In Whip Smart, Febos unflinchingly chronicles five years in her early twenties when she was a dominatrix and heroin user. But the book is about so much more than those details. It’s about living a lie—sometimes many lies at once. It’s about lying to yourself. And it’s about discovering truths about yourself in places you never expected.

I’m always interested in how writers’ parents react to secrets revealed in their memoirs—especially when, like me, the writers project fairly clean images to their parents. As far as Febos’s parents knew, her focus those years was on her studies as a creative writing major at the New School, and then at Sarah Lawrence. They knew nothing of her work at the dungeon, nor her drug addiction, until toward the end of the book, when she tells them.

Over dinner, we got to talk about her parents’ reactions to the book—which goes into much greater detail about her work and her drug use than she had when she revealed those things to her parents in person—and much more.

***

The Rumpus:  It might sound cliché or fawning to say that I loved your book, but what I want to convey is that I loved not only the story but also the writing.

Melissa Febos: Thank you!

Rumpus: A memoir like about your years as a dominatrix, in someone else’s hands, might be one of those where you have to trudge laboriously through the exposition until you get to the exciting or tawdry parts. But your writing is so beautiful. I was studying it, going back and back over it. The sentence construction is so great.

Febos: Oh, thank you. I’m sure we’d be hard up to think of a writer who wouldn’t love to hear that, but I like to think that I particularly like to hear that because of the sort of sensational content of it, which could so overshadow the actual writing. Which is not to say that I think it’s genius or anything, but nobody ever talks to me about my writing. They always just talk to me about my spanking.

Rumpus: You studied creative writing undergrad at the New School and then you got an MFA at Sarah Lawrence. Did you know while you were studying that the first book you would publish would be a memoir?

Febos: Oh, my god, no! The thought never crossed my little, drug-addled mind.

Rumpus: What were you thinking it would be that you would publish?

Febos: I started off calling myself a writer when I was five. The hubris started very early. Novels were my bibles. I’m not sure I knew what memoir was, although I probably read some memoirs as a little girl. It’s just that they were indistinguishable to me at that point. Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn’t really have anything to write about, or I didn’t know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural. When I was in college I started writing prose, because a very smart professor asked me what I like to read and I said, “Novels,” and she said, “You should be writing them then.” Memoir never even occurred to me. I think I was afraid of nonfiction and I was afraid of navel-gazing, and of being seen.

Rumpus: Yeah, being seen. I’m as conflicted about that as I am about writing about other people.

Febos: When I was in graduate school for fiction it didn’t occur to me to write memoir until I was doing it.

Rumpus: A lot of people, especially with material that’s dicey, go with autobiographical fiction. It gives you a veil. Did it ever occur to you to go that route?

Febos: It did. I more seriously considered publishing it under a pseudonym than I considered publishing it as fiction. I think the decision to write it as nonfiction happened at the very outset of the process, because the overwhelming impetus for writing this book was to understand what the experience meant, and to override my own reductions and rationalizations, whatever story I had that was not true.  It didn’t sit well with me and I needed to answer that. That’s sort of the reason I write everything. That subject matter is so knotted that I think the veil of fiction that would have protected me from the public also would have obscured what I was trying to get a closer look it. It was hard enough. I already couldn’t see my subject matter clearly, and to further obscure it and give myself that freedom—I’m a hustler, the book is largely about that—if I give myself that trap door to avoid my own experience, I’ll take it every time. I had to pen myself in so that I could really just wrangle the subject matter in a way that was honest.

Rumpus: So you did consider a pseudonym.

Febos: I did. The other reason I didn’t want to fictionalize it is because one of the main points of publishing a memoir in nonfiction was that I wanted to write about what had been a very lonely experience. The books that most saved my life as a kid were the ones that articulated lonely experiences that I had thought were mine alone. I’m always writing to a younger version of myself, or a young woman who is like I was. I want that girl to know that I really existed and that it all went down that way. You know what I mean?

Rumpus: A few writers I know are very against mining their life for material as they are going along. I personally feel like I was sent here by aliens to get it all down, so I am taking mental notes through everything. As you were going about your life as a dominatrix and later attending twelve-step meetings, did it ever occur to you, This would be great material. I’m going to write about this?

Febos: Honestly, no. I don’t think people believe me when I say that sometimes. I understand that, but part of it is dissociation. Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people’s asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn’t have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it. I was in the fantasy. I was selling myself on the fantasy as I was doing it. It never occurred to me. I did take notes, but just because I am a writer. I’ve been a writer since I was five. You don’t have any sort of outlandish, shocking, extraordinary, horrifying experience without writing it down, because I know and knew that you forget things. No matter how outrageous and amazing and extraordinary and seemingly unforgettable an experience is, it’s kind of like a dream. It will erode inevitably, for me.

Rumpus: I remember you writing in the book that you kept a journal.

Febos: Yeah. I saved letters from my boss. There are things in there that are directly transcribed. I was so glad I did that. Sometimes when I was writing the book I wondered if some little writer hobbit part of my brain was back there puppeteering that action. But it really never, on any conscious level, occurred to me that I would write about it. I will say, I thought probably some day there would be an ancillary character in some novel—not in the one I was currently writing—that would be a dominatrix or something.

Rumpus: So you were working on a novel.

Febos: Yeah, I was working on novels as an undergrad.

Rumpus: My number one obstacle is the fear of upsetting and offending my parents by revealing things about me they’d rather not know, or by revealing things about them, my father in particular. I get the sense in the book that your father wasn’t too affected by your admission about what you’d been up to, at the dungeon and with drugs. How did he react to the book?

Febos: My dad had a very hard time with the book in completely unexpected ways. And then I wrote about him having a hard time.

Rumpus: Where’d you write about it?

Febos: I actually wrote about it for Sarah Lawrence Magazine. It was a small venue, so I could choose not to show it to him if I didn’t want to. I ended up showing it to him and it was really meaningful. It’s funny, because he had this incredibly difficult time with the book and then we sort of moved beyond it but not completely, and then I actually set about wanting to very consciously make it up to him. I’m going to write a really nice essay about my dad, I thought. Then of course that didn’t happen. Instead I just told the truth of what was happening in our relationship, which was not at all what I had set out to do.

Rumpus: Oh, I so related to that desire to just write something that flatters your parents, and pleases them. I have that fantasy all the time. For about five minutes. So, you couldn’t fake it.

Febos: I guess the writer in me has more clout than the daughter in me. It wins every fucking time.

Rumpus: I need to choose between being a writer and a daughter. I know that I’m eventually going to be the writer and not the daughter. I’m hoping that I won’t get disowned or I won’t my father’s heart.

Febos: Wow. You probably don’t want more advice.

Rumpus: No, I do!

Febos: Cheryl gave you great advice. I would echo what she said to you: you don’t know how people are going to respond. But I would add to that, that getting your heart broken is not the worst thing and it’s actually quite unavoidable. I think in some ways I had to break my father’s heart and then face that in order to have a real relationship with him.

Rumpus: Right. I don’t have a real relationship with my dad.

Febos: No, and I didn’t either before I published this book. We were okay, meaning I placated him and then resented him for not really knowing me for twenty years. And he resented me and took personally my sluttiness in junior high school. Our relationship was us talking about movies on the surface, and these sort of seething wounds underneath the surface that motored our decisions. When the book came out, it was OUT. I didn’t write about our relationship directly, but I revealed things, I didn’t lie and I didn’t placate him with the narrative.

Rumpus: What about your mother? I love the scene where you try to present your work as a dominatrix to her in psychological terms, because she’s a therapist.

Febos: Yeah, I presented it as, like, this feminist, sociology experiment.

Rumpus: Right, and also as therapy. In the book, she and your dad don’t really react in a big way when you tell them these things. Is that how it really happened? Or was it a choice, to keep your parents’ roles small? And if so, was that to protect them, or because it woudn’t have moved the story forward in an important way?

Febos: You mean why I didn’t include more of how it affected my relationship with them?

Rumpus: Yeah.

Febos: Honestly, I included in the book most of our interactions around the subject, because we avoided it like crazy. I did not talk to them about it. That was it. I think what more I could have said in regard to how it affected our relationships would have come in the form of analysis of their reaction. I didn’t want to do that—to protect them, but also because I don’t think I needed to. I think it was also because that story wasn’t over yet. Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I’d never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

Rumpus: Did they know that you had this book deal?

Febos: Oh yeah, they knew about the whole thing all along.

Rumpus: You reveal a lot more in the book than you had revealed to them when you talked to them. How did they react to the galleys?

Febos: My mother called me at 7am the morning after I had given it to her. I was walking the dog and I was like, “Why are you calling me? You’re not supposed to call me until you finish the book.” Oh, let me preface this by saying that when I gave her the book, I said, “Look Mom, fair warnings, there’s material in here that you don’t already know about that is going to be painful for you to read,” and she said, “Tell me what it is before I read it.” I said, “No, I wrote a book because I couldn’t say it out loud.” Then she insisted,“You have to tell me. I don’t want to be cringing the whole time I’m reading it.” And I thought, Okay. And I said very little but enough that she knew. I said, “The drug use is a lot worse than anything I’ve ever told you about, and there’s some really intense sexual material of me doing submissive sex.” In the end I was grateful to her for that because then it wasn’t the first time we talked about it after she read the book. I wasn’t cringing. She read it in one night.

So she called me the next morning and said, “I stayed up all night reading it. I haven’t slept.” And I said, “Are you sure you don’t want to just wait and talk to me after you’ve processed it a little bit?” But of course she didn’t. I get a little teary sometimes when I talk about this, but she said, “I kept closing the book and turning off the light, and then I had to turn it back on because I needed to know that you were okay.” I said, “I’m okay, I’m right here!” And she said, “I know but the ‘you’ in the book,” which was really sort of raw for me to hear because there is so much that I experienced for the first time through the process of writing the book, because I was so dissociated the whole time.

I think that conversation highlighted the desolation that I experienced. No one had known. That was really painful for a lot people in my life, to know what had been going on when I was in regular contact with them and they had no idea. Then my mom started crying on the phone, and I asked, “What do you think?” And she said, “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever read in my life. I think it’s a masterpiece and I’m so proud of you,” which is amazing; the testament. She’s an amazing woman. We had other awkward conversations about it but—she’s a pretty great lady. My dad was not as easy.

Rumpus: Yeah, what was your dad’s reaction?

Febos: I tried to warn him and he scoffed at me and was insulted that I thought he needed a warning. His line is always, and I think I quoted him saying this in the book, but again he was like, “I’m the cool parent. Of course I can handle it.” I sent him the book and then I didn’t hear from him for like a month. I talked to my mom and I said, “What’s going on?” and she was like, “You should give him some space.”

Rumpus: Are they together? No? They’re friends?

Febos: They’re friends. It was kind of obvious to assume that it was the drugs and the sex that upset him. I wrote about a lot of things that no parent honestly should ever have to read about their kid. If I could have given them an abridged version, I really would have, but they’re not those kinds of parents.

Rumpus: I fortunately don’t have anything even vaguely along those lines to write about; it’s just about my perceptions of things, which are different from those of my parents, and those of a lot of other people in the world I grew up in. Oh, and cheating on my first husband.

Febos: It’s largely the same material I think. Actually, in terms of what mattered to my parents, it wasn’t the drugs or the sex for either of them. More for my mother, but that wasn’t it at all it turned out with my father. It was much more about him. He was so profoundly hurt by my portrayal of him which came as a surprise to me because I commented not at all; he’s barely in it, which he may have also found insulting.

Stephen said something really smart to me over the summer while we were talking about this phenomenon as a writer: he said that even when people tell you “write about whatever you want,” they are never saying “write about the parts of me that I don’t know about.” I think that’s what happened with my dad. He had one narrative in his mind about our relationship during that time, and his role in my life; I didn’t write any judgments of him but I just presented my own experience of it and it conflicted pretty dramatically with his version. I think he felt like I had stolen his memories and revised them. I sort of ruined those memories for him and he had thought that we had this really candid, close, easy, intimate relationship, and I basically shat all over it and said, “You didn’t know anything.” I was writing this story of how I tailored a version of my experience for other people to protect them and to hide behind and then sort of the devastating loneliness of that kind of hiding. What he heard was, “You didn’t see me.”

Rumpus: When you were writing, were you ever thinking, Oh shit, my parents are going to read this? And if you did, did it ever stop you?

Febos: No. It didn’t stop me and I think for a couple of reasons. I mean, one—and I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, because I feel like it makes me sound like an arrogant asshole—but I really think that early on in life, I made a decision to let the writer win, you know?

Rumpus: That’s amazing.

Febos: And to always pick that. I don’t know, it’s funny because there are so many ways in life—and I think it’s true of a lot of writers and certainly true of a lot of women—that we just put ourselves last in line for the things that we want. And I do that in many other ways. I don’t attend tenderly to any of my needs, but I do pick writing over other people, over my hygiene, over dinner. I just made that decision early on and have managed to stick with it. Knock on wood.

So that is one thing. But I think that more so, my wonderful skill of dissociation came in very handy. I care very much what other people think. I’m a total pleaser. I want everyone to like me all the time. I feel like people who don’t feel that way on some level are lying, but particularly female memoirists. We want to be seen and we want to be forgiven. So that occurred to me very early on. I didn’t know enough as a writer to understand why I needed to do this, but I understood in a very gut way that I could not entertain those thoughts of pleasing people and write this book—that it would be a very different book. Without really sort of investigating that instinct, which I’m glad for, I just made a conscious decision to put blinders on and not think about anything and put it all in. And I did. I put everything in. I had to look at the whole picture to see what I needed.

I couldn’t have articulated this process at the time; I just sort of did it instinctually. But now when I talk about this with my students all the time, it’s one of the first things I address in memoir classes—that you have to put it all in because you’re writing your way into the ending of your own story. Even if you think you know what the story is, you don’t until you write it. If you start leaving things out you could leave out vital organs and not know it.

