-tier Medicare supplement to keep her safe, and got her onto community Medicaid to keep her roof over her head. She lived with us for four months during Covid; we made sure she went home when it was safe, but she lied about a dental emergency, and we brought her back. Wherever she went, chaos followed: when I was awarded a wintertime writer’s residency in Maine, nine hours away from her, I got a call one night from Susan that began There’s nothing to worry about, and I paced the length of my beautiful little Rockport apartment while she told me that my mother had fallen and couldn’t get up, and the New York Fire Department had to break down her apartment door because she had refused to give anyone in the building a set of keys; the bigger problem was that they had to re-attach it that night so that she had something to lock. The building tried to charge her $14,000 to replace it but agreed to take $7000 when I reminded them that they had building insurance, and they couldn’t double dip. My mother laughed at the absurdity of it all, and she said that the sight of three handsome New York City firemen breaking down her door late one night was something right out of I Love Lucy.

As she got older, she still managed to create pandemonium on a daily basis, which she thought was cute, and funny. She had enough of her wits left to make same day doctor’s appointments so that I couldn’t possibly be there with her, calling me at the last minute to get an Uber to pick her up and bring her, and then bring her back to her apartment. When the bradykinesia she refused to believe she had got so bad and most Ubers were SUVs, she tried to crawl into them on her hands and knees, and then couldn’t pull herself up to a sitting position. A driver named Mohammed called me one day from his black Cadillac Escalade to say that my mother was sitting on the floor in the back of his vehicle and he couldn’t get her onto the seat because she was dead weight, even though he had crawled in from the driver’s side and tried to pull her up under the armpits so he could get her seated and strap her in. He flagged down a yellow Prius taxi for her, and called me to say she was okay. God bless Mohammed. God bless every Uber and taxi driver in the city of New York who helped her, and me. When I wrote Motherland in 2019, I did so not from a fit of pique, but as a way to try and understand her and us, together, how we grated against each other like two rocks. I wrote it to try and understand who we were together as we moved through lives plaited like a French braid.

Over the course of our twenty-seven years together, Susan and I estimated that my mother called me roughly ten times a day, for a total of 98,500 phone calls. This one was approximately 98,490. I was teaching on Cape Cod when I got the call that she’d suffered the fall that would ultimately kill her three months later. We raced back to the city where she had surgery and moved from rehab to rehab to nursing and finally, to hospice in Connecticut, three miles from where I live.

And then, just like that, she was gone. It was like a Maserati doing 180 was stricken with prolapse and its engine fell out, and suddenly, it was over.

She was ninety; I was sixty-two.

We’re surrounded by her things now; her baby clothes that my grandmother had saved, a thousand headshots from when she was in television, the 1966 rider to our lease from our Queens apartment allowing us to have a dog when I was three, a letter from an attorney to her dated a month after I introduced her to Susan, confirming the removal of my name from co-ownership of our apartment in Manhattan because she was furious: I had left her for another woman.

Every morning, when I get up to brush my teeth, I look in the mirror and I wonder: Who am I? Where did those sixty-two years go?

When a person lives in service of an all-encompassing parent — when they are each other’s primary relationships for better or worse — and that parent dies, who do they become? How do they know who they are? The fashion stuff never took; she was fond of flounce and sartorial hysteria, and I prefer all things Margaret Howell. Age doesn’t matter, until it does: at sixty-three, I am now in a place where I am discovering who, exactly, I am, the way college students are supposed to when they’re nearing graduation. If Emma Greenway-Horton hadn’t died at the end of Terms of Endearment, what would her relationship with her mother, Aurora, have looked like? If Suzanne Vale’s mother hadn’t driven her car up a tree at the end of Postcards from the Edge, necessitating a reversal of roles — Suzanne, who is sober, now has to take care of her alcohol-addicted mother instead of the other way around — who would Suzanne have become? Would she have survived? Would she have drunk herself to death? Would she have fled, literally, for her life?

I vote no. Because old habits are engrained in us; they’re a part of who we are, like our hair texture, and the color of our eyes. Which is why we always hear from people who go home to their complicated extended families for the holidays I turn into a kid again, and I don’t know why.

So I’m trying to be kind to myself. Moving through this time is like swimming through pudding. It’s like learning a new language — one that I’ve heard before and can vaguely understand, but can’t speak.

And of course then, there’s the grief.

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This is the problem, and also the point:

One doesn’t know what is real, and what is not.

It has been long-planned: if you distract the general population long enough — get them addicted to scrolling, to bad news, to obsessing over how much they hate each other — the artificialization of the world will slip right by them, and they will continue to assume that what they are looking at, breathing, wearing, eating, reading, thinking, listening to, is real because how could it not be? Simple logic: if something is what it seems, it is. If you, dear Human, have built a computer, programmed it, and you ask it to do X, it will do it, because you’ve got opposable thumbs and you’re the one in charge.

This is a nightmare that dates back to HAL, who famously said

Let’s get back to opposable thumbs.

Fingerprints cannot be created by a machine. I mean: I suppose they can, because almost anything can be created and replicated by machine — even one’s personality, to some degree. Months ago, I tested this out: I opened a Chat GPT window and wrote Please write a sentence that sounds like it was written by Elissa Altman. And it did. It was terrifying, undoing, nullifying. It reminded me of the last scene in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when it is revealed, finally, that the Donald Sutherland character has been replaced with an identical pod person, curly hair and all. Or Paula Prentiss in The Stepford Wives, who has been duplicated: she still looks like herself, but the real her has been destroyed, and her likeness built and programmed to be a trad wife who serves her husband and does nothing else. These dupes are shells of the truth, devoid of interiority and emotion; the essence of what it means to be human — to be a creative, a creator, a maker, a thinker with a heart and a pulse — cannot be copied.

As someone who makes things for a living — I’m a storyteller, but I’m also an editor, a teacher, a musician, a cook, a gardener — I naturally hew to things that emanate from places of passion. They can be the most utilitarian, mundane things on earth — an 18th century spoon; a 19th century mezzaluna with part of its handle worn out from where its many owners rested their thumbs, and where I now rest mine — or they can be quiet works of art, like the 1930 Martin 2-17 that I fell in love with one day at Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. It was beaten up, and looked like it had been through a tornado. There was a round, black cigarette burn on the back of the neck where it joined the peghead, and a crack along one of the sides that had been wood-taped years earlier. Next to it hung a pearl-encrusted 1940 Martin 000-45 in absolutely pristine condition except for a light grazing on its rosewood back; barring the scratch, it looked like it had just come out of production. A few feet away was a recently made jumbo-model acoustic meant to be a stage guitar: it was so ornate and oversprayed with lacquer that I practically needed sunglasses to look at it. Of the three, one of them was teeming with life and history and story, and had a warm, woody, resonant sound common to older mahogany Martins; the second one felt slightly less alive, although the light graze on the back indicated that someone who once played it was wearing a belt buckle that scratched it; the third one (whose manufacturer I will not name, but it’s the one brand of guitar that I really do not like at all, for all sorts of reasons) was devoid of human connection beyond the employee’s hands that unpacked it from its box, tuned it, and hung it on the wall. It was made, start to finish, by a machine that was calibrated to achieve a specific radius of the fretboard, and its pearl-inlays were designed by computer. The oversprayed top — it looked like someone had taken it by its peghead and dunked it into an oil drum filled with shellack — was meant to be resistant to chips and dings and aging, so that it would always look brand new and perfect; it also prevented the spruce from vibrating freely (which is how stringed instruments get their volume and tone), and when I strummed a single chord on it, it sounded muffled, as though the instrument was wrapped in a wool blanket. I might have visibly cringed.

The first one, though — the one with the cigarette burn that nobody bothered to fix because it didn’t impact the integrity of the instrument — left me with all sorts of questions: who had the owner(s) been? The inside of the guitar smelled like tobacco. Someone had once stuck a lit cigarette, or maybe a roach, between the ivory nut and the neck, and when it smoldered down to nothing while it was being played, it left a small cigarette burn. (Not uncommon: both Stevie Ray Vaughn and Eric Clapton stuck lit cigarettes between the strings and the nut while they were playing, and their Strats had burn marks on their necks as a result.)

That trip to Nashville was twelve years ago, and so much has changed since then. The artificialization of our world is now ubiquitous; it is hard to know what is real and what is not. It may be a personal response, and the only thing I have control over, but after our recent annual trip to Maine, I realized that I was making a concerted (and often even subconscious) effort to surround myself with things that bear evidence of human work, touch, ownership, art. I was listening to Matt Gibberd in conversation with psychologist Dr. Alexandra Shaker, in which he used the phrase sensing the hand of the maker. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a podcast about storytelling, a book, a piece of jewelry, a bowl, poetry, clothes, food, a knife: the hand of the maker can be sensed whenever and wherever there has been human involvement. This is what I am striving for, and looking for; it is more important to me, and I think to us, than ever.

Here are some hand-of-the-maker-isms that have been vitally important to me in recent weeks:

Jeremy Lee’s Kitchening: I have fallen head-over-heels in love with this book, but not just because of the food, which is predictably wonderful. This is as much a reading book as it is a cooking book, and while you conceivably could download it to keep on your kitchen Kindle (if you have a kitchen Kindle), please don’t. This is a book that will be and should be splattered upon, written in, with its pages turned down. Jeremy’s writing is tactile; he is a storyteller at heart — Jeremy is a Scot from Dundee, and I think that Scots are natural storytellers — and his stories feel transportive and deeply personal. His narrative voice is uniquely his own, and his words as much a part of his craft as his food.

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The TMI Project: We are the storytelling species; it is what we do and who we are. A few years back, I mentored a young physician who was part of an independent healthcare organization based in Maine, where most of the patients were underserved members of the local Somali community. This physician wanted/needed/had to tell their story about caring for young Somali mothers and mothers-to-be, and working with them while honoring their cultural differences, but also their (in some cases, extreme) trauma. I believe that everything begins and ends with storytelling (see Jeremy, above), and artist Eva Tenuto and the late storyteller/comedian/activist Julie Novak put this into action with their TMI Project, which is devoted to amplifying the voices of those whose stories often never get told. TMI hosts monthly events both on-line and in-person as well as writing workshops, live storytelling performances, and more. I cannot possibly say enough about TMI, what it does, who it is, and what it means. If you are interested in the act of storytelling, please have a look.

David Sedaris on Bella Freud’s Fashion Neurosis: I don’t even know where to start with this one. Words fail me. I’ve been a longtime fan of Bella Freud’s work (her conversation on is wonderful), and now, her podcast, in which she puts A Famous Person on a couch — the couch; she’s Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter and painter Lucian Freud’s daughter—and has a conversation with them about fashion, art, culture, life. In this episode, she speaks with David Sedaris, who is a longtime devotee of Comme des Garçons. Topics covered: books, fashion, Sedaris’s bullying and wholly cruel father, and staying in a trailer at a senior citizen’s nudist colony.

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Ida Hakkila’s The Heavy Light Show on Mixcloud: I knew Ida’s work long before I knew Ida; we were in the same place at the same time (New York City, downtown, 1980s-ish), probably crossing each other’s paths, fanatically involved in the music and art worlds. The only way I can describe Ida is as an artistic polymath: storyteller, musical producer, the Hudson Valley’s best DJ who hosted The Heavy Light Show on Radio Woodstock for a decade, DJ for 92.3 K-Rock in New York City, a music consultant for The Late Show with David Letterman, a storyteller for The Moth…Her work is extraordinary. Her Heavy Light Show is for you if you absolutely love musical eclecticism, ranging from rock and alternative, to old-school hip hop, R&B, and Latin alternative.

Ana Zaja Petrak: I came across this remarkable Zagreb-based artist via , and I love — love — her work, which often evokes the magic in the mundane. These are images of the slowness of life: kitchens, cooktops, tables, a Moka on a burner. If I were to ever write another food book (who knows?) I would want Petrak to illustrate the cover, if she does such things.

Vintage cookware: I know I harp on this a lot, but I feel so strongly about it. The next time you have to replace a piece of cookware — a skillet, a saucepan, a knife (caveat below), a spatula — I ask you to visit your nearest good antique shop and have a look around before you place an Amazon order. The best flame-tamer I’ve ever used was picked out of a FREE box at a local vintage store in northern Connecticut. A 1950s Descoware skillet might weigh a ton, but you’ll have it forever if you treat it well; the coating on a stick-proof pan (even a good one) will end up in your food, and the pan itself will give off dangerous chemical fumes. I never gave much thought to vintage cookware and its importance until I met Susan, and was introduced to her Aunt Ethel’s nesting set of jet black 1934 Griswold cast iron pans, which had been a wedding present. Susan inherited those pans, and we use them all the time; so well-seasoned, they are practically stick-proof. Vintage cookware is alive with history and experience; the 1960s Le Creuset skillet I bought for a song at Antiques at 10 Mechanic in Camden, Maine is wrapped in story. Whose kitchen did it live in? Why is the wooden handle a little more worn on one side than the other? There are some exceptions: I love pans from Netherton Foundry — black iron pans made in Shropshire, England — and use mine for everything: roasting a chicken, searing a steak, baking a pie, broiling a fish, sauteing vegetables. They are made by hand, collectible, and meant to be passed down to the next generation. Skip the teflon, please. And re-use whenever you can. (The roast chicken below is sizzling away in one of Aunt Ethel’s Griswold pans.)

The blade mastery of Sam Gleason: Some years back, I was lucky enough to teach food writing side-by-side with Diana Henry at Glin Castle in Limerick, Ireland. While we were there, we ate some of the most extraordinary food I’ve ever had — the Sunday roast (lamb) was the kind of dinner that Sunday roast dinner dreams are made of — most of it cooked by the team of Sam Gleason and Niamh Fox. What I did not know at the time was that Sam is a master culinary bladesmith known for his magnificent work beloved by chefs far and wide, from Darina Allen to Jess Murphy (and me). In his own words, The craft of bladesmithing includes metalworking techniques similar to those used by blacksmiths and centuries-old skills of master swordsmiths, woodworking for handles and sheaths and leatherworking for rolls or cases. I am motivated by materials and the story they hold – giving new life to found and recycled steels and incorporating them into my work using centuries old forge-welding techniques to blend and twist them together. High carbon steels sandwiched between found gems; wrought iron cartwheels, whiskey barrel straps, storm-damaged limbs from orchards or estate house forests.

Sam and Niamh are also the founders of Under One Roof, A community-led rural skills hub bringing together craft, food, heritage and shared making. In their words, Under One Roof is a not-for-profit social enterprise based in North Clare. We create opportunities for people to learn practical skills, connect with others and access shared tools and learning spaces. The vision is to create a place where skills, creativity and community come together.

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings: In which they cover Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors, below. The guitar that David is playing is his 1935 Epiphone Olympic, which he found in the basement of a friend, who got it from a friend who bought it at a yard sale. Which just goes to show you. (Another gem from that year: 1935 Martin 00-42, played by Molly Tuttle.)

I have left out several of my favorite makers here simply because I’ve run out of room: The people over at TOAST, who make gorgeous clothes meant to be repaired and passed along (I have not yet had any of my Toast pieces in need of repair nor am I passing them along for the moment); Margaret Howell; the breads at She Wolf Bakery in New York (especially the sprouted rye); the people at Heath Ceramics, Bennington Potters, and Megan Flynn Ceramics; the vegetarian food of Heidi Swanson; the crafters at Fog Linen; the luthiers at Martin Guitars; the master soap makers at Trillium Soaps in Rockland, Maine.

The importance of seeking out the artists and makers among us — the cooks, the poets, the painters, the clothing designers, the filmmakers, the musicians — cannot be overstated; we are now facing a potential creative cataclysm, where anything and everything can be copied to such a degree that even the best trained eye will not be able to know what is authentic and what is not.

We are the art-making species, and the hand of the maker is sacred.

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I’m not much for long, drawn out cooking processes anymore. Unless the weather is terrible (which it is today) or I’ve got a bee in my bonnet about something (like the time I was obsessing over making cassoulet from scratch, including the sausages and the confit), I generally cook what is fresh and fast, and can be eaten out of a small bowl with a single utensil. The older I get, the smaller the bowls get.

But last night, that all went out the window, because I am in what can only be called a state. I’m a woman of a certain age, and it would be unseemly for me to curl up in a corner and suck my thumb, although one day last week, when I was alone on a rural road, driving back to my house from physical therapy, I pulled off onto the shoulder, checked the rear view and side mirrors, and screamed at the top of my lungs.

I am not, I should say, a screamer. I once had to scream in a grade school play, and what came out was kind of a middling, whiny MEHHHH as opposed to an actual shriek. But last week, on a quiet country road in Redding, Connecticut, I screamed so hard and so loud that my chest hurt when I was done. And then I drove the rest of the way home and got ready to teach my Wednesday night master class.

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So it surprised me, this particular moment, when my nervous system overrode my sense of propriety. My cache was full; I had reached maximum capacity. After almost a year of dragging around a weird grief-like thing — a kind of amoebic-like Moomin but without the charm — that got buried beneath the busyness of post-death paperwork and tasks (my mother’s funeral, her estate of $741 that Wells Fargo is refusing to release despite my being her beneficiary, the apartment and its contents, the bills, the clothes, the two Lladro pieces that absolutely no one wants) coupled with the nail-ripping fury of our relationship, I hit a wall while driving home on a pretty fall day. I felt, literally, as though my head was going to explode, like that Nazi’s at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It came out of absolutely nowhere: I’d had a very good physical therapy session, had stopped on the way home at a local market, and picked up a large pumpkin for our front walkway. I admit to also buying fried chicken, which I only do while under severe stress; it’s a first-indicator of impending trouble. I actually call it Stress Chicken, and I eat it the way the famous food writer Marion Cunningham used to take slugs off the small flask of gin she carried in her purse while driving across the Bay Bridge in the Jaguar she bought with her royalties from The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. Needing stress chicken is a telltale sign that something is about to hit the fan, and it was, and did. There I was, driving home, a twenty pound pumpkin rolling around in the way back like a stray bowling ball, a few greasy flecks of fried chicken crumbs clinging to the steering wheel, and suddenly, I pulled off and screamed at the top of my lungs until I couldn’t breathe.

Oh, I thought. So this is grief.

It’d been different when my father died, in 2002. He’d been in a car accident the week before, and for seven days, I had to plan his death while he was still alive. We had a wildly complicated relationship and at one point barely talked for a few years; our history had been a chaotic mess, but we both agreed to acknowledge it and move forward. At the time of his accident, we could not possibly have been closer. But, with him lying unconscious in a hospital bed, the shit hit the fan with other family members—people to whom he had told me to go if something awful ever happened began the work of disengaging me from the family I had cherished. I went into grief counseling; my therapist likened what had happened to that scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry’s mother dies and his father doesn’t tell him because, on her death bed, his mother said Don’t bother Larry, he’s in New York. What else happened: My step-siblings removed my father’s will from the condo he shared with their mother while I was at the hospital until one of their wives called her husband an asshole and he gave it back to me in the hospital lobby. Another cousin withheld the obituary from me on the morning of the funeral. The whole thing was so nuts that I began to dissociate as a way to get through the days, which felt oddly comical and endless: the year following my father’s death was filled with legal threats and insurance quagmires, and on the day we had his unveiling, Susan and I returned home and stopped by her mother’s house to pick up our dog, where she was spending the day while we were on Long Island; Helen was already chewing on her lips with rage when we arrived, and when she invited us in for tea, we said we were exhausted and needed to get home. There she was, dressed in a velour Pepto Bismal-pink T.J. Maxx lounging outfit, and so irate that she lay down on the hot August macadam and tucked herself in beneath the rear wheels of Susan’s Hyundai. I yelled at her to get the hell up, and from underneath the car she said Shhh—not so loud; the neighbors will hear you.

