A few weeks ago I had the honor of attending the Pasadena Festival of Women Authors, which each year brings together a handful of writers and hundreds of wonderful readers for a day of talks (about our writing paths) and book signings. My fellow authors were Tania James, Thao Thai, Helen Elaine Lee, Cathleen Schine, Parini Shroff, and Fiona McFarlane—a hilarious, warm, brilliant, and inspiring group. I felt very fortunate to be among them.
Here, a lightly edited version of my talk.
When I started considering my journey as a writer, I thought: easy. I can talk about how, growing up, I’d get chastised for reading while crossing the street, and for reading instead of looking out the window on family road trips from our home in San Francisco to the chamber music festival that my parents, who were orchestral musicians, played in Telluride, Colorado each year. It became a little joke for my parents, the idea that they were telling their daughter not to read.
I thought: I can talk about the old manual typewriter I used to tinker around with on the floor of my childhood bedroom, plinking out escapist fantasies about girls with names like Clementine who did not take long car trips but did travel weekly from San Francisco to Paris. There was the fantastic sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Pellegrini, who assigned creative writing prompts as homework and held short story competitions, which I sometimes won. Later, at my college in New York’s Hudson Valley, I took writing workshops with novelists like Emily Barton and Paul La Farge. And after college, I got a job at a magazine and squeezed in fiction writing early in the morning and late at night and on weekends, and over half a decade those stolen bits of time accumulated into a book, and four years and many revisions later that book, The Mythmakers, landed on shelves.
And that’s all true, and I started to write it all down, but the thing about the act of writing is that it begets more memories, and more images, and if things are working they get progressively more specific and true, and sometimes strange. When I think about writing I picture a sculptor who has to quarry their own marble. That first set of ideas is like blasting this chunk of rock out of the earth, but then you have to haul it home and you’re sweaty and tired and then that’s where the real work begins, but also the real joy—the real play.
So as I was writing about my writing journey, I started honing in on this one memory, which was actually an accordion of memories, and I started feeling like this really was the key to understanding why I had become a writer, and why I’m interested in writing the kind of fiction that I do. I was about five years old, and I had a friend, and although this wasn’t her name we’ll call her Mable to protect her identity for reasons that will soon become clear, because she is the villain in this story.
Because Mable and I were best friends, we ended most of our play dates with one of us crying. I think that’s a sign of having a best friend when you’re five and a girl. We had these toys called Sky Dancers. If you had a child in the 90s or you were a child in the 90s, maybe you remember them. They looked like little Barbies but their arms were very straight with these stiff foam wings attached because they were fairies, and they wore toe shoes and tutus, because they were also ballerinas, and they came with these plastic launchers, some of which were shaped like dolphins, others like bunnies, others like forest scenes—and if the Sky Dancer creators had had a good editor, she might have suggested they trim down a few of these details.
You stuck the ballerina fairy’s pointed feet into this launcher and you’d pull this string which would cause the doll to spin and her wings to rise, which lifted her into the air. Like magic. My friend and I would play for ages with these things, or until one of us sustained an injury, because it turns out that if you give a couple of little girls a spinning toy with foam blades that whir like a helicopter, whether or not the thing’s neon pink, it’ll quickly turn into a blood sport.
My memory’s a little hazy so I can’t bore you with the details of the particular injustice I suffered on this particular day, but I do recall that it began with someone hoarding the dolphin launcher, which was the most elite of the Skydancer launchers, and ended with me hiding in the bedroom at my friend’s house, weeping, which as I’ve said, was par for the course. What stands out about this memory is that my dad, who had either been there the whole playdate, or who had come to pick me up, sat down with me, his back against the wall, and began tearing up too.
I think it’s probably a common early memory, seeing a parent crying or otherwise in distress because for kids it can be quite an upsetting and confusing moment—destabilizing. In my memory however I felt only a powerful sense of vindication. My adult father also understood the inconsolable desolation wrought by what we can call, for shorthand, the Skydancer Debacle of 1996.
So the memory stuck and surfaced occasionally over the years but I didn’t give it particular thought until I was in my early twenties, when I mentioned it in passing to my dad, who didn’t remember the day himself, but said sort of jokingly, as though it was obvious, that probably he wasn’t crying because of whatever had happened with the Skydancer. I said yes, yes, of course.
And then later that day when I was alone I thought, what could he possibly have been going through that was more important than what I was going through with those Skydancers and my best friend? And I realized suddenly the very obvious answer which was that my already very brave and stoic baby brother, who was probably less than a year old, had been born with his insides in a jumble and had already spent a significant portion of his life in surgeries and in the hospital, and that my dad must have been terrified.
I think that experience stands out to me because it’s one of the more striking examples of the gulf between my personal reality and understanding of the world, and the reality of another person. And for me books have been the most consistent way I’ve been able to begin to bridge that gap between consciousness—both as a reader and a writer, but my favorite books also capture the actual feeling of that gulf, and how difficult it can be to accept or imagine or understand the real experiences of another person. And how often we get other people wrong.
It’s always been incredibly maddening to me, that gulf. I have always been a very nosy person, which I think is not unusual among writers. One of my naughty indulgences is that I love riding the subway in New York and getting to read the text messages that strangers are writing on their phones. Getting to live for a few moments inside someone else’s head. For years I have thought about this very particular look this young mother sitting across from me on the train gave her son, who was looking at the window. It was so tender. I also, unfortunately, love watching breakups, which happen all the time in public, these dramatic dissolutions of a relationship, it’s very sad but also very hard to look away. If blinds are open while I’m out walking at night, I will look into them. If you are my high school friend and you leave your Facebook logged in on my computer on a browser that I do not typically use, and months later I discover this fact, it will take more willpower than my eighteen-year-old self perhaps possesses to keep from reading your private messages. And it occurs to me now that maybe I’m actually the villain in this story.
