The family story was amusing, a drunken Scottish doctor, me on a doorstep in London, age three, smashing milk bottles. And then kneeling in that broken glass. Getting stitched up by that doctor who squinted at the gaping wound and apparently stitched it up with something like a fishing line. I found the scar useful for remembering my right from my left. I never thought about the other details like being alone on a doorstep at age three, breaking milk bottles. And why was this doctor drunk?

I am chronically discontent. Set a goal, draw a line in the sand, set a bar, articulate a dream, an intent, an aspiration, and I will get there and immediately embrace some version of failure. Here are some of the things I’ve achieved, a master’s degree in writing, four published novels, a marriage lasting into the third decade, a healthy, happy adult child, a sulky but secretly content cat, several houses, the ability to swim over a mile, a full-distance triathlon, bicycling over seventy miles a day for six days, wonderful friends, over forty years of continuous sobriety. Guess what? It’s all slightly flawed, not quite perfect, shadowed by an overwhelming feeling that while I am fully aware, the life I inhabit is privileged and, at times, extraordinary, there is that pea under the mattress I can’t avoid, the slight flaw in the dream, the cloud in this sky where I live in such aching beauty here in Northern Michigan.

My publishing history has been…interesting. Back in 1990 after getting fired from my editing job at Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, I started to waitress and do things that artists sometimes do; I was a fake patient for training foreign doctors, I posed naked for a photographer wanting to diversify his portfolio, (Me: “Do you want a picture of me naked? Boyfriend: “No! You look terrified.” Me: “I’m smiling!” Boyfriend: “Your eyes are filled with fear!”) I edited a few essays for money and I wrote.