These essays were written over a period of so many years that it is impossible to thank all the people who had a hand in helping me, in ways small and large. My husband, Benjamin Alexander, has been perhaps the one constant, continual presence during the time span these essays describe; he has read every one, at times with a grimace, because he, unlike me, is a deeply private person who cannot fathom the autobiographical impulse, which is not, as people think, a narcissistic need to perform on your own personal stage but rather a reaching out, from some deeply personal space, a reaching out into the world in the hopes of hearing your words echo in the lives of others who, like you, share your struggles and your joys. I’d like to thank, therefore, my readers, many of whom e-mail me to let me know my work has reverberated for them; this is the greatest gift a writer can receive. I’d also like to thank my children; they have enchanted me and enriched me in so many ways, lending me language and image, plot and prism, allowing me time and space to write while also insisting that I return to the real world each afternoon, the world of peanut butter and homework, spelling tests and track meets. My children are both inspirations and anchors, as well as amazing individuals, and becoming more so every day.
After I gathered these essays together, which was in and of itself a significant task as they were strewn across computers and hard drives and disparate publications, I sat down to read them in the order my editor at Beacon Press, Helene Atwan—whom I also need to thank for her masterful mind and vision—had suggested. And I was, well, a little shocked, a little shaken, by what was on the page.
These were indisputably my essays, but some I hadn’t seen or touched for ten years or more, and thus reading them in a chronological arrangement was like peering at my past through a hole someone had punched in the air. There I was, pregnant and despairing. Here I was, still bleeding from my mastectomy, my daughter’s words and comfort—remember that? I did. I saw myself starkly, a self capable of greediness, small heartedness, fear, and also love. It was uncomfortable to see myself from so many angles, rendered so starkly, all jagged and ripped and incapable, at least at times.
Each essay in this book was written “on assignment” (though here you are seeing the full-length versions, sometimes two and three times longer than what was first published), and thus I always took these essays less seriously than my “real work,” my books, which I wrote not for money but for love. And yet, looking at these arranged essays, I realized that, without ever knowing it, or meaning to, I had told a sober, serious, and scathingly honest account of one woman’s life straddling two centuries.
I want to thank each and every person who put up with me during those years. I want to thank the friends who nurtured me, despite my prickly nature. I want to thank, especially, the editors at the magazines from which the assignments issued, specifically Laurie Abraham at Elle, and Paula Derrow, who was at Self, and Deborah Way and Pat Towers at O, The Oprah Magazine, and Cathleen Medwick and Nanette Varian at More; I want to thank every editor at every women’s magazine where these essays all initially appeared.
Women’s magazines—they get a bad rap. If you can publish in the New Yorker or the Atlantic, then you can publish with pride, but to publish in a glossy with advertisements for lingerie and lip gloss and attendant articles about lovemaking techniques—that can be embarrassing. And I was always a bit embarrassed about publishing in “women’s magazines,” as they don’t have the pomp and polish, the intellectual heft, of some of their more serious competitors. And yet, I now see that I was wrong to feel that way. Elle, Self, O, More, and the other women’s magazines that published my autobiographical work were willing to show their readers much more than eyeliner and thongs. My essays are about the darker aspects of being a white, middle-class female in our times. These magazines, for more than a decade, allowed, even encouraged, me to tell the truth about my life, the whole unruly, unpretty truth, which they then published, proving, along the way, that “women’s magazines” are capable of carrying complex stories about difficult subjects to their vast audiences.
In making this book, I have revised my notions about women’s magazines and want to encourage you to do the same. These glossies have provided me with pages to tell stories that had no gleam or gloss in them, stories my editors celebrated each and every time, their mission, I now see, to bring to their readers honest accounts of what it is like to live inside a mind and body with two x’s in every single cell, this body, this mind, grim, difficult, delighted, in every state, in every way, with thanks to all the hands held out, from all these magazines. My stories exist because they do.