I was beaten into literacy by an angry Irish teacher at a school located outside of Dublin called Glengara Park. I was six and had managed very well in an American kindergarten where we carried our chairs for credit. In fact, I had starred as Mother Nature in the Spring play and had learned all my lines by heart because I could not read.

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.”

I am very, very conflicted about social media. The irony of writing this on a social media platform is not lost on me any more than that disgusting fuck saying he totally understands all sports and then admitting he has no idea what a red card is. I liked Facebook. I wrote stuff, funny or moving stuff, and people said they liked what I wrote. I never noticed who liked anything, and if no one liked it, I didn’t care. Occasionally I attended a party, and someone would tell me something they had no business knowing, and when I asked them how, they would say, Facebook. That was a little weird, but hey, it saved time because people didn’t need to be filled in on details about my cat or son or parents or constant whining about day-to-day stuff. My husband posting unflattering pictures of me with a cheese hat or coming out of the water in a bathing suit or making weird faces was annoying but nothing I couldn’t handle by looking at some old headshots and remembering I was once quite the looker.

“Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.” —Virginia Woolf

Recently, I have had two weird experiences when attending writers' groups. One was definitely for anyone who writes, whether songs, limericks, stories, or poetry; the other was a group of supposed “published” writers. I attended the first one reluctantly, invited by a neighbor who mistook my identity as a “writer” for someone who wants to write, who writes as a hobby or as a long-postponed dream of a future. This group started with the leader's arrival, who unpacked several bottles of wine and led a sort of insider exchange of information about bears and snow (we are in northern Michigan). Soon, a member displayed agitation of a sort I associate with homeless people yelling at strangers, made worse by his consumption of alcohol. While I was reading a story and was greeted with a small amount of praise, I sensed this was not the purpose of this gathering. I recognized my approach to my work, the work of a writer, was not going to be appreciated by the others who spoke of the “torture” of creating. It started to feel like a hostile support group with the agitated member focusing on me and demanding an answer to the question, "Why do you write?" After remaining to show my support for another reader, I fled.

Is it shameful that I have never outgrown my tolerance for if not adoration of reality television, started in the 1970s with the people on An American Family.

Writing exists in my life free of neurosis or attachment. It has brought me a little fame and money but mainly it has given me purpose, a way to process what sometimes seems impossible to accept or forgive. It has also given me a way to help others. As a writing teacher and coach, I have witnessed students discovering their stories whether based on fact or conjured from dreams and imagination. Writing was a way to change the realities of my childhood. While my parents were brilliant, funny and loving they were also narcissistic and self-destructive. My father’s dedication to his writing and to the writing of others as a respected literary critic made several things clear to me when I was very young. The importance of books was manifest while the writing of them was potentially a form of torture. Witnessing my father’s disappearance into his own writing with the subsequent publishing and frequent frustration when his novels were remaindered convinced me that the life of a writer was a life I wanted to avoid.