what we keep
I moved back in with my parents at the tail end of December of 2012; I started drafting A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART in late April of the following year. I've written about how I didn't know what I was doing when I started: I mean in terms of writing in general as well as with this story in the specific. One of the things I didn't know I was doing was writing about my family.
I had spent most of my adult life until that point living 3,000 miles away from them. I moved to Connecticut to go to college when I was eighteen and didn't really come back to Los Angeles until a few weeks before my twenty sixth birthday. It was shocking how shocking it was to be back-- and not just back but all the way back, sleeping in my childhood bed at the top of the stairs and getting woken up by my parents making each other coffee in the mornings.
I had come back in part because my grandmother, my mom's mom, was dying. She was in her nineties and relatively healthy but dying nonetheless, in the slow, sure way people that age do. She was my last surviving grandparent; my mother has one sister, who has no children. It seemed like the kind of thing I should be home for. And I had always wanted to come back to Los Angeles eventually anyway. It wasn't a sacrifice to do it.
So I was surprised that it was still difficult-- not just her decline and the drama around it, but everything else, too. It's no secret that the people you know and love best are the ones who can cut you the deepest, and the most easily, but it's one thing to know that in theory and it's quite another, after so many years of keeping yourself at a distance from it, to make your bed in a house of their blades.
What is this, I kept asking myself, this thing I was feeling, this intense, marrow-deep affection and frustration. My family is a happy one, very close; I was surprised and unsettled to learn how much they could challenge me-- and how much I wanted to love them in spite of this.
The mother in the book is not my mother; the father and brothers are not at all like my father and brother. Their family dynamics are nothing like ours. Instead what I was writing about was the dynamic of having a family: how insane it feels to know people that well, to see up close and very personally how crazy and flawed and difficult they are, and still to choose-- to choose absolutely, with your eyes open to the craziness of it-- to love them with abandon anyway.
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Happy Mothers' Day if you're celebrating. I'm sending this letter a few days ahead of schedule because a) it's on theme b) you can still enter to win a copy of A SONG TO TAKE THE WORLD APART here, but only for a few more days and c) by the middle of next week I should have some different and extremely exciting book stuff to announce, so I wanted to clear the runway for that.