Archive | Essays

The Russian Dolls We Carry

I broke up with the Legend–or, really, my relationship with the Legend ended–because he ignored me in front of his ex-wife’s current wife and her infant son. If that sounds complicated, it’s actually a lot more complicated, but the bottom line is he clung to the sense of family that his ex and her clan provided him, and played uncle to her son as well as her sister’s kid. I’d always empathized with his desire to do so. But this meant that he was ignoring me in front of his people, and the sting was profound. It was hardly the first time he’d thrown me under a bus, but I suddenly saw how little he’d ever rally for me, how little I meant to him, and that only one path extended from that moment on my personal timeline.

And that path was Legend-free.

That’s exactly how I saw it. Even as I blew up at him later, even as I railed to friends, even as I masturbated with a violent grief, some part of me already was watching dispassionately from a future I now knew existed. A future in which this man I loved had no place.

That’s how I explained the breakup to people as soon as I was sure it would stick. With concern and maybe a little ennui knitting their features, they’d say, “How are you doing?” And I’d say, “I’m in the future now.”

I knew it was true even though I didn’t yet understand what I was saying. Continue Reading →

Message from the Management: Heart Power

We are gliding into a more matter-of-factly fourth-dimensional, energy-is-matter Age of Aquarius. Think I’m being lofty? Consider the new-fangled electronics you count on that even ten years ago would have been inconceivable. Consider how the pull of digital information is now as real as the pull of “real life.” And consider how speculative fiction and animation now deliver more plausible interpretations of modern life than the navel-gazing, self-important balderdash that conventionally passes as serious fiction and live-action. It all comes down to a new plane in which gravity responds to time like any other object. Our feelings fold chronologies and our passions warp each other’s paths. Continue Reading →

The Legacy of Diana Athill (1917-2019)

Diana Athill, who died last week at 101, was one of my living literary idols–a model of complex, creative female independence that even now comes at great cost though it imparts greater rewards.

Never married, she was born in 1917 to English nobility that lost its cash. After serving for the BBC Overseas during World War II, she worked as a groundbreaking book editor for decades; her authors included Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, Jean Rhys, John Updike, Jack Kerouac, and Margaret Atwood. In her late 40s, she published her first book of fiction and went on to pen two more novels and ten memoirs. She also moved through a stable of glittering, great loves well into her dotage.

Coolly phrased, exuberantly hot-blooded, her subject-verb subject-verb rhythms taught me so much about the multitudes uncluttered sentences could hold. Never was there a Hemingway dissociation in her reserve–just precise passion and ever-piercing truth.

Once she hit her 90s, I held my breath every time her name appeared in Google alerts. Each one heralded more brilliant things she’d written, more generous comments she’d made. By this year I stopped thinking she’d ever die, and took enormous comfort in that fact–as if a life could persist so long as it was usefully and joyously lived. Then Thursday the news I’d been dreading arrived.

Already it had been a tumultuous few days–the stranger’s slap, my financial white flag, the return to my memoir for the first time since November, not to mention the triumph of Nancy Pelosi, the arrest of Roger Stone. But nothing proved more destabilizing than this headline: “Diana Athill, dead at 101.”

What life she lived. What life she shared. She and Mary Oliver both deserve their rest but I imagine instead they’re diving with great zeal into the Book of Akashic Records–both of them always so appreciative of other people’s words. Thank you thank you thank you thank you, child-free mothers. You showed younger Jo Marches how to love everything big and everything small about ourselves and the world.

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