So I have a very long and weird history with death and grief. It sometimes feels like a cosmic boundary test, and I often fail it because I’m a card-carrying people-pleaser. You want me to do WHAT after my father has died? Oh sure, of course; how can I help you? You want me to do WHAT while my mother is in hospice? It will be my pleasure. Can I get you anything else? This is what my friend calls being an emotional flight attendant. And now I’m sitting in my car a year later, screaming, with a pumpkin rolling around in the back. Call me crazy: The period of time after a loved-one dies feels somehow sacred to me. For God’s sake, just let me grieve for however long I need to; let me burst into tears for no good reason while I’m pumping gas. Let me eat shitty car chicken with fryolator oil running down my chin onto my nice Alex Mill gray cashmere sweatshirt. But no. Nope.

Nyet.

When I think of my father’s death, I think of a year of legal worries, of cruelty, of hot pink velour outfits and being sent out to buy a case of cheap Cabernet and six bags of Mint Milanos during shiva while I was a primary mourner and meant, ritually, to do absolutely nothing, according to a three thousand year old law. When I think of my mother’s death, I think of her man-friend who I like to call Dick—a tall, doughy, beady-eyed fellow with chronically wet palms, who once took her cane away from her in full view of a room packed with retired cabaret singers and Joyce Randolph from The Honeymooners — who texted me upwards of ten times a day while she was in hospice, demanding to know exactly what decisions I was making because he said I have feelings too, you know. I think of her apartment building demanding payment for a portion of her last month’s rent after I had moved her out and even though I’d already given them $20,000 between the date of her accident and handing over the keys to the management company; when I told them that all that was left in the estate was $741, they said Fine, we’ll take it. I think of the lawyer’s letter dated November 2000 confirming my mother’s removing my name from co-ownership of the apartment we’d bought together in the nineties, and where I’d lived for a decade before moving to Connecticut, my name forged by her to execute the shares sale. I think of the bags and bags of unused makeup I found, and her hidden $700 Swarovski-encrusted Christian Dior sunglasses bought with money earmarked for food. I’m enraged. I’m furious. I’m so angry I could spit. And still:

I want my Mommy.

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After my father died, I spent a month cooking his favorite things, as though it would raise him from the dead. It was a hot August, but I made Holsteiner schnitzel; lox, eggs, and onions; sardines and Brinzer cheese; matzo brei; and apricot-filled palascinta. I made fettucine Alfredo; shrimp remoulade; oysters Rockefeller; dumplings and chicken paprikash; pork stuffed with prunes; duck confit; and quenelles de volaille. I drank enough of his beloved gin Gibsons to send my liver into free-fall.

My response to the last year since my mother died has also been to cook, but differently than I did when I lost my father. My mother had no favorite food; she was body dysmorphic her entire life and the table was utterly terrifying for her. But here I am, as I write this, surrounded by piles of cookbooks, many of them heavily comfort food-focused. In the way I once obsessed about cooking cassoulet years ago, with all its components made from scratch, I’ve been fixated on making a greens pie like the one we recently had at Double Grazie in Rockland, Maine: a mass of unidentifiable greens cooked down to a dense mass, chopped, and folded into a hot water crust. On Sunday, I searched every cookbook I had to try and find an appropriate recipe, but came up only with Torta Pasqualina — an Italian Easter pie packed with greens and hard-cooked eggs — which wasn’t right. It took my friend Simón de Swaan, a CIA-trained chef, to unearth a recipe that was very close to what I was thinking of, and we made it, with Susan putting together the pastry, and me, making the filling. It was good — so good — that we stared at each other in disbelief.

The tightness I’d been feeling in my chest loosened a little bit that night; I don’t know whether or not it will last, or if there will be other days when I’m doing something mindless — dropping off the dry-cleaning, walking the dog, boiling an egg, driving home from the grocery store — and grief will grab me around the kneecaps and tackle me to the floor out of the blue. In the twenty-four years since my father died — twenty-four — I can say that I have failed wildly and profoundly at Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief; I have, however, perfected the Holsteiner schnitzel he loved and that we shared at Rolf’s on freezing nights in Manhattan, when I was still in my twenties and neither of us knew what the future would hold for us.

Making the greens pie was different, though. It corralled my flailing, dizzy brain and my grief anxiety and the feeling that everything around me was spinning out of control. Making the pie was a slow exercise in process and steps, in not rushing the sweating of the onions or the simmering of the greens, or the rolling out of the dough. Making the pie was like that moment when you let go of the side of the metaphorical pool, and terror and despair envelop you so you climb into bed and let the hours tick by, one after the next, refilling your cache, and you doze and wake and doze again until it’s dawn and the dog has somehow decided to let you sleep, and you realize that you will be alright — maybe not to someone else’s standards, but who cares; it’s not about them — and you stand up and put your slippers on and your wife, who is working in her office at the other end of the house, brings you a cup of coffee, and you realize that this, this, is time and your life, never to be rushed, but lived slowly, moment to moment, with all its joy and all its sorrow.

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I grew up in Queens in the late sixties and seventies, and I spent much of my time after school in one of two playgrounds — the one connected to my grade school in a lovely, leafy area called The Crescents, and the other one connected to what would eventually be my middle school that was at the time so dangerous that one took one’s life in one’s hands just using the bathroom on the third floor.

In each playground there was one child — usually a boy, but not always — who enjoyed passing his after-school hours by dismembering Daddy Longlegs (Daddys Longleg?) one leg at a time, just because he could. This was the same child who discovered that if you captured an insect and held it under a magnifying lens in the sun, it would slowly burn to death, eventually bursting into flame. I’m thinking in these two cases of a specific child, who, when I close my age-hobbled eyes, I can still see clearly. I was horrified by his actions — most of us were, except for those few who, recognizing his burgeoning psychopathic tendencies, decided that it would be safer for them to befriend him and become part of his posse.

Finally, one day I asked him: Why? Why are you doing this? He had a two-word, simple answer: Why not?

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I was mystified; it made no sense to me. I had certainly been bullied to an extreme as a child, but this was different. Five years after I told my grandmother what was happening, this kid tried to land a job walking my eighty-pound Airedale. My grandmother said no. After the spiders, she said, there would likely be mice. Then cats. Then dogs. And then people. 

My grandmother was smart and a good judge of character, and she was right. I don’t know if he harmed small animals — we certainly didn’t let him anywhere near our pets — but eventually, he took to standing on a Grand Central Parkway overpass not far from where we lived and dropping heavy, fist-sized rocks onto the windshields of oncoming cars. He was eventually caught by the cops, and they asked him why he was doing it. Why not? he said. He was a preteen, so the police released him to his parents with a warning: if it happened again, he was going to end up in what we used to call juvy.

The girls who did this kind of thing were less inclined to be impersonal about it; I remember being in sleepaway camp in 1975 and running the 440 during a track meet. I was struggling hard to pace myself, and really concentrating — I’m not a natural runner — and as I came down the last straightaway, on the inside and in the lead, a kid from my group who was standing off to the side of the track stuck her foot out in front of me. I don’t remember much more than a counselor running over to see if I was okay, and then walking me to the infirmary, where I spent an hour having the camp nurse remove bits of gravel from my bloodied knees with a pair of tweezers.

Why did you do it? this girl was asked by the head counselor.

Why not? she shrugged, adding, It was fun.

We were both twelve years old.

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What I am getting at here: the inclination to commit acts of cruelty just because. To harm others just for the hell of it. To commit these acts at all seems completely antithetical to human nature and instinct, although it is here that my friends in the clergy tell me I’m wrong. It’s just another version of hell, they say, to live with a brain that commands you to intentionally harm others. And this is the definition of cruelty: the intentional infliction of suffering or the inaction towards another’s suffering when a clear remedy is readily available. But do those who commit cruelty even bother to look for that clear remedy? Or is the dopamine hit that comes with a sadistic act so strong that it simply overrides everything, not only removing any control over it but enticing the cruel to just keep going, to want more and more, in the way that some of us just can’t stop after the first drink? Years ago, in the days of my heavy wine imbibing, I would turn into someone else after the third glass. My wife described me as a dog with a bone. I had inherited my father’s temper. After what began as a pleasant evening with a bottle of wine or two, there would be a shift. I’d pick a fight with her and pick and pick and pick until she fled the house in tears. One day she said to me You can be incredibly cruel when you drink too much. The person I love more than anyone else in the world held a mirror up to me, and I hated, truly hated, what I’d become. Stopping has been a large part of this final third of my life. Chemical-induced rage and cruelty and I are no longer on speaking terms.

We are all, every one of us, at risk of it; it’s our job to recognize it, to realize it, to halt it. People who like to fight, to argue, to engage in emotional sadism because it hits a dopamine target: this is also cruelty, with its roots in the soil of unfinished business. It was Vivian Gornick who said we need to see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. That’s because it exists in every one of us, to a lesser or greater degree; the greater the degree, the more likely the tip-over into psychopathology.

Is cruelty addictive? Did the man I once saw in a schoolyard on West Houston Street and Sixth Avenue, beating his sweet young Chocolate Lab with a leather leash, not stop because he couldn’t, or because he wouldn’t, not even after I screamed at him, yelled to the fucker that I was calling the police, and a crowd of angry New Yorkers gathered around me, some trying to climb the chain link fence to get to him, and the man just didn’t seem to care?

Cruelty is surprisingly complicated; there are certainly neurochemicals involved. Young children are often the recipients of cruelty at the hands of their parents or teachers in an effort to impart some sort of lesson of the This hurts me more than it hurts you variety. But there’s always a moment when a master switch is flipped, and it ceases to be about the lesson, and just becomes about control and punishment and the funneling of unbridled rage that has nothing to do with the recipient. When I was still in single digits, I said or did something that annoyed my father, who at times could be prone to both psychological and physical violence, and instead of sitting me down and having a conversation about it, he didn’t talk to me for a week. I was not yet ten years old. First, I thought it was my imagination. And then I realized it wasn’t, and he was waiting for me to beg forgiveness, warranted or otherwise, just to hear him say my name. It resulted in a lifetime of being so attuned to the behavior of others that I’ve been convinced that if only I were this instead of that, I wouldn’t have made them so angry.

(A lot of therapy.)

There are points in time when entire communities engage in cruelty because it’s sanctioned. It’s official. It’s approved and rewarded:

In March 1968, when US Army C Company tortured and executed an entire unarmed village of South Vietnamese civilians, they did so because they believed their actions were sanctioned by the US government. Someone told them in words or deeds that they need to do THIS regardless of what THIS is, and cruelty and its execution, having been successful, will be rewarded. Lieutenant William Calley, who was found guilty of murdering twenty-two Vietnamese civilians, was given a life sentence; he served minimal time, and his sentence was commuted to three years by President Nixon, who was reported to have said to Henry Kissinger that no one gave a shit whether he killed those people or not. (For more on this, see the incredible documentary, Cover-Up, about the investigative reporter .)

Shoot your puppy? Get rewarded with the job of Homeland Security Director.

Let a woman bleed to death because of an abortion ban that prevents her from getting any help? Oh well: just following orders.

Stand at the bedside of your trans spouse, who can no longer get a vital medication because some heartless schmuck has decided they’re not real? Too bad.

Force an eighty-year-old farmer to march into the forest outside her town and dig her own grave with her family and neighbors? Sanctioned and approved mass murder committed by a formerly art-and-music-loving modern society looking for a scapegoat. What they did to my great grandmother in 1942 was not against the law; it was the law, like letting that young woman in Texas bleed to death.

Round up people simply because they’re brown, and then leave their babies strapped into the car seats of their parents’ Dodge mini-van, clutching Sophie the Giraffe, unaware of what has just happened?

Announce that the government will execute a murderer by firing squad. And livestream it. Why? Because it translates to “Watch closely. This could happen to you.” It is a warning.

Realize that whenever that gorgeous frenemy infiltrates your social media universe of friends and colleagues — she tends to get bored and wreak havoc; you know it because she makes it clear that she’s suddenly in public conversation with them — those friends of yours suddenly go silent and it could be months, or even years, before they realize what she’s done, just because she can.

What is it that moves people to such abject cruelty? Never mind the kid with the spiders, or the girl who tripped me just because, or even my father deciding that not talking to me was a smart thing to do to a nine year old to teach them a lesson. Can entire cultures and populations become psychopathic? Yes; I believe they can. Look around.

There’s an old expression: there is nothing more dangerous than an NPD who is out of options. He (or she) will commit to distraction. He or she will organize a community that will get behind him or her, no matter what; more distraction. This party of the cruel will make it their job to follow the orders of a person who likely once was that kid in the schoolyard torturing spiders and dropping rocks on oncoming cars, no matter how outlandish, outrageous, and inhuman those orders are.

What is the answer to this? How to deal with it? And now I’ll sound like a message on a coffee mug or a T-shirt: Be kind. Relentlessly. Impossibly. And if you can’t be kind, be patient. And if you can’t be either of those things, walk away and do the only thing that is left to do: preserve your humanity.

From the archives

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I am writing this from a residency at Barnswallow in Rockport, Maine; the apartment I am in overlooks the harbor which, in almost any light, looks like a Wyeth painting (symmetry: Wyeth lived and worked not far from here, in Port Clyde and Cushing). This is my third stay here; I wrote a large portion of Permission in this space during January 2024, so coming back to do a Permission reading and discussion in conversation with Caitlin Shetterly felt like coming full circle. I’ve been working on my next book here, and there is a symmetry to that as well: Where You Used to Be is about the marriage of art-making and grief, and is titled with words from Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was born in Rockland, a few miles to the south of where I write this, and who grew up in Camden, less than two miles to the north.

I never feel more grounded than I do in Maine; I never feel more tethered. The world is clearer, even in the dense, pea-soup fog that we sometimes wake up to. I once wrote about the architecture of New England — specifically this part of it — possessing the straight-line vernacular of assurance that reminds me of the simple, safe houses I drew as a child: they exist everywhere here, with steep, gable roofs, twelve-over-twelve windows, and a broad transom over the door. I have a cousin who is a wonderful painter of gardens and homes in northern Virginia, where she lives. She is a skilled, trained artist who studied for a time in Florence; my drawings and the watercolors I paint while I’m here look like they were rendered by Lassie, if Lassie could paint. But her paintings and my drawings possess the same quality in that they are both about beauty as metaphor for safety and security: the straight-line vernacular of assurance. When I see this style of building in New England, my shoulders drop by at least a few inches. When I see this style of building in New England in the vicinity of the ocean, I have moments that can only be described as sacred.

Long before Maine became trendy, this sanctity drew people both to the interior of the state and to the coast, and kept them here for generations (although even someone who moved here fifty years ago is considered from away). But New Englanders — especially Mainers — tend to be deeply private and reserved people, and so what is sacred in Maine is also ineffable. No one attempts to put words to it; to do so would be to make the quietly hallowed somehow profane. Whenever I read that Maine is the least religious state in the country, that makes perfect sense to me: when asked about their higher power, I suspect that many Mainers, at least where I intend to drop my anchor, would stand on the shoreline, squint out at the horizon and the islands in the distance, point to them, and say, This is my higher power.

On the morning of September 1st, 2020, I had what my neurologist — very high ranking, very young, very arrogant — called a neurological event. After two weeks of being in bed for eighteen hours a day, I was starting to feel better, I got up to brush my teeth, and it felt as though some massive cosmic hand grabbed my nightshirt collar and flung me, head-first, into my closet doors. I couldn’t stand up. I made it to the bathroom on my hands and knees; the floor was where the ceiling was supposed to be, and the ceiling was to my left. The vision out of my left eye was dodgy. I felt like something was vaguely dripping inside my head, behind my left ear. Susan came running, got me back into bed, and called the doctor. It was a disastrous day: the emergency room at the local hospital (known affectionately as “The Dirty D”) had no one around to order an immediate MRI, so they did a CT scan which showed nothing. By the time my blood test results came in, it was hours after the event had occurred. My cousin, a chief neurologist at a major hospital in Michigan, stayed on the phone with me and said, Sometimes, strokes occur in places you can’t see on a CT scan, like in parts of the brain stem.

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But no one — none of my doctors, including that neurologist at Yale — would officially call it a stroke, because the films showed nothing despite the evidence, and the long passage of time between event and treatment (this is why, if someone is exhibiting stroke symptoms, you have to get them to a hospital immediately. Time is of the essence.). A week later, I had two TIAs while stepping outside of my house to get some air, and once while talking to my neighbor of twenty-three years. She was speaking and suddenly, I didn’t know where I was, or who I was, or who she was, or how I’d gotten there.

For the next year, I would lose words mid-sentence, unless there was a microphone in my face — I had recently published Motherland and was technically still doing publicity for it in lockdown — which created enough adrenaline that it took over. (Remarkable things, bodies and brains.) I had every test under the sun; MRIs and MRAs showed significant numbers of lesions, some of them very deep. My doctors were listing towards an MS diagnosis until I had a lumbar puncture (friendly advice: do not have one, especially if the person doing it is a first year resident); it revealed a severe autoimmune condition of unknown etiology. A Yale endocrinologist said that it was a connective tissue disorder. Someone else suggested lupus. Another neurologist, after I failed a FWT (five word test), decided that it was probably MS after all.

Two weeks after the event, I asked my primary care physician if we could go to Maine, as we always did at that time of year. In the particular region we go to, and will likely move to, medical care is not stellar. I didn’t want to have to be airlifted anywhere. My doctor, a dyed-in-the-wool non-hysterical New Englander, said: GO TO MAINE. If something happens, go to the hospital. You need the air and the water and quiet.

So, we went. I was still wobbly. We stayed in the little cottage we’ve been renting for years, which is perched above a stone beach, which spills out into Penobscot Bay. We both prayed that nothing would happen while we were there, and nothing did. We walked the beach with Pete, our terrier-herder. I stood up to my hips in the ocean. We saw friends outside at a distance and behind masks. We read, and slept late. We cooked. We came home to more appointments, more fights with insurance companies, more know-it-all doctors conjecturing and doing more painful tests on me like I was a lab rat, to no avail.

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Six months later, with no conclusive answers, I went to a Lenox Hill vascular specialist/cardiologist-turned-functional-medicine-physician at the behest of a friend who had something similar happen to her while crossing Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn: she went straight down in the middle of a very busy thoroughfare, was in the Mount Sinai ICU for a while, had every test under the sun, and no one could figure out what had happened to her until she found herself in this functional guy’s practice. I had never met him before; he looked to be as mad as a hatter. Without knowing me from Eve, when I walked into his office he said You need to stop with the wine. Also, tell me about the painting. (I was just beginning my long, casual, meandering saunter towards breaking up with wine, but had said nothing to him about it. I was also finding painting to be a stress-reducer, but again, had said nothing.)

He took two hours-worth of notes; I handed him all of my test results. He was non-plussed. He read everything, and after a deep sigh said This is not complicated—here is what happened: You had Covid, it attacked your central nervous system, you had a massive blood pressure spike in the middle of the night, it dislodged plaque from your carotid artery which then traveled to your brain, and you had a vascular brain stem stroke. Given where it likely was, you are lucky to be alive. The test results show that you have the residual brain inflammation and cerebrospinal fluid of someone who had a deadly virus and a stroke, and survived both. Some of the lesions are from the event, and some of the lesions are from an old traumatic brain injury. (I had a near-fatal TBI when I was a child).

