Only Connect, E.M. Forster Wrote. I’m Trying.
Sometimes I have to stop and acknowledge how weird memoir-writing is—just arranging my most traumatic experiences like pretty little knickknacks on a shelf for people to peruse!!! Unhinged behavior tbh
-Lily Dancyger
Two months ago, my book was one month and four days from publication. I’m sorry if the math is confusing, but if you read the book, you’ll see that math is not a strong suit for me. Not my forte, if you will. (I recently discovered that some people believe that “forte” should be pronounced like “fort,” French for “strong,” and not “fortay,” like Italian for “loud.”) I apologize for the digressions. Writing is hard. So is math.
Anyway! Three months before the time of this writing was March 14, also known as Pi Day to those who celebrate, because 3.14. I personally do not celebrate, but this particular Pi Day was special because it happened to be the day it occurred to me, with poke-in-the-eye clarity, that in 34 days my book was going to be out in the world and that people would read it. Sure, I spent years wanting more than anything else in the world to have my book out in the world and accrued dozens of rejections that only made me want to have my book out in the world even more, but suddenly, now that publication was imminent, I wasn’t altogether sure that it was such a great idea to have it out in the world, where people might read it. And hate it. Or judge me. Honestly, why should anyone care? College counselor to tightly wound-students blah blah, her own family unraveling, yada yada. Maybe no one would care but having it out in the world would lead to the ruination of my life and the lives of everyone in my family, and my parents would be mad and no one would speak to me ever again. Or, another fun possibility was that after all that effort and longing no one would read it and it would fall over like a proverbial tree in the forest and make the sound of one hand clapping, which as everyone knows is no sound at all.
My husband David floated a third possibility: that people would read it and like it. But that was not a possibility I was capable of entertaining, just like I can’t understand why he keeps suggesting I go to a happy place in my head. Even after 30+ years of marriage, he can’t seem to grasp that if my head is a house, it contains a warren of rooms stacked to the rafters with superstitions, premonitions, and intimations of doom (and, okay, maybe a sunny window seat or two where I go to imagine the book getting made into a prestige TV series where Tina Fey plays me and Jenna Ortega plays our daughter. I haven’t yet decided who will play him and our two sons but it will definitely be someone good.)
At any rate, a month and four days pre-publication, I was running errands (returning a lipstick to Sephora that I mistakenly thought would make me look young and sultry and instead made me look like an anxious aging swamp witch, mailing a cardigan I finally sold on Poshmark, and picking up chicken thighs for dinner. Such is the glamorous life of a writer). And it was on the way to the Whole Foods meat department that I walked through the bakery section and saw the prominent pie display and remembered that it was Pi Day, and because I was already out of my mind with anxiety and not thinking straight, I decided it would be cute and whimsical if I picked up an actual pie for dessert.
We don’t usually gravitate toward pies in our family, but I am here to tell you that the Whole Foods cherry pie is exceptionally good. That evening, David and I each had a small slice, like normal people. But on the day after Pi Day, after I refreshed my Amazon ranking approximately 82 times to see whether I was even close to 50,000 (nope) and checked to see whether anyone responded to anything I posted on Facebook (no), Instagram (also no), or Twitter (nope, nothing there either), the whisper of misgivings in my head crescendoed into a roar (a forte roar, one might say). And then my eyes fell upon the barely touched cherry pie on the breakfast bar and I went into what I can only describe as a fugue state and proceeded to eat most of the pie without the benefit of utensils. (Don’t worry, I used a broken off piece of the delicious buttery crust to scoop up the filing. Did you think I ate it with my hands? Ew. I’m not a monster.)
The small slice I had eaten the day before was good, but anxiety pie spooned straight out of the tin with a piece of crust was transcendent: tart, gooey, sweet, buttery, crumbly, and above all, supremely comforting. And when I had had enough (although what is enough, really?) and emerged from my trance, what was left of the pie looked like the aftermath of a particularly violent murder. The photo in this post is not the actual photo of the mayhem, because the actual photo is disgusting and to include it here would be in poor taste. Suffice it to say that what remained looked like Kane’s chest after the baby xenomorph burst out of it.
I think most memoir writers would agree that to write about your own life is to experience a profound cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, piecing together your life is a feeling like no other—gooey, tart, sweet, buttery, crumbly—but it’s also like cracking your ribcage and holding your ribs open so everyone can examine your insides. And yet, you can’t not write. It’s a problem.
Pi is an irrational number. Writing a memoir is an irrational act. So is falling in love. So is yelling at people you love for being late instead of saying, “I was terrified something happened to you and I can’t imagine my life without you.” So is conjuring catastrophic outcomes that may or may not come to pass. So is using a piece of crust to shovel cherry pie into your mouth the day after Pi Day, three days and a month before your memoir gets published.
“Only connect,” says Margaret Wilcox in Howards End, and so I did. I texted a photo of the eviscerated pie to my friend Christy Warren, a badass retired Berkeley fire captain whose phenomenal memoir, Flash Point, you should all read. The caption was “33 days to publication. Here’s a thing I did. Solo. Without benefit of utensils. Are these the actions of a well person?”
Christy responded almost immediately (there’s a reason first responders are called that. They are quick). Her reply was everything—acceptance, validation, recognition. It was only eight words long, and it was perfect. She wrote, “Nice! You fucked up that pie good.”
For more of my reflections about college admissions, parents, children, and books ranging from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to The Odyssey, check out my memoir The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays.