Blog

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.

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First, when your little boy decides to give you a new hairdo while weaving binder clips, white out, jars, pencils, and possibly a small stapler into the back of your head, let him. This may give you another ten minutes or so to work on your book. Recognize as soon as the call comes from the West Coast radio show, your son will forget the “no talking game” and demand something complex from the refrigerator. You will describe your artistic beliefs while mixing parmesan cheese into orzo. Then he will tell you he needs to sit on your lap and whisper things in your ear, even though this sort of thing never happens anymore. Practice sounding authorial while your child mutters, “I love my momma” in your ear repeatedly.

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We met at an audition for a play at Trinity College Dublin, where I was spending my junior year. By then, I was no longer planning suicide, which was my first idea. Somehow, I thought it would make things easier for my parents if I killed myself in a foreign country. Okay, I was twenty, and my prefrontal cortex was still undeveloped. Also, I was in a depression so deep I could not imagine any future. At the beginning of the summer, I had broken up with who I believed to be the love of my life, and shortly afterward, my best childhood friend was killed in a car crash. After attending her funeral in a state of chaos, I went back to New Jersey and told my mother I was an alcoholic and wanted to die. Since she was in the middle of slicing up a massive rump roast, she waved the knife at me and said, "No! It's his fault. You are perfect. Go to your room." Instead, I left, found a gig house sitting, minding a depressed dog, and spent several months drifting around in a pool, stoned, crying. 

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