“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.

Home. It feels like I’ve been gone for a million years and like I never left. I emulate my parents’ routine, a balanced breakfast at eight in the morning, soft boiled egg, one piece of toast lightly buttered, or cereal, fruit, plain yogurt. The papers, The New York Times and local, my mother does the puzzle, my father supplies answers. I have been living amongst savages and have lost the practice, more than a practice for me, an obsession, and an addiction to reading. Reentry is challenging and my mother stares at me hard as if she can discern all the drugs, the alcohol, and the men.

During the rest of the weekend, I obsessively reviewed what I’d worn to work. I took out all my clothes and tried to eliminate anything that was overly feminine or revealing. But my clothes were not the problem. There was nothing to suggest sexual availability. For the second time in my life, I had failed to keep a man from sexually abusing me; a man that I knew, a man that I thought respected me. I hated myself even more than usual. On Saturday afternoon I went to the package store and bought several bottles of wine. I spent that night drinking.

After I graduated from pole climbing, I was told to report to work the following day.  I would meet my gang of employees and start my job as a resident installation foreman for New Jersey Bell Telephone. “Fresh meat!” The speaker was about seven feet, hugely muscled, tattooed. with a buzz cut. “Excuse me?” I’d heard him, but I hoped he wouldn’t speak to me like that again.
“I said, ‘fresh meat.’ Where are you from, baby? You’re new, right?”
I nodded.
“So, which side? Business or residential?”
“Residential.”
”You just get out of pole school or what?”
“Hey, looky, look! It’s our new management hire!” A very spiffy, buff man with slicked-back hair and a wide smile was standing at my elbow. ”Howdy, Mary Ellen.”
“Molly.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” the fresh meat guy said, spitting on the ground. “She’s one of them bitches?”
“Watch your filthy mouth Halloway and fuck off!” The spiffy man extended his freshly manicured hand. “Welcome to hell, Molly. I’m Marco Lopez, and I will be your tour guide.”

Of course, I wasn’t healthy enough to accept we needed to stop seeing each other. During the few months that remained in the Trinity year, we drifted apart. He came to say goodbye when I was leaving Ireland, and we drank coffee in the back garden pretending we would see one another again although neither of us believed that was true. Trine was driving me to catch the train to begin my trip across Europe, but he was standing on his head and refused to say goodbye. I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Don’t forget me, Christopher Robin.”

I landed in Dublin and was in a cab headed to Emily Murphy’s flat on Wilton Place before I felt anything but a mild sort of shock that I had actually managed to leave the country. “Are you visiting a relative?” the cab driver asked.
“I’m going to Trinity for a year.”
He glanced in his rear-view mirror. “Ah, Protestant then?”
“What? Oh, no. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Well, not even lapsed, never started. My grandmother was from the North. She grew up in a convent.” This need for self-identification was always in play in Ireland. Unlike race in America, Irish people looked alike and needed a guide to hate each other. It was almost impossible to remain mysterious about your belief system or to deny religion when choosing a side was necessary.