Mothers of the Revolution

The January evening I saw Paramount Theatre events newsletter that advertised discussion between Margaret Atwood and Gloria Steinem, I stopped scrolling. A voice in my head spoke. Don’t miss this. The last time I had been in Austin’s most revered performance venue at the end of 2019 to see the one-man comedy revue, A John Waters’ Christmas. I needed the laughs; God knows we all did. Global upheavals, a splintering democracy and the specter of climate change had made it a difficult three years for everyone. What none of us knew was that it would be the last time most would chance going into a closed public space with large, freely-breathing crowds for the next two years.

An ice storm named Landon—of the kind Texans had never seen until Uri nearly shut down the state’s power grid in 2021—pushed a February show to April. That made me impatient. I’d long been a reader of Atwood’s poetry and frighteningly prescient fiction. And Steinem, one of the original founders of Ms. magazine, had been among the many dynamic feminist activist-intellectuals I had followed since college. Steinem had identified as feminist from the beginning. Atwood did not. It would take the better part of an almost sixty-year career to realize that writing meaningful novels about women was anything but an apolitical act.  

I won’t lie. Going into a small downtown venue that had been sold out for weeks gave me a raging case of the willies. Especially when I saw how few people were wearing masks. But infection numbers were lower than they’d been since the COVID outbreak; we were clearly in some kind of remission, and the excitement of being out and about was visible in the animated chattiness of everyone—women and men, young and old—standing in line to get into the show. And it was a fine, mild spring to boot, better than any we’d had in years.

I sat perched in the mezzanine, the energy sizzling and popping around me. Voices buzzed, bodies buzzed. It was as though I had stumbled into a revival meeting for liberals, minus the tents and laying-on of healing hands. Not that I minded. People were filled with a joyful exuberance I’d not seen in a long time, their anticipation stoked like fire by each of the speakers who introduced the show. And never let us forget that the spectacle about to take place was not just a parley between two octogenarian village elders but a historic event.

The crowd roared appreciation when Atwood and Steinem took the stage. They moved slowly, these age-bent sisters, their hands interlaced before them. The trademark silver concho belt around Steinem’s slight waist nodded to the trademark stylishness that had made her a feminist fashion icon, as did the elegant red scarf around her neck. But it was Atwood I loved. Gray curls flying, she seemed less a prophetess of doom and more a crazy great-aunt who’d pulled on red and white socks to recall the colors of the Canadian flag but forgotten they were mismatched.

Almost all topics discussed were grounded in Texas politics—a clear message, it seemed, that the state had evolved into a bellwether for American democracy. Leading off with the state’s controversial abortion bill-turned-law, the pair took aim and fired. The decision wasn’t just about limiting a woman’s right to choose. It was also a warning shot across the bow of democracy.

Both drew historical parallels between that decision—which has since become a model for other conservative state legislatures seeking similar restrictions—and decisions made by three twentieth century dictators: Adolph Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Romanian autocrat, Nicolae Ceaușescu. The day after Hitler was elected, his first act was to close down all abortion centers and declare abortion itself a crime against the state; Mussolini would follow suit. And when Ceaușescu came to power in the mid-60s, he not only mandated that women have more children, but that they take pregnancy tests every month.

It was about the body, specifically, the female body. It always is. I knew this from my own work on this topic as a literary historian of colonial empires. Democracy and the lack of it reveals itself in what laws say a woman can do with her body. Especially when it comes to reproduction. Steinem knew this from first-hand experience as a young woman coming of age during the McCarthy era, when she took her future—and life— into her own hands by seeking a then-outlawed abortion. Atwood, whose chilling bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, did too, basing much of the novel on her study of Ceaușescu’s draconian policies.

With what’s happened here in Texas, and now Idaho and places throughout the south, challenges to Roe v. Wade are imminent. Atwood and Steinem await this next phase with horror and hope. With the Supreme Court’s current—and unbalanced—composition of three liberals, five hard righters, and one conservative moderate, the outcome seems a foregone conclusion. Unless there is a counter-movement that perhaps revives the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), that needs only congressional ratification to become law. As it stands, the United States is the only one of the twenty-six democratic nations in the world that has not yet included women in its constitution.

That wasn’t all these women had to say. They talked about the Texas school library book ban that, since the beginning of February, has forced school districts across the state to pull 850 titles that, like Atwood’s novel, deal with race, gender and/or sexuality issues. I knew about this, of course. But hearing it spoken aloud in a packed theater with every ear attuned listening in rapt attention made it seem too real. So did statistics from the American Library Association that revealed how 2021 had been the worst year yet for challenges to the freedom to read. And ultimately, express oneself.

In restricting access to books, it mirrors actions it took regarding who can vote.  In September 2021, the legislature passed a law that targets mail-in ballots. A law that, as the results from the most recent Texas primary have shown, disproportionately affects people of color, especially those who live in rural areas. Neither speaker seemed surprised. “It’s the exacerbation of an existing tendency,” Atwood said. A tendency she meant but did not say included the racism and income inequality that are destroying the country just as surely as the COVID pandemic.

Despite the gravity of these topics and their concern that the chaos in American politics and society would blind the US to external and internal threats to its existence, both still expressed guarded optimism. “Hope is a form of planning,” Steinem said. A necessary life-affirming vision of what could be. Nodding her grizzled head, Atwood concurred. From the humanist perspective I understood so well, she expressed belief that hope is something all people have from the very beginning. A kind of in-built programming to protect us against ourselves. Against the destructive impulses that continue to devastate the Ukraine, create worldwide chaos, and threaten both our species and the fragile blue marble of a world it continues to abuse.