The cure: The tincture of time. Keeping my blood pressure low. Staying away from anything that would spike my cortisol (stress, booze, etc). Reducing my stress despite the fact that I was the longtime primary caregiver for an abusive, mentally-ill elderly mother. I would have to have repeat brain MRIs for a few years, and I did. Eventually, neuroplasticity would move things forward, and six years later, it mostly has. In the years following the stroke, I tried to do things that were as neurogenerative as possible: fingerpick my guitar, walk, paint, do the New York Times crossword puzzle daily, cut back (or put a stop to) very longstanding bad habits. For the most part, it all worked, although I’m still working on some of the habits.

But something else happened that I had not counted on as a result of the stroke: my spiritual life flat-lined. I felt physiologically disconnected from it, like someone had reached up with one of those giant hooks and pulled down my personal bodega gate. Closed for business. I went from almost daily meditation/prayer, contemplative reading, and practice to nothing. I couldn’t find it; I couldn’t access it. I called it anorgasmia of the soul. When I wrote about it, the general response largely misconstrued what had happened: I hadn’t lost my spiritual connection because I suddenly didn’t believe in God, or a higher power, anymore. I lost it because something somewhere had gone off-line, as though a plug had been pulled. I felt nothing. And then I discovered this: a study of those with a traumatic brain injury showing that conclusively affects the part of the brain responsible for self-reported spiritual belief (the periaqueductal gray, or PAG, a brainstem region that has been implicated in numerous functions, including fear conditioning, pain modulation, altruistic behaviors and unconditional love). After a TBI, self-reported spiritual belief changes. (More here on lesion mapping, and its connection.)

So here we are: I am six years older. I’ve had Covid four times. I am no longer fighting the demand to be who I once was pre-2020; the spiritual lens through which I see the world has changed. Instead, I am finding that connection, like many of my friends in Maine, in the natural world. I’m finding it in music and in poetry, the writing of which is absolutely sacred. I’m finding it around a table, when I’m breaking bread with friends. It’s in the knowledge that, in a world of 8.3 billion people, Susan and I managed to find each other.

And if that is not holy, I don’t know what is.

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He really would have.

When Susan and I moved here in 2004, the house had been recently emptied of masses of Danish modern furniture — not the knock-offs that we see today online — collected over the years by its original owners, one of whom was (actually) Danish. On one wall was a massive, floor-to-ceiling teak bookcase with a dropdown bar, much like the one I grew up with in the sixties. There were two black leather sofas and two matching chairs, each of them on a metal base. Hanging over the teak dining room table was a Sputnik chandelier of the sort that can be found in places like 1stDibs for many thousands of dollars.

My father loved Danish modern furniture so much that my childhood home was packed with it, as was his advertising office on Madison Avenue. Photos of his bachelor apartment on East 79th Street in Manhattan looked the same. When I stepped into the house that Susan and I would buy a few weeks later, the familiar woody, oily smell of teak overtook me in a way that can only be described as Proustian, and a manifestation of olfactory grief.

We moved in twenty years ago, just two years after I lost my father in a car accident on a hot, sunny Saturday morning in August. After he was gone, strands of bitterness squeezed me like toothpaste from a tube out of the familial throng where I had lived for thirty-nine years. When he died, the last thing I expected to happen did: those he told me to turn to in the event of tragedy vaporized into a cloud of indifference. I lived in a state of numb sorrow and isolation, and I clung to whatever I had left of him: memories good and bad; photos; audio recordings; letters to his parents written while he was in the Navy; the letters I sent home to him from sleepaway camp; the sound of his voice when I coughed, as though he was standing behind me.

If you have lost a loved one under sudden circumstances — perhaps they were not ill; perhaps they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; perhaps they went out to run an errand, the way my father did the day of his accident — you know that the so-called strict Elisabeth Kübler-Ross-ian phases of grief may not apply to you. There is no time to prepare, no time to codify or organize, no time to weep over impending loss, no time to think about moving through specified phases. In her seminal essay, The Love of My Life — I carry this essay with me, folded and stuffed into the back of my notebook — writes Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time. Which then begs the question: but what if you don’t? What if you can’t?

What if you go off-script?

Cheryl goes on: We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged.

But those of us who have lost someone to the expected — age, illness — don’t seem to deal with grief any differently, or, for lack of a better way to say it, neatly. It is a different journey for every one of us, and as Cariad Lloyd, host of the podcast Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone puts it, quoting Reverend Richard Coles, There’s a sort of impatience with mourning because it’s boring. Grief is boring.

For the most part, people just don’t want to hear about it, or talk about it. It’s like a virus: get too close to someone who has it, and you might get infected.

The seven days between my father’s accident and his death — the latter of which was planned: on a certain day at a certain time, I was called upon to remove him from life support and the medical assumption was that he would die quickly, which he did — were a swirl of practical tasks: dealing with lawyers and insurance companies and finding his papers and calling the veteran’s administration and trying to locate his honorable discharge papers from 1945 and meeting with clergy and fending off attacks from someone who, smelling blood as a wild animal might, set upon me with everything they had including imploring my wife and me not to be intimate in front of the rabbi during our meeting with him in his office. I actually laughed. Look away, I wanted to tell this person: We’ll be engaging in unspeakable relations on his desk right between Job and Leviticus.

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When it was finally over — the planning, the doing, the sorting, the funeral, the burial — it was just the beginning of a journey that has continued for more than two decades, and that I would write my way through, as though words were my pick-axe and chisel. My Elisabeth Kübler-Ross directions were obsolete, like the 1948 pre-highway Florida roadmap my father used to carry in the glove compartment of his car. There were no directions, and my journey took me in overlapping loops that moved backward and forward. I had done everything I was called upon to do ritually and I had taken care of everyone who needed to be taken care of, but I had not begun to think how I would carry the weight of sorrow with me into the future, or what role it would take on in my life; I was just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I tried to remember to breathe. When Susan and I returned home after it was over, a book was waiting for me on my front stoop: Emotional Control, written by a friend of the person who implored me not to jump my wife’s bones in front of the officiant. What had set this person off? They had seen me quietly crying in the casket room of the funeral home.

I tell you this not to shock, and certainly not for pity, and not to exact rage on the person who was so comically cruel that my therapist likened their behavior to the scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry goes to visit his father and discovers that his mother has died, but no one has told him because, in her last hours, she told her husband Don’t bother Larry, he’s in New York. I tell you this so that you understand: sometimes grief is met head-on by the inexplicable and the ineffable. It scrambles your ability to think straight, to make sense of the words that people are speaking to you and you to them; it results in a kind of syntactic aphasia, as though the language of your birth is no longer familiar.

Grief mangles more than the grief-stricken; it unravels relationships and rearranges the tides. It takes by the lapels those who were once prevented from grieving by either culture or situation or familial demands and tosses them into an angry sea of schadenfreude. If they had been prevented from grieving a particular loss, they would be damned if they’d ever let anyone else grieve either. It took me years and hours of therapy to find a way to save myself from the same kind of fate, and on bad days, I still slog through it. My heart broke for this person and it still does, but only now from a very far and very safe distance, with no contact.

Over the next few years, I looked for my father everywhere.

I wore his navy blue woolen Pendelton shirt, his flight jacket, his English duffel coat; he was a diminutive man, and we were almost the same size at the end of his life. In the pocket of his duffel coat, I found an old dry cleaning stub and a single key; only he knew what it was for. I took possession of his hundreds of jazz albums from the late 1950s and bought a turntable so that I could listen to them, which I did, one by one. Not one family member checked in; no one called. Susan and I spent the next months in stunned silence. It took its toll on me physically: My heart literally broke, and I was diagnosed with an aortic enlargement and Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, neither of which were aided by the enormous amounts of gin I was drinking almost nightly because a good and cold Gibson had been my father’s favorite, so much so that after moving me into my first apartment in Boston, he left a large bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a jar of cocktail onions in my refrigerator so that I would always be prepared. Where there was gin there was my father, and everytime I made myself an ice cold Gibson in a coupe, he was with me, as if it were just the two of us, the way it had always been. My father was not an alcoholic, but he did love his gin from time to time; as for me, I just wanted him with me again, as often as possible, in whatever way I could find him. Even in a glass.

Twenty-two years later, I sit on my couch with my wife of over two decades, and I look around at this relatively humble, center-entry ranch house we live in, which is like the ones my father took me and my mother to see on weekends in the sixties and seventies, when one of his biggest advertising clients was a Long Island real estate developer of spec house communities. I was very small, and we went from one to the next like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer; we drove from town to town to visit these houses, and he was always drawn to the single-level ranches because they were inevitably a little more contemporary, with Danish modern touches here and there. I was in single digits and didn’t understand that in model homes, you couldn’t open the fake refrigerator, or sit on the fake sofa, or wash your hands in the fake sinks, or pee in the fake toilets, although, according to my mother, I tried.

Every weekend, we made a journey to yet another stop in the post-war land of hope and promise, with no chance of attaining either. Every weekend, the message was reinforced that my father had failed to attain the so-called American dream unlike other family members: the houses were fake, and nothing inside them was real, although they looked it. This comparison and attendant shame were brutal, and I inherited the tendency towards them from him the way I inherited his height and his crooked smile: he felt his work was never good enough, he wasn’t funny or smart enough, he wasn’t tall enough or thin enough, and his financial sensibility was alternately okay and deplorable. After the war, he was engaged five times to five different women. His parents and sister disapproved of each of them, setting up a test for him every time: it’s us, or her. He always chose the former, and finally married at thirty-eight a few months after he brought home my bombshell/television singer/model mother who was inarguably as perfect for him as the Long Island spec houses he yearned for: gorgeous on the outside, but, like the fake sinks and the plastic fridges, just for show. Despite her beauty, my mother could not navigate the messy business of love.

My father ultimately did find love after the divorce; he and Shirley adored each other in a way that I never knew was possible for him. They created a home together, finished each other’s sentences, laughed at each other’s jokes, wept over each other’s losses. She was in the car on the day of his accident and severely injured, and the EMS team took him to one hospital and she to another, and after twenty years of constant companionship, they never saw each other again. The impending loss of my father was a top layer of grief, a limbo, like Dante’s first circle. Beneath it lie layers of grief, fashioned like the layers in a strudel, each with its own color, its own flavor, its own texture. It was not just the horrendous grief over my father’s accident that would eventually paralyze me; it was everything else that came along with it—the fact that he and his beloved would never see each other again, the fact that he was ironically the healthiest he’d ever been, the fact that people he trusted so implicitly had become strangers to me and, by extension, him.

This was the first time I gave any thought to what the physical and tactile properties of grief are — what they look and feel like, what color they are, how they taste and smell. On the day of the accident, I felt flattened, as though a house had fallen on me. When we had to decide when to tell Shirley about my father, lying in another hospital in another town, the hue of grief was kaleidoscopic: it wouldn’t settle on a color and instead just spun like a top, and I remember feeling knocked off my center and seizure-y: my hearing shut down and my peripheral vision blackened the way it had when I once nicked an artery in my right hand after accidentally breaking a window when I was a kid, and the world went dark. I had no anchor. I could not explain what I was feeling; I could only exist inside it.

What I didn’t understand during that week and the years that followed was that grief is wave-like; it pounds the shore, it crashes hard, it recedes, it storms, it’s as gentle as a ripple. Like the sea, it goes gray, and then bright blue, and then black. But it is absolutely always there; there is no end to it. Even now, twenty years after his death and having only recently unknotted the last of the cords that bound my grief over his loss to the abuse I endured at the same time — for years, the former could not exist without the latter — I think of the day of his accident as though it happened yesterday: I can tell you what I was wearing, what I was doing, what water glass I was drinking out of when the phone rang. There are days of benign memory, and days that make me laugh when I think of him, and others that feel like a sharp, endless sting: the accidental drop of lemon juice in a paper cut. They will always exist side by side, and when I wake in the morning, I often never know what kind of day it will be where grief is concerned. I do not think that this is emblematic of some deep-rooted pathology; I think it is emblematic — whether it’s me, or you, or anyone else — of what makes us human: the enduring bonds that tie memory to heart.

And when I sit on my couch with my morning coffee and look at the house around me, with its windows that need cleaning, the Sputnik chandelier that we had built, the Herman Miller chairs that Susan inherited from her aunt, all I can do is smile and think how much he’d have loved it.

For my father.

From the archives.

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I am writing this from a quiet space in our longtime-rental Maine house.

The window in front of me faces out onto a thicket of native wildflowers — goldenrod, sweet pea, wild rose —and already, the wind has picked up speed and, like a hard cosmic cough, is violently blowing the flowers before returning to stillness. To my right is a sheltered pond — it’s hidden, and I rarely investigate or bring the dog there because it’s home to so much bird life; a Great Blue Heron lives there and has for a few years, and at every 5 pm, he goes fishing off the shore of the ocean that is, as I write this, about fifty yards to my left. Late yesterday, at low tide, we saw a family of Bald Eagles perched on a little sandbar that emerges twice a day off our rocky beach. We were walking Petey down to the water, and two women, one of whom grew up on this street, swimming in these ice cold waters, handed us their binoculars and said Have a look. We did, and there were the eagles, unmistakable and remarkable.

Where do you think they’ll go, Susan asked me.

No idea, I said. I think to them it’s just more weather.

This community — it has welcomed me and Susan and Pete for years now, and we expect to drop our anchor here permanently as soon as we possibly can; it is complicated with an elderly parent who cannot be moved, and no siblings to help — is getting ready for the arrival of Hurricane Lee, which is set to roll right past New York and smash into Cape Cod and coastal Maine tonight. No one here seems to have generators and are instead just doing what they’ve always done in preparation for a storm: water, batteries, food that can be cooked on a propane stovetop, bungeeing grills to decks, playing cards and puzzles and candles. Having lived through many big storms, Susan and I are oddly calm, and although we are from away, we have many good friends here and are taking our cues from them. Panicking is not a particular part of the Mainer DNA. Still, I found myself listening to the lovely Richard Shindell this morning, singing the old Carter Family song The Storms Are On The Ocean. Because right now, they are.

When we returned to the house yesterday, Susan made us a honey cake to mark the beginning of The Days of Awe: the Jewish New Year begins tonight at sundown, and is always celebrated with sweet food, that the coming year may be a joyful and good one. It feels appropriate to be here in Maine for the holiday not because I’m formally observant in any way — I’m not and never have been; I have particular and private views about my Higher Power — but because to be so close to the sea is to be in a liminal place where the threshold between the comprehensible and the unknowable is thin as a reed. This is the way of the ocean, which ebbs and flows according to the phases of the moon; the Days of Awe are calculated according to the lunar cycle, and on the first day of Rosh Hashanah the tradition — it is called tashlich— is to cast into the sea bits of bread representing our sins of the previous year, to be carried away on the tide. I’ve always imagined the bread of a thousand sinners being eaten by fish — the idea of an innocent creature swallowing my transgressions feels wrong — and then I come back to this place: does it not make sense that our egoist human tendencies and every sin that comes from and with them might be transformed into nourishment for the mystical creatures who live in the darkest places we cannot see and do not understand.

We are in the throes of so much change — my mother is rapidly aging, we’re getting older, Petey is so old now that he doesn’t quite know where he is every night and we are investigating medication for dog dementia, I’m finishing my next book and making notes for the one following it — that I spend a lot of time just standing in the ocean, in the gap, feeling the pull of the current and the undertow, and I know that if I don’t stand hard and bury my feet in the sand, I could easily be knocked over and dragged out to the tiny islands that lie offshore. We’ve never seen anyone swim off our rocky little beach, although once, during low tide, we watched a grown man stand-up paddle board his way out to the closest island, cool his heels a little while on the sandy beach, and then paddle back to where we were watching him, whereupon his ancient mother toddled down to the shore with a sandwich for him and a sandwich for her, and they sat down together on a rotting log and had a little lunch.

The man stood up, walked to the edge of the shore, and threw crusts of bread into the sea; all I could think of was redemption.

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Devonshire Honey Cake

Adapted from BBC Good Food

To be clear, this is not the honey cake of my people, which tends to be cloying and overwrought (but in the right hands, can be extraordinary when baked in a loaf pan, sliced the next day, toasted in a dry skillet, and lacquered with cream cheese as you would date nut bread), but it is by far the most elemental and delicious version I have ever eaten. (English friends, please let me know the history of honey cake in Devonshire.) Susan baked it in a cake pan and it rose far higher than we expected, so if you do the same be sure to put a baking sheet on the rack beneath it.

I wish you all a sweet New Year, whether you observe or you don’t.

Note: The recipe is converted from UK measurements and temperatures.

1 cup unsalted butter

3/4 cup clear honey, plus 2 tablespoons to glaze

1/2 cup dark muscovado sugar

3 large eggs

2-1/3 cup self-rising flour

Preheat oven to 320 degrees F (not a mistake).

Butter and line an 8 inch round springform cake tin. Cut the butter into pieces and drop into a medium pan with the honey and sugar. Melt slowly over a low heat. When the mixture looks thin and liquid, increase the heat under the pan and boil for about one minute. Leave to cool for 15-20 minutes, to prevent the eggs cooking when they are mixed in.

Beat the eggs into the melted honey mixture using a wooden spoon. Sift the flour into a large bowl and pour in the egg and honey mixture, beating until you have a smooth, quite runny batter.

Pour the mixture into the tin and bake for 50 minutes to an hour until the cake is well-risen, golden brown and springs back when pressed. A skewer pushed into the center of the cake should come out clean.

Turn the cake out on a wire rack. Warm 2 tablespoons honey in a small pan and brush over the top of the cake to give a sticky glaze, then leave to cool. Keeps for 4-5 days wrapped, in an airtight tin.

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Twenty-five years is a quarter of a century.

Twenty-five years is a long time.

Twenty-five years ago, my father was still alive. My cousin Harris was still alive. I had recently left Manhattan for Connecticut, to begin my coupled life with Susan. I still had my apartment on East 57th Street (or so I thought). My family was still getting used to the idea that I was, and always had been, queer, no matter how many orthodontist or accountant sons of my aunt’s bridge partners they tried to fix me up with. I was still in and out of the city a lot, although I was nine months into a job as editorial director at a Connecticut-based small publisher, working down the hall from my friend Susie Middleton, who writes this Substack on the intersection of gardening, food, family, nature, and sobriety.

Twenty-five years ago today, I was in the city, attending a memorial service at the University Club for my HarperCollins colleague, the brilliant editor Robert Jones, who had died after a long battle with cancer. After it was over, I walked to the west side in the pouring rain with Kera Bolonik, also a Harper alum, got onto the number one train, and took it up to my mother’s apartment where I was staying for the night.

The next morning, I woke and left early so I could drive back to Connecticut and be at my desk before nine. I was on the Saw Mill, driving past the Riverdale exit when NPR announced that a small plane, possibly private, had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, which was burning. Every fire company in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn had converged on the site. I walked into my office just as the South Tower was hit. My staff was at their computers, trying to listen to the news, but they couldn’t; the owner of the company had the sound cards removed from every computer in the building, believing that as long as employees had access to them, no work would ever get done. I sent them out to their cars, and told anyone who had to leave to do so.

I called my parents; the phone lines were dead.

My cousin Harris watched the towers collapse from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, with his close friend, Sarah Manguso. My father watched the towers collapse from a chair in his home office on Long Island; later, he told me that he wouldn’t live to see the end of the year, and he didn’t. My mother, when I reached her almost six hours later, had gotten home from her job on Fifth Avenue by walking west with a crowd that, having reached Sheep Meadow in Central Park, ran through the field, because someone said that planes were coming to bomb the city and they were going to be strafed.

Susan, who was working in the advertising department for the same publisher as I, drove us to a community center near where we lived in northern Connecticut. She gave blood; I was not allowed because of exposure to Mad Cow Disease fifteen years earlier. There was no blood needed.

