"Make my body and life the soil that grows love stories"

Seven years ago from today I was finishing the final edits on my novel The Madonna Secret and preparing to submit it to agents. I’d never envisioned myself having to be a public-facing envoy of my work, preferring a hazy idea of a tiny, black and white author photo and the occasional phone interviews where I mainly discussed my fictional craft and historical research.

But we can’t just be authors right now. We also have to be visible brands: easily digestible with certain catch-phrases and identity captures.

I thought I’d write books. I never wanted to be seen. But cue the pandemic and cue my rude awakening that to be an author who makes a living means constantly negotiating social media’s algorithmic enticement that we self-cannibalize our lives and our worst experiences in real time, updating our audience before we’ve done the tricky, unglamorous work of actually processing these things. Or not processing them….just merely surviving.

I’ve done quite a bit of narrating my own survival. There may come a time when it feels necessary. And I do think it comes from the isolation of illness, especially my own during the early pandemic. This writing turned into a memoir that attempted to encapsulate what it means to keep surviving with illness that doesn’t easily resolve. That meant really putting myself – my story and my body – front facing. Something I’d never put on the bingo card of my life as a writer. And it was really difficult. Incredible connections were made but I also noticed that it correlated with a steep decline in my personal mental and physical well-being. In the past year I have decided that I don’t want to narrate my bodily decline or struggles for an audience. I’m living it. And it’s hard enough that way. I don’t want to pray to a certain story about what is happening to my body and prematurely limit what physical ease and miraculous changes are possible. I have always, most of all, wanted to be a writer of epic stories – rich ecologies of relationship – not a narrator of personal calamity.

There is always an excuse not to write. And, then there are always ample reasons to write my life as a catastrophe.

I want to write it as a love story that acts like a pitcher plant, hosting other species of love story. Make my body and life the soil that grows love stories, not tragic monologues.

My one personal health update for the past six months and the next six months: the body is not good and complicated and exhausting and expensive. Just because I’m not writing about my health, does not mean it is going well. It is…going and going. I guess the continuance is a miracle in and of itself?

Yes, there is wild fire smoke and pain all around. And there is also so much love. So much joy made brighter by the anguished times from which it emerges improbably. As Tolkien writes so eloquently:

“…joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.”

Joy polished by tears to brightness. That is the flavor of this summer for me.

What I most want to share with all of you who very practically keep me alive are the nodes of love in my romantic ecology this summer.