No one, including myself, wanted to see them leave the stage. But as they stood up to receive the standing ovation they deserved, they used each other as braces. Even from where I sat, I could see they were tired. Pulling each other up by the shoulders, they pushed the sides of their smiling faces together and squeezed. Strong as truth, they were still two frail old women who needed each other’s strength to speak. And say the words that too many people outside the walls of a small Austin theater refuse to hear.

Bone Digger

Most people shudder at their family’s skeletons, those broken bones of past indiscretions they wished would disappear. But mine are so much my passion I sometimes wonder whether I shouldn’t have become an archeologist. Then again, memoirists like me are archeologists of a kind. We track down dead things, dig up remains, speculate on meaning, evolve theories. Where or when this mania started I can’t say. Only that as a child I never failed to exasperate my parents for asking too many questions. So I learned to listen and observe to find my answers. And when that wasn’t enough, use the stealth of thieves to root through drawers, cabinets and closets I had no business looking in whatsoever.

 The family member who interested me most was Papa. My blue-blood mother had a pedigree she could trace back for centuries; but he had been a child with a Dickensian past. The little boy his foster mother never wanted enough to adopt. Born in Paris to a nameless woman who abandoned him at birth, the only thing he had besides an incomplete birth certificate was a Middle-Eastern sounding last name from a man he swore up and down wasn’t his father. I’m English, he’d say. My mother just snickered and called my father a liar. He doesn’t know who his parents are. He’s just saying that.

 The freebooting child in me didn’t forget. Which is why, more than forty years later, I spit into a tube from an Ancestry DNA kit and waited eagerly for the results. The child had not succeeded in finding answers, but perhaps the adult could. The test results excited me—at first. There was British blood mixed with blood from Germanic Europe that explained Papa’s translucent white skin. There was Armenian blood, too; but that result mysteriously vanished when Ancestry recalibrated the results several years later. Skepticism creeped in. I didn’t doubt that Papa was English. But had the bias in the laboratory—perhaps because of my name—“created” incorrect data?

 Skeptical as I was about the test, the genealogical database into which my results were entered did eventually yield a first-cousin match to an elderly man named Martin who lived in the West of England. I did not bother to contact him. Too often the other people I had contacted, the second and third cousin matches who answered my feverish queries could not help. Then the tables turned and an amateur genealogist and ex-priest who shared a connection to both me and Martin became the one to ply me with questions. Do you know Martin? Where are you on the family tree?

 I had only my father’s strange, fragmented story to offer him in return. So he looked at the amount of shared DNA I had with Martin and concluded I was a half-first cousin, the child of a relative born out of wedlock. That wasn’t all. Because he had studied Martin’s family history, he was able to offer a theory about the parent who had given Papa his English bloodline. Papa’s English parent wasn’t a man. It was a woman named Ethel Maud, the sister of the man who became Martin’s father. Her name was unsettlingly ironic; naming me had been my mother’s business, not Papa’s.

 Ethel’s story stuck with me. A spinster, she came from a respected West Country farming family. She kept house for an uncle who lived in Bristol, living there until both he—and eventually she—died. My imagination began spinning stories. Had this placid woman taken a lover in secret, perhaps—for whatever reason—not the taste of her family? One thing was for sure. If she was indeed Papa’s mother, she went to great lengths to hide her pregnancy, going to Paris to have the child, then abandoning it. Perhaps it was the very British need to keep up appearances that drove her. That and the fact that as a middle class woman of the 1920s, she had everything to lose from being a single mother.

 Despite my DNA test skepticism, I decided to take a second test just to confirm there was no Armenian connection. I would not know who Papa’s father was; but perhaps I could lay that piece of the puzzle to rest. This one, by CRI Genetics, promised insights into a deeper past that went back thousands of years. I swabbed the inside of a cheek: three weeks later, I received confirmation of British, Northern and Southern European ancestry along with a huge surprise. Weaving in and out of Northern European and Tuscan Italian bloodlines was an Asian one stemming not from the Asia Minor of Armenia, but the Asia of the Far East. The line itself was split into others that came from Bengal, the Punjab, Southern China. And even Japan.

 The romantic side of my imagination whether one of Papa’s relatives, perhaps someone on his still-unknown paternal side, was a gypsy. The Romani people originated in Northern India, mostly the Punjab region; their descendants live all over Europe and the world. But the Chinese connection? Before 1900, Asians (and Southeast Asians), came to Britain as servants or sailors, usually in service of the infamous East India Company. Those who stayed in Britain lived in London or big port cities like Liverpool; most lived in poverty or at best, working class. Perhaps a Britisher in Papa’s history had worked in India or China, perhaps for the East India Company or even as a colonial official; perhaps had a liaison with a woman there. And the child that resulted wound up in Britain, probably London. Whoever they were, these relatives, they were travelers. People on the move…just like Papa, a restless man who could never stay in one place for long.

 Going back even further, to the 1600s, the test revealed another surprise: a Taino connection from Puerto Rico. CRI Genetics had found connections to Spain; so had the first version of Ancestry DNA. It was clear now that if the test was correct, my ancestors had been part of the Spanish Conquest…and that this Taino had more than likely been a woman. I had read enough history to know that this was how empire worked: kill the men or work them until they die. Enslave the women and turn them into concubines. It doesn’t matter which side, maternal or paternal, she came from. Only that she existed and that one or more of her children had followed their father to Europe.

 With so many unknowns in my paternal ancestry (and a few on my mother’s side), I am tempted to further speculate that these people, these other ancestors, had no wish to be known, desiring instead to lose themselves in whitewash of Europeanness just to survive. One of the things I remember my father telling me over and over was how glad I should be for who I was. Which in his parlance meant white and middle class. But the curious child who didn’t obey her parents had already learned what was important to her and remains important to her still: knowing where her skeletons come from. And understanding them—loving them, even—rules be damned.  