For a long time I have been caught between two feelings: the first is the extraordinary luck of having been born into this life, which has so far been filled, mostly, with love and interesting people and experiences, with safety and health. And the other, which is how unfair it is that, as least as far as I’ve observed, we only get one life. I look at old photos of my parents taking trains across Europe in the 80s while on orchestra tours and feel so mournful that I’ll never have done that, or I’ll interview a scientist for a magazine piece and feel envious that my brain doesn’t work in that way. My mom played for decades in the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, and I’d hang out backstage and watch the dancers stretching, having this really particular experience of being in their bodies that I would never get to feel. I wanted to be all these different people, which is maybe why I tend to pick up and discard hobbies. I was a really middling violin student for a long time and later tried to learn guitar. I’ll go through phases where I paint or knit or embroider or crochet; I took ballet classes as an adult which, as someone with next to zero spatial awareness, it turns out, was quite humbling.
I have also been blessed with universally supportive parents, Skydancers notwithstanding, who nurtured creativity and arranged for me to take art classes with one of their friends, a painter, and came to all my violin recitals although, a few years ago, in 2020, my husband and I moved back in with my parents for five months, and while I was there I found my violin, which by then I hadn’t touched in some ten years, and began jamming out with some Bach minuets. My mom was at the dining room table doing some paperwork—and keep in mind, this woman loved a poem that I wrote at age thirteen so much that she sent it to The New Yorker, which deliciously, became my first rejection. Eventually I mused out loud to myself that maybe I shouldn’t have given it up, you know, maybe I could’ve been really good, spinning through this alternate life where I stole Hillary Hahn’s career out from under her, and my mom goes, “I don’t think so.”
And of course she was right, because that was not my thing. The one thing I’ve stuck with, that I’ve wanted to do every day, ever since I learned how to do it, was write. And it’s so lucky, because with writing you get to inhabit all these other worlds.
Someone told me once that there are two cliché paths for debut novels, the first is some very thinly veiled autobiographical story, so mine might have been about a young woman living in Brooklyn, working in magazines and making a series of questionable dating decisions. That’s one path. And the other is packed with every single thing the author has ever found interesting. Armed with this knowledge, I thought that I certainly wouldn’t be falling into either of those traps. But it turns out I’m actually an overachiever, because I did both. In The Mythmakers a young woman working at a magazine, living in Brooklyn, shrugs off her life and dives headlong into the tangle of another family. She seeks out the recently widowed Moira, a physicist who came of age during the space race, and who has recently lost her husband Martin, who was a male author. (Another thing I’ll never be.) And without understanding what I was doing at the time, I peopled my novel with characters who lived lives I found fascinating or curious and that I would never get to live, myself. For Moira, I spent years reading about quantum mechanics, I interviewed a NASA historian and talked to my father-in-law, a nuclear physicist, trying to wrap my brain around these mind-bending concepts of time. I also sunk into the feeling of a parent terrified about the wellbeing of a child.
Still, these characters are, in a certain way, all me, all from my brain. That’s one of the limits of empathy, of imagination. Wherever you go, there you are, holding a duffle bag brimming with a jumble of childhood memories and genetic predispositions and biases and anxieties and the pages of other books.
It’s hard to say how and why, exactly, we become the people we are. Lucky therapists, or they might be out of a job. Writers, too, maybe. I have no idea why it is that my brother, who lived through all those hundreds of hours in the hospital, now spends his free days waking at dawn to photograph Tule Elk in the Marin fog, or climbing into cages in the Atlantic Ocean to capture images of sharks, while I’m compelled to spend mine holed up in front of a computer, trying to locate the right words to describe two people almost but not quite understanding each other. Though I suppose we’re both attempting to pin down observations, to give meaning to a world in which meaning is not always readily apparent.
I think the thing is that I obviously won’t ever fully understand other people, and I won’t even ever fully understand myself, but reading and writing books are two things I think I’ll want to do forever because they are clawing closer, at least, to connectedness, even if it’s always just out of reach.
After the festival, I did a little three-day DIY writing retreat in San Francisco. More on that next time. For now, if you’re looking for further reading:
As always, you can buy my book—either the glorious hardcover right now, or a preorder of the ultra chic paperback, hitting shelves this summer.
I talked to Natalie Portman, who appeared on this year’s gorgeous Vanity Fair Hollywood cover, about truth and fiction:
“When you’re using real stories, there is a vampiric quality that you have to beware of, and there is a question of whether it’s really possible to be non-interfering in your subject’s life. Like, does the depiction alone interfere in someone’s life? Does your depiction in itself affect the course of the story?”
For more on the murky lines between reality and the stories we tell, here’s my conversation with Lauren Oyler, also for VF:
“There’s a reason why people are attracted to gossip, and people are also attracted to autofiction in the literary world—because the ambiguity is baked into these forms. They allow for much more freedom, both in interpretation and in expression. You can express two things at once.”
And because there’s a lot to catch up on—I’ve been a little truant about this newsletter—here’s my interview with Sloane Crosley on profound grief, coping with humor, and Joan Didion at the Javits Center.
“You feel like you have something to say, you think you can say it better, you can say it best, and so you do it. It's why anyone writes a book, but a little part of me also recognizes that it would be a great side effect if it saved even one person from the self-help aisle.”
Such a funny, tender essay. Brought me to tears. How is it that one so young - is so wise?