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.

James and I went to the pub, had a few drinks, and he made it very clear any mention of his dead fiancée was off limits. My jet lag resulted in a stagger to my room, but a few days later we slept together. I was immediately drawn to this man, his broken heart, his anger, his humor, and his connection to my childhood. Of course it ended badly, with his shooting out the mansions’ windows with a pellet gun and fucking another woman, an old girlfriend, in the room next to me.

Here’s what I knew about the world at seventeen: men could walk on the moon, all good politicians would be assassinated, and people murdered one another for no good reason. Six million Jews, gypsies, gays, Catholics and anyone who lacked Aryan cred were exterminated. Not just Anne Frank. Hippies were doomed to failure and capable of the utmost hypocrisy. The Beatles would never reform. The Summer of Love was over. Adults were treacherous and selfish. Men blame women for being beautiful. Men didn’t like smart girls. Men didn’t want an uncontrollable woman. I was uncontrollable. We dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My parents got married on the day we bombed Hiroshima. Placing your hands over your head would not protect you from atomic fall out. Cancer was fatal. Heroin was fatal. Love was fatal. I wanted to save everyone I loved from harm. I was powerless to save anyone from anything.

Seventh grade was supposed to be set in a brand-new school. Instead, we were sent to attend school in the National Guard Armory. I'm not sure where the National Guard was. After the Kent State shootings, it seemed like everyone was either an anti-war protester or a soldier. That year, the US Selective Service started the first draft lottery date for the Vietnam War. On December 1, 1969, men aged nineteen to twenty-six would be drafted based on their birthdates. The National Guard kept getting photographed looking overwhelmed and miserable at the prospect of beating up more college students.