Rumpus: One of the things Nick Flynn said, actually on stage here, was, “You have to get it out and get it on paper before you can know if you need it. Wrestling with it in your brain is not useful.”

Febos: I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That’s why I’m a writer. It’s the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything. Another thing that I tell my students all the time is, for better or worse, no publisher is going to come wrench your story out of your hands before you’re ready to let it go. You will have time to take stuff out. You don’t have to show it to anybody. That’s what I did. I wrote this story. I put everything in and I looked at it and saw what the story was. It was so vastly different from the story I had thought I was writing. Thank god. It was a much better story: interesting, painful, humiliating. Then what I did was I put my mom-goggles on, and I looked at it and said, “Okay, how much is this going to hurt?” and I took out everything that wasn’t necessary that was going to hurt. I did that for everyone, especially the people who I still have relationships with. I measured the potential pain versus its function in the story, and I took it out. I took a lot out. It may not seem like I censored it very much, but I took a lot out that I thought would hurt people that was just being clever or just adorning it, or anything that wasn’t really essential that would hurt people.

Rumpus: In terms of your parents what were you more afraid of them reading about, the dominatrix stuff or the addiction stuff?

Febos: I think the addiction stuff, because I was already sort of outed in my family as a sexual person: as a sexually-adventurous and sexually-conflicted person and sexually-driven person. They already knew that about me. They knew that about me when I was eleven. My parents very consciously tried to provide an environment that would protect me from becoming a drug addict. My father was raised by a violent alcoholic. There was alcoholism in my mother’s family.  I’m half-adopted, and my birth father was a drug addict and alcoholic. So, I think they very consciously made decisions and parented me in a way that was aimed to help save me from that. So, I knew it would be particularly painful and it was, especially for my father.

Rumpus: What’s interesting to me is in a lot of places in the book you say to people that you are not doing sex work, and then there are scenes where there are men getting jerked off. Then there’s a scene where for $1,500 you’re fisting someone’s girlfriend. I’m thinking, Kind of seems like sex work… I wondered if you needed to tell yourself it wasn’t? How do you see it now?

Febos: Oh god. It was absolutely sex work. I knew it then. I know it now. I knew it when I was writing the book. I remember when I was thirteen, I had this excruciating interaction with my mother that really was a precursor to every conversation I depicted in the memoir, where I got into her car—and I’m sure that supposedly I had been hanging out with a friend of mine when really I’d been getting finger-banged behind the mall—but I got in the car and my mother, without looking at me, said, “You smell like sex,” and I said, “I’ve never had sex.” She said, “Don’t kid yourself; you don’t have to have intercourse to be having sex.” I’ve never forgotten that interaction.

I do think that was a narrative trick that I made with writing. The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in—or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things. I made a conscious decision when I was writing that book to depict in real time how I treated it, and how I thought about it, and how I portrayed it to other people, because I wanted the story to be one of change from that to a more honest appraisal, a more accepting appraisal of myself and other people in that world. But I knew, and this turned out to be true, that when people read it, it was going to be very easy for them to think, She’s kidding herself! Look at this cocky little bitch! Because I was, or at least that was the pageantry of it. That I had a really good argument or a spin or I thought I did. But it was largely bullshit. It was for me.

Rumpus: So, do you ever miss the dungeon or any of that?

Febos: No. I mean it’s been a long time now. I missed it for a while. It was very hard to leave. It was a tremendous relief to leave, and I missed it. I think partly it was like flying any nest. You have to separate in a radical way in order to leave. Early on I really cut myself off from that world. Even sexually—those practices—I really just drew a hard line because I had to in order to leave the parts of it I needed to leave. I missed it a lot because I had separated myself from some things that were authentically connected to me and part of my personality. I ended up circling back around to some of that and acknowledging them in a more balanced way. But I dream about it a lot. I dream about it not as much as I dream about shooting heroin, but in a similar way, like really heavy-handed symbols.

Rumpus: Do you think it is going to appear in future work?

Febos: Not for a long time. I said most of what I have to say about it in the book, and then in subsequent discussions of the book, and in discussions about Fifty Shades of Grey, which then restarted the whole conversation. I’m sure my perspective on it will change, but I need more time to get to a new perspective. I just have other things I want to write about.

Related Posts:

• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #13: Cheryl Strayed
• Process Talk
• The Rumpus Interview with Susie Deford
• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #9: Elisa Albert

***

A frequent foil to my good girl image was a friend I’ll call Lilith—after the biblical Adam’s first wife, allegedly demonic in comparison to virtuous-until-the-fall Eve—or “Lily,” for short. (She’d kick my ass if I used her real name.)

Lily once said to me, “Break some rules or something, will you? You’re making me look bad.”

***

Lily didn’t keep it to herself when she had an abortion in her twenties. She knew she’d be shamed for it, but she didn’t seem to give a shit, or if she did, she wasn’t letting on. She needed someone to go with her, or at least someone to bring her home from the hospital so she could be released, so she spoke up and said, “I’m pregnant. I need an abortion. Who’s taking me?” She was on her parents’ insurance still, so they were bound to find out anyway.

Sure enough, afterward, some in her family who knew about it wagged their fingers at her. Lily hung tough; she barked back at them. “Fuck you,” she said. But I could tell it bothered her.

Cut to ten or so years later. In my thirties, I have had two abortions, six years apart. I tell no one, not even Lily, leaving her alone to flap in the breeze of her family’s vilification. I perpetuate the shame—hers, mine, and that of every woman who has ever chosen to terminate an unwelcome pregnancy—with my silence.

For years I told myself I’d withheld that information because it wasn’t anybody’s business, and maybe it wasn’t.

Later I told myself it was because the topic of abortion was unpleasant and difficult, and nobody wants to talk about it. That’s my husband’s take on it too. He was party to an abortion when he was forty, and although he is very glad it got him out of co-parenting with someone he didn’t want in his life any longer, he remains deeply conflicted about having gone through with it. Even to the staunchest of pro-choicers, the reality of abortion, the termination of something—someone?—that had gotten a start, is unfortunate and sad. It’s still so, so crucial to have as an option. It is an option my husband would choose again under the same circumstances, and one I would also choose again. But it is never a happy option, even when it provides great relief.

Whatever my reasons, I’m now of the opinion that I wasn’t doing anyone any favors by keeping quiet. Not Lily. Not the friends who wanted to talk about abortions—the abortions they’d just had, the ones they were agonizing over whether to have. Every time I acted as if I’d had no experience with pregnancy termination myself, I helped perpetuate the stigma, not to mention fear. I missed an opportunity, each time, to help another woman come to terms with that choice—and maybe even make that choice. I withheld information that could have informed someone, or at least comforted her and maybe kept her from feeling alone and like a “bad” girl for something that surely didn’t make her bad.

***

Recently, a nonprofit monologue writing workshop I co-run (tmiproject.org) held a weekend retreat for women. The participants ranged in age from nineteen to seventy-seven. At some point in the weekend, the topic of unplanned pregnancy came up, and nearly every one of the eleven participants had a story. One, against her parents’ wishes, kept a child she’d conceived at sixteen. Many had had legal abortion. The four oldest women confessed to having had illegal abortions in the sixties and early seventies, when those were the only option. One woman in another of our workshops talked about having to postpone her 1973 post–Roe v. Wade abortion after the provider was shot dead in front of the clinic.

It was a discussion that everyone wanted to contribute to, and which inspired those who were still keeping secrets about their own unplanned pregnancies to finally divulge them. The women who’d had illegal abortions shared their stories for the first times in their lives, and were relieved to learn they hadn’t been alone. They were so relieved that they cried and hugged.

The youngest participants had their minds blown. Most notably, one girl, a college junior, said the discussion opened her view on abortion, and the people who had them. “This is really changing my mind,” she said. “I never knew anyone before who’d had an abortion, and I had always had a dim view of people who did.”

Whoa.

Hearing her, I realized a crucial—maybe the most important—reason for talking openly about abortion: young women, first-time voters, need to know real women who’ve had abortions. They need to hear from women who’ve had to have them illegally, so they will be more likely to vote for candidates who won’t send us back to those dark ages, when that was the only way.

Finally, I opened up to the group about my abortions. The retreat was one of the first places I ever did. It was a relief to be a real girl instead of a “good” one, to be like the other women.

***

Alleged “good” girls, like the kind I used to be, are the worst. We are complicit in upholding ridiculous, unrealistic standards to which others ultimately are held. We stand by, pretending to possess neither needs nor unflattering emotions, all the while hanging realer sisters out to dry. We allow them to be vilified for asking for what they rightfully deserve, speaking out when they disagree, daring to take chances, making messy real-life mistakes—including ones that lead to abortion.

And often, we “good” girls are totally full of shit, secretly doing the things the other girls are doing, but never owning up to it. Having abortions of our own, for instance. Before that, acting like the purest of virgins a year into college, when we’ve in fact been sexually active since sixteen.

Imagine the look on my father’s face when he inadvertently learned that I, the perfect daughter, had a diaphragm. (Remember diaphragms?) He and his wife had driven me to a pre-op screening session at Albany Medical Center, near where I attended college, in preparation for a laparoscopy I was about to have. The doctor suspected I had endometriosis.

It hadn’t occurred to me that I might not want my father present in the room when a nurse performed a pre-op interview. I was so convinced of my own shining example, I forgot I had something to hide.

“Have you ever used barrier contraceptives?” the nurse asked.

My father and I seemed simultaneously to stop breathing. I could have lied, but maybe my answer had some important bearing on a decision the doctor might make regarding my surgery. I could try and tell the nurse the truth later, but would there be a later? Would I get that chance? Maybe not.

“Yes,” I answered. My father’s face blanched. His effort to conceal his upset only magnified it. He would never be able to un-hear this. Just breathe, I told myself.

“What kind of barrier contraceptives have you used?” This lady wasn’t going to let me off the hook.

Was I really going to acknowledge in front of my dad that I owned and operated a diaphragm? A diaphragm represented a much greater threat to a late-teen’s father—a man desperate not to have further shattered the illusion of his daughter’s innocence and virtue—than, say, condoms. Condoms take comparatively little thought. They represent impulse. “Okay,” my father might have been able to delude himself if my answer was condoms, “she’s tried sex. But maybe she won’t ever do it again—at least not until she is married to a nice, Jewish man.”

A diaphragm, on the other hand, represented a premeditated and significant investment of one’s babysitting money and a fitting by a doctor—a commitment to future sex.

The truth was, I had a diaphragm before I even had my period, which I didn’t get until I was eighteen. Come to think of it, that was kind of a responsible, good-girl move—making sure my first boyfriend took me to Planned Parenthood for reliable protection. I thank Whoever Is In Charge of the Universe that Planned Parenthood was there for me, because there was no way I’d go to my pediatrician, who’d probably tell my parents, and I didn’t yet have a gyno. At Planned Parenthood, I was able to get protection, no questions asked, confidentially, for very little money.

But I doubt my father saw my choice as a “good” girl move that day. Witnessing his reaction to what really shouldn’t have been too surprising for a normal nineteen-year-old made me even more reluctant to reveal certain truths about myself in the future.

***

That laparoscopy confirmed endometriosis and led me, inadvertently, to my first abortion.

In the years after that operation, I saw many doctors, in New York City, on Long Island, in New Jersey. One told me the endometriosis, combined with the pituitary micro-adenoma I’d developed, would prevent me from ever being able to get pregnant. I’d been divorced from my first husband for a few years when the doctor told me that. Single at the time, I didn’t give much thought to the implication that I’d never be a mother. Instead, I saw my condition as painful but convenient birth control.

A couple of months into dating someone, once our standard-issue New Relationship HIV tests came back negative, we ditched the condoms.

Oops.

When we were sure I was pregnant, there was no question in my mind what I’d do. Even though I was thirty, an age by which I’d once assumed I’d be a mom, I wasn’t feeling very much like a grownup. I made very little money, and lived hand-to-mouth in a tiny East Village hovel. For his part, my boyfriend wasn’t anyone’s idea of a beacon of emotional or financial stability. He was living off of me. We fought all the time, and I’d been waiting for him to save up enough money temping to move out of my tiny tenement. But he kept sabotaging opportunities for work and for apartment leases. He was not daddy material, and I was not mommy material. And I was too “nice” to kick him out.

I didn’t even entertain a moment’s thought of “I can do this on my own.” There was no thought necessary, or even possible; every cell in my body screamed, “GET THIS OUT OF ME.”

It’s not a feeling or thought I’m proud of. It doesn’t at all fit with my “good” girl image. I don’t enjoy the thought of myself as the kind of cretin who couldn’t love a newborn living thing she’d created, regardless of the rest of its parentage. I don’t relish the view of myself as someone lacking even a small vestige of a maternal instinct. But it turns out that’s who I am, and that was my first glimpse into that reality.

I felt strongly about my choice to abort, but I also felt guilty about it. I was deeply conflicted—this was a potential life—but not so conflicted that I’d consider for one minute not going through with it.

Easing my conscience a little was the doctor’s suspicion that the fetus wasn’t viable. Easing it more was the apparent miscarriage that began the day before my scheduled abortion: clotted crimson pouring out of me after a few sharp cramps. I called to ask the doctor whether that meant I could forego the D&C. Then I’d still be a “good” girl who hadn’t had abortion. But since I was at about the eight-week point, he said, the operation was still necessary.

***

In my book, you are only allowed one mistake pregnancy in which your own negligence and/or sheer stupidity play a role. Which is why I was deeply disappointed in myself, and even more ashamed, when I allowed a negligence/stupidity combo to lead me to a second one.

It was 2002, and it was with my 9/11 boyfriend, the guy I clung to after meeting him at a vigil, in Union Square Park following the terror attacks, when it seemed like the world was coming to an end. A guy who was really nice, but who was much younger than I was, not just chronologically speaking, and who lived in his van half the year. And who sort of didn’t know who the Beatles were. Seriously, his reference to the Beatles was, “Oh—I think my step-mother likes them.”