Pasta & the Theory of Everything

Mama was an Italian lapsed Catholic who sang while she cooked. It felt so much like a ritual I sometimes wondered whether her from-scratch meals and the songs that accompanied them weren’t a substitute for Sunday Mass. The noodles, though—they always came from a box. Perhaps she bought them because it was the modern thing to do. A time-saving convenience. I only realized this after I bought a pasta machine last December, a whirring, purring dream that efficiently pushes out 200 grams of everything, from capellini to linguine, pappardelle and lasagna, in under fifteen minutes. It seemed my desire to experience something like traditional pasta had made me regress.

The machine would have competed rather than harmonized with my mother’s sonorous mezzo-contralto. But its near-scientific precision? It would have won her over. She was a trained biochemist who transformed our kitchen into the culinary laboratory that was also her refuge. I think of this now, whenever I watch my machine work. Seeing the noodles wriggle from the tiny holes of my machine’s extruder, now, it sometimes seems I’m witnessing the birth of worms. Or maybe even the threads that, according to one branch of theoretical physics, make up all matter.

I think of string theory now because my mother was a scientist. But it didn’t become a recognized area of research until the 1970s, nearly twenty years after she fled biochemistry and disavowed her connection to the laboratory.  On-the-fringe but not quite discredited, string theory suggests that vibrating “strings” create everything from single-celled amoebae to entire galaxies. Proponents further argue that it could unify space and time and everything in it with coextensive physical forces that keep large objects like planets and moons from flying apart. For believers, it’s the concept that explains the entire universe.

Just about the time homemade pasta became a menu staple, this strange theory became my personal food for thought. Like my meals, it’s one of the few things that links me to my mother. And—I like to imagine—to the aunts and grandmothers and grand aunts and great-grands who cooked from scratch,  perhaps setting the noodles they made out to dry in the bright Italian sun. The women against whose way of life my mother rebelled through science; but to which she reluctantly returned as an unhappy housewife. Those strings of egg, water and semolina flour—they’re more than a meal. They are the invisible and complicated strands that remind me of the nurturing my mother could not offer except in the food she prepared.

String theory, of course, is not nearly as linear as the pasta I imagine connects me to my foremothers. Beyond the three dimensions our senses know and the invisible fourth dimension of time, there are as many as 25 separate dimensions. They exist as tiny balls of curled strings  associated with every point in the three-dimensional world we live in and affect all different aspects of that world including time.  Depending on how these cosmic strands move, they can create an infinite variety of effects in all dimensions. These can take the form of everything from invisible “collisions” (as between atomic particles) to large body connections (as between planets and their moons).

The possibilities string theory suggests have inspired others—especially science fiction writers—to play with the related idea that strings can create universes that parallel our own and exist with different versions of ourselves and the lives we know. No wonder the strangeness of string theory appeals. This space of what ifs and alternatives—this is a space I can understand. And yet…it’s not the science that draws me, or even the squirming strands of homemade pasta. It’s the strings themselves. The idea that behind the strings that they are vibrations, expression of pure creativity. The creativity of the universe.

Which takes me back to my mother. To what I now see as creativity. She sang along with Spanish-language songs broadcast from radio stations in Los Angeles; they were the closest thing to her native Italian she had. And they were sad, so full of regret. Those songs, those expressions of the artist my mother also was, reveal more about her than she would ever say or admit. Fearful of looking too far into the future, she lived in the past, in memories of what could have been…had she not come to the States, not met my father, not had children, not left the lab, not obeyed the twists and turns of her own rebel heart.

 So now, when I stand in my kitchen, watching my machine spin the flour and water it will turn to strings of pasta, I picture my mother. Not in our old kitchen, but singing on a stage, her body swaying rhythmically, a rapt audience before her. In another universe, maybe that woman exists; and maybe, she is joyful.

I’d like to think so, anyway.

Eying Winter

My optometrist told me I needed bifocals just as I turned forty. Right on schedule, he said. Your eyes will keep changing for a while, but by fifty, they’ll settle down. I winced. The prospect of new glasses didn’t bother me. At age three, I’d been diagnosed with astigmatism and juvenile farsightedness and bore the nickname “four-eyes” well into my teens. What did was the welcome into middle age implied in the optometrist’s words. My lips twisted; I would deal. I had no choice.

TThe prescription changed by small degrees but frequently enough that I needed new bifocals every few years. Fifty came and then fifty-one. And still my eyes continued to change. Then, around my fifty-sixth birthday this past October, I noticed something else besides the routine re-blurring of my world: small rogue particles that flitted across my field of vision. Worried that my eyes had entered an unforeseen phase of decay, I turned to Google and self-diagnosed the problem as floaters.

The vitreous in my eyes had begun to liquefy. Tiny collagen fiber bits were now floating free and clumping together, casting shadows on my retina. And that meant seeing the optometrist again to make sure I didn’t also have a matching set of detached retinas to start 2022. Then I remembered something my father had told me about a cataract diagnosis he received the not long before he died. It’s like looking through a veil. I laughed. Papa had seen his world through gauze. I was seeing mine through fine gray snow.

Perched on his rolling stool, the optometrist tested my eyes. They were healthy, except for the fact I was now in the early stages of cataract disease. Can I stop it? He shook his head. One day, perhaps in the next decade, I would need surgery to stop the white moons of full blown cataract disease from eclipsing my vision. Until then, I could only slow their development by wearing anti-glare lenses, maintaining a healthy lifestyle and wearing sunglasses outdoors. He didn’t need to school me on the benefits of shades. I wore them all the time already, mostly for the pleasure of feeling hip and young and only incidentally for the way they softened sunlight.

