This recent scandal at Interlochen involving faculty members and students, as well as the Epstein connection, has reminded me of my own experiences as a teenager. Because I grew up in a household that was suffused in literary sex, not actual sex, I was an idiot savant in terms of relationships between men and women. Having read Women In Love in the back of my parents’ Volvo while we were driving down to southern Spain, I became convinced that men and women were meant to destroy each other, but also they should have lots of sex. I was eleven, and my family discovered my reading choice when I asked from the back seat, “What’s a luminous loin?”  This question came from the scene when Gudrun watches Gerald climb out of the water: “The beauty of his dim and luminous loins as he climbed into the boat, his back rounded and soft-ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal.” There was that, and it was fatal, and in my eleven-year-old brain I thought I understood something, but I did not.

I am not a boss lady. During my life I have been in a position of authority as a mother, a line foreman, a teacher, and as a client.

“You are suffering, once again, from CMS,” my husband said in response to my shouting at the cat and then bursting into tears and announcing I hated my life.
“No, I’m not,” I said, “everything’s hopeless.”
“CMS,” he said, “completed manuscript syndrome. It’s the exact way you acted with your previous contracts.”