Hey friends. How are you all doing out there? It’s become pretty impossible to speak meaningfully into this void box weekly about the state of the world. At the same time, the sun is shining here in California, and our messy, overgrown garden has sprouted purple and yellow flowers that I did not plant, and they are, right now, peering at me through the windows. I’ve been writing and reading and running, and moving through some life shit that feels both cataclysmic and quietly predestined.
I’ve been trying in recent months (k, years) to make more space around everything, and I’m looking forward, in the coming months, to spending more time offline and outdoors at kids’ sports games and in the community pool, with books on towels under the sun. I really appreciated this recent meditation on time and the work of writing on this platform by
.I’ve also been trying to think about how I might downshift in this space in the coming summer months, without losing touch with all of you. In the meantime, though, I’m SO looking forward to next week—we’re doing our first ever Mad Woman Writing Group virtual retreat, which you can read all about here:
And I’m teaching a 1-day seminar, Against Heroism, this Sunday. (Discount code for ALL paid subscribers is here.) I hope to see many of you there.
While I get ready for all of that, I also want to share with you an interview I did for Times Insider, on my recent story for New York Times Magazine. The interview is a little behind-the-scenes look at how the piece came together. The reporter asked me about what I didn’t get to explore in the published piece. There was so much! Something I don’t mention in the interview is that the final story was originally supposed to be about 2k words longer (we cut it down so it could appear in the Modern Love issue of the magazine). As I do with any written thing, that means I also wrote several thousand words above that. I’ll be sharing here some of what I didn’t get to explore in the published piece in the coming weeks and months.
For now, I hope you enjoy this conversation.
Not being married any longer I didn't throw my hat in the ring to talk to you for this one. But if you ever do any reporting on "when sex ends a marriage" sign me up.