Though cataracts can develop at any age, they are one of the more predictable ills of those fifty and older. Live into your eighties and the chance of developing them becomes one in two. But when the disease runs in families, the risk of developing them is higher. My father never knew his birth parents nor did he know the predispositions of the genes he inherited from them. Even if it wasn’t in his DNA, I was convinced he had set himself up for cataracts. He loved the sun as much as I did. But he rarely protected his blue-white eyes from its damaging rays.

Papa didn’t live long enough to tell me what else to expect—blurry vision, decreased ability to focus and see color brightness, increased sensitivity to light—as the disease progressed. But I never forgot that veil. For years, there had been so much in his life he had refused to see. That his second marriage could not be saved. That his body and heart were failing him. That he needed a will to tell his family what to do with his belongings. That veil was his metaphor, the thing that revealed his denial. Snow was mine.

Like my father, I dislike the thought of my own finitude. But I have no veil to shield me from that fact. Instead I have snow—and my still-immature cataracts—to remind me that I am mortal. They clarify rather than obscure, reminding me how much I loved my youth, my former ability to withstand the changes and shocks of life with ease. While also forcing me to look at the truth. The snow is starting to fall; winter is coming. Though not old, I am nearing the precincts of age.

Psychology teaches that bodies often offer clues—physical metaphors—that hold the key to understanding the causes of emotional ailments. Alternative health practitioners take this idea and go one step further, claiming that all illnesses—not just psychological ones—are produced by negative emotions. Louise Hay, for example, famously claimed that everything from colds to cancer had precise metaphysical causes, which she listed in Heal Your Body. Curious, I looked up an online version of Hay’s book. Cataracts, she claims, are the product of an “inability to see ahead with joy,” the belief in a “dark future.”

Papa never tried to look beyond his veil. I think he wanted it that way, just as I believe he died willingly, no longer wanting to fight the weak heart that had nearly failed him so many times before. So yes, he had been unhappy. But would I say that this unhappiness caused his cataracts? Probably not. Or not entirely, anyway. Just as I cannot say that my own too-frequent pessimism did the same to me. I had no empirical proof, only the ambiguity of bodily metaphors.

What I can say is this. The January day I was diagnosed, I did not feel upset. I could not; outside, the day was sunny as a promise. Whatever the cause of my disease I had a chance my father did not. One day my lenses would be replaced and I would once again be able to see with crystalline clarity. All I had to do was embrace the snowfall and my cataracts. And walk into the light.

Queer but Not Quite

My elementary schoolmates, boys mostly, used to play a recess game called Smear the Queer. Teachers banned it because it was rough and had no rules. The kids still did it anyway, mobbing up on the small triangular playing field on the southeast corner of my school, elbowing each other as they chattered and giggled. Someone would toss a ball in the air then the free-for-all started. If the ball landed near you, you became the “queer,” the one who picked up the ball and bolted, trying to avoid the hard-boned tackle that would eventually take you down like hunter’s prey.

The name taunted as it warned. Be “queer"“—different or odd, as I understood it then—and other children, the ones with sun-tanned faces and limbs, long hair and surf shop t-shirts, would never let you forget it.  I never played the game; tall and rangy, I was still a girl. More than that, I was the kid with the mother who insisted she had to walk me to and from a school just two blocks down the street. I had no wish to call even more unwanted attention to myself.

Like most childhood games, Smear the Queer taught lessons. Not the best ones, but ones that assured survival. Being part of the group, not sticking out in any way, meant security. Conform and you got by. But the conformity demanded went beyond having the right clothes and being the right level of cool. To conform—especially if you were male—meant being tough. No sissies or gay boys allowed. And if you were that rare tough girl who dared play, the message carried an extra homophobic warning. Play with the boys but don’t risk being taken for one because in life after puberty, girls are for boys and boys for girls.

If I remember that game now, that game I did not play, it is not just because I’ve spent the last ten years excavating my past for a book. Gender and sexuality, the struggle of being a woman who loved a charming, selfish runaway of a father but not the patriarchy that twisted his life and my mother’s, infuse the story I tell. A scholar of women’s literature, I probed stories for how female characters, straight and gay, cisgendered and not, navigated living among the men in whose image their worlds were made. My narrative was no different from the ones I studied and loved.

Some people may read the memoir as the story of a woman with a raging Electra complex…until they see Electra’s queer patina. As an adolescent, I gender-switched with abandon, slipping  into dresses one day and clothes made for boys the next. It mystified my schoolmates but after a while they accepted it as an extension of what they saw as my general strangeness. The too-tall girl with the overprotective mother and foreigner parents who never mingled with their neighbors. All through junior high I crushed on boys and men, mostly my teachers; but in high school, I stumbled into platonic love with another girl who broke my heart with a devastation more pure and complete than any I’d know from almost every boy or man I who would ever enter—then exit—my life.

There was a boyfriend after that beautiful girl, but one who despite the intimacy and the love, sometimes turned my stomach for the way he felt like a brother. Other relationships followed. Yet the compelling connection that would make me want to stay was never there. Even when the emotional component existed, a connection of mind or spirit lacked. Once there was even a lover I did not want who came to me during a time of profound personal crisis. That was by far the worst of all my relationships for the role of victim he needed me to play and that I knowingly accepted because I had nowhere else to turn.

A beta reader told me he’d pegged me as a gender-bent demi-sapio sexual who could desire only when emotional and mental bonds existed. I hate labels but realized he was right. Though cisgendered, I have always been most comfortable presenting as a short-haired, hoodied androgyne in jeans. And when I  desire, it is only when emotional and mental bonds are also present. In other words: I’m fringe straight. A gray-ace living between asexual and sexual, queer and not queer.