Unknown at the time: My stepbrother, a civil engineer who worked for the City of New York, was in the North Tower, six floors below where the first plane hit. He didn’t wait for announcements or instructions. He ran to a stairwell and, at two hundred pounds, made it down to the street and flagged a truck that was heading uptown; he lived. A week earlier, Susan and I had been at a Soho cocktail party with the small staff of a Manhattan digital publisher I had briefly worked for; I remember thinking that my creative director’s lovely husband, Kenny, was the sort of guy who ironed his Levis. He was a trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, and he and Lorie had two young children. He didn’t live. Jeff Hardy, a friend and corporate chef at Cantor who moonlighted as a bassist for Fast Folk Musical Revue: he didn’t live.

I was fired from my job two days later. Each morning for months, I picked up the New York Times, drove to a nearby diner, and read the thumbnail memorials of every person killed. My HarperCollins managing editor, who had a lot of friends in the FDNY, attended funerals for the firemen day after day, every day, for months; her birthday had been on 9/11. Entire firehouses had been decimated. She kept funeral-appropriate clothes in her office at all times.

For days and weeks and months, New Yorkers needed to know: Was it okay to gather and eat together. Was it okay to stop and sit next to a complete stranger on a brownstone stoop, weeping with his head in his hands. Was it okay to go out for a run, or to take your kid to a playground. Was it okay to talk to a child about hatred, and what hatred can do, and why people believe it is their right to destroy others. Was it ever, ever going to be okay to laugh again.

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Fifteen days after 9/11 came Yom Kippur, and I wanted to know: How many candles could I possibly light. How many names could I say during the prayers for the dead. Every time I was in the city, I stepped into as many churches as I could, and sat for a few minutes. I lit as many candles as I could find, on every visit.

I watched Letterman and Jon Stewart and I listened to Fran Lebowitz read the eerily prescient Here is New York by E.B. White, written in 1949. I read ’s piece in the Times, A Small Food Thing, which ran the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2001, and made me feel like it was somehow alright to gather again, even if all we did was stare across the table at each other. A year later, less than a month after my father died, Amanda wrote a piece that ultimately was behind my wanting to devote my life to writing about what sustenance means: A Meal With Loved Ones Closes the Circle of Life. I actually remember standing in our little kitchen in Litchfield County, reading that piece while leaning up against our big farmhouse sink, our dog lying on the floor near my feet. I have made the dish at the end of that essay more times than I can possibly count: I have made it during times of immense sorrow and times of profound joy, and I have always made it to share with people I love.

Sept. 11 is not a holiday. There are no traditions, Amanda writes. She goes on:

Feeding yourself is a way of healing, of embracing your existence, of remembering the lost, and of pushing forward. It is why in Mexico, people get together after a burial for a prayer and eat atole, a corn gruel, and chocolate. And why on the Day of the Dead, they celebrate their deceased loved ones with a feast of mole and tamales, often right in the cemetery….I have pan-roasted chicken in mind. The last tomatoes of the season will figure in somehow. So will corn and those tender oval Italian plums. Because what I want when I’m finished is not a feast. I simply want to look across the table into someone’s eyes.

Roughly three weeks ago, it started: CNN and NatGeo began running short reels on Instagram and Facebook about what happened on that Tuesday morning in 2001, when the sky was such a brilliant blue that, even in sunglasses, you had to squint. After watching the reels for a day or so, I began to wheeze again. I’m just over Covid and it settled in my asthmatic lungs, which have been weakened over the years by multiple bouts of the virus, but also the grief that the Chinese believe settles there, in a condition called grief-stricken lungs, or bēishāng sǔnfèi. Every morning over the last few days, I woke up coughing, unable to breathe; my Oura ring tells me that my oxygen level is in the eighties. None of my puffers help.

One day twenty-five years ago, I remember distinctly wondering: Is it possible to quantify grief? In a way, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did: she said we’d go through this, this, this, that, and this, and then we’d be through it. We know now that she was wrong. And still, I wonder about grief capacity and sheer volume, and the fact that the human spirit is, I believe, simply not meant to withstand the horrors of a particular event, or events, in our occipital lobes — that part of the brain that processes what the eyes see — over and over again, relentlessly. My grandmother was sitting in front of the radio on the morning of Sunday December 7th, 1941; she heard the reports that we have all heard. She did not see them. She did not see the fires and the sinking Arizona and the bodies in the water. The sound of the report stuck with her forever, though; she remembered what she was wearing and the cup she had used for her morning coffee. It had the same effect on her heart, certainly, and when the radio reports were replayed on television when I was a child, she had to get up and leave the room. Those I knew — the parents and grandparents of friends — who survived the Holocaust and had been in camps: They closed their eyes when they got into bed, and they were there again. Images are seared in our brains, like cattle brands.

So I have tried to limit my exposure to the visuals of September 11th on this twenty-fifth anniversary, and what happened that forever changed who we are at the most visceral level. It is enough to imagine those above the strike zones, knowing they would never get out. It is enough to imagine the young fire fighters in full gear, climbing seventy, eighty, ninety flights, knowing what their fates would be. I cannot listen to the voice messages left by partners and fresh-out-of-college kids in their first jobs; it is too much for the heart to organize. Some things are sacred and not meant to be shared; I feel this way when I see a photo of someone on their deathbed being posted on Facebook. I want to scream: keep that in your heart, for you and you alone. Close the circle of life with sacred ritual, not social media.

How can an entire nation metabolize such grief? How does it work for so mamy to have experienced a trauma that was at once so epic and so deeply personal? It seems to me that part of the human experience may not be in the seeing, but in The Telling: where was I and where were you, who made it out and who didn’t, how we moved through the days and weeks that followed, and how we supported and cared for each other. I am reminded of the story of Catholic activist Dorothy Day, who at eight years old, witnessed the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and said While the crisis lasted people loved each other…It makes one think of how people could, if they would, care for each other in times of stress, unjudgingly in pity and love.

I think of Kenny, at the Soho cocktail party the week before the attacks, and Jeff, playing his upright bass at The Bottom Line. They’re still here, their feet in the sand, their hands in the water, of this earth, as long as we remember them. I will never watch, but I will always say: Never stop telling. Never become so inured to the loss that it becomes just a distant memory dusted with ash.

Always tell your story, and I will tell you mine.

PAN-ROASTED CHICKEN WITH END-OF-SEASON TOMATOES

for The New York Times, September 11th, 2002

Time: 1 hour 15 minutes, plus soaking time

3 teaspoons sea salt, more for seasoning

1 4-pound chicken, cut into 6 pieces

3/4 cup flour, for dusting

Freshly ground black pepper

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon butter

3 sprigs thyme

1 shallot, finely chopped

1/2 cup fino sherry

3 very ripe tomatoes (from a farmstand, if possible), coarsely chopped

1 teaspoon aged sherry wine vinegar

1. In the morning, pour salt into a bowl large enough to fit chicken. Add a cup of tepid water and dissolve salt. Add chicken pieces, then cover with water. Refrigerate 8 to 12 hours, until ready to cook.

2. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Remove chicken from water and pat it dry. Place flour and more salt and pepper in a plastic bag. Add chicken pieces, two at a time, and shake to lightly coat them. Vigorously shake off excess flour and repeat with remaining chicken.

3. Place a deep, ovenproof sauté pan over medium-high heat. Add oil and butter. When foam subsides, add chicken pieces, skin side down. Brown well, adjusting heat as needed, then turn and cook for 3 minutes. Add thyme sprigs and transfer pan to oven. Roast chicken, basting every few minutes.

4. When chicken is cooked (20 to 30 minutes), transfer it to a platter and keep warm. Place pan back on stove, over medium heat. Add shallot and sauté one minute. Pour in sherry and boil, scraping up any pan drippings. Reduce until pan is almost dry, then add tomatoes and increase heat to high. Cook until tomatoes have broken down and juices have condensed, 10 minutes. It should be pulpy, not drippy. Taste and adjust seasoning, sprinkle with vinegar, then spoon sauce over chicken. Serve.

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It’s been a tough time.

So last night, we did what we sometimes do (and freely admit to) when we’re frazzled: we had dinner in front of the television.

Everyone knows it’s the plan for the evening and so the dog comes in and sleeps on the floor in front of the den slider (after begging for a little of what we’re eating), and Arthur-the-25-pound-cat lays behind us after chewing for a few minutes on a nearby lampshade, because that’s his thing. (He chews, we yell, he jumps down, and we get on with our night.)

I’ve grown so tired of the usual offerings that I re-upped my subscriptions to BritBox and PBS Passport, and now we get to watch as much as we want of the best documentaries and Austin City Limits concerts and Grantchester and Poldark and Vigil (Susan hasn’t seen seasons one or two so I have to watch them again, poor me, guilty pleasure) and Happy Valley (can’t watch; too bloody) and as many Ken Burns docs as we can muster. So last night, we watched Saved By the Beauty of the World for the second time, because I was sure I’d missed a lot during my first viewing, and I had. I also tried really hard not to weep, but I couldn’t stop. Maybe I’m just tired and overwrought; there’s been so much loss lately and the state of the world is overwhelming. Maybe it was seeing Stephen Colbert not being able to hold it together. But when Mary Oliver leaves Provincetown for Florida and you find yourself thinking NO PLEASE DON’T DO IT, DON’T DO IT you know it’s not going to end well, and it doesn’t.

Surprisingly, nowhere in the documentary is there a mention of the long-form 2015 conversation that had with Mary on — it was the very first interview Mary granted, and Krista flew down to see her, and somewhere, while audibly puffing on a cigarette (after being in remission from lung cancer), Mary mentions that she’s getting used to the mangroves, and if you know her history in Provincetown, you (or at least I) think Uh oh. Here is their conversation (if you go to the On Being website, you can also listen to the unedited version).

Mary Oliver in conversation with Krista Tippett on On Being (2015)

Dolly and Wendell left us inside of a week.

Dolly Parton left us last week, and then last night, I read, by way of the wonderful Kentucky author Silas House, that his friend and fellow Kentuckian Wendell Berry has left us too, at 92. It’s taking me a while to gather my thoughts, but I would like to share this short and extremely timely poem, from Berry’s This Day: New & Collected Sabbath Poems:

Whatever happens,
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
into the lasting world
and will not leave,
whatever happens.

Thinking about home.

I’m a Cancerian and so is Susan, and we spend a lot of time thinking about what home means to us. It is very much time for us to move to Maine, but there are many moving parts, so to speak, most of them financial — we are two creatives — and the fact of our Cancerianism doesn’t help; we drop our anchors and when we do it’s very hard to pull them up. But beyond this, I have lately been thinking a lot about home as a way to organize one’s place in the world — where it is and what it means for each of us — given that we are witnessing on a day-to-day basis some of the most emotionally and physically violent acts of warfare that goes back to pre-Biblical times: there is the cutting off of water and food and the destruction of crops, there is rape, there is destruction of language, culture, and history, and there is the ripping of people from the places they call home, be it by illegal settlers, invading armies, or paid paramilitaries whose only goal is to tear humans from the safety of the lives they’ve built. So I have been going down a deep rabbit hole over the last weeks, listening to Matt Gibberd, host of Homing. His podcast is one of my absolute favorites — I love his conversations with my dear friend Katherine May, Nigel Slater, Anna Jones, Margot Henderson, and Patrick Williams — and this week, I listened to his talk with Dan Pearson about Pearson’s outdoor kitchen and living space. Given that I’ve been thinking a lot about Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, there was some symmetry to sharing this:

Celebrating Jeremy Lee’s new book:

In celebration of Jeremy Lee’s new book, Kitchening, and the 100th anniversary of Quo Vadis (where last year I ate the sweetbreads of my life and Susan had a beef pie that rendered her mute for hours) April Bloomfield’s Brooklyn restaurant Sailor will be bringing Quo Vadis to Fort Greene for two nights in September. For more information, go here.

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I love Toast.

In the last few years, I have become a big fan of the clothing and lifestyle company, TOAST. I first discovered them a decade ago, when my friend, one-time memoir student, and brilliant photographer/cook/design polymath was featured in their pages for her fermented Winter's Bone Broth, which nursed me through the long, bitter winter of 2016. (She was also featured there in an interview about her 2023 book, Cooking With Mushrooms, which I love and cook from regularly.) I went down a rabbit hole and discovered that the Toast design and craft aesthetic speaks to me in a way that almost no other clothing company (they’re really more than a clothing company) does: growing up the tomboy-daughter of a model in 1970s New York, I was surrounded by fashion and style (hard to believe if you know me: I am five foot one and, shall we say, solid and zaftig compared to my mother’s tall and lanky with legs up to her neck), and to this day would gladly live my life and ultimately be buried in barrel jeans from Pilcro and M&S than anything else. And while I cannot wear any of those gorgeous Toast dresses — on the one hand, I’d look like I was in drag (and drag is fabulous, God knows, but not for me) because I definitely tend more towards androgynous style but also because I’m so short and large-breasted and would look like a well-draped fireplug — I love their clothes and buy them whenever I can. Their clothing can be often breathtakingly expensive, but everything I buy from them I consider an investment, which is something the company takes very seriously: their program, Toast Circle, believes in repairing and recycling their garments, which feels absolutely commonsensical (and also why I love to buy vintage and pre-owned, whether clothing, guitars, books, and even cookware). Toast also produces some wonderful films in collaboration with Nowness— usually about crafters, growers, and artists—and they are beautiful. I watched this one several times this week, as ballast against the stormy seas of the world:

And more from Andrea Gentl, here on Substack: her gorgeous recipe for Pan Con Tomate with Green Coriander Seed. Perfect for when you have a glut of late-season green tomatoes, which I do, along with the eleven cucumbers that Susan harvested last night. Which brings us up to approximately forty over the last two months.

What I am loving this week:

Katherine May in conversation with Elise Loehnen at The Clearing

Sam Baker in conversation with Meera Syal on The Shift

Susie Middleton on early sobriety and being saved by the words of Wendell Berry at Six Burner Sue

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The problem with going through a parent’s things is something no one ever talks about: you come to not only understand who they really were by peeking under the hood, but you also learn what they actually thought of you.

At the beginning of this month, I was teaching for a week in Truro on Cape Cod, which is where I was at the same time last year when I got the call that my mother had fallen. It took two hours for an ambulance to get to her in Manhattan because of city cutbacks under the Eric Adams administration; it was already early evening when she got to the emergency room, so Susan and I left the next morning and met my cousin at the hospital. By the time we arrived, my mother was out of surgery, fully conscious, comfortable, and grabbing for my hand. I held it, but we didn’t look at each other. She made a joke; I made a joke. Everybody laughed. I don’t recall what we said to each other.

For the next three months, my mother would move through the system: from the hospital to a Manhattan sub-acute rehab that was so bad, so filthy, and so dangerous that it needs to be shut down by the city; a sub-acute rehab in northern Westchester that was less bad; the skilled nursing unit down the hall from the sub-acute rehab in northern Westchester, where the staff was kind but the care terrible, and where they managed to not recognize that she’d had a massive stroke towards the end of her stay there; and the incredible hospice in Danbury, Connecticut, a few miles from where I live, and which gives me hope for humanity.

My mother died at the end of October, having never made it back to the apartment she lived in for forty-five years (and I, for two), that was filled with the detritus of her life, and the patchwork of stuff that represented who she had been for ninety years. Susan and I finished cleaning it out in the middle of July; it took that long, and then I signed the apartment release documents, returned the keys, and said goodbye. She had been a longtime renter, and the building management, ever demonic — they wanted her out for years because the apartment was rent stabilized but worth seven figures on the open market — tried to get me pay for the removal of a few sparse bits of wallpaper, even though the apartment was going to be a complete gut and all the walls scraped, plastered, and painted anyway.

There’s only $741 left in the estate, I said.

We’ll take it, they said.

(I might have told them to go f**k themselves.)

So when August rolled around, I was happy to be teaching back on the Cape, a mile from the healing sea in two directions. But: the body remembers.

A year to the day of her accident — teaching the exact same class in the exact same place — I began to cough. We went to the beach, I walked into the bay up to my neck, dunked, and let the saltwater hold me. I felt better; I kept coughing. It is the Chinese who believe that unresolved grief sits in the lungs and doesn’t budge until it is dealt with.

My mother was just this side of a hoarder, which in part is what made it so difficult to clean the apartment out. When she moved in in July 1981, I was eighteen and had just gone to work as a lifeguard for a hotel in upstate New York before starting college in Boston that September, and so she, my grandmother, and the movers just packed my stuff up from my childhood bedroom, and hauled it into the city, where it lived in the closet for the next forty-five years, remaining untouched. Which meant that every box opened could have contained stuff of mine that I had not seen since I was a teenager, or my grandmother’s stuff (since my mother just moved it into Manhattan after she died in 1982, and also shoved it into the closet), or her own stuff, which dated back to 1938, when she was three.

It was not quite a Collyer Brothers situation, but Susan and I repeatedly found ourselves face-to-face with my mother’s filing method of choice: beyond the various boxes, every drawer in every room was filled to the top with masses of papers — bank statements, receipts, old legal and brokerage documents from 1969, stray SX70 photos of my mother and stepfather on the beach in Mexico, matchbook covers with strange phone numbers written on them in soft number two pencil along with my social security number, phone bills from 1974, my grandmother’s electric bills from 1967 — and Susan and I ended up dumping them into giant, plastic-coated grocery delivery bags. The other things — china, odd pieces of silver and crystal, even her clothes and purses— were easier to deal with by comparison. The bags of paper were another story, so we just brought them home to Connecticut where they sat in our entry way until Susan and I began to go through them one by one. This took months. And with every day that passed with my mother’s stuff sitting in our entryway (and my office, and the guestroom and the basement, where much of it migrated), time stood still. Even now, her death feels as though it happened yesterday.

Children who grow up in situations like the one I did learn how to protect ourselves early on; our exposure to things a child should never see or hear — the emotional and physical violence, the sexual impropriety, the weaponizing of money, the constant threats of abandonment — forces us to wear the garment of hypervigilance which prepares us for something always going off the rails, even if it never does. We ride the great cortisol bomb, until it explodes into a cloud of illness like Slim Pickens riding the warhead in Dr. Strangelove; If we cannot trust grown-ups to keep us and those around us safe — younger siblings, pets, even other parents — we learn by survival instinct to do it ourselves. Even in single digits, we become unwitting caregivers for others when we don’t believe we can be protected by those officially charged with the task.

So I took on the role of caregiver for my mother long before her first fall in 2016; I recognized sometime in the 1970s, when I was a teenager and she, recently divorced from my father, that she had to be watched closely in the way one watches a child running through the house with a pair of scissors. I worried for her safety and ours indeed because I loved her, but also because I was living under her roof; she was the source of our security — she was the grown-up, with the lease and the job — in the way that a dog views its owner as the source of food, and therefore will go out of its way to protect them. My grandmother — stoic, tough, having a grim relationship with her daughter — was in our apartment every day and also kept an eye on her comings and goings, My mother was newly single and it was the seventies; If she came home at two in the morning, my grandmother sent me to to bed and stayed in our apartment until my mother got home, often falling asleep in one of our French foyer chairs, the New York Post in her lap, the dog at her feet, and the living room television blasting. If I woke after midnight, got up for a glass of water and mumbled Ma? while still in a sleepy haze, my grandmother would say Your mother must’ve forgotten to come home, Lissie.

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I knew she was being sarcastic, but I wondered: Really? Could she forget to come home? Abandonment — real and threatened — is my family’s koan, on both sides. It was my lifeblood, to the degree that even at sixty-three, I still cannot listen to the one Dolly Parton song that nobody played when she died — To Daddy — about a mother who, having quite enough of her dispassionate husband, abandons her family.

