Revisiting the Writer Who Inspired Me to Change My Life

Hello! How are you holding up this summer? The temperatures have cooled in France, but they are expected to rise again next week. I’ll be with my daugther in Paris, which is particularly ill-equipped to handle the increasing frequency of heat waves.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous times in Paris, especially my week-long stay there in September 2022 as the jumping off point of my year of travel when I quit my old life and was throwing myself out into the world, destination unknown.

I document this exhilarating, terrifying time in Flight: A Year in Search of a Passionate Life. This week, I sent out the last installment about my time in Paris, following in the footsteps of the writer Kay Boyle.

This part of the memoir was longer, so I cut it into two installments. Some readers said they didn’t know if they could wait a whole week for the continuation of her story.

Kay Boyle was a part of the so-called Lost Generation in Paris in the late 1920s—but, unlike her famous male contemporaries, she truly has been lost. No one seems to know who she is anymore.

After the Wall Street Crash, most of the other Americans abroad went home, but Kay stayed in Europe through the thirties and the beginning of the forties, Europe’s darkest years. She wrote about the rise of Nazism in Austria and the fall of France to the Germans, winning major awards for her stories. She even came back to Europe after the war and wrote about occupied Germany for The New Yorker. I’ve never read anything like her stories. (I always recommend Fifty Stories, her major retrospective collection. Usually you can order it online.)

Before I left the U.S. and quit my old life, I was researching and writing a biography of Kay Boyle. I worked on it for four years, including one year supported by a Public Scholar Grant from the National Endowment for Humanities. But my own life intervened. I couldn’t put off the drastic changes that I needed to make. With a large dose of regret, I put Kay aside.

Returning her these past two weeks has reconnected me to her and reminded me how important she has been to me. As I explain in the memoir, she inspired me to embrace a larger life than I had been living. Her life was massive—three husbands, multiple affairs, six children, and dozens of books and stories and poems published throughout her life. I could feel her saying to me:

Go out into the world and find love and art and meaning. Don’t expect there to be a happy ending, though. Also, don’t let that stop you. Because you haven’t really lived yet, have you?

The part of the memoir I’ve published these past two weeks is about hearing that call and arriving in Paris, where Kay also began to live again after a time of devastation. She was in her late twenties, having left her first marriage and given birth to her first child, the result of a passionate affair that ended in the father’s tragic death to tuberculosis. She was at loose ends, unsure of how she would support herself and her child, but determined to be a writer and be a part of the world that her lover had introduced her to. (He had published her writing in his magazine alongside Joyce and Hemingway. Through his connections, she would become friends with Joyce, Beckett, and many others.)

I’ve been in France for a couple of weeks now, contemplating my next steps. Remembering those early days of my new life, how fragile my hopes for happiness were and how desperately I wanted to live, as Kay had, has helped me see how far I’ve come. But it’s also has reminded me of where I wanted to be.

I’ve been living such a quiet, small life again, in a little village on the southern coast of England. I’ve been writing my novel when I can, learning how to cope with chronic illness, reading some great novels (or listening to them when staring at a page makes me dizzy), meeting with coaching clients and friends online when I am able. I can see how I’ve pulled in the horizon around me, comfortable in my little cottage by the sea. Too comfortable perhaps. Kay is reminding me how much I have yearned to create a bigger—more audacious—life for myself. And being in France again is helping me visualize it.

I called the serialization of my memoir an ‘experiment,’ and six weeks in I can say that it is going well—beyond my imagining, in fact. It’s been useful for me personally to revisit that time of my life, to remember how it all began. It’s reorienting me, you could say.

It’s also been a wonderful experience to share my memoir with readers. The response has been incredible. I feel like I’m sharing my work with friends who are deep readers and thinkers and are right there sharing this experience with me. Thank you to all who are reading!! Here are some of the comments I’ve received:

There are slo so many thoughtful reflections from readers on their own lives, how mine intersects with theirs, how they have come to view themselves, their relationships, or their past lives. It is this kind of give-and-take that makes this newsletter so special to me. And the even more intimate revelations I share in my memoir, along with readers’ honest reflections on their own lives, are making it even more so!

Here is where the whole memoir lives. I add links to new installments as they appear.

Flight, the Memoir: A Year in Search of a Passionate Life

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Jun 3

Here is the full list of installments of my memoir about my first year of traveling around Europe in search of a new life, after leaving my old one as a professor, wife, and mother in New Orleans in 2022. I went on my journey in search of a full life, one filled with passion, art, creativity, and love. I spent a lot of time contemplating what kind of life I could live, in my fifties, now that I was free to build one from scratch. I looked to various women writers and artists from the twentieth century who had reinvented themselves or created unusual lives for themselves outside of the norms. So you will meet them along the way as well: Kay Boyle, Dora Maar, Simone de Beauvoir, Muriel Spark, and more.

Now on to the travel recommendations based on the recent chapters. These are the places I loved most during my stay in Paris in September 2022 when I was just beginning my new life. There’s lots of stuff about women writers and artists here, for they were helping me to find my path.