Archive | Essays

The Spark of Darkness

Dad and I at Ellis Island Museum, c. 1994

My father and I never talk. This is not an exaggeration. I have not heard his speaking voice in almost a decade. Why this is so is not the stuff of blogs– it’s the stuff of the book–but suffice it to say I always feel my father in the very early morning. He is the only person I know who rises as early as I do though we’ve never discussed that pleasure and perhaps never will. Continue Reading →

An Earl and a Countess

Larry Rivers, “Formal Marriage Portrait Of Earl And Camilla McGrath.”

I’ve been reading a ton about Earl McGrath, the ultimate mid-20th-century arts-world mover and shaker– the only thorn who ever truly pierced Eve Babitz‘s side. Besties with Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol, the godfather of Harrison Ford’s kids, pals with Jasper Johns and Aretha Franklin and Babs and you name it, Jesus (probably Jesus too), he presided over everyone’s parlor, curating the best be-ins and the slyest jokes. Continue Reading →

More Lipstick for the Wolf

Lately, I spend my Saturdays reading.

I have read five books by Ruth Reichl, wonderful stories of travel and food and champagne and love. I have read all three of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon books, which, as Natasha Lyonne avers, are better if grimmer than the Anne of Green Gable series: more honest, higher stakes. Also I have reread Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage and Black Swans. And of course all of MFK Fisher.

Especially How to Cook a Wolf.

It does not escape me that all these books are by and about women writers who found love and literary success.

For the moment, both evade me. I say “for the moment” because I am relentlessly hopeful in my own way. Though my romances have conferred as much pain as pleasure, I still look forward to the next one.

And though I have yet to sell my book–yet to finish it, even–I see its cover before I go to sleep at night. Sometimes on someone else’s night table.

In the meantime I keep my scale very, very small. Frankly, I’m too broke to go out. I have no money to spend and though an affordable New York still lurks beneath the city’s Instagram ops and best-of lists, I find myself weary and wary when faced with the prospect of restaurants and bars. Friends invariably pick up the checks and it hurts to burden them. This is not how I like to live. This is not how I like to treat my people.

In my home I can take care of business. I rise early and write as long as my brain will let me, then go for a long walk, the neighborhood quiet in the mid-afternoon. I shop the grocery sales and cook slowly as the sun ripens in the horizon. I cook because it is cheaper than eating or ordering out but also because the rhythm of stirring, chopping, stirring–knife thumping, oil sizzling, sauce thickening– feels elegant and serene. The way I felt before the Legend smiled at me and I smiled back. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy