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Every time I have a “frand Mal”… the recovery comes in two very distinct waves.
The first three days… reality is pressed right up against me like a city bus. Extremely loud. Terribly close. The world turns aggressively technicolor. Too bright. Too sharp. Too there. Everything is dopamine on steroids and ultra fine-grain patterns. Light fractures. Sound blares. Texture insists. Chafes. All you want to do is recede into sleep. 12-14 hours at a time.
The next three weeks… it’s a snow globe. Everything shaken loose. Nothing settling where it belongs. Memory retrieval is maddening. The tape leading up to the moment of electric oblivion is largely erased. When I need something, anything, a word, an idea, I feel my hand grasping around the dark of my mind, desperate to find the switch, to flip on the light. Trying to grab the one thing I need, pull it down off my brain shelf, and get it out of my mouth and/or translated into meaningful action before the moment passes.
Where are the forks?
Am I wearing my food again?
Who is that person?
Did we get tickets for that?
Do I have an email? Dear God, let there be an email.
It’s this low-grade, constant panic. A quiet internal audit running at all times: do I know this? Can I trust this? Spoiler: I cannot. My brain is an unreliable narrator of the near term past. Pre-seizure retrieval is temporarily shot. And it only returns when I’m allowed to work with both my hands on something not involving words or screens—so cooking or baking are my go-to’s.
At the same time, I’m struck by these sharp, narrow bolts of lightning. Shocks of memory. From long ago. Fully intact. Bright. Immediate. Undeniable.
They arrive without warning or effort. No frantic rifling around required. I’ll be standing in the kitchen, holding a drawer open, unable to find a fork… and suddenly I’m slipstreamed back to our 1980s kitchen at two in the morning.
The Secret Gardener
I’m fifteen, trying to make sense of my mother, dressed in full cat burglar black. Her face is caked in dirt, her frizzy mom-fro tangled with grass and twigs, a blinding headlamp strapped to her forehead like some third-eye cyclops—her nails, her cuticles rimmed with little soil moons.
“Mom…?” I whisper. “Mom! What are you doing?”
She is joyfully mischievous. A benevolent criminal, organizing her pots of dirt.
“Oh, I’m stealth gardening for Linda!” she whisper-screams back, fully feral, eyes sparkling like she’s just pulled off something big.
“Cancer-Linda???” I whisper-shout.
“Who else? Of course, it’s for Cancer-Linda and stop calling her that. Everybody gets cancer if you live long enough. Come with me!”
“What? No! You’re going to get arrested!”
Yes, this was long before Ring cameras, alarm systems and legions of Hillbilly Elegy-types all armed to the teeth, but even then I could see that my mother’s particular brand of charity was the kind that could absolutely get her thrown in the clink. I mean, her mouth alone…
“Stop being such a goody-goody—we’re not going to jail for planting rogue ranunculus!”
“I can’t—what about my permanent record and uni?” I insist, because clearly we are committing multiple misdemeanors here.
“Come with me, or…” Her raccoon eyes narrow.
“What?” I snap, defiant. Such a Hermione.
“You’re grounded!” she cackles. I gasp. She yanks me out the door.
We scramble over the wall into the neighbor’s yard in the dead of night, carrying flowers. Things that bloom loudly. Things that insist on joy.
We dig in the dark. Whispering. Laughing. Violating acres of HOA codes. And yes, we add a hideous garden gnome with sunglasses, because even in the middle of a covert kindness operation, she has a wicked sense of humor.
And then we wait. We watch the next morning over coffee before school. The woman comes out—headscarf, only whisps of hair, body betraying her—and she sees it. Blooms where there had been none. Color. Surprise. A yelp of laughter. A small, defiant miracle.
And I remember thinking, even then… who does this?
And now, standing in my own kitchen, unable to find a fork, my brain shorting out… I remember. She did. And somewhere in all this neural chaos, that memory comes back to say: You do.
The High Priest
And then, because my brain has zero respect for tone, it hurls me somewhere completely different. Easter Sunday. Nob Hill. Which means uphill in every direction, always.
I slip out of Mass early. Quietly, or what I think is quietly after the throngs of the faithful take communion. As I round the hill behind the church, there he is. Our parish priest, he’s sneaking out the back, checking over both shoulders.
And I swear to God, he is the absolute spit of Father Brown. Soft face, a little rumpled, a veritable doppelgänger of the sleuthing spiritualist invented by G.K. Chesterton, who knows everything and just chooses not to ruin your day with it.
And what do I see Father Brown doing behind the church on Easter Sunday?
It looks like he’s pulling out a joint! And I think, A-ha! YES! And I shout from the corner, “YES! HE is RISEN!”
And he breaks out in the biggest grin and waves whatever he is smoking. It’s not weed or even a normal cigarette. It’s one of those impossibly thin Capri things. Elegant. Slightly absurd. Very European.
I just stop, because it’s too perfect. He looks at me. Takes a drag. Doesn’t deny it. And there’s that moment where we both understand exactly what’s happening. Ah. Ok. This is who we are. “Can I have one?” I ask, because boundaries have never been my strong suit. And he doesn’t say no.
So there we are. Me and the priest. Behind the church. On Easter. Smoking like a couple of teenagers hiding from their parents.
It feels more honest than anything that had just happened inside, because there’s a certain set of folks in San Francisco who are so self-satisfied and smug. They’re always like…
I’m pretty sure I recycle MORE than you do.