My mother and I did not spend a lot of time alone together; beyond our genetics, we had little in common. When we were together, I was the source of No. I did not want to do the things with her that she required of me. I did not want to go to Bloomingdales for makeovers, so she sprang them on me, dragging me along with her ostensibly to do her own shopping, only to shove me forward into a makeup chair, where she knew I was too shy to make a scene. I did not want to go to the movies with her. I did not want to go out with her and her girlfriends. The few times we went out for a meal alone, we had very little to say to each other; I was a dour teenager, and furious at her for her role in upending my home life with her flagrant infidelities, and she was enraged that I was not the hyper-heterosexual mini-me that she had expected to produce. When we did go out, I would sit across from her in glowering silence while she’d recount the details of her life on television and the Copa in the fifties, and then would spend the rest of the meal listing everything that was wrong with me as a way, she would reason, to inspire me to be thinner, prettier, crazier about boys. A different sort of girl.

I’m just gilding the lily, she’d say, hammering away at me while I got smaller and smaller, until I evaporated.

When my mother remarried a wonderful man in 1981, I took a breath; I was leaving for college in another state, and when I got there, it was like I was shot out of a cannon. The first half of my freshman year is a total blur; I partied hard every day and every night — booze, weed, the odd mescaline — until I nearly got myself expelled. During the second half of the year, I got a grip on my habits and became part of a tight-knit group of friends who were as straight-laced as Mormons; they became my surrogate family, and I only went home to Manhattan when I absolutely had to, always bringing a close friend with me. Instead of displaying acts of performative affection in my friend’s presence, my mother put on a show of power and control, becoming verbally abusive if I didn’t dress the way she wanted me to, or wear as much makeup as she did.

How can she talk to you like that, my friend whispered to me when we were back in my mother’s apartment after we’d come home from dinner out.

Like what, I asked.

I didn’t recognize it as being out of the ordinary; it was my normal.

One of the more complicated moments in the life of an adult is when one is able to also finally see their parent as an adult, separate from them rather than as someone from whom they are tethered by DNA and primal affection.

In Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, the book begins at the end, when the narrator receives word of his father’s death; the reader is then taken on a journey into the dual pasts of a conman father and his devoted, and eventually wary, son. Deception, as the title indicates, is the foundation on which the story is built: we see the narrator at Princeton, getting stuck with the thousand dollar bill for clothing that his father has purchased in his name. We see his father wearing a fake ancestral signet ring purchased at a jewelry store next door to Schwab’s in Hollywood, and never paid for. I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him. I miss him, Wolff writes, after his death. Grief becomes complicated. What we don’t get, though, is what Duke Wolff thinks of his son. Is Geoffrey just another pawn? An easy target for duplicity and gaslighting? A patsy, and easily manipulated?

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What if the story were flipped? What if Mary Karr’s mother wrote a memoir about her daughter(s) from her side of fence? What if Dorothy Allison’s mother wrote Bastard Out of Carolina from her own point of view? Or if ’s adoptive mother turned the tables on her daughter in her own version of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? A few years ago, Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, and I were in formal conversation at an event in Provincetown for the Provincetown Film Society. I had just begun work on Permission, and the subject of story ownership came up. Michael revealed that the character of Laura Brown — the 1950s California housewife who ultimately abandons her young son, Richard, who becomes an award-winning poet and spends his career writing over and over again about his abandonment — was based on his experience with his own mother. Before Michael’s mother died, he showed her an early cut of the movie. I don’t recall exactly how she responded, but I found myself thinking: what if Dorothy Cunningham had written the Richard character, who is loosely based on Michael? What happens if we learn exactly what our parents thought of us?

When this does finally happen — and sometimes, it does, as I discovered it had with my mother as I went through her bags and boxes that I had taken possession of after she died — what does it do to the psyche, the persona, of the adult child? What hazy beliefs and conjectures — all the maybes and what-ifs — become focused into sharp relief so that we can see them, and finally understand? The human subconscious wears a filter designed to protect us from truly knowing what our parents think of us as people. Because — accurate or not — if some of us knew what our parents thought, we might not be able to put one foot in front of the other, even if their behavior towards us was verbally or physically abusive or both. A well-known memoirist friend who grew up in a home so identical to mine that we’ve always spoken in shorthand since the start of our friendship, once said this: that physical abuse is almost easier to bear because, God help me for saying this as someone who lived through it, it is concrete — it is there and then it’s gone. Devastating. But right or wrong, for children it is often actually easier to metabolize than simply not knowing where one stands when every day brings a new psychological twist that can come out of nowhere, like riding a surfboard in a storm. We never know where we are; emotional and psychological abuse prevents us from geolocating ourselves.

Until we hear the words coming directly from them— in writing — the aforementioned abusive behavior still comes to us through a filter. Every one of us has said things in moments of rage that we didn’t necessarily mean, and our instinct is to retract it, to apologize, to beg mea culpa. But when it’s in writing, though, there is a premeditation that is undeniable.

And this was the thing that kept me from going through the bags of my mother’s things — all those papers, all those documents — that had piled up in my house. Would my suspicions be confirmed: that my mother loved me in a way that was primal, but as I grew, she didn’t like me? That she didn’t like who I was, or who I’d become? That I had been a disappointment to her? If I went through the bags of papers, would I learn, exactly, what she thought of me?

On an ordinary Sunday afternoon about four months ago, Susan and I sat on the couch with the dog at our feet and a bag of my mother’s papers between us. We opened every envelope, and went through every paper.

Do you know this lawyer, Susan said, handing me a business envelope with a return address I didn’t recognize. My mother had always worked with an older family lawyer whose own grandfather had known my great-grandmother as far back as the 1910s. This was not them.

The letter read

This is to confirm your request to have Elissa’s name removed from co-ownership of cooperative apartment 6C at 153 East 57th Street, New York, New York. A new shares certificate will be reissued with your name as sole owner. If you have any questions, please contact me directly.

The letter was dated November 2000, a month after I introduced her to Susan and a month before I moved to Connecticut full-time both to be with Susan, and to begin an executive editorial job at a small publisher there. It was my intention to keep the apartment, a small studio, for as long as I could, and continue to pay the small monthly maintenance on it, as I had done for the decade I’d lived there,

In New York State, it is impossible to transfer co-ownership of real estate into sole ownership without one party signing over their shares to the other, unless it is a survivorship. How had she accomplished this? In the same bag of papers we found a business envelope used as scratch paper, where, on the back of the envelope she practiced signing my name in pencil. Elissa Altman. Elissa M. Altman. E.M. Altman. She had forged my signature.

This was never discussed; she never let on, and I never suspected. Why would I? Our fights and rages continued as they always had, since I was a teenager: She would call me useless, or a failure just like your father, and I would call her vampiric and then we’d make dinner plans, while Susan watched in horrified awe. Two years later after I moved to Connecticut, she called me weeping and apologetic because she wanted to sell the apartment in order to liquidate the funds, which she needed. It was clear that I was not coming back to the city, and she asked me for permission to put the apartment on the market. But it was a ruse: the apartment was already gone. Had I wanted or needed to return to the apartment any time during the previous two years, I couldn’t have, and I had no idea.

As the years passed, had she simply compartmentalized what she’d done? Forgotten about it? My mother re-wrote history whenever it suited her, convincing herself of a new, different truth that made sense to her. Had she just buried her actions as though they’d never happened?

So going through all of the boxes and bags has been a slow process, and I am told this is not out of the ordinary. But we live in a small house, and as a writer — as someone who has devoted her career trying to make meaning and art out of chaos; that’s what we do — I have to get back to the work of sifting and sorting, and getting to know who my mother and I were together and apart. Yesterday, I went through more boxes of letters from her sent to me when I was eleven, and in sleepaway camp. They are affectionate, loving, warm, and deeply maternal. What had happened? When had it happened? When had I become the enemy? What had she thought of me, to do something like that? Sometimes, at my worst moments, I can hear her, her voice dropped down half an octave, growling through her teeth: You deserved it, she might have said. I protected you by agreeing to be a co-owner of that apartment when you had nowhere else to go; you betrayed me by leaving me. And you betrayed me by leaving me for another woman.

I share this story not as evidence of foul cruelty or deception — even if that’s what it was, it feels like an easy, cheap shot — or because I’m looking for pity (please don’t), or to claim victimhood. I’m sharing it because after almost a year since her death last October, I am also now having to wade through the dangerous swamp of a deeply complicated grief, mottled with rage and relief, dizzying sorrow and emotional land mines that defy the tidy Hallmarkian vicissitudes of commercially-approved, one-size-fits-all grief that the American self-help market does so well. In the grief group I have attended, no one has spoken of the furies, as Janet Hobhouse called them. No one has spoken of being a lifelong caregiver for a parent who never made you feel safe, because you weren’t, nor was she, and yet: you felt responsible for her because she was the adult, and because she was, as Gabor Maté has written, a lifeline that a child cannot accept is defective or insane, as that realization would cause unmanageable, life-threatening terror. Therefore, writes Maté, the child unconsciously shifts the blame inward, concluding, "My parent is good, but I am bad.”

And so this grief arrives in other ways; it takes hold of the cells, and eats away at the mitochondria. I began to cough when we arrived in Truro at the beginning of the month, and after my class was over I sat in the living room of the barn where I was last year when I pleaded with a New York City dispatcher to pick my mother up and get her to the hospital. My cough got worse and two weeks after we got home, I developed a fever and what my doctor thought was probably Covid. It sat in my lungs until the rasp and the whistle woke me in the middle of the night and my oxygen level dropped into the eighties. Steroids now have me careening off the walls, but I can breathe again, and I’m coming back to myself.

The Chinese are right: unresolved grief invades the lungs. And if that grief were comprised of opposing armies — The Army of the Dead Parent, and The Army of the Unknown Truth — it is the latter that is engaged in guerrilla warfare, attacking when one leasts expect it. In the middle of the night, when my coughing is at its worst and I’m wide awake, I stare at the ceiling and whisper: I was not your enemy. I never was.

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Join me for my Permission and Memoir Workshops:

Esalen October 12-16, 2026 (LIVE in Big Sur)

The Center for Fiction October 20-November 10, 2026 (via ZOOM)

Kripalu March 19 - 21, 2027 (LIVE)

MORE DATES TO COME

Hello friends. I’m sorry I’ve been MIA for a little while, but I came down with what my doctor is sure to be Covid (although I tested negative, which I always do, even when antibody tests prove otherwise), and I’ve been flattened since last week.

To add insult, we lost Dolly Parton yesterday. I don’t have to add more to the chorus at the moment — I posted my connection to her over on Notes, and on my Instagram feed, and you can read my words there — but I will say this: I grew up in Queens, New York in the 1970s, and, thanks to my father, who during the war had been stationed all over the south before being shipped out to the Pacific, I was introduced to mountain music at a very young age because he loved it so much. I don’t know what it was about it, or why it was, but I took to it instantly, and while my friends were at home listening to Blondie and Led Zeppelin, I was glued to my stereo, playing the albums of Norman Blake and The Carter Family, Doc and Merle Watson (who my father took me to see shortly before Merle’s tragic death in 1985), and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (whose music figured significantly in the early days of my relationship with Susan). I love this music. I love it, I hear it well enough to play it, and I love the history behind it, which is about making art from places of grief and pain. There’s a well-known joke about all old-timey, mountain music having to have a death (TB, mines collapsing, Tory and/or Union soldiers, fires, starvation, murder connected to a love gone bad, visitations by ghosts, etc.) for it to be authentic, and this is not off the mark. Stories are told, and art is made, to make sense of and somehow organize the unthinkable, and this music is no different.

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So when I first came upon Dolly Parton singing Bury Me Beneath the Willow — a gorgeous, traditional old song made famous by The Carter Family in 1927, but cited as early as 1909 and arguably dating back at least a century to the British Isles, as these songs often do — it changed everything for me. It was 1976, I was thirteen, and I watched her sing this song with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, and I had what can only be described as my Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan moment, where nothing after that would ever be the same. (It remains my favorite, with the Tony Rice/Ricky Skaggs chill-inducing version a close second.)

Of course, there was the over-the-top Dolly we all knew, the glitz and show-biz Dolly, the wild Dolly, the Dolly of the movies, the brilliant businesswoman Dolly (I was lucky enough to work with her for a year as her editor in the 1990s, and I got to know several of these permutations first hand). But beneath the rhinestones and the jumpsuits and the wigs and the take-no-s**t Dolly, there was this profoundly talented, devoted daughter of the American south, and everything that means in all its contradictions. She longed to do good, to fulfill the meaning of the words Good Christian as she knew them to be, and she did.

We never need to lose a talent who is also a true humanitarian, but we especially do not need this right now.

Here are the things that are helping shore me up as we navigate this time:

Another favorite 1976 video of Dolly, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt singing a heart-rending The Sweetest Gift, which is a beautiful example of traditional call-and-response being used in a modern, lovely manner.

I hang on the words and stories of Kris Cravens-Hutton of IG’s Kris and Dave — she’s one of the people I immediately turn to when my hope needs to be bolstered, so I was thrilled when my friend at The Bitter Southerner interviewed Kris in the most recent issue of that great publication. I loved it and read it twice, and suggest you do too. And then subscribe to it. Truly one of my favorite reads.

Speaking of Kris Cravens-Hutton, she and her husband, Dave Hutton recently took a trip to Marion, Alabama, to take part in the great Scott Peacock’s Alabama Biscuit Experience. One of these days, Susan and I will fly down there and do what can only be described as a full-body immersion in the flour/buttermilk/butter trinity that makes up traditional Southern biscuits, but also the stories of people and place that go with it. In this video, Scott makes his traditional cornbread, after which I needed a cigarette.

The brilliant Barbara Kingsolver wrote this piece for this month’s issue of American Gardener.

The new documentary about Mary Oliver is out and available everywhere now, so please go see it. And then see it again. (After which it might make sense to see The Summer Book, the movie based on the book by Tove Jannson, starring Glenn Close.) Watch it via PBS, which will also require membership. You can join for $5 a month, and if you do, I will offer you a free month’s subscription here.

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After a difficult week of illness and discomfort, I read the delightful ‘s Joy Parade #55. It is impossible for me to describe accurately why I love Alex’s work so much; you have to see it for yourself. Also: check out the egg cups.

Finally, it is sweet corn season where I live, and it’s a short one, so we are taking every opportunity to have it on our table. There are probably a thousand ways to cook corn, but I always come back to this one, and so far, my corn-fanatic wife hasn’t corrected me after twenty-seven years, so I must be doing something right: three minutes in boiling water, and that is all. Arguably, the best way to serve corn is hot, with sweet butter and a pinch of salt, but Indian chef Suvir Saran’s chaat masala + lime version, below, is delicious. Feel free to use store-bought prepared chaat masala, but homemade is so much better.

Susan and I both grew up with sweet corn as a vehicle for butter and salt, and nothing else. But change is good, and this application of citrus and a sour/hot spice mix to freshly cooked, hot ears of sweet corn is extraordinary, ideal for vegans (or anyone - we’re not vegans nor are we vegetarians), and for anyone who is watching their sugar/fat intake.

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My grandmother used to tell me that you could predict exactly how hot and muggy it was going to be by the state of berries on the vine: if they were soft, and oozing thick, dark juice in mid-August, the weather was going to be incendiary until September.

If they were still firm to the touch — perfect for eating out of hand, leaving dark purple streaks on your lips — the heat would be manageable for the rest of the summer. She learned this as a child spending a few weeks every August in Greens Farms, Connecticut, not far from where Susan and I live now, and likely restricted at the time. I never knew how she wound up there — she was born and raised in Brooklyn during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency — and when I finally asked my mother about it before she died, she told me A church group brought kids out of the city so they could breathe fresh air, and your grandmother was one of them.

These were the things that stuck for my grandmother: The 1919 Chicago White Sox throwing the Series. Seeing Gehrig and Ruth play, live; watching Gehrig say goodbye. Cheering Jackie Robinson. Laughing at my mother when she met Reggie Jackson at a cocktail party in the seventies and he said Hi I’m Reggie and my mother said Reggie who? Signing her last letter to me Your Baseball Gramma in August 1981, when I was a hotel lifeguard the summer before I left for college. The sudden loss of her only true love, a woman, after sixty years of hidden affection. Predicting the weather by the firmness of the fruit.

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I knew my grandmother only as an older woman. She was stocky and solid, and although she walked two urban miles a day, every day, she seemed ancient to me, even though she was just 62 when I was born. I am now 63, and apart from a left hip that perpetually aches and blonde hair that is largely going gray, I don’t feel too much different than I did at forty, or thirty. I wonder if my grandmother felt the same way: that chronological age and the passage of time are constructs foisted upon us by external forces, and ultimately they mean nothing if we can manage to stay in decent health despite the gravitational pull of sorrow and season. When my mother-in-law was in her mid-eighties, she would regularly drive the ten miles from her house to ours and push-mow our acre of property while we shouted at her to stop. Then she’d request a vodka tonic, go home to her house and mow her own acre of property, have another vodka tonic, make herself dinner, and go to bed. At eighty-one, my aunt — my father’s sister — in 104 degree heat, rode a donkey from the harbor on Santorini up the steep incline and into the cliffside village of Oia while my cousins and I rode behind her. A year earlier, on a blind drive, she inadvertently slayed a massive male alligator that had crawled up and out of the intracoastal and made its way to her condominium’s golf course in Boca; the game warden had been trying to catch it for months with no luck, but my aunt, at eighty-years-old and wielding a Callaway driver with a senior shaft, nailed it right between the eyes without even seeing it. The pro-shop gave her a gift certificate.

My father was thirty-nine when I was born. Twenty-four years ago today, when I was thirty-nine, he died from injuries sustained in a car accident a week earlier. When I was thirty, I was a few years away from finally coming out as a lesbian to my extremely traditional and mostly loving family; some, like my father and stepmother, and most of my cousins, were fine with the fact of me, and some were not and never would be. When I was forty, Susan and I began to investigate the possibility of having a baby; I am ten years younger than she, so I would be the one to carry it. After the eighth vial of blood was siphoned from my arm, I discovered that I was in menopause — my mother had gone through it at thirty-eight — and could never carry a baby to term. I tried not to think too much about it because it broke my heart and privately paralyzed me. At the suggestion of my doctor, I asked my mother how old she was when she’d gone through it; she balked at the idea that I would even consider having a baby, but not because I was queer.

Your breasts will be enormous, she said. When I asked her why she never told me how young she’d been, she simply said I didn’t think it mattered.

At sixty-three, a year older than my grandmother was when I was born, I am now no longer middle-age; humans do not generally live to 126, although my aunt, the donkey/alligator aunt, made it to 102, dying during Covid (but not from Covid), and when my cousins laid her to rest next to her husband, parents, daughter, and across the way from her grandson and my father, they did so while watching it unfold on their screens from a distance of a thousand miles, and with only one local cousin in live attendance, watching from the inside of her car. But I am also not old, although the Millennial and Gen Z children of my neighbors and friends, who look at me like I have three heads when I talk about things like the 1977 New York City summertime blackout, or Ronald Reagan, or the devastation that was AIDS in the late 1980s when every third person on Commercial Street in Provincetown was in a wheelchair — they think I’m Methuselah. They roll their eyes; they call me irrelevant. I tell them to watch Soylent Green when they have a chance.

Last week, while teaching in Truro, I explained the concept of gatekeepers to a classroom full of Gen X and Millennial memoir students just beginning to experience the frustrations of creative rejection. Often, they receive no response to their work. Often, they receive what amounts to a form letter in which their non-fiction is incorrectly categorized as flash fiction, or poetry. They want to have some sense of what they’ve done that didn’t meet with the approval of the publication; they usually get nothing. This is not uncommon.

