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Until now I have never, yes never, experienced writer’s block. If I had nothing to say, I did something else; baked bread, went to the movies or a museum, walked, read a book. I was fine to not be writing. If I had nothing to say I was able to redirect and find a way to feed my creative life. But this feels different. There’s a pause which I’ve experienced before, waiting to hear from an editor or agent. But this pause is uncomfortable, and I can’t seem to avoid bad things like scrolling on my phone to watch videos of cats wearing hats, beating up bewildered dogs or simply staring the way cats frequently stare. Or insanely unhealthy food being prepared by skinny, chirpy women; pounds of butter, condensed milk, peanut butter. or chocolate baked into cookies or cakes.

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I come from a subversive stock. No, my parents never overthrew a government, but they were people who looked at certain institutions and made fun of them. The first time my mother saw my new baby, she said, “With that much head, you expect more body.” Another time, after my father had broken a bone in his neck and I said he looked like a poet because his hair had grown so long, my mother said, “Yes, a poet coming out of a drain,” because of his neck brace. Their wit and intelligence made it hard to condemn this behavior. When my father was a visiting writer at Bread Loaf, a venerated literary summer school, he kept threatening to put on what he described as his “Irish serf hat” and grovel on the lawn of the Director. He refused to socialize with the acceptable, high value people and instead hung out with the runaway nuns, very common during the seventies.

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I’m not sure if it was WWI or the Irish potato famine that caused my grandmother to be such an enemy of the plump, the chubby, the…fat. She passed this down to my parents who, especially my mother, were capable of judging an entire population based on their weight. When they visited me in Chicago they told me, “We love it here. Why is everyone so fat?” Which they weren’t except they were but who cares? My years of living in New York City during the eighties, one of the most fatphobic decades ever, being broke so I walked nearly everywhere but also like most New Yorkers took public transportation which burned plenty of calories.  I had seen eating disorders up close, a woman I stayed with in Paris kept horrible bits of food in jars all over her flat and often arrived at the end of a restaurant meal to eat scraps from the table.

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