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.

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.

I was in an Uber headed to the airport when Rod Stewart’s raspy voice singing Tonight’s the Night filled the car with some of the most sexist, disturbing lyrics I’ve ever heard in my life. I came of age in the seventies. It sucked. Sex was everywhere and because of the lack of AIDS and a plethora of ways to not have a baby, it was offered the same way you might offer someone a glass of water. At least where I grew up. And then there was this.

In 1982 I was twenty-five, my eldest sister was alive and well, my best friend had been killed four years earlier. I was trying to get sober, obsessed with my weight and men and my parent’s approval. I wanted to write and act and not drink again. I would drink again. My roommate would wake from her coma and recover because she was determined to take her life back. I wish I better understood how hard that was for her. From my perspective ( forty years plus ), this girl is a mess, funny, angry, needy, confused. Constantly doubting herself in terms of men and I can’t remember who 98% of these men she mentions were! Apparently, I was good at meeting them, not so good at keeping them in my life probably because I was spinning too fast to be held down. And, trying to figure out my father. A dead-end for sure.

There were many untold stories in my family. Most of my story remained untold until I discovered the comfort of writing, all of it in a journal until I began to get published in my late twenties. There were descriptions of things I had kept secret, a rape, excessive drinking, my suffering as a child of an adored father who had black, drunken rages, my own alcoholism, the heartbreak of falling in love and then out, my own shame until I stopped drinking and believed someone who told me my writing had power.

“For someone who just had their first novel published, you seem less than happy.” I was lying in a fetal position on my then boyfriend’s bed, a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, said novel clutched to my stomach sobbing, because my father had been mean to me. Thirteen years later when novel number three was published, I was having a screaming fight with my ex-husband during a physical exam which inspired my then doctor to put me on Prozac and recommend I get more sleep. When the first check arrived, I carefully signed the back and then, inexplicably, found an envelope and a stamp and mailed it to someone who had nothing to do with the book. I then announced I had lost the check and was certain my publisher would refuse to replace it and burst into tears. I handle success poorly.

I had no idea what I was doing at first. That class, a group of men who had recently immigrated from Haiti, were painfully polite and kind despite my incompetence. I spoke too fast, I used vocabulary terms they didn’t recognize, I was constantly handing out things and then realizing they were too advanced and taking them back, aware that these men would lose their right to a free education if they failed the final exam for the third time and most of them had already failed twice. I called my father for help but he had never dealt with this sort of student having taught literate, driven, and mostly brilliant graduate students’ Anglo-Irish poetry and Dickens. Finally, I went back to the writers who had inspired me with their stories about learning and teachers who had changed their lives or students whom they had educated. I reread Teacher Man by Frank McCourt and found his approach, storytelling and humor, was helpful, but I was younger than most of my students, and a woman, which meant I had to find a path towards mutual respect. Somehow I remembered the James Baldwin essay, A Letter to My Nephew, in which Baldwin urges his younger relative not to turn bitter and angry in the face of racism but to find a way to survive and live with dignity. It is filled with tenderness and rage.

Before I married Mr. Fix-It we broke up. But since I had already paid him to put up shelves in my kitchen, he did the job. As I removed the turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving, there was the sound of things separating from the wall of shelves now filled with breakable objects and then a massive crash. He is an iron worker who could find a stud in his sleep. This was sabotage. I, on the other hand, can’t hold a tape measure straight. While I spent two years pretending to understand the process of installing telephones, drilling into concrete, climbing telephone poles, I didn’t actually comprehend any part of my foreperson’s job except for schmoozing customers and telling my gang to wear eye protection. I was a fraud.

When I was eleven and we lived in London, I was invited to spend the weekend with a school friend. What I remember was the family spoke Hebrew and never translated anything and also they ate weird food. It was not a happy experience. At eighteen, the summer before I went to college, I spent a month in Ireland, travelling around and ended up as a house guest to a family friend, a very famous writer with a wife who was much younger and would eventually run off with an even richer man. Anyway, I arrived at the gate of their massive manor house and as I walked up the driveway with my backpack, two of the largest dogs I had ever seen in my life silently appeared on either side of me to escort me to the front door of what resembled a palace. When I knocked, a window above was opened and this woman, a very pretty, naked women draped in the curtain, came out on the balcony and told me to wait.

What does it feel like to be a writer? Sometimes it’s the best thing in the world, your vision is clear, and you are amazed by your own brilliance. This is nice but it doesn’t last, and it doesn’t mean the people won’t say things that hurt your feelings or make you doubt every choice you have made in your life. Also, you hurt people. You remember things they don’t want to be reminded of and anyway, your version is wrong. They are angry to be part of your story, and they feel wounded while you have tried to find some truth, to trace the origin of important things and to convey how these things affected you. Norman Mailer once told me as we walked down the street after a meeting at the Actor’s Studio that my life as a writer would be terrible. He said it smiling and kindly and in terms of expressing his belief that I had talent, but it was a sobering moment. Briefly, I had felt blessed and filled with optimism but now I understand what he meant, what my father meant, what that guy, possibly Hemingway said about it being like opening a vein. We drink, we kill ourselves, we are bad parents, we cheat on our loved ones, and we lie, boy, do we lie.

When I started in a new private school in tenth grade, a really bad time to start a new school, the one thing I achieved that felt good was being on the girls’ soccer team. It was the first girls’ soccer team in New Jersey and we were a feisty, if not a highly skilled group. But we got better. One day my mother came back from the grocery store and said some strange woman had accosted her at the checkout line and went into raptures about how fast I was.

In my first novel I had a rich, thoughtless, lying boyfriend who tells a young woman who has just lost her sister that he is single when he is actually married. In my second novel I had a “best friend” who was codependent and needy, controlling, and possibly in love with the main character. In my third novel there was a family who lost a beloved son and brother and a murderer who killed a babysitter. These characters were based on true people, and I didn’t waste any sleep wondering whether someone was going to hate me or sue me or accuse me of being a bad person. Writing was punishment enough. If someone wanted to hate me for what I did, so be it.