Who, I asked them to consider, are the people making the decision to pass along your submissions to the editors in charge of whether or not your work will even be considered for publication? Who is deciding whether or not your work goes into the A pile or the B pile? I told them about the time, a few years ago, that one of my essays was a finalist for a fairly visible award connected to a well-known literary journal. I was never contacted, and only found out when a Google alert let me know. The editor, when I asked them about it, wrote to me via direct message from a yoga retreat in Bali, Well we can’t let everyone know everything, can we.

I am currently reading The Art of Time in Memoir, by Sven Birkerts. In it, Birkerts writes about Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, in which the passage of time is wrapped around the lives of the narrator and her mother, but also the lives of the other women who live in the Bronx building where Gornick was raised, and where her mother, elderly by book’s end, still lives. There is a rhythm of rage and reconciliation, writes Birkerts, which governs the relationship between mother and daughter (and mother and the other female tenants) and the unfolding of the memoir. Birkerts refers to this rhythm, this push/pull, as an oscillation, which repeats itself as the narrator has to step deep into scene and then pull way back in order to comprehend what she has seen; he refers to this as experience tasted and experience digested.

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As I write this, it is exactly twenty-four years since I lost my father, a week after he was in a car accident with his longtime companion, who were driving their housekeeper to her next gig on Long Island. Almost a quarter of a century has gone by since that morning of the crash when I was standing in the garden up to my knees in compost, and his dying exactly a week later. I have been told, repeatedly, that I am living with complex grief — a grief that does not let me move forward, and that stops time like a snapshot. My life — my loves, my joys, my daily frustrations — is coiled around it like a snake; it is always there. And honestly, I don’t know that there is anything wrong with that. Grief buried, hidden, and ignored takes root in the body and devastates the spirit, and does not let go. Metabolized, it becomes part of our day to day; it becomes texture, and sound, and color. It becomes part of the fabric of who we are at the cellular level.

The push/pull; the oscillation. We live our lives. We raise our children and we don’t, we get jobs and lose them, we suffer illness or addiction and go through recovery, or we don’t. We find partners; we lose partners. We bury our parents; our hair goes gray. We row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content, Donald Hall wrote in Affirmation. We paddle in circles year after year, the mundanity of everything we do getting lost amidst a few punctuation points — Gehrig and Ruth; illicit love; infertility news; standing in compost as a parent is in an accident one hundred miles away — until we are suddenly no longer in midlife.

Experience tasted and experience digested. When I was a child, my grandmother, in her mid-sixties, taught me how to predict the summer weather by the firmness of the August fruit; she learned it as a Brooklyn teenager born in 1901, visiting a part of Connecticut close to where I live now, where she was likely restricted from living. Maybe she knew that; maybe she didn’t. I don’t know that it would have mattered to her. Reaching back over the decades and the wars so she could share it with me, she loved it there for all its contradiction, loved the heat and the flavor, and the thick berry juice running down her chin that would tell her, and me, that it would remain hot until September.

Affirmation (Donald Hall)

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

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I came to Provincetown for the first time in the summer of 1988, during a tectonic shift.

I had left someone I secretly loved at home in Manhattan and joined my father, step-mother, and her adult children for a week in Orleans, at the crook of the elbow that is Cape Cod. Skaket Beach was a few minutes from the house that Shirley and my father had rented, and Nauset, a short distance further. Nineteen eighty-eight was the year of syringes washing up on shore, of Red Tide, and the safety of the water was questionable. So we did other things: my father and Shirley, in what is now known in my family as The Ambush, kidnapped me and Shirley’s daughter-in-law’s little sister Jean Marie and took us on a four-hour sunset whale watch when JM had other important obligations. But when a humpback rolled over onto its side a few inches from the boat and its great round eye the size of a dinner plate focused directly on me, and then the people next to me, and then the baby being held by its young father a few feet from me, the space between us closed: the whale looked at me and I looked at her, and I whispered I am so sorry, and I believe she understood.

I returned alone to Provincetown later that week in 1988, intending to walk up and down Commercial Street carrying the weight of my own secrets, and to visit Fine Arts Work Center, a block past Bradford, on Pearl Street. Don’t sit down on any toilet, my father said. Don’t kiss anyone. Don’t share a glass. Don’t eat off the same fork. Don’t fool around with anyone. My father and I had a relationship that many saw as questionable in its propriety — we talked about everything, openly — and he was a deeply kind man, but, like many people in 1988, he was fiercely, wildly afraid, and this sometimes tested his humanity, as fear often does. He didn’t know any better; I cut him that slack.

I walked up and down Commercial Street that day, past WomenCrafts at the corner of Pearl, past the bookstores and the tee-shirt shops, the stores selling cheap jewelry, the bars and the cabarets. Drag queens strolled down the center of the street, smoking cigarettes, marching along in four inch platform sandals. Skeletal men pushed other skeletal men in wheelchairs; a sandy-haired man with a perfect mustache, a Yorkie on his lap and a blanket around his shoulders sat in front of the library and faced the sun, his eyes closed. Others, in their twenties and thirties, walked with canes or walkers or rolled in wheelchairs from one end of Commercial Street to the other — the East End with its galleries and restaurants to the West, past the wharf and The Lobster Pot and more tee shirt shops — sometimes pushed by lesbians. Don’t fucking stare, I heard one of the women say to a sunburnt tourist eating an ice cream cone, and walking ahead of me. They’re not on fucking display.

In 1988, I was heavily embedded in New York’s food and modern dance communities; the person with whom I was living was a well-known dancer with a small company, and three out of seven nights a week found us at City Center or DTW or The Joyce or BAM, watching Pina Bausch or Karole Armitage or Trisha Brown or Bill T. Jones & Arnie Zane. In March, Zane died; one by one, every company was decimated. A hellscape of sorrow. During the day, I worked at the tiny Dean & Deluca on Prince Street; every department shrank and just two years later, thirty of the men I had worked with, all under the age of thirty-five, were gone. Thirty men. In 1992, David Robinson, a founding member of ACT UP who I had known from the modern dance community, dumped his partner Warren’s ashes on the lawn of the White House, in what came to be known as Ashes Action; by 1996, an estimated 260,000 were dead, my friends Peter Hendrickson and Tim Allen among them.

We’re moving to Provincetown We’re heading to Provincetown We’re going to Ptown We’re leaving for Provincetown was said by my few surviving friends, over and over. The spit of land, Mary Oliver’s blue comma on the map of the world hung like a hook into the ocean; the last stop for so many who were sick, who were treated like beasts by the medical establishment, who had been shunned by their families, abandoned in the name of religion, left to die: they came here. Most perished; a few survived. Art and music and poetry lived. The town nurse, Alice Foley, co-founded and was the first executive director of the Provincetown AIDS Support Group, now the AIDS Support Group of Cape Cod. On the late afternoon in the summer of 1988 when I walked alone down Commercial Street, I was struck by the sheer magnitude of the absurdity: tourists in lobster claw hats, kids eating fudge and taffy, dykes walking with ancient young men and their dogs, Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive — at first I was afraid I was petrified — blasting out of a cabaret, beauty and death and beauty and love and rage everywhere, everywhere, and if you got to Race Point even on a cloudy day you would stay for the sunset, and want to stay forever.

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Into the early nineties, I began to read Provincetown: Mark Doty was published by the company I was then working for, and for whom I would go on to eventually be an executive editor. I had read his poetry for years, and then turned to Heaven’s Coast, and then, in 2008, to Dog Years, much of which takes place at 19 Pearl Street, half a block or so from Fine Arts Work Center, where I was in residency at the end of the summer of 2023, and where I have taught over the years. Before I was at Harper, I was at Little, Brown, and found a pile of dinged books to be donated; on top was a hardcover copy of Mary Oliver’s 1983 American Primitive, its spine cracked and opened to In Blackwater Woods,

To live in this world
 
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
 
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

Like so many people who come to the tip of Cape Cod for safety, for community, for the light, I have had very long bouts of staying away because every visit is saturated with memory and grief and beauty so breathtaking that it feels otherworldly. The Provincetown of 2025 is nothing at all like the Provincetown of 1988. There are a few people — all of us now in our fifties, sixties, and seventies — who were there, who remember what happened, what it was like, this blue comma on the map of the world. Spiritus Pizza is still there. Adam Singer, owner of Adam’s Nest, on Commercial Street, once told me that when he first opened his store in 2016, the town’s carnival theme was Back to the Eighties. Dear God, he said, no, never. Never again.

I worry that the younger people will never understand what happened to this community, will never know its history, and when I bought a new black tee shirt from Adam, emblazoned with the words Silence = Death because my old one was in tatters, a group of young men shopping, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old, didn’t know what it meant. It’s not their fault, but I want them to know.

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I am in Truro this week, at Castle Hill, to teach writers how to give themselves permission to tell their stories. Now when I return to Provincetown, a queer writer, long-married, who has just hit sixty-two, I do so because of words and work, which made it all the more impossible that, after so much time, I finally saw through the grief and the ghosts to the physical beauty of the place itself, to the light. Back when I was in residency to finish Permission, I wrote for eight hours a day without looking up, moving from desk to bed to couch to teapot to desk, and what came to me was the withering realization that I had gotten the voice all wrong, and that it — even its little craft-book self — needed itself to be comprised of stories coiled around a core of permission to create, to love, to breathe. The Provincetown air and light suffuse the very idea of permission itself, which is why it has drawn so many who sought acceptance to make their art in whatever form it came, to live their lives with authenticity and pride, to die under its massive sky when the tectonic plates shifted.

Provincetown is ethereal; it is complicated, and hard to hold it, and I forever am getting turned around when I’m there. Possessed of my navigator father’s sense of direction, I never know what’s north or south, east or west. Eileen Myles said it best, writing in Agni about flying in to Provincetown: From the bowl of the sky I can never bother to try and understand land. For me it puts way too much burden on the experience to start building a map.

Provincetown cannot be mapped; the sands are always moving and shifting, the light always changing.

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Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell. - Edna St. Vincent Millay

I did not come seeking the subject of grief; it found me, as grief will.

For years, I avoided talking about it like I avoided the plague. I shut down in therapy like a bank vault and told jokes; my therapist suggested I consider a career in stand-up. When my layers started to peel like old paint, I pre-medicated before each session by drinking two large goblets of cheap Rene Junot white wine during happy hour at the bar across the street from my therapist’s office, convinced she couldn’t tell. I watched up close how grief ravaged an entire family so shamed by it that it paralyzed them, as though they might have been somehow lessened in the eyes of the world if they faced their sorrow; the threat of grief became like The Great and Powerful Oz, manipulating their every move; they became cruel. I watched how the word grief itself fell into our cultural lexicon and then inevitably became commodified and softened, like the words healing and mindfulness, trauma and triggered, which had preceded it. I once attended a yoga retreat at a dilapidated center just above the chemicaled clouds of the Fresno avocado fields; the retreat attracted grief-stricken women of a certain age (mine), many of whom had recently been through divorces and the deaths of older parents and other losses. They were completely exhausted, heartbroken, and seeking tender solace or at least a spiritual handhold, and a way through; the leader, a 200 hour yoga teacher with no other therapeutic credentials, told us on our first night I will bring you to the edge but I won’t catch you if you fall. It was 104 degrees; there was no air conditioning; Susan and I were assigned a former storage room under the residence stairs to sleep in, with a broken window that had been kicked in by raccoons. By day two, many of the people attending looked like Paula Prentiss in The Stepford Wives, at the exact moment when Katherine Ross stabs her with a steak knife and she starts stumbling around and banging into things like a pinball in an old arcade machine. Susan and I fled at the beginning of day three.

I only want to think about and do things that are pleasant, a friend of mine was fond of saying, as if, by using her powers of reason, she could stave off a part of the human experience like a retaining wall. I mean, who wouldn’t want a life like that? But that’s not how we function, as a species. A lot of species don’t: elephants, dolphins, giraffes all experience grief. Our terrier, Pete, fell into a grief-related depression when our other dog, Addie, died at almost fifteen. I spent most of three weeks sitting on the floor, hand-feeding him. He had zero desire to sustain himself, to play, to engage. All he would let us do was take him out, bring him back in, and kiss his head, and even that was a stretch. He spent the weeks following Addie’s death staring off unblinking into the distance at something only he could see. He would come back to himself just when he was able, and eventually, he did; we waited for him.

I began thinking about my next book, Where You Used to Be, years ago, first when I lost my father in 2002 to a car accident, and then, when I lost much of my family to estrangement, and I wasn’t even aware that with every journal entry, every essay, every inebriated note scribbled on a pad at three in the morning, I was building the foundation for this book that I would finally write more than twenty years later. When I go back and read my journal entries from those days, there is a definable tone, and a shift; there is no anger, but a systemic grief that left me hollow and droning, like Pete staring off into space for hours. Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking came out right after my father died, and it sat on my bookshelf for over a year before I could even touch it. I turned to CS Lewis’s A Grief Observed because in it, Lewis was mystified, unhinged, confused, even ranting against God; so was I, and he had given me permission to do so. Lewis came back to his Christian devotion; a secular Jew, I became an agnostic. When my father died, I realized that I had been a family appendage and after he was gone, a relative said that any familial obligation to me was also gone, snipped like a hot wire.

[Clarity is often a good thing; clarity can also sometimes be deadly.]

What happened to you —You used to be funny, a cousin of mine liked to say to me, and I had to explain to her that I was no longer the same person I had been before the losses first of my father, and then everyone else. Last October, I began making notes for this new book while my mother was hurtling toward the end of her life, after she sustained an early August fall that took place while I was teaching hours away, on Cape Cod. I realized then that the book had already been a part of my life for years, long before my father, and long before the loss of my family; I had read my way through Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast, and Marie Howe’s What the Living Do, Donald Hall’s Without, and Woolf’s Orlando; I stood in front of Guernica and Haring’s Ignorance = Fear/Silence = Death and Tracey Emin’s Lovers Grave; I listened to Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Hazel Dickens, and Karine Polwart; I read the stories about the Taj Mahal, and watched Bill T. Jones perform Untitled; I poured through Francis Weller and Seamus Heaney, Joy Harjo and Helen MacDonald and Terry Tempest Williams, Michael Longley and Eli Wiesel, Mohsin Hamid, James Baldwin, Robert Macfarlane, Jackie Morris, Sami Tamimi, Claudia Roden, Edmund de Waal, Patti Smith, Gail Caldwell, , , John O’Donohue, and in The Sun, perhaps the greatest evocation of grief ever written, by . And it has become clear to me that, wherever we turn, there is a direct connection between grief and art-making, at the most public and private levels. Art-making is the natural artery that feeds our forward movement through life, hand-over-hand, fast and slow, informed by the sorrow that we live with like an undercurrent that is always, ineffably, invisibly there.

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I wrote to my dear friend Deirdre in Dublin yesterday; we had worked together years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and our attention turned to Glen Hansard. I had always loved his music — adore might be too hyperbolic a word although an accurate one — and on nights when I woke during my 3:23 am witching hour from too much caregiver stress or financial panic or wine, I would quietly put my Air Pods in and listen to him sing Her Mercy until I fell back to sleep with tears soaking my neck. Hours after Hansard’s death was announced, Laurence Akers, co-director with his wife Suranne Jones, of the film, television, and theatre production company TeamAkers, sent along to me a film he’d made and edited of Hansard in the earliest days of The Frames, back in the nineties. Hansard had tentacles that touched everyone, everywhere, no matter who we are or where we live.

How is it possible that one man could reach so many, many lives, even ones that cross by happenstance.

My friend and I were talking about Hansard — his face, his voice — and how he seemed to be emblematic of a profound and visceral Irish cultural grief and art, soaked in the sorrow of famine, violence, displacement, oppression and the almost unfathomable fortitude that manages to creep through the cracks of history, and typifies the human condition at large.

It’s easy to forget, given our disconnectedness, and the screens that we stare at all day. But this is what we do: Grief, as very young Jacobi Jupe said, is love. Grief metabolized is art, and sustenance, and story. This is why prisoners continue to make music and write poems; it’s why my great-grandmother baked her challah into perfect braids every Friday night, knowing that the Nazis were coming; it is why the incarcerated draw on walls, and a little girl in Gaza, caught up in unspeakable, unfair, mutual hatred of a thousand years, will ask someone to record her cooking traditional food over a makeshift stove.

It is why soldiers plant gardens they will never see thrive.

The outpouring when Hansard died unexpectedly, unthinkably, left so many of us bewildered by its sheer abundance. But it also felt right, unsurprising, and appropriate to me: we are a world in such deep distress right now, facing wild extremes of violence — political, racial, spiritual, capitalist, environmental, intellectual, psychological, emotional, purely physical — that we witness daily, hourly. We are a world living in active grief the likes of which most of us have never seen or experienced before, and it has invaded virtually every part of our lives. We have no tools for this level of relentless sorrow, so we do what we have always done: we bring art into our lives and we cling to it, ferociously. We listen to it. We read it. We make it — I don’t care if it’s a crocheted, grandma-style couch throw or a pot of soup or a small flower bed or exceptionally shitty watercolors like the ones I paint — and when we’re done, we make more of it. When you watch Glen Hansard in some of his more famous performances, like the memorial service for Shane McGowan, he did what he always did: he got strangers on their feet, singing, weeping, dancing in the aisles (along, in this case, with Michael Higgins). He made us howl with anguish and joy, which are two sides of the same coin. And now he’s gone, and I, for one, am very, very afraid, for all of us.

Tomorrow, I will be leaving for the Cape again, to teach the same memoir workshop I was leading last year when I got the call that my mother had fallen; when I think about it — think about being there, staring into the faces of writers new and seasoned, who are grappling with the grief that inevitably infuses the work of memoir — I have a somatic response, a shiver, a walnut in the throat that keeps me from swallowing. I don’t know what I will do when I drive east to Provincetown from Truro, past the Italian restaurant where I pulled in when my mother’s aide called me. But there will be art everywhere, and music, and words, and saltwater, and I will walk into the bay at the end of Commercial and Pearl Streets, and settle myself down, and let it anoint me.

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Upcoming events and workshops

Truro Center for the Arts - 8/3-8/7/26 - Waitlist available

Fine Arts Work Center - 9/7-9/11/26 (online)

Center for Fiction - Fall 2026 dates TK

Esalen - 10/12-10/16/26 (on site)

2027-2028

Madeleine Island School for the Arts

Kripalu

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A year ago next week, I was teaching my annual workshop on writing, permission, and story ownership at Truro Center for the Arts on Cape Cod. I’ve taught there now for four years, and I love it. It’s a beautiful place to lead a class, especially one that can be emotionally complicated and demanding, in that it asks students to peel the onion and do a deep dive into the issues surrounding why we allow ourselves the space to tell some stories, but not others. I talk a lot about giving voice to these prohibitions, and turning them from something that is amorphous to almost tactile. If we can feel these things — the fear and the shame that go hand-in-hand with telling a story that is entirely yours to tell, but that others (a family member, a culture) have a vested interest in your either hiding or willfully forgetting — we stand a better chance at understanding them, and crafting them into narrative. It can be a complex process, but I maintain that there is something indefinably calming and healing being that close to salt water, and in Truro, one is surrounded by it on all sides. When my morning session is over, it is not uncommon for my students to disappear to quiet stretches of beach; I do the same as early in the day as I possibly can, before the crowds come.

