For years, I’d admired Jane Green and her wildly successful novels from afar until one night, in 2022, novelist Jean Hanff Korelitz, whom I’d originally met through her Book the Writer series, invited me out for drinks with Jane and two other novelists, Christina Baker Kline and Jessica Anya Blau. If you’re not a writer by profession, you might think this happens often, these drinks with colleagues, but I’m sad to report it does not. As much as I wish it did. Writing is a lonely profession. Your office is often your bed or a child’s bedroom or the coffee shop down the street, and so water cooler conversations simply do not happen for us wordsmiths. We talk to ourselves. We talk to the walls. We talk to our characters and hope they talk back.
This is a long preamble to explain why I was excited to join these women that night for drinks. I needed to talk, to vent, to share my life with people who would get it. That period, back in early 2022, I’d recently discovered the treachery of my post-marital partner of four years, and on the night of those drinks, I was in my own moment of rewilding—dipping my toe back into dating but also guarding my healing and time and solitude; setting new boundaries while expanding others; contemplating new horizons while remaining firmly rooted in the here and now; calming my nervous system with deep breathing but also starting new projects, such as this Substack; and trying to re-find my authentic self after the disorienting shattering of betrayal. Who was that woman? Where was the bold little girl I used to be, the one with hope and optimism and energy? How could I find her again?
That night, as Jessica and I made fun of ourselves and compared notes on our various betrayals, and Christina spoke of the deep love she has for her husband, and Jean talked about her new empty nest chapter, as she and her husband were in the midst of making a big move from uptown to her new home downtown, I noticed that Jane remained unusually quiet with regard to whatever was going on in her domestic life. She looked pained, even, as if she wanted to speak but didn’t feel that she could. I clocked a sadness. A sadness that I now know, thanks to her first memoir, Rewilding, was a life in free fall, for which she did not yet have the words to express.
Well, lucky for all of us, she spent the next couple of years not only finding those words, she uprooted everything she once knew and moved from her tony town in Connecticut to Marrakesh, Morocco, the setting for her previous novel, Sister Stardust, to rewild herself. Rewilding comes out next week, so I asked Jane if she would speak with me before its publication. How was she feeling, putting herself out there so personally and publicly for the first time in her life? What had changed since our drinks back in 2022? Suffice it to say, these days? Jane, as you can see above, is absolutely glowing.
Meanwhile, those drinks that night back in 2022? That’s when Christina first began cooking up her plan to introduce me to the man I love. He and I recently ran into Jessica, for the first time since 2022, at a book party for Christina’s new novel, The Foursome, which I’m currently reading and loving. (And yes, I will grab Christina for an interview here as soon as I’m done.) I’m happy to report that Jessica, too, is doing much better these days: glowing with renewal and new love, too.
We’ve all, in a sense, been rewilding, I guess, since that night in that pub. Which now, in retrospect, feel like a turning point: the beginning of a new chapter for each of us. Midlife is full of such turning points, if you let it.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.