Personal traumas, many of them prolonged and co-extensive, have likely played a role in the “graying” of my sexuality, the remaking of Electra. Pain and loss pushed me at different times towards gay male friends and mentors. They were safe, they did not judge, they could laugh at themselves and were just plain fun to be around. And when a twist of fate sent Electra reeling, she remembered those friends and mentors and fled straight into heart of their community where she learned to embrace the maligned rainbow of difference she had carried with her since childhood.

Living in a post-climateric female body has no doubt contributed to my grayness. Simone de Beauvoir openly lamented the loss of desire in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; other women I admire like Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer have looked at it with some regret, but always with the idea that, as Steinem has famously said, “what we keep is what we need to support ourselves.” I feel no need as perhaps I did in my youth for the connection that would make me magically whole. To use a term Emma Watson once employed to describe her singleness, I am “self-partnered.”

What gives me hope these days is what I and others, like queer feminist scholar Llliian Faderman in her newest book, Woman: The American History of an Idea, have observed among members of Generation Z. They have been coming of age at a time when the “rules” to gender/sexuality naming (and shaming) longer apply. Like the transmen and women who took American by storm in the 2010s—Janet Mock, Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner and Laverne Cox to name a few—even if they are straight, they don’t like labels either. Instead they prefer to life off the gender/sex grid or by calling themselves genderfluid and/or non-binary. Some identify as LGBTIA +, some do not. Neither male or female, masculine nor feminine, they are simply humans who, in living their truths, smear straight with queer and queer with straight, obliterating boundaries.

Companions at my Table

Omicron is on its winter rampage as I write this, Austin has a 30% COVID positivity rate. I’m not keen on venturing any further than the local market, choosing instead to nestle in the warmth of my house, a few footsteps from my kitchen—and, when I’m not cooking, the pixelated glow of my computer screen—keeping the shadows of disease at bay.

Musing on these fragile safe zones now remind me of a scene from Raymond Carver’s short story “A Small, Good Thing.” Two parents drive to confront the baker of the birthday cake their newly-dead son will never enjoy for repeated acts of rudeness, including the midnight call that sparks their visit. Once the baker hears of their loss, the baker apologizes, brings them bread and rolls from his kitchen and sits with them. Night and death surround them; all they have is the comfort of each other’s presence and the life-giving pleasure that food provides.

The kitchen now outranks the study as my favorite space. It adjoins the living room which looks out over the tiny 12 x 6 garden where I’ve learned to grow some of the herbs and plants  I use to cook—oregano, parsley, basil, thyme and lavender—since I moved in a year ago. I feed myself, walk to my couch with a mug of tea and relax in view of the greenery outside my window. Frost recently killed a bell pepper plant and a bucket full of snow peas in bud. But the pomegranate and blackberry seedlings I planted last year are holding their own against temperatures that move with frightening ease between the extremes of heat and cold; they are my survivors. Texas has notoriously fickle weather. But as I watch the clouds cycling the skies over Austin, I know better. Earth’s climate is changing because we forced it to change, evolving almost as fast as the virus that now stalks humanity.

Maybe living in this small space during this strange, thoroughly unpredictable time has been what’s made learning other women who cook and love their gardens so meaningful. It started last September with Valerie Bertinelli, whose new book, Enough, Already, I reviewed for Kirkus. I knew her as Barbara Cooper from One Day at a Time, the fresh-faced teenager who entered American living rooms to become everyone’s favorite kid sister. Then she grew up, married the late Eddie Van Halen and disappeared into a professional dead zone for more than twenty years. It was only after divorcing Eddie that she slowly made her way back to fame, first as a spokesperson for Jennie Craig, then cook books and later, hugely popular cooking shows.

Her story captivated me; Bertinelli is nothing but real. She even looks after her own plot of earth and uses the fruits, herbs and vegetables she grows herself. Her recommendation for freshly squeezed lemon over cantaloupe got my sky-high approval - tangy and sweet, it tastes like a kiss of summer. Then I looked at her recipe for Sicilian Love Cake and gagged. Made from boxed cake mix and pudding, the most Italian thing about it is the mascarpone and ricotta filling. Like everything else most Americans eat, the cake uses over-processed ingredients and relies far too heavily on sugar and fat for flavor. I learned that early on from a Tuscan-bred mother whose hyper-developed sense of smell and taste turned whole food into a source of personal fanaticism. I love you, Valerie, but not this. Never this. Shaking my head over Bertinelli’s recipe, I imagined celebrated Italian food writer Marcella Hazan, who abhorred the use of anything less than the most carefully selected foods, grumbling in chorus with my mother from beyond the grave. At least you call your cooking Italian-American.

Diana Kennedy became the next of my companions, introduced to me by my graduate school roommate Brigid. She was part of Brigid’s extended family and, as it turned out, the British-born doyenne of Mexican regional cuisine. Kennedy wasn’t someone I would have found on my own. Still, I decided to at least investigate the documentary, Nothing Fancy, Brigid said had been made about Kennedy’s life. Then I discovered that a woman, Elizabeth Carroll, had directed the film and premiered it at the last pre-pandemic SXSW festival in 2019. Curiosity now morphed into nostalgia for a bygone world less than three years past.

It comforted me to learn that this nonagenarian had also lived through a time of radical change. WWII forced her to forgo university in favor of joining in the British war effort as a Women’s Timber Corps member. And although she loved to cook, becoming a food writer had never been her plan because she didn’t have one, flitting from one experience to the next. That adventurousness eventually took her to the Caribbean where she met Brigid’s grandfather (New York Times journalist Paul Kennedy) at the hotel where both happened to be staying in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. With uncharacteristic tenderness, she recalls how he introduced her to Mexico, a country he covered for the Times and which became her second great love after Kennedy. Never once admitting that her presence in his life helped bring about the end of his marriage to Brigid’s grandmother. A deliberate lapse; but karma doesn’t forget. She in turn would lose him to cancer ten years after they met.