Last year, I was four days in to leading my workshop when I went for a short drive east to Provincetown one day after class was over. I was halfway there when my phone rang, and it was my mother’s aide calling to say that my mother had fallen, and what should she do. She had been falling a lot at this point — she’d do sneaky things that a lot of elderly folks do to try and prove their independence, like waiting until she was alone to shower, or wash her kitchen floor, or go for a walk without her cane — but this was different: she had been standing stock still and her femur snapped beneath her. Susan was with me, we left Truro a day early and my mother had successful surgery, but the Parkinson’s that she lived with (and claimed she didn’t have) would prevent her from ever walking again. She never returned home to her apartment, and died three months later, a week after her ninetieth birthday.

In the time that’s passed since her fall in August of last year and her death at the end of October, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in my mother’s paperwork, dealing with the rental apartment where she lived for almost fifty years, packing up her things and donating much of her furniture to Housing Works, and making discoveries buried at the bottom of massive Fresh Direct bags filled with ancient bills and letters dating back to the fifties and sixties. The day after her funeral in early November, I had a botched shoulder surgery that left me in agonizing pain for months; I had another (successful) surgery in April. While all of this was unfolding, I had to find creative ways to keep earning a living while most of my days were spent on the phone with physicians, pharmacies, apartment management companies, moving companies, not-for-profits, cemetery stone masons, credit card companies, physical therapists, brokerage houses, and my mother’s Medicaid care managers who, as recently as last month, called me to see how she’s been feeling, and could they send her a personal alert system upgrade because she’s overdue.

She’s been dead for nine months, I said.

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It’s taken me a while to realize that I’m probably not sleeping for a reason, that I can’t shut my brain off for love or money because it hasn’t quite caught up with reality, and that the exhaustion I’m living with actually has a name: post-caregiver fatigue. All the planning and good intentions change nothing: setting my alarm two mornings a week for five a.m. so that I can get to the gym and begin the steady slog back to physical and emotional health — it doesn’t work because my body is still flattened even while my brain is racing a mile a minute.

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I’m slowly learning to listen to how I feel, which is no easy feat for someone who has spent most of her life meeting the many needs of an ill parent. Just ask any person who has lived for more than half a century as a caregiver. It’s like that scene in Forrest Gump: When I’m tired, I rest. When I’m hungry, I eat. I’m making every effort to also listen to what my spirit needs, which, in no particular order, is: love, affection, quiet, music, friendship, the dog, community, a sense of my own history, art, poetry, the sea. And in the words of my friend : a glass of cool water.

I’m heading back to Truro at the end of the week, to teach. I cannot fathom that it is going to be easy, but I am willing to let all of it in, and to spend some time bobbing around in the sea (assuming no sharks).

Here are some of the things that are bolstering me right now:

Every drop of writing on Kendall Lamb’s Touching the Elephant, especially this and this.

The stories of the trench gardens planted on the Western Front during World War 1. Hope springs eternal, even in the face of certain tragedy. Read John Lewis-Stempl and Sue Stuart-Smith.

As I continue to think about the thing that saved me for so long until it began to destroy me, I find myself seeking out great writing on the subject, like Kevin Jack McEnroe’s The Opposite of Adventure, Parts 1 and 2. A truly captivating writer on life, love, recovery, healing, responsibility to an ill and very public parent, and being a McEnroe.

There is something called food writing, and there is something called writing about food, and then there is magic, and that is the work of Ross Gay’s To Have A First Harvest.

In my workshops, I write about this thing I call The Magic In the Mundane. Forget BAM and NOISE and TOO MUCH and FABULOUS and PHENOMENAL; all that gets us is a fake-gold encrusted oval office and a dug-up East Wing, and what my AA friends call Terminal Uniqueness. The Mundane is where life is. As such, I am currently on read #3 of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, and read #751 of Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety.

More on Tove Jansson…

These two completely adorable young people in their kitchen.

I could watch these two guys forever.

In 1991, I was a regular at The Bottom Line in New York City, and was in attendance for this concert. Watching it brings me back to that time and place: I was not yet thirty, single, not yet out, still living in my late grandmother’s Brooklyn apartment, my whole life ahead of me. If you love Nanci Griffith, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Rosanne Cash as much as I do, you will love this.

An absolutely stunning conversation between Sam Baker and Sarah Hiscox, on self-esteem, addiction, and truth.

What I’m Cooking:

Charred Shrimp with Shimi Sauce

Quinoa Salad with Corn and Basil

Grilled Chicken Thighs and Corn with Lime-Basil Butter

Grilled Peaches Wrapped in Proscuitto - Take the freshest, juciest peaches you can find, halve them, remove the stone, halve them again, wrap each quarter in a slice of proscuitto, brush lightly with olive oil, grill over a medium flame until the proscuitto gets crispy, turning them often and taking care that they don’t burn. Serve with vanilla ice cream, and drizzle with balsamico tradizionale.

Slow-Roasted Salmon with Harissa

Other things that I’m loving:

My dogs are tired, and I have finally given myself permission to wear nothing on them but sandals or sneakers, specifically these. If you haven’t tried them, do so. You won’t regret it. We have a formal event to go to in northern California next spring, and I will be damned if I’m not going to wear a tuxedo. And these sneakers. In black.

New glasses; very round. My hope is to see the world a bit more clearly.

More to come.

More reading on the subject(s)

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I have spent the last few days in a studio with a wonderful producer, recording the audio edition of Permission. This is the fourth time I’ve done this, each time for a different book, with a different producer, in a different studio. Each experience has been an excellent one; I suppose it could have gone the other way, but it didn’t, and this time was no different. My producer for Permission, Paul Averginos, had just returned from the West Coast where he received a Grammy for producing Jimmy Carter’s posthumously released audiobook for Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration, which features the music of Jon Batiste, Keb’Mo’, LeAnn Rimes, Darius Rucker, and others.

I took this as a good sign; I was a teenager when Jimmy Carter was president, and I remember what he faced, how he looked at the start of his term, and how he looked at the end, after he had been chewed up and spat out into little bits by his political opponents’ brutal attacks. It was only when the term was over that Carter was allowed to fully stretch his arms wide, and take on the work that he was truly meant to do, in which he fulfilled his place on the planet as a devoted public servant, an observant Christian in the truest sense of the word, a man dedicated to peace. I remember, vividly, when he left his lifelong membership in The Southern Baptist Convention for their stance on equal rights for women, which he felt was incongruous with the teachings of his religion. I remember, vividly, when he and Rosalynn put on hard hats and tool belts and began building homes for Habitat for Humanity in the Georgia heat. I remember, vividly, when he helped negotiate peace between two endlessly warring nations in the Middle East, without taking sides or conniving behind either side’s back.

We seem to have fallen so very far, and here we are. I am old enough to remember the Fallout Shelter signs in my childhood apartment building and in every school I went to, and how I was made to do duck-and-cover drills in the event of an attack from our friends east of Poland. Never could I imagine that everything we fought against — all of it: the brutality of fascism, the Russians, the outrighting lying, the doubletalk, the various coups that we children of the 1970s watched unfold, in horror — would happen here. And then I remember the famous Joseph Brodsky quote, as related by poet Marie Howe:

He said, You Americans are so naive. You think that evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots and climb up the stairs—it begins in the language. Look to the language.

So many of us do look to the language, as a rule. And unfortunately, so many of us look to a different language of division and artificial (non)intelligence, of manipulation and the politics of cruelty and hatred and proud idiocy. Last night, after a very long day, I was sitting on the couch in my quiet little suburb, and reading a hair-on-fire post in which the writer writes Your government is busy cutting healthcare funding, jacking up prices on everything, and laughing their asses off while you argue about whether or not it’s patriotic to wash your hands.

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The good guys win, right? Eventually — as history shows us — yes. But not until a lot of lives are lost. Not until a lot of devastation. History has also shown us that the quickest way to authoritarianism is through the hearts and minds of the easily swayed who will believe anything, who are willing to sell their souls for a meme, at least until Sunday when they go back to church to listen to sermons about peace and loving the stranger and thy neighbor.

It’s very difficult at this particular moment to continue to make art — to write, draw, make music, whatever it is you do — because it feels frivolous. It’s incredibly hard to concentrate. Where will art get us? Why bother? At 3:23 every morning, when I wake up in a cold sweat, I’m not thinking about making art. I’m thinking about what we will take with us when we have to run. I’m thinking about epigenetics, and how my cells struggle every day to not go down the familiar road of postmemory, and the work of Marianne Hirsch, whose theory revolved around the relationship that the 'generation after' bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.”

But there is a point, a moment of overload, when the heart and head need beauty like a dying plant needs water and light. They need art. They need words. They need music, ritual, and community. Humans, bombarded daily, relentlessly, with outrageous lies and the physical and psychological damage associated with chronic violence and the covenant of doom, need to create as a vital part of the promise of resilience, of groundedness, and humanity. Otherwise, it all just becomes scrollable madness.

I found myself just today re-reading the words of Margo Jefferson writing in The New York Times shortly after 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. In a 2022 article by Jason Farago, The Role of Art in a Time of War, Jefferson, paraphrased by Faraago, explains why we need art during times like this:

The reason you need art in wartime, wrote Jefferson, is because “history cannot exist without the discipline of imagination.” Through art we establish similarities between past and future, near and far, abstract and concrete, that cast received certainties into doubt. We look and listen in a way that lets thinking and feeling run parallel to each other. And in extreme times, this sort of cultural appreciation can rise from an analytical to a moral plane. If we pay close attention — a task made harder with every meme-burst and iPhone rollout — art and literature and music can endow us with improved faculties to see our new present as something more than a stream of words and images. They can “provide ways of seeing and ordering the world,” as Jefferson wrote then: “not just our world, but those worlds elsewhere that we know so little of.”

In Permission, I wrote about making the choice to create. In this chapter, just excerpted by Poets & Writers, I say that if we don’t heed the call to create, and give ourselves permission, our worlds darken and fade. Forget about funding, or grants, or the right to write being ripped out from underneath you. Keep going; you have to.

Whoever we are—published or unpublished writers; painters or musicians or chefs—if we don’t heed the call to create, and give ourselves permission, our worlds darken and fade. Our stories are stillborn; our lives thrum along on a dull, monotonous hum. The healing capacity of storytelling becomes stifled.

History cannot exist without the discipline of imagination.

Here is a link to the full excerpt for The Choice to Create, in Poets & Writers.

Originally published in 2025

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Winter is the season that grounds us, where we seek out fire and light against the cold and the dark; summer is the season of air and water, soil and seed.

We can argue this point: winter gives us heavy food and the associated holidays and gatherings, and the histories that lurk beneath those gatherings. Old catastrophes creep from between the Christmas couch cushions like the tentacles of a live octopus stuffed into a bag and trying to escape; old catastrophes breathe the same air as sadness and hope and trauma, their synesthetic rattle reminding you of a particular dish, or the sound of a particular holiday song, or of the one family member who you knew would take you down one day when you were both adults or maybe even still children, thrust together twice a year for a celebration at once joyful and forced like a size nine foot into a size seven shoe. And the food: even winter food can be more complicated and prone to comparison and commentary. The brining of the turkey, the glazing of the ham, the slicing of the roast, the good St. Emilion that you take great pains to hide in the basement from the cousin who will mix it with his Seven-Up and call it a cocktail.

Summer is when the simple things come back to us. It’s when the kids run into the water and you hang their bathing suits on the line, and they sleep into the late afternoon, leaving sand in the bed and in the bottom of the tub. Summer is when you take your mother-in-law’s ancient gardening knife — the one you found on a shelf in her garage right before you turned the keys over to the new owners after she died — and go out to a tangled patch of vine and leaf, cut some cucumbers and the zucchinis that got too big when you weren’t looking, cut some thyme from the herb box, run over to the corn stand before they close to buy six ears of Silver Queen. Summer is when you wake early to read Merwin on the front porch for an hour before the heat and the mosquitos, and nothing can touch you — not the weird grief that you’ve been fending off for nearly a year since your mother died (before which was the eldercare hell that you lived through on a daily basis), or the wonky test results, or the piles of papers and boxes and bags that you moved from your mother’s house, or the deadlines, or the witheringly terrible news in the paper — and when you bob around in the ocean, when the storms come and the storms pass. Summer is an uncomplicated time and it’s meant to be; there is a certain liminality that doesn’t exist at any other time of year. There’s the water and your friend’s dahlias and the beetles that decimate your roses and the broken Agway sprinkler that you mean to replace and the memory of the August between high school and college, and your decade-older upstate New York boyfriend who wore Jovan musk and puka beads and left a contrail of Marlboro smoke when he got up at four in the morning to leave your bed in the employee quarters of the crumbling hotel where you both worked the summer after you turned eighteen.

Cooking is intrinsically plaited to memory bad or good, and because of that, there are also certain summer dishes that I won’t go near: my late aunt’s beloved ambrosia, the cold borscht that my grandmother served to me right before the divorce, the cold leftover sliced lamb that I ate for breakfast in the employee dining room after a night of underage drinking when I realized that, for eight weeks of working as a teenage lifeguard at the above-mentioned crumbling upstate hotel, I had not once heard from my mother.

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Buying what I find at farmers’ markets rather than cooking with a plan-of-action makes everything about summer food more simple, and less fraught; Elizabeth David wrote a whole book about this. Forget the ambrosia or the sour cherry pie, unless you have a thing for tiny Brach marshmallows or sour cherries, the latter of which appear at markets for exactly eight seconds where I live, and when they’re done, they’re done. Forget the cold borscht unless you love it; I can’t choke it down. If you like it, great, but don’t plan to make your grandmother’s version because you won’t find freshly dug beets until much later in the season. Farmer’ markets sell what is seasonal; if you’re a vegetable gardener — even if you just have one big pot that you’ve filled with lettuce seeds and you’ve left it on your fire escape in the sun — it’s easier to hew closer to mindful kitchen simplicity than organized, structured cooking which, at least in my experience, causes nothing but strife. For hard planners — those among us who decide, for example, that we must make Salad Nicoise because it reminds us of that weekend in the south of France when we were in college, or the peach ice cream that we once had at a Dairy Queen between Atlanta and Athens when we were on our way to an August REM concert in the mid-eighties, or the blueberry pie that your great aunt made every summer weekend when you were a child — the flexibility required by summer cooking can be a threat to their sense of design and emotionally correlative organization and, therefore, security.

I don’t spend a lot of time planning what I cook during the summer; I just do it, with little connection to memory or history; it’s all about what’s fresh, and I’m too busy to ponder. It’s been a complicated time; there have been health issues, complex grief over losing my mother, work issues (finishing a book, finishing commissioned essays, waiting on writing contracts, planning my teaching schedule for the fall), breaking up with the thing that saved my life for four decades until it didn’t, the usual financial issues that come with being a self-employed writer and teacher. I have no inclination to fuss; summer food is good without turning myself inside out.

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There are certain things that are a given in my house during the summer, and they’re not hard to come by. They make it possible to turn any market discovery into a small meal — who wants a big meal during the warm weather; I don’t — and very little needs to be done to or with them. This is what I have on rotation in my summer kitchen:

• lemons (smaller, thinner skinned)

• limes (smaller, thinner skinned)

• fresh herbs (growing in a massive box on my deck)

• hot red pepper (Korean, Italian, Thai)

• anchovies (tinned, Portuguese)

• good olive oil (single-source: I like Spanish or Palestinian)

• red wine vinegar (nothing expensive)

• unseasoned rice wine vinegar (ditto)

• tamari (a reasonably good brand)

• toasted sesame oil (a small bottle is fine)

• chaat masala (pre-made, or make your own with Nik Sharma’s recipe)

• garlic (actual garlic, as opposed to the paste in the tube)

• tomatoes (not the giants, unless you’re making a sandwich)

• sheep’s milk feta (even supermarket feta is okay)

• chard (masses of it growing in my garden)

• zucchini (masses of it growing in my garden)

• cucumbers (masses of it growing in my garden)

• lettuces (masses of it bolting in my garden)

That’s it.

That’s my summer kitchen foundation. That’s my little black pantry dress from June until early October. Whatever happens to any of those ingredients — on their own or in combination — when successful, ends up in a little leather notebook that I carry with me to rental kitchens wherever we go, in the event that my brain needs jostling. A few of my non-recipe recipes:

Baked feta with herbs: Drain and pat dry a 1 inch thick block of feta, put it in a small. baking dish, strew with fresh herbs (thyme, marjoram, rosemary), drizzle with olive oil and bake at 400 degrees for 30 minutes until the top is brown. When cool enough to handle, crumble into warm pasta, or crumble and toss with chopped tomatoes, roasted vegetables, or corn boiled for 3 minutes and scraped off the cob. If your feta is super-thick, slice it in half width wise before roasting it.

Corn on the Cob with Chaat Masala: Suvir Saran’s extraordinary no-recipe-recipe. Slice a fresh lime into quarters. Boil the freshest corn you can find for 3 minutes and remove from the water immediately. Instead of butter, dip the lime wedges into small bowls of chaat masala, and squeeze/drag each wedge along the corn cobs.

Chard pie with ricotta: Separate the leaves from the stems; save the stems for another purpose. Stack the chard leaves on top of each other, roll them up like a cigar, and slice them at 1/2 inch intervals. Wilt the chard ribbons in a little olive oil with minced garlic, salt, pepper, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. Toss the chard mixture with half a cup of ricotta that you’ve drained for a few minutes in a colander, and a beaten egg. Roll out your favorite store-bought savory pie shell (or make your own), press it into a pie plate, and blind bake it for a few minutes. Place the chard mixture into the shell, cover it with foil, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes. Remove foil and continue for another 10 minutes. Serve room temperature.

Sliced cucumbers with tamari, sesame oil, and rice wine vinegar: Slice many cucumbers. If they’re big, peel them; if they’re Persian, or English, no need to. If they’re big, seed them before slicing; if they’re not, don’t. Toss in a large bowl with splashes of tamari and rice wine vinegar; drizzle with a little sesame oil and toss again. Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds. Serve ice cold.

I cannot tease out summer and summer food from memory; it’s impossible. Still, my summer table is far less complicated than its December counterpart, and its heart twist less all-consuming because of the air and the light that accompany it.

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It takes a lot to put one foot in front of the other in this world, at this time.

And yet: the line between sorrow and beauty is filament thin.

Our elders — my grandparents and yours, my teachers and yours, all the wise ones who came before us — would laugh and say Honey, you think it was any different years ago? You don’t even wanna know.

I come to the table of privilege as a white, middle class woman who grew up in Queens, New York in the 1970s; I had an excellent public school education, and good health care. I was given every book I asked for, and a library card when I was seven years old. I went to sleepaway camp for ten years. Music was extremely important in my family, and I learned to play guitar when I was four, piano when I was ten, clarinet when I was eleven. I played sports daily. When money was a problem (which it often was, with two parents whose idea of necessity was starkly, dangerously different) it was mostly kept from me, except for the odd weeks when we ate frozen blintzes five nights in a row. When it came time for me to apply to university, my parents were already divorced; my mother didn’t think my going to college was even necessary, and my father supported my wanting to go to school as far away as I could possibly get.

Woven in among the stories of music lessons and sporting wins, the dogs we lived with, the books I read, and the meals that my grandmother made every night for us were darker threads. My father kept the details of the Holocaust from me for as long as he could, until 1978, when the mini-series, Holocaust, came out, and at fourteen, I sat in my bedroom and watched the entire thing on my tiny color television with my mouth hanging open; nothing would ever be the same for me. It was impossible for me to fathom how people could do to each other what had been done to this massive population of Europeans less than fifty years earlier. When some of my school friends told me that their parents met in the camps, I didn’t realize that they were talking about Displaced Person’s Camps; when the wife of our local grocer pushed the sleeve of her sweater up while standing at the cash register, revealing tattooed numbers on her arm, my grandmother pulled me out of the store and said nothing. I was fifteen when I was told the story of my great-grandmother, a Ukrainian beet farmer, who, at eighty, was murdered in October 1942 by Einsatzgruppen, solely because of the way she prayed.

