Chapter 6

New York, New York

September 2007

I was mortified when, on our three-year anniversary, Dave sent a humongous flower arrangement to my work at ABC News world headquarters. The flowers came the afternoon of September 24, arriving in the main newsroom, just feet from where Charles Gibson was preparing for his nightly newscast. I was off in a side room editing a news clip that had to feed out to college campuses via our partner MTVU, and so a senior producer had to sign for the flowers and track me down to deliver them.

“How could you?” I whispered into my cellphone in the bathroom, my voice like that of an embarrassed teenager scolding a parent for not parking in a more discreet location several blocks away. “It looks so unprofessional! My boss had to sign for them!”

“Three years,” Dave said, chastened by my horrified tone. “I thought a really big milestone deserved a big gesture. Full disclosure here: I ran it past my parents, to see if it was a good idea. And they thought it was.”

And to us, at age twenty-two, it was a big milestone. We were one of the few couples who had navigated the shifting waters of college and then graduation and a move to the big city and life in the “real world,” removed from the coddling womb of a college campus, and we were still going strong.

But our new life in New York City was not going to be merely a continuation of our carefree college days, and that soon became very evident. Dave was in his first year of medical school at Columbia, up in New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood, and I was living on the Lower East Side with three college friends, the four of us crammed into a three-bedroom apartment with one bathroom. Getting from my place to Dave’s took nearly an hour on the subway. “You might as well be living in Connecticut; it would take just as long for us to get to each other on a commuter train,” I lamented.

Fortunately, we had never had one of those symbiotic relationships in college, needing to be together at all times. I had a full life and so did Dave. We were both independent and focused on our various pursuits. This would, at times, prove to be one of the biggest challenges we faced as a couple—working to weave together our two individualistic natures—but, for the most part, it was a good thing. Neither one of us was overly dependent on the other. And for those years when our apartments were far apart and we were both working hard to gain a foothold in New York and launch our postcollege careers, that independence served us well.

I was working as a freelance production assistant at ABC News. Right at the time I graduated and returned to ABC, where I had interned in college, the writers’ strike began and the economy began to wobble. This led to a hiring freeze, and the staff job I had hoped for had been scaled back to a freelance position with hourly pay and no healthcare. My salary was such that, even in our cost-saving apartment, I had only a couple hundred dollars left over after rent each month to cover every other expense, and lest I state the extremely obvious here: New York is not a particularly affordable city.

While I loved so much of the work I was doing, after eight months I needed a more reliable job and a salary that would allow me to occasionally eat more than microwaveable dinners, and I needed healthcare. I applied for a full-time position as a daytime news writer at Fox News.

I love stories. I love weaving narratives with the written word. My whole life I’ve been driven by a desire to learn people’s stories, to get to the bottom of who they are and how they got that way. To ask questions and seek to understand what a person deems important. At age nine, when my family suddenly had a legion of state troopers around all the time—driving us, passing through our home at all hours of the day, accompanying us on family vacations—I earned the nickname “Little Miss Marple” because I was so curious to get to know them all. I was so eager to learn each of their stories. I’d get in the car, introduce myself to the state trooper (usually a middle-aged male), and immediately launch a volley of questions: Are you married? If the answer was in the negative, the follow-up was about a possible girlfriend; if the answer was in the affirmative, the follow-up was about how they’d met. Do you have children? Where do you live? Do you have photos of your kids in your wallet? If so, can I see? And so on.

These were the days before cellphones, and the troopers would communicate via radios using a series of numbers and codes. I listened intently, I eventually cracked their code, and it became not uncommon for me to take the radio receiver in hand and spout off the series of codes and numbers for the message that needed transmitting.

So, given these natural investigative inclinations of mine, coupled with my love of writing and my passion for history, I thought that journalism would be the logical career path. Working in that newsroom was exciting and fast-paced and I met interesting people, but, for some reason, writing news left me unfulfilled. Although I enjoyed much of the work I was doing, I was sort of a misfit in the industry. I did want to study the major events unfolding in our world, and the way in which individuals reacted to and shaped these events—but the panic-inducing deadlines and the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-four-hour news cycle were not for me. I’m far too much of a sponge—I soak up all of the good and the bad and the stress of my environment. I developed insomnia that first year in the job; I found my brain reeling all night, and I was unable to turn it off, struggling to digest the flood of information, panicking over tight deadlines or pending guest bookings.

I was told, at various points during my years in the newsroom, the following things:

You need to be snarkier.

You need to be more cynical.

The goal here is to provoke outrage.

Use shorter sentences.

Use fewer big words.

Get in and get out, keep it moving, fast.

A sentence that requires a comma is already too complicated.

Do you take happy pills?

I had never been a snarky, cynical person, and I did not want to become one. I did not want to be mocked by a stressed-out, grumpy manager only because I tried my best to maintain a pleasant and friendly demeanor. I liked writing sentences that necessitated commas. I liked playing with words and language. This emphasis on fast, fast, fast struck me as cursory and stressful. And I did not want to unlearn everything I had spent my entire life up to that point trying to learn as a writer.

I began to write fiction in my free time, almost as a way of winding down at the end of a chaotic shift in the newsroom—an opportunity to play with the big words and complex sentences and wide range of emotions and thoughts that were discouraged in my daily work.

Before long, I found myself completely consumed by this new hobby. Suddenly, I was rushing home from work to grab my laptop and get to writing. I would be surprised on the subway, at the grocery store, out for dinner, with a new idea for some scene or a character or a piece of dialogue, and I would run back to my apartment, worried that I might lose the idea before I could get it down on paper. It turned out that my desires to study human nature and unfurl narratives were fulfilled much more by writing fiction than by writing newscasts.

Energized and encouraged by this early part of the process, I kept going. Writing fiction became a secret pleasure, an indulgence for weeknights and weekends. It was the fun I got to have after work. But I did not see how I could actually make a career of it, or if I would ever be able to support myself through writing fiction. The words keep your day job rang sternly in my mind, and even though I was miserable in my day job, I knew that that was how I would pay the rent.

Dave was at medical school, wading through his own anxieties. No matter how hard he worked, it always seemed to him that his classmates learned faster, slept less, understood the material quicker, and were better at playing the game in negotiating hospital politics. It was one of the first times in Dave’s life that things were not coming easily for him, and that rattled him. He was not the smartest—far from it—and that was an uncomfortable place for him to be. So, he did what he had always done to carry himself through times of challenge: he buckled down and he worked harder.

Dave suddenly had very little free time, and certainly no time for reading that did not involve anatomy or pathology or some other medical topic, and so I remember how touched I was when I found him reading the early, rough fiction manuscript I had sent him. He had printed it out and put it in a white binder, and I still have the mental image of him sprawled on his bed, reading my words.

Around that same time, I found a sticky note on Dave’s computer. “She likes yellow gold like her grandmother. Not white gold. Likes the idea of three diamonds.”

I had told Dave in passing—I did not even remember when—about the fact that I loved my grandmother’s engagement ring. He had taken notes.

Dave’s Washington Heights apartment was nothing fancy; it was a glorified dorm room filled with other medical students, but it was so far uptown that it afforded a dazzling view of the Hudson River and the George Washington Bridge. At night, as the sun went down behind the western bank of the Hudson, the bridge would come aglow, spanning the broad river and glittering at the top of the New York skyline. Life in those years was not glamorous, nor was it carefree—as it had once been—but Dave was my constant. His love was rock-solid and unwavering during those years of microwave dinners and first-job angst. He shone bright and steady, an unmoving star in a big, expensive city where no other stars were visible.