Somehow, in my oxytocin-addled, post–terror attack state of some kind of dementia, I decided it was safe to have unprotected period sex. Never mind that I still had an unbelievably irregular period, with intervals of six, eight, twelve, three weeks in between. I was hardly a candidate for anything vaguely resembling the rhythm method. But, well, you all know how much better sex feels when it’s unprotected—especially for the guy you, a “good” girl, are trying to please. And what’s the chance of fertilization, let alone implantation, when your uterus is violently wringing itself out to the point that you often find yourself doing Lamaze for hours at a time?

How I’d been able to have sex in that condition in the first place is beyond me. Ten years later—three years after a merciful hysterectomy—I have no idea how I did that.

Thanks to my supremely unpredictable cycle, I was eight weeks pregnant again before I figured it out. I didn’t think it was remotely possible. Then I had to get off the N train at 49th and 7th Avenue, halfway through my ride from my boyfriend’s place to mine, so I could puke into a garbage pail on the platform.

I was furious at myself when the faint line appeared in the window of the pee stick. My mind wanted to rely on the line’s weakness as evidence I’d registered a false positive. But my sore boobs knew better. They’d reached a level of soreness that I’d only experienced once before—the last time I’d been pregnant.

Again, there was no question I’d abort. That GET THIS OUT OF ME feeling was back. I called the same doctor who’d performed my D&C six years before and tearfully, shamefully pleaded with the receptionist, “I’m pregnant AND I NEED NOT TO BE.”

Again, my fucked-up plumbing conspired to help me feel a little bit less guilty about not only choosing to terminate but also feeling DESPERATE to do so, heartless, non-maternal alien that I seemed to be: the reason the pee-stick line was so faint, and the reason I’d been experiencing sharp pains in my lower right pelvis, was that this pregnancy was ectopic—specifically, lodged in my right fallopian tube, apparently common for women with endometriosis.

I had no choice, this time, but to abort, so I could feel a little less bad about it. I also didn’t have to have it done surgically this time; ectopic pregnancies are eradicated through chemical abortion.

The next day, at the doctor’s office, he injected me with the chemotherapy drug methytrexate, and then, using a speculum, inserted some ground-up ulcer medicine into my uterus. Only a few hours later, my body would begin to expel the embryo.

“It’ll be like bad period cramps,” the doctor explained. I wondered what that would mean for me, someone whose period cramps had always gone to eleven to begin with.

Still, I didn’t cancel dinner plans I had with my family at a restaurant in the East Village for the next evening. I didn’t want to tell them what was going on with me, that that night as we were dining, I was aborting the next generation, that I wasn’t the “good” girl they thought I was. I could have said I was having a bad period, but they knew that pretty much all my periods were bad, and that frequently I pushed myself through them to show up for work or other obligations. I couldn’t imagine canceling the plans, having them come up to my apartment before or after they all had dinner without me. My mother would get hyper-concerned and grill me about when was the last time I went to see the doctor about my endometriosis, and I didn’t want to lie to her, or raise any suspicion. So I went to dinner. Writhing in my seat, excusing myself to go to the bathroom often, I went through three super-maxi pads.

***

Recently, I had lunch with my mother in my hometown, where she still lives. Over seafood salads, we caught up and then moved on to talking about people in our lives. She said she’d just learned that a close friend’s daughter was unexpectedly—and unhappily—pregnant for the second time, but only by a few weeks.

“She’s terrified of having to have another abortion,” my mother said of her friend’s daughter, “and she’s afraid her insurance won’t cover the cost.”

I silently wrestled with myself as my mother told of this woman’s anguish. I wanted to tell my mother to tell her friend that, especially at such an early phase, her daughter could probably have a chemical abortion like I’d had the second time. It would probably be much more affordable, even if her insurance didn’t cover it. It would be less traumatic.

I wanted desperately to help put another woman at ease, and to let her know there were other possibilities, other choices. But if I spoke up about it, my mother would ask how I knew, and it would be difficult for me not to tell her it was because I’d had one. Telling the women at the writing retreat was one thing. Telling my mother was another entirely.

Finally, I came down from my high, high horse.

“You know, chemical abortion is an option these days, when it’s early on,” I said.

My mom looked at me with an expression that said, “How do you know?”

“I had one,” I admitted.

“You had an abortion?” she asked, clearly in disbelief. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?” She seemed to feel betrayed.

“I just . . . couldn’t,” I said. “But I’m telling you now.”

There was a pause.

“I’ve actually had two,” I said.

She asked a few questions. Then it got quiet.

My mother looked sad. Not only had she been disillusioned about her “good” girl. She’d just learned that I had been able to get pregnant. I imagine that must have been hard for her. She’d wanted me to give her grandchildren. The surgeon who’d performed my hysterectomy assured me that the condition my uterus was in when he removed it—the combination of severe endometriosis and extreme adenomyosis—indicated I’d never have been able to carry a baby to term. That had helped me to make peace, at the time, with not really wanting to have kids. I was off the hook.

And I suppose the knowledge that I couldn’t have them helped my mother make peace with the lack of progeny coming from my very compromised womb, whether I wanted them or not. For her to learn I was capable of getting pregnant, even if I didn’t seem equipped for staying pregnant—it seemed to, in rapid succession, raise and dash some hope in her.

But then, a few minutes later, the topic shifted. We were done with the revelation that Sari, the “good” girl, had been no better than the alleged “bad” girls, and we were on to the ins and outs of chemical abortion.

“It’s really not so bad,” I said. “It’s kind of like a bad period.”

I was offering information that could put my mother’s friend’s daughter at ease, informing her of another option, in case she needed it. Instead of protecting my insidious “good” girl image, I was using the truth of my real, very human experience to help someone else. So what if that also meant my mother’s friend would know. And her daughter. And whomever else my mother chose to tell—my mom’s a bit of a yenta.

“By the way,” I added, “she probably won’t want to, like, go out for dinner the next night.”

I started to feel good—a different kind of good—relieved of a tremendous burden, and useful.

***

This essay is excerpted from Get Out of My Crotch: Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, edited by Kim Wyatt and Sari Botton. 

Related Posts:

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• Get Out of My Crotch!
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• Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
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Actually, this column was born out of a burning desire to get Stephen Elliott and Shalom Auslander together so they could indulge me in some kind of Talmudic debate over just how much editorial discretion and compassion to extend to parents with whom you have difficult relationships. (I remain determined to make this happen some day!)

Now there’s a competing desire: to gather a panel of three members of the hyper-literary Roiphe/Roth clan, and have them hash out before me the imperatives – and perils – of writing about family.

I’m referring specifically to: 1) Marco Roth, an N+1 founder and editor, and author of the excellent recently published memoir, The Scientists: A Family Romance; 2) Anne Roiphe, Roth’s aunt, and the author many books including the compelling family saga memoir 1185 Park Avenue; and 3) Emily Carter, Roiphe’s eldest daughter (one of Carter’s sisters is cultural critic Katie Roiphe), and the author of the wonderful, largely autobiographical story collection, Glory Goes and Gets Some.

Over the course of the past year, I confess, I’ve become utterly fascinated with this family and the way they handle writing about blood relatives, including one another. Disagreements naturally arise over conflicting accounts of events. Feelings inevitably get hurt. In the past, at least one person got disowned. But in the present, for the most part, despite the assorted conflicts and bruises, they all seem supportive of each other’s right to their version of the truth. And they still gather for holidays, public readings and other occasions.

Here’s the Reader’s Digest version of the ways in which their stories have intersected: When Anne Roiphe was disowned in the 1960s or 1970s for writing autobiographical novels that upset her father and other relatives, she probably didn’t anticipate her own child later writing autobiographical fiction that would upset her. Then, in 2000, Emily Carter’s Glory Goes and Gets Some – initially labeled a memoir by its first publisher – portrayed a very Roiphe-like character as a bourgeois, controlling Jewish mother, and caused a short-lived rift between Roiphe and Carter. Soon, though, mother forgave daughter, and said she respected her right to write whatever, and however, she wanted.

That same year, Roiphe revealed in her memoir, 1185 Park Avenue that there was evidence to suggest her brother Eugene – Marco Roth’s father – may have been secretly gay or bisexual, and contracted the AIDS that eventually killed him not in the way he insisted – via an accident with a contaminated needle in the blood lab where he worked as a hematologist – but “in the more usual way.” This revelation, never otherwise communicated to Roth before a galley of his aunt’s memoir landed on his Brooklyn doorstep, blindsided him, and ultimately led him to try and set the record straight with a memoir of his own.

The Scientists, Roth’s resulting smart, sometimes poignantly funny memoir, turned out quite different from the revenge screed he’d initially imagined. The book recounts the many years he spent trying to make sense of his father’s motivations, and to determine whether he led a secret other life. He grills his mother. He speaks to his father’s closest colleagues. After those efforts turn up little conclusive evidence, Roth, while pursuing a Ph.D. in comparative literature, turns to books – the ones his scholarly esthete father introduced him to – for clues. In the end, (spoiler alert) Roth’s mother – who’d objected to her son writing the memoir, but has made peace with it – comes clean about having known her husband had been sexually involved with men.

Whew.

I recently got to chat with Roth about all this at a café in Chelsea. (Incidentally, he is the second member of my dream panel with whom I’ve spoken. Last year, I sat down with his cousin, Carter, for this column.)

***

The Rumpus: I feel like I really want to get you, Emily and Anne in a room and just talk about writing about family, because it’s something I’m forever struggling with, and it’s also something you all have dealt with from different angles. I mean, first you have Anne getting disowned by her father and various other family members. That’s compelling to me because I have this father who has been sort of silently, obliquely threatening to disown me my entire life. He has a history of disowning family members, like his father and his sister. Bear in mind, though, that disownership in my family doesn’t mean what it does in yours, because we really don’t have any money. It’s more like…

Marco Roth: Like people not talking to you?

Rumpus: Yes, it’s like a torn lapel—“I have no daughter…”

Roth: “You’re dead to me…”

Rumpus: Exactly. Perpetual shiva. The underlying threat is: Do the wrong thing and you can get cut off. You also nearly got disowned by your father at one point, for initially choosing to attend Oberlin instead of Columbia. Which was kind of ironic, in light of your parents giving you Free To Be…You and Me. I had that record, too, and got the same mixed message of “Be whatever you want! No! Do what I want you to do, or you’ll get disowned!”

Roth: Aha, so you also lived with that paradox.

Rumpus: Yes! I have a feeling a lot of other kids did, too. Then Emily wrote a not entirely flattering character very much like her mother in Glory Goes and Gets Some, but then Anne forgave her, acknowledging that this is what writers do. Next, you have an issue with Anne writing about your father in the way that she did – and not warning you. But then you go and write about a lot of stuff about Anne.

Roth: Right.

Rumpus: How did you reconcile that?

Roth: I think by the moment that I was writing, there was a record of family writing about family. I understood that nobody could really have the expectation of remaining hidden on that side, on the writers’ side of my family. For my mother it was a different story.

For writing about Anne, I felt that the only thing that I could do as a writer was try to be as fair as I knew how, to her and what she was going through, or what I thought she was going through. I had real ambivalence in that I loved her a lot, I still do. She’s been important as an influence in my development as a writer, and my development as a person. Her late husband was great to me in lots of ways. In the book, I wanted to conjure as much of that ambivalence as possible. I had the sense that it’s not always the case that two betrayals make a right. But I didn’t feel that I was betraying anything in her case. She knew what I thought about her memoir. I had said to her, “I wished you had written something more like Henry James.” I think her response to my book has been very heartening for me, because in some ways she feels vindicated. I guess I would have preferred for her first memoir that she had at least talked to me first. Or, not written the book.

Rumpus: Well, that wasn’t going to happen.

Roth: My wife said this funny thing: “Now I understand that in your family you have to write a book in order to be taken seriously as a human being.” And that is sad, and true. And we probably could do a better job as a family not having to write books in order to consider each other as human beings.

Rumpus: Everyone seems to need to publicly tell their version of things. It’s not enough to talk to each other. Although it’s probably because it wasn’t easy to talk to each other. I relate to that – I sometimes feel like I need to tell my story to the world because I’m not really being heard by the other people in the story.

Roth: Yeah, there was such a weight of oppression and such a code of what you could and couldn’t talk about, especially between my father and Anne. There were so many taboo topics that could lead to explosions and you just didn’t know what they were going to be. They would have a period of détente, but then my father would read one of her books that she was working on and correct a factual error – she would get some science term wrong – and this would bring up every instance of their sibling rivalry where she was feeling that he had lorded over her, even though he was the younger brother. And he would feel that she was always luring him in and then trapping him into doing something that would betray himself. It became clear to me only after I finished the book that they really suffered a lot together, and they had an alliance that was flawed from the beginning because there just wasn’t enough love in the family to go around, and they were fighting over the little scraps that were thrown from the table. But they also got each other through it. And to listen to Anne talk about my father after I published my book, I understood a side of their relationship – that she still has these conversations with him even though he’s dead. So for her that loss is really extreme and she had to deal with it in some way. And the way that she knows how to deal with that is by writing. And writing books is one of the ways that human beings deal with loss, especially when you don’t have religious consolation available. Therapy will only take you so far.

Rumpus: So after writing and publishing your book, do you have a different feeling about Anne having written 1185 Park Avenue?

Roth: What bothered me about 1185 Park Avenue was the way that it functioned as an event in my life and my family life—and I write about this. It wasn’t just a book. I felt that I was somehow required to act. I felt that I was this mediating figure between my aunt’s side of the family and my father’s side of the family. I kind of romantically cast myself as the go-between at a certain point.  And my mom somehow completely internalized my father’s will to privacy, but also his off-the-cuff critiques of Anne’s writing. So I felt like my mother was just kind of becoming my father when Anne’s book came out. I was like, Somebody has to take a more reasoned approach to this. Also, I was like, Well actually nobody in this situation is really thinking about me. And I wondered, Do they even know who I am? Do they imagine that I couldn’t handle the news that my father might have been bisexual?  That I somehow needed to find out about in this indirect way?  Did they think I was gay?