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A year earlier, Alex Haley’s Roots revealed the hideous foundation beneath much of American history; at fourteen, many of my school friends were directly touched by the story, and had grandparents who had grown up the grandchildren of people born into slavery. Institutionalized racism and cleansing are horrifically common — we see them now every day — but as ethno-and-geopolitical constructs, they were taught to us in broad brush strokes. What we were never shown were the smaller, more personal stories of cruelty that defy human imagination. In the movie The Pianist, there is a scene where Nazi officers enter an apartment in Warsaw. Its residents are expected to stand, but one, an older man in a wheelchair, can’t. The officers pick up the chair with him in it, and throw it off the balcony. This kind of treatment, and worse, was frequent, with Nazi command giving permission to its soldiers to be as creatively, shockingly cruel as they could possibly be. In the American South, stories of the rape of young (and old) Black women and girls abound. Cruelty has been standardized, codified, weaponized. Cruelty is the point, wrote Adam Serwer in 2018, and as we can see, it is wildly effective as a political tool. Nesrine Malik writes, in Georgetown University’s Global Dialogues Forum,

Cruelty thrives in atomization and silos. And what is most striking about modernity is how we increasingly interface with each other not in physical spaces, but virtual ones, where our ability to make our own judgements and human connections is limited. The ease with which one can then dismiss and demonize others in these spaces becomes gamified, rendering cruelty almost akin to a competitive sport.

Historically, I have a very hard time seeing cruelty of any kind; I continue to be called overly-sensitive. I can read the papers and watch the news, but eventually they so undo me that I can’t move forward or backward. I can’t think straight. At its worst, I get shocky; my nervous system goes off-line, which is where it has been the last week or so. I forget to eat, forget to walk, forget to drink water, forget to go to bed, forget to get out of bed, forget that I am trying to maintain early sobriety (which is dodgy enough) as a way to take back control of my own health and my own spirit which, until last October, seemed to belong to someone else. In this state, I forget almost everything.

So I have to be honest with you; many of you have been subscribers to this newsletter since the very beginning, and I owe you the truth. The cruelty embedded in recent news has kept me away from my desk because I’ve been struggling to organize my thoughts; attempting to make meaning (much less, sense) during times like the ones we’re living in feels fruitless. It’s impossible to untangle horror, to craft a pithy pseudo-spiritual narrative around it. Instead, I have been paralyzed with rage and sorrow, which are two sides of the same coin. The tipping points for me were the fall of Graham Platner, and then, the cold-blooded murders of two hard-working young men of color, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, and Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine. The two men were killed, it appears, in error. [In. Error.] The man responsible for killing Guerrero, it has been revealed, has a long history of violent behavior that includes throwing boiling water at his ex-wife while she was holding their child. On another occasion, according to a voicemail sent to the Associated Press, he told one of the women in his life that someone should slit her throat. His second ex-wife, who would only speak under condition of anonymity after filing multiple requests for orders of protection, wrote in one of the applications for protection that he suffered from depression and PTSD.

My heart goes out to anyone with those diagnoses; I know them well, and intimately.

Early on in his campaign, I made the statement to a friend in Maine that I thought Graham Platner’s tattoo was going to be a problem — right or wrong, even if it was somehow misinterpreted and meant nothing — among some Jewish voters in Maine. You would have thought that my words were the most incendiary she’d ever heard; they were, in fact, just an opinion, and there was no room for an opinion that didn’t align with hers. This surprised me because we liberals like to think of ourselves as open-minded and ready at any time for honest discussion. What I left out of my conversation with this person was the fact that, from the very beginning, I also got, shall we say, not-good vibes from the candidate, and so did many, many women with backgrounds like mine that involve sexual assault. (And I have no problem talking about this; it is not my shame to carry, a fact that I’ve finally come to at sixty-three.) But I chose to say nothing rather than be torn limb from limb by my own colleagues and friends who saw him as the candidate having the greatest possible chance of beating Republican Senator Susan Collins. It was suggested to me by the few I did tell that my lack of understanding about him was because I was from away — a Maine euphemism that can sometimes mean different things depending where you are in the state — and that I should mind my own business. (I suggested that perhaps Platner’s campaign should have rejected my — and all — out-of-state donations, if being from away was such a problem. And yes, I donated to his campaign early on, as well as his Democratic opponent’s, before any of the stories broke about him.)

What left me staggering, though, was not the insistence that this man with the highly questionable background, who was barely vetted, was progressive Maine’s greatest chance for effecting important and much-needed change; I could completely understand why he would appeal to people — myself included — who have become exhausted by politics-as-usual. What stunned me was the almost frenetic acceptance of a candidate repeatedly accused of the same thing that Brett Kavanaugh was accused of before Susan Collins tipped the scales and elected him a supreme court judge for life, which led directly to the overturning of Roe v Wade after fifty years of settled law.

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The convenient thing about assault is that it knows no party lines, no color, no ethnicity, no religion. It is a historical weapon of power. It crosses political aisles. It knows no net worth, although it certainly seems that the rich are more likely to get away with it. It doesn’t care if a perpetrator or a victim has a PhD, an MD, or a GED, or no degree. The argument that I heard repeatedly was that Jenny Racicot somehow asked for it because she left her door open. Everyone in that part of Maine leaves their door open. When my wife and I stayed in midcoast at the home belonging to some friends, I asked for the key; they just laughed. But the thing that smashed my heart to pieces was this: most of the people in my life who argued that the assaulted woman was somehow asking for it, or was setting up the candidate despite his known and even admitted history, were women.

This is where the issue hits a little too close to home for me. My own experience involved a local teacher and pillar of the community where I was raised; he told me that no one would ever possibly believe me, which is a line straight from the standard assault script (think Cosby, Weinstein, Polanski, Allen). My mother, who was enraged when I finally told her, first asked me these two questions: What did you do to lure him, and Maybe he just thought you were pretty. I was eleven (and nine, and ten). Please: I tell this story not for pity, but because I want it to be very clear how deep the cultural belief that women — girls — ask for it runs.

My mother was a product of her times who I am certain had the same experiences as a child. Still her words bounced around my brain until the day she died. In order for us to have a relationship, I had to bury them, to dig a hole and cover them with six feet of cement. I had to forget, to ignore, to forgive, to write her words off to profound mental illness. But when the Weinstein case was in every newspaper, my mother drank her morning coffee at my dining room table while reading the Times and said Don’t kid yourself. All those women wanted it. Her words made me physically ill; I put her in an Uber and sent her back to New York.

So many of us who saw the news this week, watched the continued violence unfolding in our streets, and spoke their truth about Platner and men like him — we are overloaded with sorrow, as though we’re carrying satchels crammed to bursting with an ancient anguish that feels impossible to metabolize, and this anguish feels as though it is being carried primarily by women: We are the ones who are expected to say nothing out of political expedience. We are the ones who risk our lives by picking up the phone and calling the authorities, praying to God that they will protect us. We are the ones who hope that our boyfriends and husbands don’t come home drunk, beat us, our children, and shoot our dogs. We are the ones who go to jail for protecting our families from violent, armed, severely mentally-ill partners who were easily able to acquire semi-automatic weapons and jobs as law enforcement. But we are also the ones who don’t expect other women to turn the other cheek, and throw us under the bus if we have the temerity to tell the truth that so many of us privately suspected, but decided was the lesser of two evils.

We are the ones who are never believed. And we are the ones who have to explain the definition of No, again and again.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors wrote Adrienne Rich, and so we weep until we have nothing left. But we don’t stop. We do not stop. We don’t stop caring for our aging parents and our babies and our neighbors and our ill partners. We hold down two and three jobs; we take our kids to the doctor and have no idea how the hell we’re going to pay for it; we drop them off at school and pray there are no shootings; we make public statements when our spouses are victims of mistaken identity by law enforcement, and then take our children shopping for funeral clothes. (Do they make them in 6-X? I don’t know. But I live in Newtown, Connecticut, so I suppose I should.)

But every single thing we do to care for those in our midst in the face of this world in which we’re living, stranger or not, is an act of beauty and bravery. Every single one. Every time we remember to take care of ourselves and our communities is an act of beauty and bravery. We plod ahead, creating our gardens, feeding our children, making our art, sustaining ourselves and those around us, forever weeping, forever warriors, no matter who we are, however angry or divided.

My silences had not protected me, wrote Audre Lorde. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

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I’ve been going through the boxes in my office closet, and I recently found one containing pictures shot in 1983 with my old Konica SLR on Kodak 400 film, which gave everything a grainy, slightly yellowed hue.

I’ve often wondered about this: what am I supposed to do with the photos that are not album-worthy, or that have been left in bags for forty years? I wonder if I should just throw them out — the almost unidentifiable ones, the oversaturated ones, the ones filled with people whose names I now can’t recall, or where my thumb got in the way of the lens — but I can’t, because to do so would be like snipping the wires of time. So I store them in acid-free boxes, put them on the top shelf of my closet, and never look at them.

I distinctly remember it being warm that summer, so warm that the dons who strolled through the college courts were beet-faced and in an obvious hurry to remove their robes. There was no air conditioning anywhere unless priceless artwork was involved, which called for climate control. To stay cool, I spent hours on end moving from chapel to chapel, which were open all day: St. Michael’s was less than twenty yards from where I lived, always empty, and every morning, I stepped inside and started my days very quietly, in stark contrast to how I nearly always ended them.

I got to Cambridge in 1983 as a fluke; there was a new writing program at Caius, and I applied at the last minute, was accepted, packed myself up, and went for a summer term. When it was over, I knew the inside of St. Michael’s and King’s College Chapel well — St. Michael’s was right next door and King’s was directly across the street from where I lived — and further away was Ely Cathedral. Grantchester was a two-mile stroll through lush meadows and at that time, still quiet and sleepy, and not yet the location of a television series of the same name involving a crime-solving Anglican vicar played by James Norton, who would also go on to appear as a mind-bendingly violent psychopathic murderer in Happy Valley, who, among other things, runs over Yorkshire cop Sophie Rundle (several times). When I landed in Cambridge and spent nice afternoons with my friends walking to Grantchester for lunch and a pint (and sometimes a nap in the sun), Norton was three years away from celebrating his first birthday, and Rundle, six.

It was a long time ago.

It was a term of firsts; I was just twenty and had never been to England before, despite having many close friends who lived there and spent their summers working in the States through an organization called BUNAC (British Universities North American Club). Two of my parents’ closest friends lived in Edgeware, north of London, and when I was in single digits they sent me the Enid Blyton books that couldn’t be found in the States. I had just finished my sophomore year at Boston University when I got to Cambridge, where I’d entered a program requiring a once-a-week meeting with the professor I’d been assigned to work with, rather than classes five-days-a-week, often from eight in the morning until nine at night that I’d had in Boston. I hadn’t expected to be studying chamber theater — writing for theater was never on my radar or in my plans — but I did, and adapted Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily for the stage while I was there. That was a first and a last: I haven’t done anything like it since, but I have taught many workshops about the intersection of storytelling and physical nuance, and how to convey in narrative what might be otherwise expressed non-verbally onstage. This just occurs to me now as I sit here drinking my morning coffee: had it not been for this program, much of the work I do today would have possibly never happened.

Firsts: During that summer, I began to notice gardens for the first time. Until then, flowers were just flowers — real or plastic; no difference — and for the most part, not of any interest to me. But my walks all over Cambridge often took hours because at almost every college and outside of the most humble of homes were beds exploding with color. I had family members who were recognized experts at growing certain things: a distant and much older cousin was a peony master, another grew ancient roses, and my uncle every April planted forty pink impatiens in rows so straight that my father said they saluted when my uncle walked past them. In that summer of 1983, I fell in love with Clare College Gardens: the Fellows Garden, the River Beds, the Sunken Garden, and not even getting repeatedly stung could keep me away from them.

Firsts: That summer, I ate the best fruit of my life, which made what we had in New York pale in comparison. Greengages, gooseberries, sloes, strawberries. Jane Grigson’s Fruit Book had been published a year earlier. We sat down to two full meals a day in a dining hall that my wife, thirty years later on a stroll with me around the courtyards, would say fell out of Harry Potter. I had been told by my parents for years that English food wasn’t great, and I always assumed that it was just another attempt by my dysmorphic mother at watching my weight for me. Even then, in 1983, it was very good, and I came home from England that September longing for lemon posset, gooseberry fool, a decent Scotch egg (or even a bad one), Eton Mess, a full English, a Cadbury Crisp eaten in St. James Park in London, the Cornish pasties sold in a small shop on Rose Crescent which is now long gone (the shop, not the Crescent). I did not, however, miss the lukewarm hangover burgers from Wimpy which, in the early 1980s, were made from God-knows-what or who.

Firsts: An eleven-hour train trip from Cambridge to Glasgow to visit a dear BUNAC friend when the train got stuck in an electrical storm and came to a screeching halt, the fans went out, and we all sat silently watching the cows in the field outside our windows while they watched us back. I was not well on that trip: the night before, I’d gone to The Eagle with some friends and what started as an innocent evening of cider turned into hours of conversation with a Polish dissident who had recently fled martial law in the weeks before it lifted that July. A half pint of cider turned into three turned into five, and when my alarm went off the next morning, I slithered into my clothes and out to Trinity Street, found a taxi to take me to the intercity train which got me to London which then required a change of stations to Euston which put me on a train through Bolton (rerouted; weather) and then through Edinburgh and got me to Glasgow six hours later than it should have. Still very much worse for wear from the events the night before combined with the joys of an unairconditioned train, I was picked up at Glasgow Central by my BUNAC friend and taken to the Parkhouse council house where she lived with her parents and little sister, who still spoke mostly Scots Gaelic over breakfast, and had mapped out an itinerary for me for the days I’d be there. Ill as I was, I managed to eat memorably delicious Indian food that night in a restaurant near George Square and when we stepped outside it was 10 pm, and light as day.

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Firsts: I had a very handsome boyfriend who was roughly two heads taller than I, rowed crew for both the college and the City of Cambridge Rowing Club, and was a recently minted doctor and member of the Royal Medical Corps. This came in very handy when I broke my foot late one night while walking up a flight of old, very uneven stairs in my residence after a party in my rooms involving a ridiculous amount of wine, cider, raw milk Stilton from the Cambridge Market just outside my door, and squeeze-tube caviar. Everyone brought something: claret, sherry, port, cider. When the party broke up and I said goodnight to the very handsome boyfriend at the end of the evening and walked him downstairs — the massive iron gate at St. Michael’s Court was locked every night at eleven, and if one had to be let out or let in, it required an embarrassing walk-of-shame call to the reprimanding night porter — and on the way back up I stepped wrong, rolled my foot, and my right metatarsal snapped like a twig.

I somehow managed to hop up three long flights on my left foot (youth is lovely) and got into bed. The next morning I’d forgotten what I’d done the night before and stood up, nearly fainted, and went straight down. I got dressed (no idea how) and hopped back down the stairs and across Trinity Street to the Porter’s Lodge, where I sat on a bench waiting for any of my friends to walk past because the handsome boyfriend was on call. Two did: another student, Cynthia, and her boyfriend Jon strolled by, looked at my foot, gasped, Jon picked me up like a sack of potatoes, and got me to the hospital where I was told that no, in no way would I be hiking in Switzerland two weeks later as I’d planned. They x-rayed my foot and put it in a cast. They wanted to know how I’d done it.

Party, I said.

With what they asked.

Port, I said.

Cynthia sat in the corner of the surgery and looked up from The Guardian. We gazed at each other for a nervous minute, and she went back to her paper.

There was a fair amount of eye-rolling among the staff, and a nurse pulled the curtain closed and said something about young Americans not being able to hold their liquor, and I could not argue with her.

I attempted to pay them and took out the credit card that my father had given me for emergencies.

NHS, one of them said, shaking her head and pointing toward the door.

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Firsts: Two women at Caius — one called Mary Frances and the other I have no idea — invited me to join them at the movies one night just across the street from the Cambridge Market (I could see it from my study window, which is how the photo below was shot) and I was thrilled because they were showing Return of the Jedi. We went out before the movie and had a pint, sat ourselves down in the theater, and when the lights dimmed and the credits started to roll, I realized that I was not seeing Return of the Jedi, but John Sayles’ Lianna. Despite the fact of my very handsome, very tall boyfriend, I hyperventilated through most of it and when it was over, went back to my room with a massive migraine. This should have been a clue.

In the archival box of photos that I unearthed from my office closet were photos of the market, the theater where Return of the Jedi was definitely not playing that night, a ubiquitous stiltwalker during the Cambridge Festival, a young girl feeding pigeons in front of Ely Cathedral, and Cynthia, who accompanied me to the hospital when I broke my foot and who this year will be married to Jon for forty years.

In 2014, thirty-one years after I left Cambridge, I returned and brought Susan with me. I wanted to show her everything: the chapels, The Eagle, the court where Stephen Hawking still had his office, what a stroll along The Backs is like on a perfect day. (She also had her first posset in a Kensington pub about ten feet from Hugh Jackman who was having dinner with a Spaniel puppy asleep on his lap. Neither of us realized it was Jackman and got up to say hello to the dog. And then we noticed. He was very nice. Both the puppy and Jackman.)

It’s hard to think, though, of the old photos as being anything more than a sieve of time. What began as a disjointed collection of fading and grainy visual memories proved to be much more than reminiscences: at 63 years old, I could piece together key facts of my future — my now — from these images. Assembled like a jigsaw puzzle, these images represent the things that make me me, and that I couldn’t have recognized without the benefit of perspective. The love of gardening, the love of and interest in food, the love of my wife. The possibility in 1983 that I was attracted to women far more than I was to the very handsome, very tall, very lovely doctor would have been terrifying for me; I didn’t want to look there at twenty. The possibility of alcohol everywhere (and granted, there is a lot of alcohol in college no matter where you go to school), resulted in stultifying hangovers and even severe injury that hot summer of 1983; it’s taken me this long to understand what it would ultimately mean for me, and how many years later I would continue to ignore it until my body finally relented. And that is a battle I live with every day, only now I recognize it.

If you have bags or boxes or piles of old photos clogging up the works, please don’t throw them away. Please don’t bury them. Spend some time and look closely at them for signs of who you were. And then look again, to see who you are.

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Lemon Posset

For those who have never had it, the best way to describe a lemon posset is what would happen if you took lemon curd and made it somehow even creamier, and then anointed it a dessert. I like it very much but Susan loves it — she actually still talks about having it that night in London. According to British Food: A History, possets date to (likely pre) sixteenth century and appear in Hamlet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and elsewhere, often as a curative.

This recipe comes from Nigella Lawson via Margot Henderson’s 2012 cookbook, You’re All Invited.

Makes 10 servings

8 unwaxed lemons

1½ litres double cream

500 grams caster sugar

1. Remove the rind from 4 of the lemons, using a vegetable peeler.

2. Squeeze the juice from all 8 lemons (you should have around 350ml of juice - rolling the lemons on your work service before cutting them in half will yield more juice).

3. Put the cream into a pan with the strips of lemon rind and stir over a low heat until the mixture starts to steam. Add all the sugar and stir until dissolved.

4. Turn the heat off and stir in the lemon juice, then leave to settle for 5 minutes.

5. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve into a large jug, discarding the lemon rind.

6. Pour into 10 ramekins or small bowls, if you have them, or one medium-sized bowl. Cool to room temperature, then put them into the fridge to set for at least 4 hours or overnight.

7. Serve with a biscuit such as shortbread, and maybe a little cream.