Why I Love the Library
The worst year of my life was the year I was in eighth grade. I was fourteen, had braces on my teeth, and was, according to our grumpy and insensitive doctor, “chubby.” I found boys baffling and icky, and had lost my best friend who had moved to Ohio while I languished in New Jersey. I was attending one of the worst public schools in the country staffed by right wing lunatics who were out to get me because both my older sisters had protested against the Vietnam War. The only person I liked in my grade was having an affair with our social studies teacher. The only boy who talked to me was dropping acid in algebra class. Home wasn’t much better. My oldest sister was in her second year at college living with a boy my parents found alarming while my next oldest sister was beautiful and annoying. No one paid any attention to me except to suggest I work harder in school or clean up the kitchen.
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Green-Eyed Monster
Writers are seldom happy with other writer’s success. There, I said it. It’s not that you want to be the only one to do well but you want to be spectacularly successful and for the rest to be merely okay. When people, as they invariably do, refer me to other writers as potential pals I wonder why they think we will have anything in common. I imagine it’s a bit like recommending people with broken legs to other people with broken legs. Yes, we understand the other person’s pain, but the chances are they will not be helpful, and we will just compete about who has suffered more.
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Leaving the World
My first exposure to Buddhism was during a weekend in a monastery in upstate New York, a gorgeous place with gleaming wood and a literary pedigree, albeit one that had been tarnished by some shady behavior (no, it’s not just the Catholics). The weekend was offered as a sober retreat, and I was willing to go mainly because I had a major crush on an angry Jewish guy who had signed up. We had been flirting, and the four-hour drive sealed the deal enough that, upon arrival, we snuck into what later proved to be a private sanctuary for the students and monks and made love in the hot tub.
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