Kennedy grows her own fruits, herbs and vegetables now, on a small farm located just outside Mexico City. But unlike Bertinelli’s garden, hers is filled with plants she gathered from all over Mexico. Alone. With no companion except, on occasion, a pistol. Take away the taste for risk and excitement, though, and what remains is an academic manqué with an ethno-botanical bent. The recipes Kennedy makes are exact, down to the techniques she learned in the field, from practitioners of authentic Mexican cuisine. Guacamole, she says, must be made with a mortero y maja (mortar and pestle) and the ingredients must be ground in a particular order to create what she calls layers of flavor. I don’t typically make this dish and love my blender. But her slow-form cooking style makes sense. Grinding food by hand dignifies food in a way that pulverizing does not.

These women—Bertinelli, Hazan, Kennedy and even the mother who taught a wilful, contrarian child from saying no to the good food she made—they’re all my companions in the storm. Feeding me their lives. Their wisdom. Their food. Keeping me comforted as the world changes outside my door. Most of them with the tragic exception of my mother, found their stride in midlife, sometimes after experiencing distressing lows. Apart from food, maybe what’s summoned these women to my table is the fact that now that I’ve reached the middle of middle age, I actually understand them and their epicurean sensuality so much better. I spent the first half of my life lost in books, contemplating the likes of Raymond Carver and more because to me they were life. I liked food well enough, but cooking? It was just something I did rather than spend time thinking about. Now I stay near my kitchen, my culinary companions beside me, not just to keep world-angst at bay. But also enjoy senses I once ignored. And that a global pandemic taught me to appreciate.

Hangry

I’ll never forget the caveat a fellow ex-academic gave me five years ago when I asked for blogging advice: You’ve got to keep at it. There’s nothing sadder than an abandoned blog. A prolific writer, Lisa used her blog to rant: about the $100,000-debt she’d racked up to earn a history doctorate; about the obscenely difficult humanities PhD market. I thought of her as that hangry woman: hungry to join the professoriate and madder than hell that she couldn’t.

Hangry wasn’t a term I could apply to myself back then. The blog I’d started had been my quixotic statement of commitment to writing. And in particular, to the memoir I’d been trying to set down for almost ten years. But the truth was I had neither the balls of fire nor the sense of mission Lisa did to keep screaming into the void. She wanted to expose the rottenness of academe, liberate other graduate students with truth. I respected her. But all I could think was good luck with that.

It took me six months to realize that my mission was to shut up about the memoir I was going to write and just set the damn thing down. So I abandoned the blog and started outlining. Then other things claimed my attention. The small liberal arts college where I’d taught part-time needed to do a salutary “restructuring.” What that meant in practice was blitzing its humanities offerings to only as many as its full time faculty and a handful of adjuncts could teach. So in the summer of 2018, I taught my last class and bailed like a rat off a sinking ship.

I landed a job with a state agency that catered to crusty, hard-headed firemen who didn’t think too much of women. It didn’t pay well but I held on for dear life, sitting in a gray cubicle. Listening to the assorted snorts and wheezes of colleagues who communicated only by email. And struggling with a fat and psychopathic boss who picked me apart in an office with no windows nobody else in upper management wanted. Writing after hours and in private became my refuge. The job was hell, but a hell that bought me enough security to focus on the memoir.

Only I couldn’t. Three months into both my job and the book, I became so riddled with anxiety I stopped writing and went into therapy. The therapist said it was compounded trauma. The shock of leaving academia for a new job. And of probing half-processed, razor-edged memories for stories. By spring, I crawled back to my writing. My boss’s reign of terror had ended and she more or less ignored me. Once my work was done, I could do what I liked so long as I remained at my desk looking occupied. So I journaled, mostly about the psychopathic boss and my snorting, wheezing colleagues. Then I got brazen and took notes for book chapters. Suddenly I loved my job. I was having my revenge and eating it, too.

For almost a year I did this. And then COVID devoured the world in March of 2020, turning a one-week vacation into an extended stay at home. Soon I found myself with more time and space than I’d had in years. No more psychopathic boss glaring down her nose at me. She’d turned tail and fled as soon as a new director got hired later than spring. So I wrote. My colleagues, meantime, forgot about me. And eventually, about what I was supposed to be doing in the first place.

Fast forward to August 2021. Still marooned at home, I now had a revised memoir manuscript. But I couldn’t celebrate because pandemic cutbacks and backroom politics had swallowed my job and left me unemployed. My anxiety spiked to levels I’d not seen since I started seeing my therapist. I couldn’t sleep; I slammed down meds. All I could think about was losing all the ground I gained. The townhouse I’d miraculously lucked into on a tiny civil servant’s salary. And my inevitable decline into hunger and want. My new obsession soon made me hangry: devoured by a fear and rage I could not control.

I went on unemployment and snagged the first part time job I could find: working at the market up the street from where I lived doing curbside delivery. I chugged down SlimFast milkshakes to save money and eventually took myself to the local food pantry for groceries. Wealthy interfaith Christians with a penchant for organic food and connections to expensive city markets ran the place. Of course I didn’t realize this until the day they shoved three $15 chunks of Parmigiano Reggiano into my astonished hands.  

I found a temp job with possibilities for permanence and quit the curbside job in late October. But it took more than a month after that to finally turn down the fire alarm in my brain enough to think like a rational person again. I stopped guzzling the SlimFast and cooked proper meals for myself. My kitchen soon became the one place in my house I wanted to be in the most; yet no matter how much I cooking I did, the comfort I found there wasn’t enough. For three years, I’d feasted on the words of my memoir. Then I’d stopped, first out of rage at losing my job, then out of fear I’d be unable to feed my body. Now I was compensating, but with food.

