On Nurturing Your Heart in Uncertain Times

A note from the author of Poor Man’s Feast

Hello friends.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written here, and a lot has happened over the last year: Motherland was published in both hardcover and audio by Ballantine Books and PRH Audio. I went on a book tour, and spoke with many people — sons of NPD fathers; daughters of NPD mothers — about what it means to become the inadvertent caregiver for a senior parent with whom one has had a traumatic relationship. I recently learned that Motherland was nominated for a 2020 Lambda Literary Award, which is thrilling. Last summer, I began teaching a memoir workshop for Fine Arts Work Center both on site in Provincetown, and online, during the rest of the year. I’ve also started work on some new and important projects, including stepping back into my longtime role as an editor, this time for the wonderful (literature-loving, author-supporting) Zibby Owens of Mom’s Don’t Have Time to Read Books. Susan is about to begin her sixteenth year as a senior book designer for Random House, designing interiors for authors ranging from Ruth Reichl to Jodi Picoult. People have moved in and out of our lives in breathtaking, often astonishing ways; we’ve experienced the premature death of our dear friend Kurt Michael Friese, withering illness among other friends, and ghosting where people we’ve opened our hearts and home to literally just up and left mid-sentence, as though friendships in the digital age are, as my grandmother would have said, easy come, easy go, and fleeting as a Tinder swipe.

Susan and I just celebrated our twentieth anniversary together. Our lives are, for the most part, good and safe and filled with love and the bizarre gift of clarity that is the B side to trial. And the sense that, perhaps, most of us don’t really grasp how fleeting time is, and how the stolid weight of true affection — unflappable and dare I say kind (that word is tossed around today like a tumbleweed in a windstorm) — cannot be measured in clicks and downloads and followers, but in how readily we are able to forgive the vagaries of our own humanity rather than just simply walk away. And how we help shore up each other’s hearts.

I am sitting in my office today. My little New England street is quiet, on an unofficial quarantine thanks to the coronavirus. As a child of the seventies, I grew up watching movies on big screens and small about viruses run amok. I was always certain that the powers that be would keep us ahead of the game. That was until the mid-1980s, when AIDS ravaged my group of friends and the industries in which I worked at the time (food and publishing); it took a full ten years from the time that my first friend died while I was in college to the time a cocktail was developed and released to the public. The medical world did not move fast enough; patients were expendable pariahs. And so it is personally very hard and complicated for me to put my head down and walk into the powerful wind that is the coronavirus, having been down the virus road before. But I have to.

Most of us, regardless of background, political stripe, or sensibility, are not MeFirsters. I believe that most people actively want to help others; the human condition is to reach out a hand. What can I do to help is a sentence I have heard in the last few weeks perhaps more than ever before. We are all exhausted from the politics that have plagued us, and while a deadly virus is certainly no way for a population to come together, it has had that impact in many places. As for the many heroes among us: they are neither loud nor self-aggrandizing, and their stories often go untold. And gone are the days when we will wait around for a cure; gone are the days where we will allow it to take a decade.

I’m a writer. It’s what I do; it’s who and what I am. I’m also a teacher, and a feeder. The first book I wrote, in the early 2000s, was a practical cookbook designed to help people who bought food in bulk not waste it. In the coming weeks — hopefully much sooner than later — I will be re-issuing it, and making it available digitally, for free, for anyone who wants it. Because waste is not an option: not for ourselves, our families, or our communities. We have to feed ourselves and the people around us.

These are uncertain, scary times, and we are now being called upon to do the right things. I believe we will.

Thanks so much for reading. Please come back soon.