There was so much tiptoeing around me at the same time that all this stuff was happening very publicly, that I just thought, Do I exist here? and I kind of carried that, thinking, Maybe this book was written to kind of write me out of existence. I had a fantasy of myself as a ruthless person who’d be like, Okay, this whole family drama is dead to me. But ultimately, that wasn’t me. There are people who are very good at disconnecting themselves and becoming other people, and separating from their family lives and going on. They change their names, they become someone else entirely, maybe out west. But I wasn’t ruthless enough, probably to my benefit.

And I wanted to write about the fantasies that were running around in our family.

Rumpus: So you initially felt vengeful, but then something shifted?

Roth: I really wanted to get out of that cycle in our family where somebody’s taking revenge on somebody for some slight that happened thirty years ago, and the only way to assert one’s existence is by climbing over the body of an unfortunate sibling, or with a fellow family member, and you end up even unconsciously rejoicing in the other person’s unhappiness and being like, I am happy because I can see how unhappy these other people are.

There really needed to be some way to break this unprecedented situation where several generations of writers were writing against each other and with each other.

Rumpus: I met you last year at an Emily Books event at Word in Brooklyn, where your cousin, Emily Carter read, and then you interviewed her onstage. You were there, she was there, your aunt was there – you were all there in that small room, despite the various disagreements and hurts. In one scene in The Scientists, you go to Anne’s apartment to discuss with her your misgivings about her book, like a civilized human being. Then you write your book, and maybe Anne had some issue with it, but everybody is still in the family.  There’s no “You are dead to me.”

Roth: I guess that’s the promise of a kind of psychoanalytic liberal culture where we’re supposed to be like, We know that we all treat each other horribly but at least we can talk about it to some extent. When we couldn’t talk about things directly, the writing space always existed. But it’s not like everybody should grow up to write books about their family, and everything that’s wrong with their family, and this is the way of dealing with it. There is something to be said for the openness to form, and literary form because it forces you to actually think about the other person, and their motivations, and to try to see them from all sides and to really write about them not as caricature.

Rumpus: Right, consider them as whole human beings with feelings.

Roth: Yeah, and that’s the ethical dilemma for the writer of memoirs. I know in her interview with you, Emily talked about how you can tell that certain memoirs are written as revenge pieces, and there is a kind of sadistic glee that the reader can get from this. But then there are also the memoirs that are really acts of conversation — thwarted conversation.

Rumpus: Did you strongly consider not writing a memoir? Incidentally, your aunt sort of subtly tried to discourage you from all this, from being a writer.

Roth: She’d say things now and then like, “Oh, the men in our family—we used to have men in our family who made money. What happened to those people? Why don’t you become one of those people?” And also, why didn’t I go do good in the world like my father did. These are things that I’m still in conversation with myself about.

Rumpus: No, no, no, I feel like writing a memoir is doing good in the world. Memoir gets such a bad rap and I think part of it is because there are such trashy memoirs—celebrity memoirs. But I get so much out of reading them. I find so much identification and comfort in them. I think they’re worth writing and reading. So I guess I’m saying you have done something good in the world. It was a worthwhile pursuit! Are you still having ambivalence about that? About whether publishing a memoir is a worthwhile, or honorable?

Roth: I think I’ll always have that. That said, I think you’re right, that the contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it’s a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone. I wanted to write this as an education memoir.

Rumpus: It really is. I’m an embarrassingly poorly read English major, and I found myself making lots of notes.

Roth: Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people’s relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn’t make it good or bad, it’s the execution. I think what we’re now seeing is that there is this also the investigative memoir that is developing and being pursued more, and it’s an interesting genre to be working in.

Rumpus: So, when you were finished writing, did you show the book to Anne before publishing? Or your mom?

Roth: I showed the submitted draft to my mom.

Rumpus: Did you give her any kind of permission to nix any of it if it made her uncomfortable?

Roth: No, I didn’t. I asked her to read it and tell me what she thought, but that was it. I mean, she was uncomfortable with the whole thing, but she allowed it to go ahead. I didn’t really didn’t want her to have control over the creative process or be like, “Could you find some way to write this without narrating our conversation when you threw the wineglass at the wall again?” I just couldn’t do that, because the story requires that, and I didn’t want to open her up to that game of disappointment which is something that Anne actually used to do, where I think she’d send books to my father and say, “Is there anything you want taken out?” and he’d be like, “Yeah, this part,” and she’d be like, “What?! I’m not taking that one out.” At that point it seems to become unnecessarily sadistic.  So, I did ask my mom to read it. She had some factual corrections. Like, the ceilings were actually twelve feet not fourteen feet, you know. She also told me useful information like how much they paid for the apartment in 1969, this kind of stuff. But then I also realize there are things that we remember very differently.

Rumpus: How did you handle those?

Roth: Some things weren’t so divergent. What was interesting to me was how much consensus there was; there were things where she was like, “Oh I remember this exactly the way that you remember this.” But there were other moments where she said—particularly with my father’s death, she was like, “It’s exactly the way you describe it, but it wasn’t a seizure,” and I was like, “What was it? What would you call it if you agree that it was exactly the way I described it?” So she clearly had some other narrative that she needed to have, and yet she could agree that the description was accurate. Fortunately there wasn’t anything where we parted ways about what actually happened, or the order of events.

Rumpus: There’s a writer in Woodstock, Martha Frankel. She has a memoir called Hats and Eyeglasses about her family history of gambling, and gambling addiction. When she was done with it she sent it to her sister and said, “Please read this and make sure I didn’t get anything wrong, and let me know if there’s anything you object to.” And her sister called her and said, “It’s all bullshit. But I don’t have a problem with any of it.” It really is amazing how we can all remember things so differently. By the way, yours is one of the few memoirs I’ve read recently where there wasn’t a disclaimer in the beginning that “this is as close to the truth as I remember, and I’ve blurred people’s identities.”

Roth: Well certain identities were blurred, in fact, largely for a combination of editorial and legal reasons, but I don’t think I was ever asked to put a disclaimer on it, and I think it goes without saying that this is the way that I remember it. When memories are fuzzy or uncertain, I am very careful in the book to say that I’m not exactly sure what the mechanism is by which I remember this. Like the story about my father, how he told me he had AIDS. I mean, there are four versions of this because I’m not one hundred percent certain.

Rumpus: And there are different versions of how he gave you different books and what gift wrapping they were in.

Roth: Right, like, I keep thinking my father gave me Turgenev, and then I realize at some point, Oh, this is a false memory. I mean, that’s one of the things that interests me about memoir. It should be as much about how we remember, and that includes false memories, and the realization that one is having a false memory. That’s the kind of an interesting way of layering the whole experience of recollection.

Rumpus: So, back to your mom. Are you estranged from her? It seemed that way toward the end.

Roth: No. I mean, we’re estranged from each other in the sense that we have a very difficult time talking about the things that are really important, and that was true during my childhood and that was true when I was writing the book. We’re actually getting better at it. I have had trouble calling her, she didn’t have trouble calling me.

Rumpus: The portrayal of your mother is not entirely flattering. I mean, it’s just very real. And I appreciated that you put your difficulty with her out there. That’s the biggest challenge for me – putting some of my difficulties with my father out there. But writing about that is the only way I know how to make sense of it for myself, and apparently for other people, because on the occasions when I have put that stuff out there, I’ve gotten a tremendous response from people who could identify. I just think these things are important to write about, because they’re not just about us, the people writing. Like, in my case, there are so many daugthers of my generation who are having the same difficulties with fathers of my dad’s generation. It feels so worthwhile exploring but, it’s hard to get them to see it that way.

Roth: But you published a couple of essays with him in them.

Rumpus: I wrote them before I realized what his reaction would be.

Roth: How did he respond?

Rumpus: Oh, he’s still freaking out, five years later. What happened was, I’d been afraid to write about this stuff, I’d sensed that he would have a hard time with it. And then one day he said to me, “What are you waiting for?  Why don’t you just write already?”  And he didn’t know what I was thinking of writing but he said, “Why don’t you write something about your crazy old man?”

Roth: Oh…

Rumpus: Yeah. And I thought, Wow, he’s giving me permission.

Roth: He was really asking for it. He has no right to complain.

Rumpus: When I told him I was going to have one piece in particular published, in the New York Times, and I told him what it was about, he didn’t really hear me say what it was about. All he heard was, “My daughter’s going to have a piece in ‘Modern Love!’”

Roth: That’s this weird, great irony of Jewish families. It’s like, “She’s gonna be in the New York Times!” My mother, who’d objected to my book, would call me up and be like, “So-and-so called me to say that they saw your, the review in the Times!” There’s this kind of combination of kvelling and separation from content.

What I liked about the pieces you wrote about your father, is you fit them in the comic register.  And in some ways, until something terrible happens, it is a comedy, especially because comedy has traditionally been about fear of embarrassment. Now my family’s story would have been comic but it actually is a very classic tragedy, in that my father did not really come to terms with himself as a bisexual. Who knows whether he might have gotten AIDS anyway if he were out about it? But because of the levels of secrecy, who knows the kinds of people he was sleeping with? Who knows whether there was a regular lover? We haven’t found one. Sometimes I would fantasize that there was one, and I could find that person, and learn more. But my story follows a very classic tragic paradigm in which you learn things too late for them to be of any use, and by keeping silent about the thing that you’re terrified of, you bring it about – and even worse. It misses more my mother’s tragedy, which is that if my mother didn’t want me to write this book, she had a really easy way, when I was 24, to prevent me from ever writing this book.

Rumpus: Which was…

Roth: …to just tell me. The book exists because she couldn’t do that. I think she honestly felt that what happened was not my business, and the tragedy is that by taking that approach she made it impossible for us to have a certain kind of relationship that she wanted. She never somehow put together like, “Oh, like, I can be friends with my adult son, but only if I’m honest with him about the choices that I’ve made in my life, because otherwise how is he going to trust me and talk about the choices that he’s making in his life.” And so, we had these kinds of conversations where we’d talk about everything but ourselves. But I could stand this for only about half an hour, and then it would drive me crazy.

Rumpus: So, ultimately, you needed to write the book not only despite her fears and apprehension, but because of them.

Roth: You know, I would gladly protect my mother from some evil man on the street if there was somebody who wanted to do her any kind of injustice. I would be there as much as I could. But there are certain things that I can’t protect her against. I can’t protect her against the past, and I can’t protect her against her own feeling of vulnerability over these things.

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If your answer is 2), we’ve got a couple of links for you.

New York Magazine has a list of churches, synagogues, community centers and organizations – like God’s Love We Deliver, a meals-on-wheels organization that brings food to home-bound people with AIDs and other serious illnesses.

And over at The Awl, Emily Gould has an interview with the woman who coordinates meal prep and delivery for the soup kitchen at Greenpoint Reformed Church. In it, she links to Occupy Sandy’s pages on volunteering and donating for the holiday.

Here, you can learn about volunteering at Occupy Sandy’s big Thanksgiving dinner for survivors at St. Marks Church in the East Village.

And if you can’t make it tomorrow, you can go here to chip in for the dinner.

If your answer is 1), we have no advice for you.

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But as someone whose family has been gravely affected, I remain acutely aware of it, and I’m inclined to remind everyone else. This shit is serious. Like, people have been dying.

The other day I posted here on The Rumpus about the post-Hurricane Sandy relief effort, with links to places you can donate and volunteer. Here’s a little update:

1. There are some great lit fundraisers to attend:

- Sackett Street Writers has a list of events, including a stellar one this Saturday, 11/17, at the Powerhouse Arena, which was badly hit. It features Jennier Egan, Jonathan Franzen, Sarah Vowell, Paul Auster, Pete Hamill, Teju Cole and many others.

- This one, December 2, hosted by Gigantic Sequins magazine, raises money for the Ali Forney Center, a Chelsea-based residence for homeless LBGTQ teens, which was destroyed in the storm.

2. IMO, skip the Red Cross, and donate to Occupy Sandy instead. Although it’s widely suggested that those who can’t volunteer or deliver much-needed supplies instead give to the Red Cross, there are so many horror stories about people and places the Red Cross isn’t getting to – but that Occupy Sandy is.

Occupy Sandy is a group made up of Occupy Wall Street members who, in a feat of astounding coordination and organization, are working tirelessly to reach those ignored by FEMA, the Red Cross, the New York City Housing Authority and other key organizations.

It’s a good thing they are. There are elderly and children holed up in projects in Coney Island, shivering with no electricity, heat or plumbing. Many of them are without food, they’ve run out of their prescriptions, and they’re shitting in buckets. There are others stranded in the Rockaways, on Staten Island, in New Jersey, and elsewhere, too. Occupy Sandy is trying to help these people.

And so, going forward – in addition to shopping for garbage bags, tampons, tuna cans, etc. to give to groups driving down to help with the effort – I am donating what spare money I can scrounge to Occupy Sandy.

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They are freezing in their houses and apartments, or taking it day by day in makeshift shelters.

Most of my immediate family members – residents of Long Beach, New York – are among them. When the storm hit, the ocean literally crashed through my mother’s apartment building, filling it with salt water up to the second floor. My sister’s house was flooded from two directions – the ocean and the bay. Oh, and the ocean ate their cars. With most of the town still without power, no one in my family can go home for a long time.

All this to say, people still very much need help! The relief effort still needs volunteers, supplies, and money, and there are still many opportunities for providing all of the above.

According to an article on The Watershed Post – a great, smart source of local news where I live now, in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills – the best way to help, especially if you are too far away to volunteer, is to donate money to relief organizations like The Red Cross.