I bet my BMI is MUCH lower than yours.
I drive an EV that’s NEXT level and not a Tesla…
They’re so content and morally superior. And then you catch them… secretly smoking in their EVs with the windows all the way down, polluting the entire city. And I love it. Not in a gotcha way. In a thank God you’re human way. The priest lighting up. My mother sneaking into someone’s yard at 2am. Me asking clergy for a smoke like it’s a normal social interaction.
None of it is clean. None of it is correct. But it’s real.
And then I come back here. To now.
To my actual life and the 24/7 stream of chaos-consciousness that is running a midlife women’s press while my brain is intermittently unplugged and also somehow on fire.
Another week and I still have Kerri-Russell-from-THE-DIPLOMAT-crazy-sex hair. None of it is from sex. All of it is from publishing… ops.
Wait… What do you mean the warehouse lost all the books?
That’s their only job! To know WHERE things are…
But the launch is in seventeen days??? We’ll have to print all new books… in two countries???
Hold up, we printed emergency books and stashed them at the PR agency in case they did this…
Wow. We had a feeling they would screw everything up. And they DID!
We are the WET WIPE MOMS OF PUBLISHING. Even our backup plans have backup plans!
Wait, we pre-sold HOW many books last night? One title? Holy Cats!
We are really good at data. (Ha, we kind of knew that.)
And we need to print all of them by WHEN? Hold on, how much does that cost?
Uhhhh… (Does panic-math). Sure, we can do that. (Reaches for a fistful of gummies.)
Good lord, this vendor’s having quite a moment… How can we talk her off the cunty ledge? Note to self: trademark cunty ledge—that’s a good one.
Meanwhile, Heather texts and says we need a new workout to combat the publishing patriarchy. It’s basically swords, cartwheels and yoga. GREAT! I tell her, I am IN.
Anything that helps me toward my J-Gar fitness goals. They even SEND you a SWORD!
Next finance. I don’t even know how to explain this without sounding insane, but dealing with publishing finance people feels like herding a pack of blind brontosauruses. On shrooms.
They are moving. Technically. But not in a way that results in, say, money.
There are holds and returns and all these dumb penalties and other leaves to eat that reduce a publisher to begging anyone to please, please, please just do their jobs!
At one point, I text Heather, completely serious, “I’m going to have to sell a kidney if they don’t hurry the truck up.”
Followed by, “I have stellar kidneys. I hear they can take it right out through your belly button. What do you think we could get? I know some really nice Russians.”
Heather, ever the voice of reason, responds, “Boo, no one wants your 56-year-old kidney.”
So that’s off the table. Which means we keep going.
Then we have people saying, “Why don’t you just quit? Sell… Take a break. Make your life easier.” And I’m like… uhhh, have you seen our list? And that’s not even everything!
We have authors. Real people. Waiting. Trusting us to deliver.
You don’t just pause that because you have a brontosaurus. On shrooms.
That’s lame and defeatist. We don’t do quitting here. We’re Gen X. We drank from the hose.
We figure out the dinosaur.
While building a whole new midlife women’s intelligence platform.
Meanwhile, the authors… bless them… are having their own completely valid spirals.
Why does my description look like this?
Can we change this line?
I don’t like her hair in that graphic.
And I’m trying to explain, gently, while my brain is still in the snow globe:
It’s for a robot. A robot named El Jeffe.
The robot that sells all the books. Like 90% of our books.
We are trying to help you sell more than 200 copies.
Just give us a minute.
And they’re like, yes, but also, what if we changed everything right now?
And I’m like… great. Love that. I’m going to lie down.
There are days I don’t go outside. Not once. Just moving from email to text to doc to Zoom call like a deranged air traffic controller. Two hundred people. Sixteen books. Eighteen timelines. All overlapping.
Wait, the books are lost again? How does this KEEP happening?
Can we just get an RFID tag for all our stuff—like they do at Disney?
And I’m standing in my kitchen… unable to find a fork, listening to everyone in publishing equivocate over AI when I realize, hold up… If you can read the fabulous Donna Tartt, why on earth would you ever want to read AI?
Somewhere in all of this, the dodgy postictal memory, the lightning strikes, my mother in the dirt, the priest with his tiny smokes, me Craigslisting my organs to keep up with demand, this is how still we feel when we sign an author…
OK, this but definitely NOT the racist or orientalist tropes. The point is that suddenly, we feel as if we can all dance like Ann Reinking.
And then you realize it’s all the same story.
People doing strange, imperfect, very human things in the dark. Trying to make something a little more beautiful than what they were handed. Trying to be good. Or at least… a little better. Even when it’s messy. Even when it makes no sense. Even when your brain won’t cooperate.
When someone needs a little bit of unexpected beauty, I think… okay. That’s the assignment. Not perfection. Not control. Not even clarity, half the time. Just keep showing up. Keep making things. Keep planting things.
Even if you’re a little lost. Even if you’re running on fumes. Even if your brain is basically a shaken snow globe. Especially then. Because this life… as chaotic and inconvenient, and occasionally terrifying as it is…is also astonishing.
Anyway. Back to work.
But first… we need one more song because even when you’re herding brontosauruses, dealing with a eternally sunshiny spotty mind, and seizures with an unending soundtrack, you might need…
Six days to Fallout people! Can’t wait to see everyone in Boston and New York.
Stay safe out there. So proud of all our authors and team. They’re everything. 💜
xoxo,
Gotham Girl
PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.
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