A New York City Homecoming

“Wow, New York, just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything…” –Stevie Wonder

I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold and dangerous but somehow, it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation, and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. In my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, the relationships that I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk (Cleopatra’s Needle), deserted except for a homeless man who gestured to me to come closer.

photo by Jermaine Ee

“It’s a miracle,” he said. We both stood and stared at the vision. Like so many things I had experienced in the city, it made little sense, but it seemed as if we had manifested this relic of ancient Egypt and wordlessly, we worshipped. “Make a wish,” he said. I wished for him to find a home and for a book deal. I knew I could not bring my dead sister or friend back to life or stop my parents from destroying each other.

In the 1980s New York City was a town filled with Wall Street bros, hookers, artists, criminals, dreamers, and people who believed it was a privilege to be surrounded by people from every country, economic level, race, sexual persuasion and religion. It was decimated by AIDS, Reagan’s social services cuts, bad publicity, and the misguided belief that it was filled with heartless and dangerous people. I found sanctuary in strangers who understood the struggle of surviving in a country that displayed its brutal indifference to the poor, its black heart of racism and its violent and misogynist beliefs daily. We were fragile, easily bruised, yet the city was safe, kind, and encouraged the seeking of beauty and meaning.

I am just back in the land of squirrels and lakes where I now live in Northern Michigan after a three-day, packed weekend to celebrate the new publishing imprint, Empress Editions, that has decided, after twenty-two years, to publish my fourth novel, MotherPerson. I met other writers, editors, and dedicated lovers of books while wandering those same streets at over sixty-five that I wandered in my twenties. As I hesitated on the subway, asked directions, and was prepared to be treated like the exile I have become, there was nothing offered but loving kindness. Lest you point out the beautiful weather, the joyous occasion, the brief nature of this trip, I will still defend the city that saved my life. 

–Molly Moynahan