But there are also more interactive ways to help, including some cool fundraising events. Over at nymag.com, there’s a regularly updated list of nightlife and cultural events raising funds for Sandy relief, including this literary one:

“Defiance: A Literary Benefit to Rebuild Red Hook
” Littlefield; 11/14 at 7 p.m.; 622 Degraw St., nr. Fourth Ave., Gowanus; 718-855-3388
. An all-star lineup of literary types and the people who love them convene for Restore Red Hook, dedicated to raising funds for embattled businesses in the area. $50 gets you a lineup of Kurt Andersen, musicians Steve Earle and Stew, and writers Joseph O’Neill, Sam Lipsyte, Rivka Galchen, Phillip Lopate, Chuck Klosterman, Philip Gourevitch, Meghan O’Rourke, Deborah Baker, and Robert Sullivan. Tickets available Littlefield website.”

Some members of Occupy Wallstreet have put together a coordinated relief effort called Occupy Sandy. Their webpage, interoccupy.net/occupysandy, has useful links to information about volunteering, locating shelters, and donating money. They’ve even created a Sandy “wedding registry” on Amazon where you can order things like flashlights and garbage bags and batteries and other key relief items, to be delivered directly where they’re needed. (At last, an instance in which I have no qualms about ordering from Amazon.) I love the last line of the registry description: “This couple has requested no gift wrap.”

MoveOn.org is accepting donations on behalf of a number of organizations, including New York Communities for Change, New Jersey Food Bank, Island Harvest and Red Hook Initiative.

And here are a few I’m plugging because they are close to my heart – and because they benefit my decimated adjacent hometowns (I grew up in both) of Long Beach and Island Park, New York:

This one benefits residents of Long Beach. This one lets you chip in for Thanksgiving meals for Long Beach residents affected by the storm.

This one and this one help raise money for relief in Island Park, the little town where I spent most of my childhood, and where, after the surrounding water came up about eight feet, people have lost pretty much EVERYTHING. And this one, also benefitting Island Park, offers tee shirts bearing an illustration of the building my mother lives in – well, the building she will hopefully live in again after about six to eight months of repair.

Photo by Avrohom Pearl Photography

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The people in Al-Anon were “addict addicts,” who needed others in the worst possible way and yet would counterintuitively go for only the most unavailable, most uninterested, meanest people around. I, of course, did not see myself that way—I, who was addicted to alcohol not by mouth but by nose, specifically on the breath of a difficult man.

Joey, my friend in AA, suggested I try his meetings instead.

“I’m not an alcoholic,” I pointed out.

“Here’s what you do,” he said. “Lock yourself in a room with a case of Jack Daniel’s and don’t come out until it’s all gone. Then go directly to AA.”

I thought about it. While I was at it, I might try writing, too. I’d always wanted to try writing drunk. I imagined it would free me from my crippling, good-girl inhibitions.

I couldn’t, though. I’d sworn off drinking nearly four years before, ostensibly for holistic health reasons. But also for a guy named Matt. I kept my vow of sobriety as I moved on to Jimmy, and then to Michael. How on earth would these poor men stay on the wagon without my selfless support?

That right there is what kept me hooked. How vital I imagined I was to another’s well-being. What power I could have. All while appearing saintly and superior. Trade that in for the occasional glass of wine? No way. This was much more intoxicating.

Except the buzz never lasted long. In a matter of time, each boyfriend would return to drinking, and I’d feel like a failure for my inability to prevent that. The relationship would bust apart—sometimes for a while, sometimes for good.

 ***

Michael and I went back and forth a few times over the years. Of all my men, Michael had the hardest time staying sober, and I had the hardest time walking away from him. A long-haired musician with handsome features, he was always surrounded by women and had difficulty being faithful. He reminded me of my grandfather, the original drunk in my life, alternately affectionate and icy, and unfaithful to my grandmother.

Pappa could put away a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red a day. I knew this because I worked for him at his Seventh Avenue sportswear business. When my cousins heard I’d started working there, they joked, “What do you do, pour scotch all day?” That was one of my jobs. It started at 10:30 am. He’d ask me to wash a glass, grab some ice, and pour some Johnnie. I did that over and over until it was time to catch the train home to Long Island.

I knew that smooth, perfumey, malty smell so well. I had been inhaling it since I first sat on Pappa’s lap as a little girl. It simultaneously tantalized and lulled me. Michael’s breath was infused with vodka rather than scotch, but it worked.

My last go-round with Michael, beginning in the fall of 2000, could have been avoided. It’d been five years since I’d seen him, and in my mind, whatever appeal he had—the powerful sway he once held over me—was long gone. I thought I’d finally learned my lesson. But it turned out I had overestimated my recovery from this particular addiction.

 ***

We made plans on the phone to meet at his band practice in a rehearsal space off Sixth Avenue in the West Thirties. His deep baritone voice had previously bemused me, but now it came with the memory of the way he’d get by the end of most nights—the verbal nastiness followed by incoherence, followed by his nodding off midsentence after so many beers and vodka shots. Not to mention the memory of his hitting me. It was hard to believe I ever wanted to be anywhere near that.

I didn’t even think of the sex, the amazing sex, Michael’s specialty. It eventually fell by the wayside anyway. Every time we’d get together again, the sex would be there for a while, and it would be good. He knew how to make me feel just the right combination of beautiful, special, sexy—even if I saw myself as a mousy good girl. Probably because I was a mousy good girl. But once the sex wasn’t new anymore, his drinking would pick up. He’d lose interest and eventually switch his focus to another fawning fan of his band, another mousy good girl desperate to catch a glimpse of her inner sexpot in the mirror of Michael’s flattering attentions.

I was getting together with Michael that night, I honestly believed, to clear the air after so many years of silence following a fight we’d had. I’d gotten sick of his shit and moved on to someone else, and he had hung up on me. I figured five years had passed. We’d known each other since we were kids. We had close friends in common. Enough already.

Okay, maybe I was also interested in trying on—and showing off—the mantle of just how over him I was. I was thirty-five and, yes, on the rebound from a relationship with another alcoholic—one not nearly as far gone as Michael.

The attraction/repulsion ratio shifted the tiniest bit inside the rehearsal space. I was put off by the sight of the forty-ounce Budweiser Michael swigged at every break, in every song. The man was thirty-seven now. He came from Upper East Side affluence. Time to stop posing as a kid from the streets of Chicago, where he went to college. Realizing he was still stuck in that groove made me feel sorry for him. In that detail alone there was danger for me.

He smiled the warmest, most welcoming smile when I entered the studio. It was probably the nicest reception I’d gotten from him in the more than twenty years I’d known him. I felt something inside me, my resolve maybe, loosen and resettle at a slightly different angle.

Remarkably, despite his continued drinking, Michael looked good. He still had some of his summer tan. He was fit—an indication that he was likely still rising at five most mornings to get on his exercise bike and sweat out the rest of the booze from the night before. He still wore his black, corkscrew hair long. It swung back and forth each time he rocked on his feet to the music. He caught my eye, once, twice, again, again, smiling warmly each time, and that’s when I started to feel it: the love.

In that moment I was of the opinion that it was a friendly love, the innocent love of acceptance and mutual forgiveness between two old friends who met as teens and were something like siblings before becoming lovers.

One potent ingredient of that love was pity. Unfortunately, that night I didn’t recognize what a slippery slope that presented for me. It was a key component of my attachment to one beautiful mess after another, this feeling sorry for them. It nudged me to absolve them of all responsibility and opened the door for me to wrest control. It was a subtle, unspoken transaction. My internal superhero emerged from the shadows to earn credit for saving them, whether or not they wished to be saved. Often they stated their preference not to be, which had the opposite of the desired effect: I only became more insistent. Do not try to stop me.

Even though I was feeling warmly toward Michael at the rehearsal space, I still thought I was safe. But then we went—where else?—to a bar in his neighborhood. I was not drinking, a habit I still maintained post-Jimmy. I’d assigned myself the role of the nondrinker girlfriend to drinker boyfriends, apparently even when I no longer had a boyfriend.

At the bar, Michael drank one glass of house white after another. He said he’d recently replaced vodka with wine, to good effect—he didn’t get completely blotto. That was something he’d figured out after an unsuccessful stint in rehab.

Then a strange thing happened. Michael told me about the girlfriend he was involved with when he went to rehab—Sheila, a drug and alcohol counselor who had driven him to the rehab facility in the lush hills of the Hudson Valley and then dutifully showed up to get him at the end of his stay with the can of Foster’s he’d requested. As he relayed this story, Michael became visibly and audibly tipsy. He pronounced a few words just slightly incorrectly. His eyelids got heavier. As he got drunker, I got illogically, emotionally intoxicated myself—most likely a by-product of my competitive feelings toward Sheila. She brought him beer after his time in rehab? Amateur! I could do so much better. I could really save him, cure him of his addiction, given the chance. A tragic, codependent drug and alcohol counselor was no match for me and my virtue, my selfless love, my uniquely, magically medicinal vagina.

Michael must have noticed this shift taking place in me, because he made his move. He took hold of my hand across the table. He gave me another of those smiles, and then we went back to his apartment. What was one night for old time’s sake?

In the morning, Michael’s stale white-wine breath filled the room and turned my stomach. I found the presence of mind to tell him (and myself) that more of this kind of thing would be a bad idea, especially if he was still drinking. He looked wounded, and as flattering as I found that, I was pretty resolved.

Whew, I thought when I left. Dodged that bullet.

But days later he did what I always thought I’d hoped he’d do: He begged.

“I need to do this—I need to get sober for you,” he pleaded, and I was nauseated.

“But they say it never works when you get sober for someone,” I reasoned. I also instinctively knew that he wasn’t ready, and I doubted he ever would be. There were too many other women around him who were eager to make transactions similar to mine, to let him do whatever he wanted in exchange for his making them feel important and powerful, too.

“Please?”

He was serious.

“And promise you won’t leave me if I fall off the wagon? Promise to stick around and help me back on?”

Holy shit. He was truly recognizing my great power. What he was requesting was the opposite of the much advised tough love. But fuck that! I was so in.

Things were great for a few weeks. Michael was eager to try, and he replaced his fixation on alcohol with a fixation on me. He wrote me songs, wrote love letters thanking me for being the only one courageous enough to insist he stop drinking.

Michael was sober, and I was higher than a kite, strung out on his intense adoration.

But right on schedule, he fell off the wagon. Hard. He’d never made it longer than a month, and we were rounding three weeks. Just in time, his last girlfriend, Sheila, the drug and alcohol counselor, sent him a Christmas card. He met her for a “friendly dinner.” He called me that night and tried to hide his slurring.

“I can’t talk to you like this,” I said.

“But you promised you wouldn’t leave me if I fell. You said you’d stay and help me get up.”

I did. I went to Al-Anon, bristling as people whined. When Michael stopped going to AA, I dragged him there myself, holding his hand the whole time. After meetings, he’d sneak off. He always had to be somewhere. I knew where. In 2000, cell phones were not yet ubiquitous; Michael called from pay phones, and the names of the bars they were situated in came up on my caller ID. They were often bars in Sheila’s neighborhood.

Michael’s drinking got worse—so bad that he passed out as we were eating dinner at a Thai restaurant in Midtown, snoring with his head on the table as people tried not to stare.

Suddenly I was the enemy. “At least Sheila will drink with me,” he argued on the phone one evening. “You’re. No. Fun.” He had this way of punctuating his words when he was sloshed, in what seemed like an effort not to sound that way. “If you’d just come with me to the bar . . . ” He fell asleep.

 ***

Okay.

I’d go with him to the bar.

Maybe sitting there across from him, sober, I could appeal to him. And get him to go back to AA. And change his ways. And save his life! And save our love! Because I was just that awesome and powerful.

For a guy who clung to the mid-nineties grunge look, Michael had weird taste in bars. He liked these shiny Midtown tourist traps on the ground floors of hotels, which especially appealed to high-class hookers and their businessmen-in-from-out-of-town clientele. One well-dressed flight attendant type came back with three different men in the course of an evening as I sat and watched Michael down seven pints of draft beer, each one followed by a shot of chilled Stoli.

I stared as he pounded, wondering what it felt like inside his brain. I was fascinated by the idea of being blissfully anesthetized but not quite tempted to go there myself. I found myself torn between wanting to be fun like Sheila and wanting to get serious and save Michael. One minute I was laughing at his stupid jokes, positioning myself just so to receive his sloppy, fragrant, vodka-tinged kisses, and the next I was crying, pleading, “When will you be ready to get sober again?”

“This is just a bender, babe,” he said, holding me tightly, alcohol fumes wafting from his mouth and off his skin, enveloping me, caressing me. “I just have to go all the way through this to get to the other side. Stay with me. We’ll get there.”

There was more drinking, more dragging Michael to meetings, after which he would run off. Then the confession.

“I cheated,” he admitted.

I punched him in the stomach. I stopped taking his calls.

“What about me?!” he shouted into my answering machine. “I want to kill myself, and you won’t even pick up the phone. Would you even cry if I died?”

Whoa. By just answering the phone, I could save his life. But I was tired of being so powerful.

Still, I went back. I should’ve been done with him the night he grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me, hard. Or the night he grabbed me by the throat in a bar. But it wasn’t until the night he canceled our plans so that he could stay at Sheila’s and drink that it was finally over for me. (Apparently I was less concerned about bodily injuries than I was about injuries to my ego.)

In agony, I decided to try Michael’s antidote for that. I needed to know what it was like, what he and Sheila felt when they were knocking back shots. I went to Detour, the jazz bar across the street from my East Village tenement. I hadn’t had a vodka drink since my eighteenth birthday, when a single screwdriver yielded bed spins and a terrible hangover. But that night I wanted vodka. I knew the smell. But I wanted to know the taste. It was my chance to finally try writing drunk.

