I never intended to be a writer.
Very early on, I was going to be a ballerina and a doctor, and no doubt, a mommy, simultaneously. No one told us we couldn’t have it all. There were a few things that did not bode well for the ballerina/doctor career track: I didn’t know my right foot from my left and I was a poor math student. In high school, I failed chemistry and had to go to summer school in order to graduate with my class.
And yet, through my childhood and adolescence I wrote: exhortations (“Plez, plez, plez by us a pupy I promis I wil wok it + fed it + tak car of it”); diaries; bad poetry; a neighborhood newspaper (handwritten in pencil, so it had a circulation of one…well, two if you count both my parents).
In college, back in the 60’s, I was a drama major with my sights on Broadway, but an elective in playwriting resulted in a one-act that not only was performed at my university, but won second prize in a national collegiate playwriting contest. On a recent rereading, I questioned the sanity of the judges, as well as my own. It was so cringeworthy, so racially insensitive, I shredded it so my children wouldn’t find it some day and do a complete re-evaluation of their mother.
I fell into a post-collegiate writing career after a year of cattle calls for off, off-off- and off-off-off- Broadway productions. I got one of those: it was one night only, performed in someone’s East Village crash pad. It was not reviewed in The New York Times, or anywhere else. Was it an experimental theater production of Chekov? One of the new playwrights like Sam Shepard or Lanford Wilson? Or just the post-acid trip scribblings of the guy who needed to make rent? It remains a mystery. Desperate for a job, any kind of job that would put me in close proximity to the smell of the greasepaint and the roar of the crowd, I started working at a newspaper that published casting calls for actors. My first job there was to making dunning phone calls to advertisers who hadn’t paid their bills. I held the phone button down and pretended to talk. Soon, I graduated to writing restaurant reviews. Since this was a perk for the eateries that paid to advertise in the paper, all reviews had to be at least positive, if not glowing. For one Polynesian place that kept a chatty—uncaged– parrot chained to a perch at the front desk, I waxed poetic about the bird’s vocabulary and noted: “You may want to try the Puupuu Platter.”
After about a year of writing these ersatz reviews, as well as advice articles for actors seeking work, I finally quit the paper when the sleazy publisher invited me into his office and pulled me onto his lap. For years, I scanned The New York Times for his obituary. It took 20 years for it to finally appear and I could stop reading the death notices. #MeToo.
Break of about six years: got married, had two kids, moved to the country, and wrote grocery lists and absence notes (“Please excuse Jonathan from school this morning. He has a dentist appointment.”). I was bored and we needed the money, so when I saw an ad for a reporter position at the local weekly newspaper, I applied. I think it paid $120 a week.
Over the next decade, as my children inexplicably evolved from primary school pupils to teenagers, I evolved as a journalist. I covered town meetings; slept with the police scanner next to my bed, so I could be on the scene to photograph the midnight barn fires that plagued our town until the arsonist was caught; and got invited to every 50th anniversary celebration, retirement party, and opening of deer season—people loved to see their pictures and read their stories in the paper. The dead deer? Not so much.
At 40, I decided to get my MSW and embark as a free-lance writer at the same time. Among other assignments, I wrote a section of a Fodor’s travel guide—these were the days before Trip Advisor and Yelp– and ran out of adjectives to describe “quaint” and “charming” country inns.
My gratifying social work career was spent as director of several anti-violence agencies, where I wrote grants (many, many, many grants) and reports to our funders (“Yes, federal government, the paper clips and copy paper we bought with your money went to the funded project only and absolutely, I swear, was not used for any other agency business.”) and swore that after I retired, I would never ever write anything longer than a grocery list.
And yet…Some health problems forced me to adapt a highly restrictive diet (as in: no grains, no dairy, no soy, no corn, no legumes; no sugar, restrictive). To rescue myself from death by culinary boredom, I started devising recipes, which I shared on a food/memoir blog, www.paleogram.com . And then, I decided to write a novel. Or, rather, I decided to resurrect a 30-year-old unpublished novel that I had stashed in a box in the back of a closet after it received one rejection. After four years of revisions and three more drafts, So Happy Together was published by She Writes Press on April 20, 2021.
So, here we are: Accidental or not, I guess I’m a writer. Please subscribe below to join me in this grand adventure.