Without realizing it, I’d become word-hungry. All along, the kitchen had been my substitute study. What I needed to do with writing was what I had been doing with cooking: slicing, dicing and sautéeing; mixing, sifting and baking. Creating because I needed to create. Creating because I had a hunger that cried out to be sated. Then I remembered Lisa and the blog I’d left behind. The irony made me smile. I’d finally become the hangry writer on a mission to discover what was next.

A Tortured Nirvana

Also published in the South 85 Journal online blog, 08/07/17

People who glamorize the writing life should be hanged, drawn and quartered for their demon-spawned lies. Writing is unsexy dog work, a ceaseless plodding of word after blasted word. And it’s unforgiving. Progress for most comes in stingy half-inches rather than expansive miles. Joyce Carole Oates and Stephen King are among a tiny handful of individuals as famous for their prolific output as they are for the hypergraphia — a kind of verbal OCD —that drives them to the literary excesses behind their fame.

I’m still quite not sure why I do it; maybe I'm an undiagnosed masochist. Or maybe it has to do with an addiction to the writing process itself. When I try to describe that addiction to friends, they smile, as if to humor an idiot child or a woman too far gone to listen to reason. No person in her right mind would hunker down alone in her apartment to sit in front of a computer for 10 to 12 hours at a stretch; or just to get neck cricks and cause more damage to half-blind eyes that have made a mockery of five different bifocal prescriptions in less than 10 years.

But what do they know? Sitting in my black IKEA recliner, laptop perched atop my thighs and locked into focus mode, I can stare at the screen and let my gaze turn inward rather than react to the endless stream of fuss and noise around me. My heart rate slows, beating in time to the slow-pulsing cursor on my screen. I go into a kind of trance where the only way I can tell the time of day is by noting the changing pattern of light and shadow outside my window. For a short time, I know a rare commodity: peace.

Psychologists would characterize this relaxed alertness as the alpha wave state associated with waking dreams and meditation. Synapses fire in the synchronic harmony of identifiable patterns; the alpha state is just one of them. What I actually experience is a corporeal forgetfulness where eating, breathing and even excreting don’t seem to matter. Those body parts engaged in the writing act—eyes, arms, fingers —become appendages of a consciousness seeking expression through the medium of language. I am blissfully, gloriously, canceled out into temporary non-existence.

The best part of the process is what Robert Olen Butler calls “dream-storming.” That happens at the beginning of almost everything I write, when I just let images, voices and/or memories, however faint or fragmentary, rise up from the primordial stew of my unconscious. Listening to instrumental music like jazz—which I’ve always loved for its improvisational nature—helps. What I eventually manage to set down often make no sense, even to me. But dream-storming is the best way I know to access material that my snippy inner critic might otherwise sniff at because it’s just not good enough…or is just too weird for anyone else to see.  

The hard part is actually trying to make sense of that surrealistic tangle. The first thing I typically do is to take that material and distill it into a brief opening sentence/paragraph that offers insight into a narrator, character or situation associated with whatever it is — an essay or story — that I’ve decided to write. After that, I let my imagination take over and use dream-stormed material to structure the narrative. Because my notes are so fractured, it sometimes it feels like I’m using broken crutches and a lunatic map to hobble along into oblivion. But it’s a method that has yet to fail me.

Maybe it’s just the need to see something — anything — on paper and realize that all those voices, images and memories in my head don’t necessarily mean I’m crazy. Or as crazy as I thought. When I'm not busy climbing the walls at the start of a project, it’s actually kind of exciting not knowing where I’m going. Ray Bradbury never knew where any of the narratives he started would end up. And he did just fine.

Of course, when the process of deciphering, reorganizing and revising goes too slowly, I want to rip out my eyeballs by the roots and throw my computer out the window like a titanium Frisbee. Instead I go into my kitchen and bake bread. Pounding dough can be quite therapeutic and far less expensive than paying therapist or making Apple even richer than it already is.

When I have to leave my trance to take care of the tedious business of living, the mood shifts and not for the better. Like a she-bear roused prematurely from hibernation, I can become sullen and cantankerous. No matter how few kinks I’ve managed to unbend in my writing or how much hair I’ve yanked out in frustration, I have no wish to emerge from my alpha wave cocoon.

Writing is a tortured nirvana. But it’s one I wouldn’t give up for anything in the world.

Reading "Shapeshifters"

Two nights ago I stood up in front of a room full of people who had come to Malvern Books in downtown Austin to listen to four writers: Texas literary lion Jan Reid; Texas Monthly journalist Michael Di Leo, country singer-songwriter Christine Albert...and me.

We had been invited that spring to speak as part of national literary readings series called "Why There Are Words." I was still wondering how I had even managed to get on the presenter list. Weird luck? Some unforeseen cosmic convergence? The need to fill space? Doubts assailed me. I was the wild dark horse among well-vetted quantities.

Heart twisting and straining in my chest, I wanted to obey the raging impulse to flee into anonymity. But God help me, I didn't. Instead, when it came my turn to read, I did what until that moment had seemed impossible: I opened my mouth. A voice that seconds before had been strangled by fear tumbled out, stringing together word after word like a needle chasing beads.

The piece I read was an essay I wrote in 2013 called "Shapeshifters."  It was one of my first, very imperfect, attempts at writing memoir-style non-fiction. I wouldn't know until much later that it would become one of my favorite pieces precisely because it had been so unruly and unwilling to accept taming. More than 40 journals rejected it before one (appropriately titled Animal) decided to send an acceptance, contingent on deep cuts that made me curse, bleed and cry with every deletion.

