Edits in

This week I sent in my final edits on Leave: A Postpartum Account. It was also the week of my kid’s fifth birthday.

Five years since the night described in the opening chapters. Five years since I desperately googled third degree tear what to do, third degree tear why, third degree tear how long to heal. Five years since I began taking notes on my phone to capture my thoughts, feelings, and questions — so many questions.

That night no longer feels recent. I can read what I wrote about it with artistic distance (though I made the decision to forego narrative distance, putting the whole book in present tense). I can be happy about the book, feel proud of it. I can be happy about my kid’s birthday, be proud of my kid and myself as a mom. This is personally momentous. Sending in the edits this week felt meaningful.

Daniel got me this cocktail shaker to celebrate our “birth day.” What should I use it to make first?!

This week in writing

After the edits were in, I spent all my writing time (not much this week) writing notes to my fellow essay workshop participants. I love reading and responding to other people’s drafts. So many good essays coming out of just one six-week class!

Then I got notes back from Chelsea on my own essay and they are SPOT ON and maybe I will do another revision this coming week because I think I can execute exactly what she’s suggesting and how often does that happen? I’m also feeling drawn back to some of the essays I started during 1000 Words of Summer. Still in the essay place! I think 2024 for me will be summer of the essay, autumn of the novel.

Self-portrait on a summer day, coming from acupuncture, going to physical therapy, stopping for an iced oat milk latte at Cotton Bean, one of the cutest little coffee shops in Brooklyn. (Also has amazing food and it’s affordable — highly recommend.)

This week in reading

Still listening to All Fours, dragging it out because I love it so. Still reading Attachments. Just started Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story (one of the books I picked up last weekend at One Grand, along with her memoir Fierce Attachments).

Last weekend, I read Ithaka by Sarah Saffian. Sarah has been my therapist since 2018 and it’s wild it took me this long to read her book. At first I thought it would be inappropriate, a crossing of the therapist/patient boundary, but the more I got to know her, the more I understood that she didn’t think about our relationship that way. But by that time I was attached to her as my therapist and worried — what if I read it and didn’t like it? Sarah is also a writing coach and teaches memoir at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and our sessions over the years have been a mix of therapy and support for my writing life — she was even one of my first readers on Leave. I have come to think of her as one of my writing mentors and I was terrified of losing that.

After six years, though, I just felt silly that I hadn’t read her book, so I finally got over myself and started it and, of course, I couldn’t put it down. It’s wise and thought-provoking and the story unspools at just the right pace. Published in 1999, it’s Sarah’s memoir of how, after she was adopted as a baby, her birth parents found her when she was 23 and revealed that after giving her up they had married and had three more children. As Vivian Gornick would say, that’s the situation. The story is her feelings about it, her processing whether or not she wants a relationship with this second family, her life as a young adult in New York City as she figures out who she is and what she wants. I loved it.

I do have thoughts about the NY Times Top 100, but they are lighthearted. With all that’s going on in the world, I’m not here to quibble. Favorite books are subjective! No one has read every book published in the last 24 years! The best books are often from independent presses and having a cult following comes with its own kind of prestige!

Other reading recs this week:

• Sarah Thankam Mathews wrote about the political times in which we find ourselves and what to do it about it and I found her assessment to be level-headed and a good reminder of what’s actually important.

  First things first: if you’re feeling anxiety or dread about the question of the Democratic nominee, you can, if you want, free yourself. There is something liberating to be found in asking, in succession: What is the actual nature of the situation I’m considering? and What power do I actually have, within it?

  Read the full piece: living in interregnum: the context and the coconut tree.

• I am not the only one to have feelings about All Fours. I have about an hour left of the audiobook, so I’ll reserve my final judgment in case it takes another wild turn before the end, but in the meantime, here are two thoughtful reviews from writers I respect and admire: one from someone who loved it and one from someone who didn’t.

Love to you all.