In Finishing My Book, I Rewrote the Story of My Own Life

I’d never met a metaphor I didn’t like.

I’d recently started going to the beach each night to do something I called “death practice,” an exercise that involved watching the sun disappear behind the ocean while I envisioned myself taking my final breaths. It was late summer in 2020, and it seemed perfectly appropriate to be imagining my own death every day. The world was in the midst of a pandemic. I’d just turned 40. And, though I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, my marriage was bleeding out.

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The Story That Saved Me: On Writing My Way Out of a Life That No Longer Felt Like Mine

The clouds were dark over the ocean as I sat next to my husband on a beach chair in Mexico. I’d been feeling a vague sort of apprehension all weekend, and now it was Sunday, the day before we were supposed to fly home. The approaching storm struck me as an appropriate ending to the four-day vacation we’d taken to celebrate my thirty-ninth birthday. We’d bickered through most of it. And now forty was coming for me. Black clouds seemed about right.

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Cribs & Carpet

The year I turned 25, I got married, changed my last name, moved to L.A, and . . .

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Surrounded by Stories

A year ago, on my drive to the White Hart Inn for a writing retreat I very desperately needed, I stopped . . . .

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On Obstacles

These two creatures are my biggest obstacles to creativity. I could pretend that parenting two mildly insane humans with Y chromosomes has made me a better writer but . . .

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Personality

My kids have “personality.” This is the euphemism people who know them use instead of saying what they really think, which is something more like “loud, sometimes funny, often obnoxious, totally devoid of manners, and occasionally endearing.” I thought . . .

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The Magic of Metaphor

I am a flower. Not a fragile flower. A strong, wild, sometimes beautiful, often brave bloom. I need water. I need sunlight. I need . . .

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My Essentials

The greatest thing about writing is you need so few things to get started. I wrote the first paragraph of my new novel on a scrap of receipt paper at a bar near my house (and that first paragraph never changed!) But on a regular day . . .

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The Liminal Space

I took this photo a week before quarantine started, three days after my fortieth birthday. I didn’t know then that this image would come to symbolize for me . . .

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Our Anxiety, Ourselves

She has her daddy’s eyes. His athletic ability. His love of math. She has my. . . .

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