AN OVERDUE RANT

from 2015

A Rant, Overdue Since 2015

In a review in the NYTimes of my third memoir, “What Comes Next, and How To Like It,’ I was called a “serial memoirist” by the reviewer. Right off the bat. I wondered if there were such things as serial poets, serial novelists, serial playwrights. I don’t write fiction anymore. I learned more about myself writing Safekeeping than I had learned from fiction, than I had learned from my entire life. And life presents us with moments when our world changes, and we need to keep track of what is happening, of who or what we are becoming. I have written four of them. If we are writers, we write our way through.

A month after Safekeeping was published, everything I thought I knew was rendered obsolete, upended by the sudden tragedy of my husband’s traumatic brain injury. He was hit by a car while walking our dog, and both our worlds changed in that moment. His was a world of confusion and fantasy, black moods that appeared and disappeared swiftly or lingered, sweet happy moods, long quiet times when I didn’t know what he might be thinking, or trying to think. He forgot whatever we had talked about five minutes ago. Time was absent from his world, it had neither place nor meaning. I am fully capable of forgetting five minutes ago, whole mornings disappear without a word, I lose my car keys (and sometimes my car) but I still am conscious of my surroundings. I know what time of day is, and what the weather is doing outside.

I wrote about that terrible time as it was happening. I carried my notebook everywhere, to the dog park, to visits with my husband, to record what I was thinking, what Rich’s mood had been, whether he was aware of where he was and why. Sometimes the things he said made me think of the Delphic Oracle, whom I imagine spoke in mysteries. I kept track of everything. That was my second memoir. I’ll stop now. Except I want to add that she referred back to that book, speaking of my husband as “the unfortunate Rich.” My god. “Unfortunate?! did she not realize what an understatement that was? Unforgiveable.

an angry dirty blonde old woman with three dogs

I wrote the third book because my best friend, Chuck, asked me to. It was about our friendship. He trusted me to tell hard truths. He trusted me to write about an unbreakable bond. That is the book she was reviewing. I wrote the fourth because by now I am 83, and I love being old. I guess the only reason I am writing this is because I have never forgotten “serial memoirist,” and “the unfortunate Rich.” Has she led such an uneventful life, blissfully without tragedy, or sadly without beloved friends, that she cannot imagine a woman writing more than one book about her life? The review itself was insulting, written with an attitude that reeked of superiority, and I always wanted to write her a little note. We all suffer bad reviews, I know. It goes with the territory. But still, I did want to write that little note.

Fuck you, bitch.

There. Now I’m done.