Prologue


Save yourself, the plotlines and narratives and trajectories of the bestsellers crowding my night table earnestly urge in sweet, seductive whispers from their pastel-colored covers. And now, I am a typical reader: a casualty of intention and expectation, a woman shaking off a bad fall. Maybe I’m like someone you know: someone who believed she held all the answers until the day a bouquet of questions was delivered to her hospital room. And now I’m guilty of reading every one of these damn memoirs of reclaimed self-esteem, trying to figure out what just happened and what I'm supposed to do next. I’ve become a sucker for self-improvement, a postulant of positive messaging.

For someone living out her own cautionary tale, someone who started out on a pedestal of righteous good intentions and wound up crying herself sick and half-dead in a restroom off the New Jersey Turnpike, these books more than fit the bill, with their messages of salvation through cookbooks and ashrams and poems composed in serene Italian gardens. And like most parables, all of these stories come with a similar, simplistic message. Save yourself. Find yourself. Reclaim your soul from darkness and despair. Shine your light and proclaim your Truth from the hilltops, from the mountaintops, from your desktops and your laptops.

With time now to catch up on my reading, friends bring books by on a regular basis. I can’t help but notice that the covers of these stories I’ve been reading lately resemble nothing so much as board books– those chunky volumes meant to capture the attention of pre-verbal infants. By contrast, the young adult books lent to me by my young cousins and nieces are a coven of black covers adorned with gothic typefaces and distorted images of blossoms and flames and waterfalls in intense shades of orange and vermillion and ocean blue. The message of this phenomenon is that the next generation is valiantly protecting the world from supernatural forces. Women like me are merely trying to appease the demons they have created for themselves.

Like me, my favorite heroines start out in early pages weeping in places just as undignified as the Grover Cleveland Service Area – in a subway car, on the bathroom floor, just prior to the second act of Tosca, during the dessert course of an elaborate dinner party complete with wine pairings. A picaresque journey ensues, and by the time one reaches the acknowledgements and the book group guide at the end, my vicarious self has shed her dead-end job / fears about marriage / fears about motherhood / fears about Life Itself. Invariably, she has either jetted off to Asia to procure ancient wisdom, courageously cooked her own weight in artisanal butter, or bravely sets and raises her chin as she accepts the weight of a newborn or two nestled into her blessed, benevolent arms.

I, like so many other women my age, reach for one dog-eared volume or an interchangeable other in that final quiet hour of the day before sleep. We read along and imagine ourselves returning our table trays to the upright position, anticipating the descent into the foreign city that will lead us to our true selves. We picture ourselves at the stove, the wooden spoon at ease in our fingertips and the nutty aroma of browned butter and sautéed leeks filling the air as we embrace our destinies of home and hearth.

In the hour that transitions us from doing to dreaming, we try to reconcile our true potential with our deep fatigue; the equations of work and love and memory and independence relentlessly resolving and unresolving themselves with imperfect symmetry. We attune our ears to that distant melody, the song of self-salvation.

But until now, I have never been particularly interested in saving myself. I wanted to save the world.

Ever since I was a little girl, I was taught that it was my responsibility to leave the world a better place than I had found it. My mother was a schoolteacher, my father a detective. In our house, fighting injustices – of crime, of poverty, of ignorance – was as normal as pouring the first cup of coffee in the morning. It was all I ever knew. I never for even one moment imagined that going out into the world, armed only with a talent for words and intentions of doing good, would do me no good whatsoever.

Now I know differently. Like my sisters in literature, I, too, have done my time on the bathroom floor; I know the feel of white tiles cold against my cheeks. Like them, I believed the old biblical saw: those who sow in tears shall reap in joy. Something in me could never believe in a world so unjust, or a God so cruel, that those who sow in tears could actually reap a harvest that only brings forth more tears.

But I am not one of those heroines. And this is not one of those stories.