Hello from my bedroom-- specifically, from my bed. On more normal days I try to get up and work at the kitchen table all morning; eventually I make lunch, and after I eat it I migrate to a coffee shop, or at least go run an errand, just to give my brain and body a change of scenery.

Now, instead, I work mornings in bed and afternoons in the kitchen. When I'm done I walk in the hills near my house, keeping distance from everyone I see; I come home and fix myself a bourbon and some dinner and FaceTime with a friend.

It is a lucky life in so many ways, and for once, I feel gratitude without having to reach for it. My job that goes on uninterrupted-- still unstable and underpaid, but so far uninterrupted. My loved ones, by and large, have homes they are safe in and resources to support them through this crisis. I can see their faces, tiny and blurry, on my screen, and I can drive my little safe bubble of a car around the city to drop presents on their porches. How could I feel anything but overwhelmed and undone by my astonishing luck?

Over the summer I read Rebecca Solnit's book A Paradise Built in Hell, which is about how people respond to disasters. There are no pandemics in the book-- instead, it focuses on two earthquakes, an explosion, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. I can't say enough about how it has helped me contextualize and understand my experience these last few weeks-- my grief and my happiness, as well as the structures, beyond the obvious (money, mostly) that create space for me to be happy, a little bit, at least, in this wildly awful moment in history.

"In disaster people come together and, though some fear this gathering as a mob, many cherish it as an experience of a civil society," she writes. "In contemporary terms, privatization is largely an economic term, for the consignment of jurisdictions, good, services and powers... to the private sector and the vagaries of the marketplace. But this economic privatization is impossible without the privatization of desire and imagination that tells us we are not each other's keeper. Disasters, in returning their sufferers to public and collective life, undo some of this privatization, which is a slower, subtler disaster all its own."

Of course, this disaster is unique in that it has brought us inside, rather than out of our homes; it has made us seem, at least at first glance, more reliant on our devices, rather than less. And it could have been ameliorated significantly if our leadership wasn't so hideously venal and also astonishingly stupid. I wish this wasn't happening. I do not mean to suggest that anyone else is getting sick "for a reason," that their suffering is balanced by my opportunity to learn and grow or whatever. 

But since all of this is happening, I am trying to find a way to think through it. And  I recognize the sensation Solnit describes here in my own days: the reassuring sense that I belong to a community of people who are doing their best to care for one another. Ever since isolation began, I cannot spend a day wrapped up in my own life, the way I often do, busy busy busy, launching myself from event to event, plan to plan to plan. Instead, I am obligated to consider the people around me in everything I do. 

Solnit writes about the terrible things people do in crisis as failures of this kind of community-- if you are ripping hand sanitizer off of a hospital's wall, it is likely because you have been failed so often by so many that you no longer believe anyone will save you but yourself. (Or you're an acutely isolated and selfish person; very rich people's disaster pathologies are a separate subject.) If you are hoarding supplies, it's because you don't trust that your neighbors might be willing or able to lend you an onion, a can of beans, a roll of toilet paper. 

I don't have money to donate, or masks; I can't sew, and I can't intubate a patient, or help build a ventilator. The best things I can do right now and are stay inside, and stay healthy, and remind the people that I love that I love them, and that I will take care of them any way I can. I can be a part of a network of people that trusts in and provides for one another as best they are able. 

This is not to say that things are always easy. Lately at night I will dream that I'm out somewhere, doing something I'd planned Before-- going to a friend's wedding, or a book event in New York. In the dream I'm in a crowd, and then I remember that none of us are supposed to be together. I realize I am probably already sick.

I wake up in the dark and soothe myself back to sleep. When I wake again, in the morning, there's no remembering to be done. I already know.

My body is integrating the knowledge of its precarity as best it can. I am looking for work I can do to keep myself grounded and useful.

I wish so much of the same for you.

-

Okay, so: all of the events around my book release have been cancelled. But you can still order a copy through Skylight, Indiebound, Bookshop.org, or your local indie if they're still doing deliveries. Audiobooks are at LibroFM or through my publisher. (Really just anywhere but fucking Amazon, please.) 

And I'll be doing a couple of livestreams! I'm taking part in Belletrist's Virtual Book Tour on their Instagram on Monday, March 30 at 10am Pacific. 

Then on the book's release day, which is Tuesday, March 31, I'll be on Instagram Live at 5pm Pacific, reading a chapter of the book, answering questions, and maybe even wearing lipstick for the first time in a month. 

If you are looking for a quarantine read, I reviewed NK Jemisin's The City We Became for The LA Times, and I recommend it highly. 

I also got to do a podcast interview with Miranda! We talked about writing, work, butts in chairs and of course our meet-cute.