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The Black and Blue Swans of Spring

May 16, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Queer Matters, Weather Matters

Lately every time I want to write you I find myself writing my book instead. I need to finish it eventually, and why not now? is my basic thinking, and it’s solid, you can’t deny that. Especially since I feel like everyone and their sister is now involved in this process–that is, ever since I revealed my broke and broken underbelly and almost all of you were awfully nice about it.

Time is money, don’t you know. And more than that: money is time. Meaning when I have free time it doesn’t feel free at all. Now I really feel that I should be working.

When it was raining all the time and we New Yorkers felt like we were on some sort of dystopian Noah’s Ark–which, I’m sorry, the jury’s not out yet on whether we aren’t–it was easy to just keep working and working. But now that spring is actually behaving like spring again, I have to devise all sorts of tricks to keep myself on the straight and narrow.

Not that my book is especially narrow. Or straight. Continue Reading →

Interstellar Eve Babitz

May 13, 2019 in Astro Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters

Eve in her 50s.

Happy Eve Babitz Day! As a Gen Xer forced to spend hundreds of dollars I didn’t have in the 90s to track down Eve Babitz’s out-of-print books, there’s a part of me that’s irritated the millennial girls think they’ve discovered the brilliant writer, groupie-adventuress, and auto-muse. Just a tiny part, though, because everyone should have an Eve who gives Lilith a run for her money. Every female-identified person in particular should have a star-fucking, bridge-burning, convention-flouting, binary-busting, sexy and smart, lush and arch, totally mean and totally kind, self-identified-spinster role model like Evie. So I’m glad she is finally back in print and translated into billions of tongues. (She always was good with tongues.) Continue Reading →

Stop the Clock (Book Excerpt)

April 18, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, Past Matters, Spirit Matters, Style Matters

Head

I’m back in book and here’s a tiny tiny snatch of what I’ve been working on this week. Oh such a relief to be back in 1987 Boston, ugly and beautiful just like everything else.

Even as my first romance was happening I was remembering it and wishing for it too. Like all girls without a safe haven, I’ve always been willing to throw over so much for a here-you-are-my-other kiss. For that walk, hand in hand, into a future that doesn’t loom so much as beckon.

For here with Matt was all the magic I’d been looking for. Dark clouds were blown away and I could smell the future as present, sweet as soil, soft as rain. With this boy I could lie all day and look up at trees that glowed. Trust that he had a clock whose hands didn’t just move forward but everywhere at once.

Alone we dipped into the galleries of the Isabella Stewart Gardner, pretending the whole mansion was ours–the paintings, chapel and courtyard, all of it. Down the Fens we moseyed (past my mother twenty years before, lolling in the sun with cigarettes and half-closed eyes), first to the MFA then across Storrow Drive, glittering like the Charles by which it slid. On the Blue Line we rode all the way to Revere Beach, where we stared at steel waves, so different from the Outer Cape’s unfettered glamour. From Portuguese-speaking vendors roaming the trash-strewn beach we bought pineapple sodas and spicy meat pies enhanced by the reefers passed around by the old winos up and down the sand. Continue Reading →

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