There was a woman about my age singing old standards accompanied by a guitar and bass. I ordered a vodka martini. I liked the way it looked in the glass—clean, simple, all business. After four years with not a drop of alcohol, I sat at the bar and sipped it slowly. It went right to my head. I felt like I was in a bubble. The edges on the bar sounds softened. Everything moved more slowly.

Once I finished the drink, a man at the end of the bar sent over another. I smiled at him, not feeling the least bit flirtatious or amorous. This stuff made people want to rip each other’s clothes off? The appeal was lost on me.

Sip . . . sip . . . sip. I felt out of it. Removed. Numb.

I stumbled back across the street to my apartment. As I lay down on the couch, exhausted, I noticed my journal on the coffee table. This was my chance. Inhibitions be damned.

The next morning I woke up with a crushing headache. The journal was on the floor. I picked it up. There were only two lines: “I drank vodka tonight. I can’t feel my face.”

 ***

In the year after we broke up, Michael tried several times to reach me, including on 9/11. He called once after midnight, drunk, from a bar. I hung up on him.

I’d finally had enough of it all, my ridiculous sense of greatness and what it cost me. As painful as that last round with Michael was, I think I needed it to cure me, and to kill my romantic notions. It’s now been more than a decade since I’ve spoken to him. Two years after our ending, I met my husband. Michael was my last alcoholic boyfriend.

According to twelve-step wisdom, you’re never fully recovered from an addiction, only forever recovering. Maybe I’m naive, but this time I believe I’m truly, fully recovered.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

***

“The Sweet Smell of Excess” by Sari Botton has been excerpted from Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up edited by Leah Odze Epstein and Caren Osten Gerszberg. Available from Seal Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2012.

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Typically an advice column might not be the first thing to come to mind when considering examples of fearless first-person writing. But Cheryl’s Dear Sugar column is a major exception in that way. In the majority of her column entries, she boldly delves into her own life, to places where she’s had to overcome obstacles similar to those her letter-writers have experienced. Her understanding and compassion are real and hard won, rooted in her own experiences. And so is her sometimes butt-kicking advice. “If I was able to do this,” she seems to be saying, “so can you, sweet pea. Now get off your ass and do it.”

The stakes may have seemed lower when she was writing the column anonymously. But Cheryl says she always knew she’d eventually reveal herself – which she did in April. Now many of her best Dear Sugar columns have been gathered into Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection that goes on sale this week (and is available through The Rumpus). Her name is on it; the revelations, the fearless admissions are hers. And I’m awed.

I spoke with Cheryl via Skype last week, about how she keeps finding the courage to be honest in her work – about herself and others around her.

***

The Rumpus: I was reading on Oprah’s site the other day about the things that you left out of Wild, and it just dawned on me how mind-blowing the whole Oprah thing must be for you. I mean, that’s like the kind of wish you paste onto your “vision board” collage when you’re doing The Secret™:  “Oprah restarts her book club for my book…” accompanied by magazine cut-outs of Oprah and some books.

Cheryl Strayed: Yeah, it’s sort of beyond whatever I had let myself fantasize about. It was very exciting. She called me on my cell phone just out of the blue in April and told me she loved Wild and wanted to restart her book club for it. And then I had to keep it a big secret until the news was announced in early June. That was tortuous.

Rumpus: I know what you mean – well, this is hardly on the same scale, but I knew for a long time that you were Sugar, and had to keep that secret. It wasn’t easy. I can be kind of a yenta, but I managed to keep that under my hat. I’m actually very proud of that.

Strayed: You know, it was really fascinating; some people were terrible at keeping that secret and other people were just great at keeping it. Toward the end, a lot of people were figuring out it. If they read the work I’ve written as Cheryl, and then read Sugar, it became pretty clear.

Rumpus: So, your first book, Torch, is often described as an autobiographical novel. One of the things I personally wrestle with is whether or not I should fictionalize my own story. To some degree, it would be an artistic choice for me, to give myself lots of creative latitude, but the biggest factor is always protecting people close to me – either from what they might learn about me, or from having things revealed about them that they’d rather not. When you wrote Torch, was it an entirely artistic choice to make it a novel?

Strayed: So many people ask about this and it’s so interesting because I never, ever, ever, ever, ever thought of Torch as anything even remotely resembling a memoir. It wasn’t as if I took real life and then I fictionalized it to make it a novel. It was more the reverse – I was writing a novel, and then I used parts of my life in it. A memoir is your story, and in Torch I wasn’t interested in telling my story. There was one young woman character with whom I have a lot in common, but she’s absolutely not me. I mean, the situation in the story is very similar to a situation I was in, my family was in. Obviously my mom died of cancer, and I would say that that piece of the novel, which is a big piece – well, if you read Wild, you can see the echo.

Rumpus: Yes, you can.

Strayed: In some ways, in a couple of cases, it’s almost like the same scene, but slightly different. In Wild I stuck to what really happened and in Torch I did whatever I wanted. But because there’s that situation, the death of the mother, and also the setting is a fictionalized setting based on the place where I grew up – because there are those two big, bold kind of sweeping autobiographical elements – people read all the rest as if it’s nonfiction or close to it, and that’s not the case. To take you back to my process, when I first was writing, nonfiction wasn’t on my radar. I wasn’t thinking of myself as memoirist. I was really very much a fiction writer and I felt free, the way fiction writers throughout time have, to draw heavily on experiences in real life. That whole “write what you know” thing. It was only once I was pretty deep into Torch that I realized I was sort of forgetting who my actual mom was because I had so much made her into this fictionalized character, Theresa. So my nonfiction was born out of that fear. I woke up on the fourth of July in 1997 and I realized I was conflating my mother and Theresa, and I didn’t want to do that. So I spent the day writing the real story of her death, and what ended up coming out of that was that my first essay, “Heroin/e,” which was later published in Double Take and in Best American Essays 2000. That’s when I first started thinking, oh, okay, I can use real life that way in my literary work. But it was still long before I ever really thought, I’m going to write a memoir.

Rumpus: But it’s interesting that there is some clear overlap between the two books.

Strayed: Well, that story of my grief around my mom’s death, it’s like I’ve just had to keep telling and telling and telling and telling that story, and anything that I was writing, it would appear in. It would appear in Torch, in Wild, in numerous essays I wrote, in several Dear Sugar columns. It’s been like my obsession, this story that wouldn’t let me go. In one of my Dear sugar columns, I write about the death of my mother and how the last word she said to me was “love,” and I say that’s like my Genesis story. I think that’s true. In some ways it’s like every story I tell winds back to that one. And so I keep having to tell it, even though the form varies. You know?

Rumpus: Yes, I do know. There are certain stories that I always just keep coming back to and back to, in things I’ve published, and in things I’ve not yet. And I think if I do publish a memoir, I will still have to write about them.

Strayed: A lot of writers do that. You look at the bodies of work of some of the writers I admire most – Mary Gaitskill, Alice Munro. They’re each telling like a family of stories over and over again. I mean, some writers manage to be incredibly diverse. But most writers have a sense of what their territory is. And not that they don’t deliver something unexpected – they do – but they deliver something unexpected within the context of what we know belongs to them.

Rumpus: You describe in Wild how you chose your last name – Strayed. I wonder though whether to some degree you were also choosing it as a pseudonym, knowing you were hoping to write. Was there any aspect of hiding from people from your past?

Strayed: No, no. I never thought of the name as a pseudonym. I thought of it as just a name change.  And I broadcast it to everyone. I sent out a missive saying, “Now my name is Cheryl Strayed.” Actually, one of my fears when I changed my name was that I didn’t want people to lose track of me.

Rumpus: The idea of a pseudonym is something I toy with a lot. I just recently published on xojane.com a very revealing piece about myself. My father is a clergyman and also a former school teacher and he’s got all these very worshipful former students and bar/bat mitzvah kids. Today got an email saying, basically, “I love your piece about how you hate condoms and cheated on your first husband! By the way your father bat mitzvahed me, and I love him!” Oy. So, I wrestle with being this daughter of a clergyperson and writing really very raw, personal stuff, and also revealing stuff about myself that I think that my family probably would rather not read. But I also feel like, fuck, I don’t want to have to change my name, I don’t want people to not know it’s me. I want to have the courage to own this shit. But if I changed my name, I might feel as if I get to say whatever the fuck I want. Anyway, this is challenging for me!

Strayed: It is. You know, I’m always talking about taking risks and being fearless and all that stuff, but also always acknowledge that different people have very different situations – family situations.  One of the liberations of having a dead mother is that your mother is dead. One of the liberations of having a father who is not in your life is that your father is not in your life. Those are hard and sad things that I’ve had to come to terms with over the course of my life, but as a writer they are frankly liberating. I get to say whatever the hell I want to say! Of course, I mean I’m overstating that. I should amend that and say there are absolutely things I don’t write because I fear I would hurt someone’s feelings, invade their privacy. So there are lines I draw. Trust me, there are many, many, many stories that would be very interesting to readers that I didn’t tell in Wild because they have to do with certain people – family members and such. I didn’t write everything there is to say about all of the people I mention in Wild, and it was because I had those considerations. I try not to hurt people’s feelings, I try not to expose people who aren’t asking to be exposed. I do think people have a right to privacy, and that if I’m going to expose anyone it’s going to be me. Of course, what happens is sometimes when you expose yourself, you end up having to write about other people, and that’s what’s complex. But like, in your case, you have this very different family system than I have. Your father has this public role. There’s a different kind of fallout and different consequences.

Rumpus: Yeah, I want to “write like a motherfucker,” but, I have to be careful not to be a clergyman screwer-upper. What about your dad? Do you think your dad has seen Wild or Tiny Beautiful Things – your collection of Dear Sugar Columns that’s out this week – or knows about them? I mean, you’re kind ubiquitous right now.

Strayed: I haven’t heard from him.

Rumpus: There’s an entry in Tiny Beautiful Things called “The Empty Bowl.” In it, you write about your father, and deciding you couldn’t sustain a sort of fake, surface-y relationship with him without any acknowledgment or resolution of the past. I feel like I’ve got an Empty Bowl-related conversation on my horizon.

Strayed: As I write in that piece, the last time we were in contact was that email exchange we had right before I turned thirty-nine. He’s tried to friend me on Facebook a couple of times since then, but I’ve declined. One thing that’s really true is I do not want to hurt my father. I have absolutely no interest in harming him. I wish him well, actually. I really do. I feel like I’ve really completely healed all of the difficult things I’ve written about when it comes to him. I’ve moved beyond it. When I think of him, I hope he’s well. I hope he’s at peace. I don’t want my writing to hurt him.

Rumpus: But you also feel like it’s important to write what you need to write about those situations.

Strayed: Well I can’t lie. I can’t pretend that I had a great dad. I think the fact that I didn’t have a great dad forms the person I am, and it tells a story that only I can tell. So I have to. I have to tell readers about that. Just, I have to.

Rumpus: I’m really glad you wrote all the father stuff, in both books, because that really informs me in a way that I need to be informed – I’m working some of that same stuff out myself.

Strayed: I want to say a couple things to you. I mean, I am Sugar, so I’m going to give you advice.

Rumpus: Oh, shit.

Strayed: One thing I will say is that you don’t know what will happen if you write the truth. You don’t know what will happen if you decide to write what you feel really compelled to write. You think that there might be this consequence but there might actually be a different sort of outcome, and it could be a positive one.

I was a little bit worried about my brother and my ex-husband’s reactions to Wild. In the case of my brother, there are some difficult things that are said, and he’s certainly in some very difficult scenes. And in the case of my ex-husband, I don’t say anything negative about him, but here I am writing for this national – really international – audience about our marriage and its demise. I just really felt like, oh my god, I don’t envy anyone who’s in anyone else’s memoir, even if nice things are said about them. There’s this funny feeling I imagine one would get because one is being portrayed by someone else. I could see how my ex-husband might think, oh, just please leave it alone. And so I felt kind of sick to my stomach about the idea of him having to read my book. But what happened was amazing. We haven’t been in touch for years, even though there aren’t any bad feelings between us. We’re just not in touch. But he sent me an email telling me he read Wild, he really loved the book, he thanked me for the way I wrote about him and us. My brother, too. He said he felt like we reached a new place of understanding. I hadn’t anticipated that, so, you know, you can’t necessarily predict people’s reactions.

Rumpus: Wow. That’s actually sort of comforting. And inspiring.

Strayed: I saw my stepfather in Duluth when I was there on my book tour, and you know, there are some painful aspects of that relationship that I write about. And he hugged me and told me he loved me. We didn’t talk much about the book. But what I mean to say is, you don’t always know that there are going to be negative consequences. All of those people I just named, I wrote about them with love.  I wrote about them with a real sense of the fullness of their humanity and our relationship, and I’m so pleased to see that they understood that. They knew I wasn’t trying to go after anyone in my book, and I think that sometimes actually writing truthfully about something can bring people together or bring you to a new level in your relationship.

Rumpus: I think you’re right about that. I also think sometimes you have to weigh whether going forward with work that might inadvertently offend or hurt that one person is ultimately worthwhile, because there’s something really valuable for other people in your story. For, example I’ve written some things about my relationship with my dad, and with other people in my life, and I’ve had so many women write to me afterward and tell me that what I wrote resonated with them and helped them. But still, people get hurt. In the piece I mentioned on xojane.com, I tell a story about something that happened with my ex-husband more than twenty years ago. It’s not a story that’s flattering to him. I also reveal that I cheated – something I never told him. But we have been out of each other’s lives for twenty years. Before publishing it, I hemmed and hawed – do I need to drop him a line and say, “Hey, how have the past two decades been for you? Oh, by the way, at the end of our marriage, I cheated.” But a lot of women commented on that essay, saying they identified with my experience. And I got a lot out of writing – and publishing – it. Somehow I seem to keep flying under the radar. You know how they tell you in writing workshops, “Write as if everyone you know is dead”? Elissa Bassist once tweeted something about how she writes as if no one in her family knows how to read. I tend to write as if no one in my life knows how to Google, which is pretty much the case. But I don’t know for how long I can get away with that.