Here I am, delivering the words, still so raw and so imperfect, that made me want to give up writing the essay entirely.

All That & Siri, Too

It began with the iPhone I bought in January.

I’d wanted one for years. But at $400+, it wasn’t at the top of my shopping list. So I stuck with my $50 features phone. Who cared that the flimsy plastic back flew off every time the phone slipped from my hands and onto the floor. Or that hard-to-push buttons built muscles I didn’t even know I had in my thumbs. My cell and computer let me do all the talking I needed—so I thought.

I knew one other quasi-Luddite, a university colleague who studied the English Renaissance and owned a flip phone even older than mine. Brian’s pleasure lay in “resisting the system.” In practice, this meant not only dispensing with smartphones but also avoiding social media. He was my very own Neo: Matrix unplugged and proud. Cut-rate cell phones made us comrades-in-arms. But Brian still made me feel guilty as hell. Unlike him, I'd sold out to both Twitter and Facebook.

“I don’t use them often,” I told him once, hoping that a near-derelict Twitter account could balance out my weekly Facebook sins.

“Dump them, join forces with us!” He was laughing, but Brian’s zeal still seemed evangelical.

My colleague wanted to shield personal information from data miners looking to make a buck and keep smartphone satellites out of his business. I just wanted do things on the cheap. If I could avoid Big Brother, that was a bonus.

Three months later after my purchase and more than a year after my conversation with Brian, I took the plunge into the Matrix-like world of total connectivity. Falling head over feet into a place with no beginning and no end, I now see my life as falling into two distinct periods: Before the Rabbit Hole (BRH) and After the Rabbit Hole (ARH).

BRH I was the Jurassic-era alien who relied on email and made distinctions between the online and the offline. By contrast, the smartphone users around me texted, chatted and data-scrolled while trying to exist in a place that sometimes required they pay attention. To their feet and where they walked. To the street in front of them and where they drove. To the person trying to look them in the face and have a conversation with them.

Homo cyborgus, I'd say to myself. All thumbs and no focus. At school, if I dared disconnect my students from their gadgets in class or took the phones from them, they looked at me in pain. It was like I was amputating an arm or leg. And maybe I was. BRH I had no sympathy for anyone with an added electronic appendage. They struck me as multi-tasking, instant gratification addicts with no self-discipline. I kept my handset at home. Calls could wait. So could social media updates. Somehow, the world would manage.

ARH my phone travels with me. It counts my steps, charts my way across town, pinpoints the location of every iPhone picture I take and post online.  I even take it out during class breaks to check messages across several online platforms including Facebook, a resurrected Twitter feed and a new Instagram account. When it's not with me, I reach for it like a phantom limb. 

Who needs privacy when you've got all that and an incipient case of ADD to boot? And if my eyes need a rest, my AI assistant Siri can talk to me. It—or should I say “she” since I decided she would speak with a woman’s voice—is surprisingly clever, even sarcastic. Once I asked her to tell me a bedtime story.

“In the great green dimension,” she began, “there was an iPhone. And a red balloon. And a picture of…a Zoltaxian cow jumping over the third moon.” A smirk (or so I imagined) skittered across the features of her virtual face.

When I asked her to tell me another story, the smirk turned snarky. “Then you’ll be asking me for a glass of milk and a dark matter cookie,” she said.

Starting Over, Starting Out

It wasn’t supposed to be like this at 50. Maybe I'd be single, yes. But not on the verge of starting over while friends were counting the years until retirement.

The professional life I had worked so hard to build in my 20s and 30s ground to a dead halt when I was 39. Poised to finally move into full-time academic respectability, I stumbled. Badly. A pulmonary embolism, followed in quick succession by a nervous breakdown blew everything apart. Forced onto a regimen of meds that fogged my brain and transformed grief into bonafide crazy, I struggled to pick up the pieces and keep teaching. People told me to write and I did. But it made no difference. I didn’t know who I was anymore.

Wheels spinning, I tried different things. I had an affair. I took up photography. I left Tucson for the Eastern Europe to teach English, vowing never to return. When I did it was with everything I owned packed into two suitcases, the rest left out in an alley for the trash man to collect. A friend in Dallas who’d just left his own job took me in. His more practical wife threw me out less than three weeks after I arrived. She couldn’t bear to have me watch as they fought each other to keep the big suburban house and perfect life they couldn’t afford.

An organization dedicated to helping the homeless found me an apartment just east of Oak Lawn, the Dallas gay district. Meanwhile I survived on unemployment until I could get surgery to fix the wrecked body that had traveled back with me from Europe. After that, I found work scratching out a living as a part-time community college English teacher and kept regular appointments with a therapist. I hated every anguished minute.

Fearing another another rendezvous with the street, I started writing. Then I noticed it. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. Not just copy for local newspapers, magazines and marketing firms that might earn some bus fare and grocery store money. But personal essays about a life that had taken a series of spectacularly wrong turns. Looking back now, I can see what I didn’t see then: that Dallas was also also the place I finally began to heal.

In late 2012, I approached poet and memoirist Lucy Lang Day, a writer I knew from my work as a Kirkus book reviewer. Calling on boldness I didn't have, I asked her to read sections from a jumble of papers I was daring to call a book. To my surprise, Lucy didn't turn me away. After reading the essays, she said,“You can get these into journals. Good ones even.” I listened to her and did.

That was four years ago. Now I'm in Austin with published essays and a book on hold, watching my profession—and the place I have in it—erode. Full-time jobs are scarce, people say, and the academic market is in crisis. But I'm done with crazy; all I want to do is leave the university like a worthless lover.

So here I am on yet another precipice, writing. Again.