Archive | Essays

The Radiance of Pain

Before Now After (Mama, Mummy and Mamma)--Njideka Akunyili Crosby“We’re all just walking each other home.” It’s a phrase that’s been ringing in my ears lately. I don’t remember who said it. I could Google the answer, but I like not knowing, as if the phrase were as common as “sly as a fox” or “out of the frying pan, into the fire.”

I wish it were.

What’s made me remember these words is the pain I’ve witnessed this year. I don’t normally discuss my clientele because I would not be a very trustworthy intuitive if I did. Some colleagues do, of course–usually when they count celebrities among them–but while I understand the impulse and hope everyone is being discussed with their consent, I feel I must adhere to very clear ethics because intuitive work is not regulated though it entails such fragile, precious material–namely, souls. Continue Reading →

The Myth of JT Leroy

leroyIn 2005, JT Leroy died. Technically, of course, JT Leroy never existed. The transgender, HIV-positive, homeless child prostitute-turned-bestselling author was the fabrication of two San Francisco women whose machinations were exposed by journalists in 2005. But during the nine years that Jonathan “Terminator” Leroy “lived,” he presided as the little prince of U.S. literati and glitterati.

In last year’s excellent The Cult of JT Leroy, director Marjorie Sturm exposed the smoke and mirrors of this story, treating it as the country’s biggest hoax this side of War of the Worlds. As a San Francisco local who’d worked with mentally ill homeless people, Sturm had begun the documentary as an earnest homage. BUT upon the revelation that forty-year-old San Francisco resident Laura Albert and her twentysomething sister-in-law Savannah Koop had posed as Leroy (the former woman wrote his books and spoke as him on the phone; the latter posed as him in person), the filmmaker had whipped off her rose-colored glasses to give voice to the many who felt betrayed and manipulated. Continue Reading →

Dance Out the Dawn, Eleanor Rigby

eleanor rigby beatlesI’m not minding how lazy the sun is this time of year. It gives me an excuse to wake a little less aggressively. This morning, I slept until 6:30—nuts in my book—and only rose then because Grace took matters in her own paws and woke me herself. Lest you think she was mean about it, “waking me” means she settled softly into my chest and patted me softly on the cheek. Continue Reading →

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