Strayed: I understand what Elissa is saying because I, too, think that when you’re writing that first draft, yes, write as if everyone is dead. Things are going to come out in the work that are really important. There’s that liberation – taking risks and just telling it like it is – and that’s really important. But I will say in the revision, that’s when you have to think, who isn’t dead? What are the consequences of what I’m saying? I think that you know there’s a place to ask those questions as well.  But also, you say that so many people wrote to you because your work helped them, and I have that experience a lot as both Sugar and Cheryl. So, I agree. Sometimes taking that risk and hurting that one person’s feelings because you’re telling the truth about a relationship, is really worth the good that comes about from your writing. I will say, too, a lot of times the people who object to what you’ve written? They would object to anything you’ve written.

Rumpus: Yeah, I think that’s true. I’ve experienced that. Some people are also just not fans of memoir and first-person writing. The whole idea of it makes them uncomfortable.

Strayed: You need to assess that. Like, is someone rightfully saying, why would you say such a nasty thing about me, or what right do you have to write about my cocaine addiction or whatever? If you’re writing about a sibling or a cousin or whatever and you’re telling about all the terrible things they’ve done, I think maybe you don’t have a right to expose that person, who really isn’t a public person. On the other hand, if you’ve got a family member who essentially just wants to silence you – who, unless you write, oh we just had such a happy family and my childhood was just great, is going to complain – then you can’t listen to that person. They’re not going to be any kind of accurate gauge of what is reasonable and you need to just move forward and do the work you need to do.

Rumpus: Part of me wishes I could just publish my memoir or collection of stories as a series of Rumpus Letters in the Mail. It was such a good experience writing the one I did – partly because I knew I was writing to a very limited audience of 2,400 subscribers, none whom, as far as I knew, were related to me, or exes of mine. I felt like I could put some really personal stuff in there.

Strayed: Maybe you can. Or at least you can trick yourself into taking risks by telling yourself you’re just writing Rumpus Letters in the Mail. And when you’re done with it, you can see what you have, and where you can take it next.

I do think that when it came to writing personal, intimate things in my own work, it wasn’t like, rip the band-aid off all at once. I did this, and then I did that, and then I did the next thing. It’s like anything – you build a muscle. You build a sense of strength around it, and you also learn how to set boundaries. Where have you crossed that line that you don’t want to cross? People are always asking, how do you write so openly and intimately, and I’m always like, well, what the hell else are you suppose to do? I don’t understand how to write any other way, and maybe part of that is really just borne out of years of practicing doing it. Maybe your secret is the Rumpus letters; you know, you write a collection of them, and see where it takes you.

Rumpus: Yeah, maybe. That could be the way to at least frame it in my mind.

Strayed: Letters to two thousand and four hundred people.

Rumpus: Oh, yes. That’s my title: Letters To Two Thousand And Four Hundred People! So, back to the idea of using pseudonyms versus writing under your own name. In April, you revealed yourself to be Sugar. Now Tiny Beautiful Things is out there with your name on it. When you first started writing that column, did it occur to you that you might at some point reveal who you are? Because you really reveal as much about yourself in Tiny Beautiful Things as you do in Wild, if not more.

Strayed: Oh yeah, I knew from before I started writing the column that I was going to reveal my identity some day. There was never any question about that. I definitely always wrote it with the consciousness that you would know who I was some day. When people knew I was going to reveal my identity, some would say, oh, no, don’t do it! It was because they were so afraid I would write the column differently and be more hidden, and I was always like no, no you don’t understand. From the very first column, I wrote it with the consciousness that my name would be on it eventually. I didn’t write it from the vantage point of a secret person who could say anything and never have people know who she was. No, I always wrote it as Cheryl in my heart, and I just put the Sugar name on it. And I knew I would step out someday.

Rumpus: You reveal a lot about yourself in Tiny Beautiful Things, and also about other people– like for example, “A bit of Sully in your sweet” is about you learning that you’re husband, before he was your husband but was your boyfriend, cheated. So you’re revealing that about him, and now we know who he is! How does he feel about that? And were you concerned about that at all as you were writing?

Strayed: I asked him before if it was okay to write about it. I wouldn’t have written about it if he had said no. I knew that it was an important story to tell, and I was nervous about telling it, and he was nervous about me telling it. But we also thought that the greater good would be served. That it was a piece of our relationship that so many people could relate to and did. And so pretty quickly when I said I want to write about it, he was just like, “I trust you. It makes me feel a little sick, but I trust you.” Being involved with a writer does require some bravery. Luckily Brian, Mr. Sugar, understands the work I do. He’s an artist to. He’s a documentary filmmaker and he understands the endeavor and he really trusts me, that I’m not going to violate him or us in any way.

There are also a lot of things that aren’t in the column or Tiny Beautiful Things. One thing about writing really personally in Wild and in the Sugar columns and in my personal essays that I always remind people is, while there’s a lot of intimate stuff that felt very risky for me to expose, there’s also a lot of stuff that’s not in there. It’s not as if I take my entire life and open it up to public scrutiny. There are things that are private that I don’t write about or not yet, like maybe someday I will. Maybe someday I’ll be ready to tell this story or that story. I guess that’s the difference between confessionalism and what I do. That kind of truth telling in writing is not just about going online and blabbing everything that ever happened to you. It’s really about considering why you’re telling any particular story. And I had a good reason to tell the story of what Brian and I went through with his infidelity before we got married. The greater good was served, and so I did it.

Rumpus: You also reveal a bit about him in the “Thwack, Thwack, Thwack” piece, in which he mistakenly assumes you wanted to be spanked, which made me laugh so hard. I have been there! He comes off well in the end of both pieces. I’ve written about my current husband a couple of times too, and he’s been really understanding about that – a really good sport. Sometimes it’s just light stuff, but other times it’s been stories where something difficult has happened between us, and he doesn’t look so good at first, but he comes around in the end and he realizes what he was wrestling with. Like this one experience I wrote for an anthology about body image called FEED ME. Early on in our relationship he made some comment about how I was the most full-figured woman he’d ever been with, and how he never knew he could be attracted to that, and he was, like, so proud of himself for now being able to. He was trying to say that there was something different and positive for him in our relationship, but he was saying it in a way that was hurtful – that he didn’t know was hurtful. Like with the world’s biggest foot in his mouth. And what we came to was a realization that he had been as negatively affected as I had by the media’s obsession with certain body types. It was actually very eye-opening. Well, initially it was kind of maddening and heart-breaking, but then, we got to a place where it was eye-opening, and bonding. And it felt like a story worth sharing.

Strayed: By the way, that experience in “Some sully in your sweet,” as terrible as it was, I feel lucky for it. I think it made us stronger and it made us look deeper and it made Brian confront some of his issues. It’s not like the only hard thing we’ve come up against in our relationship. I think in some ways having that experience early on helped us get through other things. Just like what you just said about your husband and that conversation. As painful and hurtful as that was, it sound like he was speaking out of like an honest place. That allowed you to kind of go deeper, right? I mean, it could have been the place at which you just basically said fuck off, and broke up with him but it was this place where you guys decided to go deeper and that’s important.

Rumpus: It was really important that we went through that.

Strayed: It’s a good thing he said that – he was telling his truth.

Rumpus: So we are both blessed with husbands named Brian who don’t mind being written about. But there are inevitably going to be people who don’t want be written about. It’s nearly impossible to tell a story about yourself without having other people in there, at least for context. What’s your philosophy about where you have the right to tell your story?

Strayed: I think you have the right to tell your story and like I said I think you should do what you can to protect the privacy of those you write about. For example, in Wild I gave my ex-husband a different name and I wouldn’t tell you publicly what city he lives in, just in case he doesn’t want to raise his hand and be like, hey I’m the ex-husband in Wild! I want to respect his right to privacy. Now obviously it wouldn’t take many research skills to find out who he is and there’s legal records and such, so it’s not as if its some deep secret. It’s the same with my father. I don’t name my father in Wild and I have no wish to sort of out him in any way. So I did my best to just write about him truthfully while also not blatantly exposing him, if that makes sense. I think you can do those things. So, for you writing about your ex-husband, I would just make sure not to tell anyone who he is actually.

Rumpus: I’ve changed his name. Of course, anyone who really knows me or him knows the identity of the guy who held the title of “first husband” in my life.

Strayed: But ultimately, what you’re really trying to do is tell the story of who you are. Sometimes you have to include other people, but mostly it needs to be about you. For example, I didn’t want to write about my father in Wild. I don’t enjoy the passage that I wrote about him where I tell about some of the difficult and painful aspects of my life with him. I took no pleasure in that, but I had to tell that piece of the story because I was trying to tell you who I was. You can’t write a memoir without accounting for your mother and your father – even if your father was absolutely never there. You have to tell who they are, what happened, what your relationship with them is and so I had to do that. We need to write about other people in our lives. What I always say is, you just have to do that, and then do your best to take out what isn’t necessary. Through every draft of Wild as I read it, I would take out a teeny bit more. Each time I went through, I would take out a little more about the people I wrote about, because it had to meet two tests. 1) Did the piece of information that I was revealing about this other person contribute to the story? And 2) was it necessary. Like, did you have to know that so and so was addicted to cocaine? If the answer is no, it doesn’t need to be in there. And also, are there consequences? If I do determine something is necessary, what are the consequences of including that – for me and also for that person? If you’re writing about somebody and saying that they are a cocaine addict, it actually might have negative consequences in their lives. To what degree are you willing to take their life into your hands in that regard? Those are questions I was asking a lot when I wrote about other people in Wild. And you know, I didn’t necessarily find a perfect path through it. But I think I found a pretty solid one. Nobody who’s in the book has written to me to complain about what I wrote about them.

Rumpus: Did you let anyone see it before hand? What’s your policy about that?

Strayed: I gave a copy of Wild to my brother back in September just because I wanted him to have that kind of advance notice I guess. It was great because we got to have this really great conversation about the book and it was before it came out and before all of the more public things happened. But he’s the only person I sent it to ahead of time actually, for that purpose.

Rumpus: On a different note, I’ve been wondering how you decided which details of your life should have been in Wild, and which in Tiny Beautiful Things. For instance, in “The Baby Bird” in Tiny Beautiful Things you talk about what I would categorize as sexual abuse on the part of your grandfather, and it was interesting to read Wild and not see that there. I think that your character in Wild, I mean if I can call you a character, clearly has issues with sexual boundaries. Everyone I know who was sexually abused as a child has them. I wondered why you chose to leave that out of Wild.

Strayed: It was originally in Wild. What’s really fascinating for me is Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things were essentially written at the same time. What happened is I finished the first draft of Wild, sent it to my editor, and that same week, Steve Almond emailed me and asked me if I wanted to write the Sugar column. I was waiting for my editor to get back to me with her notes on the first draft which you know are always significant – you’ve got to do this big revision and everything and so that’s when I began the Sugar Column and I didn’t know I was writing Tiny Beautiful Things as I was writing the Sugar Column. The reason that the sexual abuse stuff is not in Wild is that it was everywhere I would put it. Like I kept rewriting it and putting it here and then putting it there and putting it elsewhere and it just kept coming up as too heavy handed and too much as if I were saying, I’m like this because I had this experience. And that really made me feel uncomfortable. It didn’t feel true that there could be a direct line drawn between what happened to me with my grandfather when I was so young, and the young woman I became and the way I behaved sexually. It just kept not working and my editor felt strongly about that too. It felt in the end not necessary. But it worked for Sugar. Tiny Beautiful Things, even though its full of advice and other people’s stories, is also full of stories about me, so it’s a kind of strangely anecdotal memoir. Some of the same stories are also in Wild. In a way, Tiny Beautiful Things gives a deeper sense of what was happening in Wild. There’s a very strange symbiotic relationship between the two books.

Rumpus: Yeah. It’s sort of like reading companion memoirs. And you were very brave in writing both of them. I draw a lot of encouragement from them. Although, of course, I’m still trembling, as always.

Strayed: One thing that I think is important when it comes to bravery, is that it’s not necessarily about doing something and not being afraid. It’s about doing something even though you are afraid, and I think that idea has been very powerful for me over time. Whenever I’ve written something that makes me scared, which I write an awful lot, I remember that being scared is not an indication that I shouldn’t do it. It’s actually an indication that I should.

***

Photographs by Brian Lindstrom.

If you’re in the Bay Area, join us at The Rumpus Release Party for Tiny Beautiful Things on July 27th.

Related Posts:

• Give the Gift of Sugar!
• Ethos of the Era
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things
• The Rumpus Release Party for Dear Sugar’s Tiny Beautiful Things

My husband, Brian, must too. He’s quick to defend his listening to The Odyssey, narrated by Ian McKellen, while on a long drive to Canada with his brother several years ago. “The Odyssey was meant to be told, as part of the oral tradition,” he will assert when it comes up.

Brian’s widowed 90-year-old mother, however, harbors no shame about her affection for audio books – nor for a particular audio book narrator, Scott Brick. (She also read-reads books. She goes through about five titles a week, a few in print, a couple on tape or CD.)

Shortly after meeting Bridget in 2003, I started hearing of her love for Brick’s smooth baritone. “When I take her to the library,” my sister-in-law told me, “she asks the librarian, ‘Do you have anything read by Scott Brick that I haven’t listened to already?’”

Anytime someone in the family would mention Brick’s name, Bridget would get moony. “He could read me the dictionary…” she’d say, batting her eyelashes and staring off wistfully – totally milking it – and we’d all melt.

In the summer of 2006, as we were approaching Bridget’s 85^th birthday with a dearth of gift ideas, I came up with a long shot: I could try to contact Brick and see if he’d send her…something. Anything. An autographed photo maybe, at the very least.

When I emailed Brick via the contact button on his website, it occurred to me he might not respond. He turned out to be kind of a big deal in the audio book world – A Publisher’s Weekly Narrator of the Year! Over 40 Ear Phone Awards! “A golden voice,” according to the Wall Street Journal! – and also an actor and screenwriter. And even if he weren’t too busy to answer his own mail, it dawned on me it was entirely possible he’d be creeped out by some old lady in upstate New York swooning at the sound of his voice.

But a day later, he responded, and was clearly touched. He offered to send Bridget a special birthday package. We spoke on the phone so I could provide details. (He really did have a nice voice…)

He sent the birthday present to me first. It was torture trying to keep it under wraps for the week or so I held onto it. It contained an autographed photo, a collection of audio books he’d recorded that weren’t yet released, and the highlight: a half-hour tape in which he narrates various points throughout his day (“I’m at the studio now, and I’m about to start reading a Nelson Demille book…”) and ends by reading her a couple of entries from the dictionary – “happy,” “birthday,” and “Bridge,” because I told him that her nick name at the orphanages and convents where she grew up had been “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

Oh, did I neglect to mention that Bridget grew up in orphanages and convents? Yeah, that kind of makes the story even sweeter, doesn’t it? She wasn’t a true orphan, actually. When she was about three, the Catholic Charities took Bridget and her siblings away from their parents because they lived on a tugboat in New York Harbor. The Catholic Charities felt that wasn’t a good way for kids to be raised, so they swiped them and sent them off to orphanages run by nuns. But that’s a whole other story. (That’s whose memoir I should be ghostwriting, or co-writing.)

Anyway, if you think there’s something deeply satisfying about providing an adorable 85-year-old with a gift you know she’s going to love, imagine if that 85-year-old grew up in orphanages and convents until she was old enough to be on her own. The satisfaction is exponentially greater. In case you aren’t already deeply touched (or thoroughly nauseated) here’s a video of Bridget opening Scott Brick’s present on her 85^th birthday. (Sorry about the loud, shitty music playing in the background that day.) We’ll never top that gift. The following year, we gave her…I don’t know, a scarf? And a brick with “Scott” written on it.

A couple of years later, when I took an adjunct journalism professor job a little over an hour from my home, Bridget suggested I might try listening to audio books on my commute. With more than four hours of driving to get through each week I figured, sure, why not? Of course, I had to start with my mother-in-law’s favorite narrator.

On Audible.com, I found a vast selection narrated by Brick – classics and thrillers and sci fi. The one that seemed most in keeping with my taste – literary autobiographical-ish fiction, about writers – was Keith Gessen’s novel, All The Sad Young Literary Men.

I was excited to give it a try, but first I had to get through Apple’s cryptic, byzantine process for putting audio books you’ve downloaded to iTunes onto your iPhone. Once I figured that out (I have not been able to replicate it since), Gessen’s book turned out to be a good first choice. I enjoyed it, and appreciated Brick’s ability to make each character sound different – especially since some of the characters bear strong similarities. I felt as if Brick’s interpretations of the men and women, the subtle differences he gave them in their accents, tones and speech patterns, helped me understand them possibly better than if I’d read the book.

When I was done, not eager to deal with the iPhone uploading issue again, I headed to my local library in search of audio books on CD. They had the John Cheever Audio Collection, with stories narrated by Meryl Streep, Blythe Danner, Peter Gallagher, George Plimpton, Cheever himself, and others. I was watching season three of Mad Men then, so it was good timing. I had read some of those stories before, and loved them. But I loved them even more read by the actors and writers performing them.

This listening-to-books-while-driving business was working out pretty well. I was using my commuting so time efficiently, filling my brain with literature as I drove.

Next, I went for The Sun Also Rises, narrated by William Hurt. As good as Scott Brick is, it’s probably no surprise that Hurt gives him a run for his money as a narrator, making every character, major and minor, sound notably distinct. Again, to my surprise, the audio book format brought the story to life for me in a way the print version hadn’t. (Granted, I’d been in high school when I read it.)

It seemed to make sense to try audio versions of other books I hadn’t fully connected with before. It felt a little like cheating, like a short-cut, but who would know? I’m embarrassingly poorly read for an English major, and here was a chance to catch up on wide swaths of the Western cannon that I’d skipped – or skimmed – over. Having recently loved reading Anna Karenina, I signed out the audio version of War and Peace.

I didn’t realize, though, that I’d picked up a dramatized edition – a recording of a staging of Tolstoy’s novel. I found that without narration, I was having a hard time keeping track of the characters, plus I kept getting distracted by things on the road, like, oh, other cars. I’d lose my place, and have to rewind, nearly crashing a couple of times.

I gave up on the dramatized edition of War and Peace two disks in. And then I never picked up another audio book. I stopped teaching after a couple of semesters; it was costing me almost my entire paycheck just to fill my gas tank each week. I realized I like listening to stories in the car. But now I’m rarely in it longer than the length of a Moth podcast, or maybe a This American Life episode.

Bridget, though, keeps tearing through the audio book section of the Oneonta Library, plus the shelves stocking the true crime and crime fiction. Those are really her favorites. For Mother’s Day we got her True Crimes of Passion: When Love Hurts, a nonfiction anthology with a lot of blood and guts in it. She loves Court TV, too, especially when there are murder trials. One of her daughters will say, “Mom’s glued to The Headless Torso channel again.”

She’s listened to pretty much everything Brick has recorded – even Gessen’s novel, which I got her last year for one occasion or another. “How’d you like it?” I asked. “Pretty good,” she said, “for a book with no murder in it.” (If that’s not a potential blurb for future editions, I don’t know what is.)

Bridget will turn 91 in August. I’ve got my fingers crossed, hoping Brick has recorded something new by then. Otherwise, I’m at a complete loss as to what to get her – and taking suggestions.

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When I saw the words “This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Sari Botton” at the bottom of Wednesday’s Daily Rumpus email from Stephen Elliott, my stomach dropped.

I hadn’t been nervous while writing my letter. There was something so uniquely freeing for me in the epistolary medium. Maybe it was because for once, what I wrote wouldn’t be on the Internet, searchable by certain acquaintances and family members whom I’d rather not have read it?

I’d also been operating with an outdated tally of Letters In the Mail subscribers. I thought we were still talking, like, 5/600 people, tops. Then, when I saw Stephen in NYC one day, he brought me up to date.

I’d said to him, “You know, writing my letter was a really good exercise, because with so few readers, I felt like I could take more risks.” He looked at me curiously. “What do you mean ‘so few readers’? There are 2,400 now.” Whoa.

The other reason I think it was so easy for me to reveal more on paper, through the mail, is because of a particular correspondence I have maintained through the mail for, oh, 33 years now. My friend David and I have been trading letters since 1979, when I was 14 and he was 16.

It began that summer, at sleep-away camp, where we were in The Sound of Music together. David was going out with my step-sister, who was 15, but he and I had some kind of special connection. No, no it wasn’t that kind of connection. There was never any of that kind of chemistry between us. I would talk to him about my crushes and my first boyfriend. He was more like an older brother to me. And that has turned out to be some serious glue.

One day at Sound of Music rehearsal, David slipped me a note, which I still have. He’d folded it up and addressed it to “Sari, Inc.” When I opened it, I found what was basically an invitation to be friends. I’m not allowed to tell you exactly what he wrote, because I see that at the end he requested, “Let’s keep this between me and you!” (Which is why I have my hand blocking the letter in the photo.) But it was really sweet. And it was the beginning of a correspondence that continues.

Back home from camp, David and I lived 7 minutes away by Long Island Rail Road, 15 minutes away by car. But in that first year, before he got his driver’s license, it wasn’t easy for us to get together often. If he was visiting my step-sister at my dad’s house in Westchester while I was there, my role changed – I was relegated to being just another member of the annoying family he had to put up with in order to hang out with his girlfriend. So that sucked. Phone calls were more expensive in those days, so we didn’t talk too frequently. Instead we wrote. And wrote. And wrote. Sometimes once a week, sometimes twice or more.

In the letters, we talked about being unhappy at home, and wishing we could live at camp 12 months of the year. He wrote about his frustrations with my parents – especially the time they walked in on him and my step-sister fooling around. I wrote about the boys I desperately wished would notice me, and then, when I got my first boyfriend, I wrote about the ups and downs of that.

He sent me Bruce Springsteen lyrics, and wrote about how camp was the real Promised Land. He made me tapes – the first four Springsteen records (that’s all there were then!), mixed tapes with Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, The Band, CSNY, and other classic rock/folk stuff. He was on a mission to bring my musical taste up to speed. I was raised by an opera and pop singer/slash clergyman who was in musicals, and so I grew up listening to classical, show tunes, and pop standards. I loooooved Liza Minelli and Barbara Streisand and if I was going to be David’s close friend, his surrogate little sister, I was just going to have to be a little cooler than that.

One week when his brother, Peter, was away on a school trip, David loaned me Peter’s copy of Quadrophenia. Before my mother picked me up from his house, David gave me a tutorial on how to handle the record without scratching it or getting my fingerprints on it. “You hold the edges with one hand, and the paper center with the other.” And he left me with these explicit instructions: “You have to listen to the record at least three times! And read the lyrics!” And so I did.

Sometimes I would include in my letters to David what we called “items.” They were little drawings on scraps of paper, and they usually had to do with B.S vs. B.S. – or Bruce Springsteen vs Barbara Streisand. I was mostly kidding around; I was really coming to love all the music David gave me. (Although, I can still sing all Babs’s songs on the Star Is Born soundtrack, word for word and I would totally karaoke every one, especially Queen Bee, if they were available. And I generally still love her and have many others of her records. Don’t tell David.)

David took his job of broadening my musical horizons very seriously. He brought me to my first and second concerts ever – Jackson Browne at Tanglewood in the summer of 1980, and Springsteen, at the Nassau Coliseum, New Year’s Eve, 1980 into 1981. He’s still sending me stuff. Last year, it was The Promise collection of DVDs and CDs. (Which is pretty fucking awesome.)

When he went away to college, and then I went, David and I kept writing. The pace of our correspondence definitely slowed, but we always kept in touch – and still do, to this day. There’s always been an ease for me in writing to David, no matter how long we’ve gone without being in touch. In fact, sometimes, when I’m having a hard time writing something, if I simply write, “Dear David” at the top, the words begin to flow. I call it The Dear David Method of Writing. I didn’t even realize I was invoking that when I wrote my Rumpus letter, but I’m pretty sure that’s what allowed me to open up about…well, you’ll have to read it. (I even drew some “items” for you.)

Lately my correspondence with David is mostly digital, via email and video iChat. Once a year or so, though, one of us will still drop a letter in the mail, and it’s so much more satisfying to both write and read. When I receive those occasional actual letters from David, who’s in San Francisco now, I add them to my collection of notes on the brown personalized stationery he had in high school, with postmarks dating back to the fall of 1979.

***

Here’s a bizarre fact about me: The most money I ever made came from working for the U.S. Postal Service.

From some part of 2002 to some part of 2004, I worked, on and off, as a freelance copywriter for a digital ad agency that had USPS as a client. We were tasked with re-writing the entire usps.com website, which was something like more than 600 pages. It was boring and tedious, but it was also both the easiest and most lucrative job I have ever had in my life.

Sometimes, I wrote maybe three lines in a day. Well, I’d write three options for each of the three tag lines, so nine – this or that about Click ‘N Ship™. (We copywriters called it “Click ‘N Shit.”) I shit you not, I made $75/hr doing this. Full-time, for months at a clip, as long as they needed me. Even on the many days I got to work from home and double-dipped, writing articles and essays.

Ironically, around that time, Time Out NY gave me an assignment to write about how the mail system works in NYC.

***

Among other things, for that Time Out article, I had to trail the mail carrier assigned to my neighborhood for a day. My mail carrier was a really friendly, jovial guy, and he got clearance from up top, so there I was one morning, hanging out as Joe sorted the mail. This is where it got a little weird.

The sorting area at the 10003 Post Office was a big room with lots of these kinds of desks with grids of mail slots climbing up from them. Joe’s station was next to a wall, which was covered…with Joe’s porn. Like, graphic porn. Blow jobs and people doing it, for example. I tried to avert my eyes. Joe got this weird grin on his face, and said, “Yeah, my lady co-workers are none too happy about this.” And then he giggled. “But it sure makes my day go faster here.”

I was stunned. I really didn’t want to engage with him about this, but I had a hard time believing you were allowed to hang porn on the property of the United States Postal Service. I had to ask. “They let you do that?”

“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “No, they do not! I have to have another meeting with my supervisors about it. They keep telling me I have to take it down. Well, we’ll see what they do.”

As you can probably imagine, this made the afternoon, walking from door to door with Joe, rather awkward – not to mention every time I saw him thereafter, delivering my mail.

As we snaked up and down the streets of the East Village, Joe schlepping two heavy mailbags on his shoulders, I tried to focus on other observations. Joe talked about the problems with his back, neck and knees. About how he tried to log as much overtime as he could to be able to make ends meet. “I almost never take off,” he said. “I can’t afford to.” You’d think that would also make him afraid to jeopardize his job as he seemed to be doing, but what did I know?

The more we talked, the more wrong it felt wrong for me to be making such insane money for writing puns about tracking and certified mail when this guy was breaking his back, literally, for barely enough money to live an hour away, near Kennedy Airport. It seemed so fucked up that there was all this money budgeted for advertising and the website, white collar money, but so little for the blue collar people doing the hard work. Granted, I didn’t feel bad enough to quit. But I never worked another day at the digital ad agency without thinking of Joe and the lopsidedness, the injustice, of our different pay scales.

I still think about Joe, and that cushy copywriting job I had, every time people bring up how the postal service seems to be dying in the Digital Age. I think about David, too, and how much we used to love sending and receiving letters. It was fun to get to relive that a little, for Rumpus Letters In The Mail.

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