Bread and Bread

“The moment of queer pride is a refusal to be shamed by witnessing the other as being ashamed of you,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, a book I’m consuming in grateful gulps. Beyond the Absolut Vodka float and bronzed dancing boys in West Hollywood—beyond the bounce house at Dyke Day—this is what Pride is about. I came out slowly and anticlimactically somewhere around 2000; I’d already been following Rent around the Western United States for three years, so I thought I was plenty proud. Proud enough to roll my eyes at the commercialization of it all, proud enough to have sincere conversations about the downside of assimilation. On one level, embracing the rave-hued, raised-fist anthems of Rent was an act of defiance of my conservative (though not homophobic per se) upbringing, but it was also Broadway, and I’d never personally been harassed or shamed. Read this book! I didn’t come out, even to myself, until I was sure it was cool to do so. Not just not-dangerous, bu...

At Andrea Seigel ’s encouragement, I signed up for the Gilda Radner BRCA study program at Cedars-Sinai.* Might as well put my freaky genes to use. My first duty, after supplying a vial of blood, was to participate in a focus group about Gilda’s new online family history questionnaire. They instructed us we didn’t need to enter real data. I was a little baffled—you don’t need a genetic mutation to beta-test a website—but whatever. They had me at “light dinner will be provided.” I plugged in made-up relatives and causes of death for the characters in my YA novel. No one in the novel has cancer, but I decided that Kate has some Ashkenazi Jewish blood on her mom’s side, and I sprinkled the family tree with BRCA. I gave breast cancer to one of Kate’s cousins, but I let her live. I thought that seemed like a healthy story to tell myself. Gilda Radner and a well dressed, cancer-preventing friend. My sister calls BRCA “the pretty gene.” She developed this theory—that women prone ...

Dear Emily , When I was going through some dark times a few years ago, I read a couple of your essays about slowly losing your son Ronan to Tay-Sachs online. At the time, when I was grieving the loss of much-wanted, miscarried twins, I devoured your writing greedily and gratefully. My experience was one part catharsis, one part relief that It could always be worse. I couldn’t hear such statements from my caring but baffled friends who didn’t get why something as common as a miscarriage should flatten my identity and shatter my sense of safety in the world. But I could hear it from someone who was living out everyone’s worst nightmare. When I picked up your book in Vroman’s last weekend, I paused. Would reading it—as I’d wanted to since it came out—be indulging a kind of grief porn? It could always be worse. Would it ward off the evil spirits I still feared surrounded my fate, or would it invite them in? Since my 2011 miscarriage, I’ve had the time and opportunity to ask ne...

I’m sitting at Swork right now, trying to start Draft 3 of my YA novel. The good news is that my agent liked Draft 2 and gave me some good notes, and Swork has almond milk. The bad news is I feel like I’ve forgotten how to write. Maybe the new job is filling my brain with Grant Voice, or maybe I’ve just been in nonfiction mode for too long. To get some of the right kind of voice in my head, I Googled Andrea Seigel, whose blog and novel The Kid Table are wry and well observed. I think I’m aiming for a voice adjacent to hers. I hoped she had a short story or something online to get me started. Once I saw her and her cute BF in South Pasadena while I was on my way to a particularly grueling couples therapy session. That was a bad idea. Because what I found instead was this interview , in which she discusses her anxiety about growing old alone and childless while engaged and pregnant. She says: Our discussion about the baby, was “Maybe we should stop using protection. ...

10/31, Thursday 1. life of oh my The last part of our day in Esperanza was a kayak tour of Mosquito Bay (not to be confused with Mosquito Pier ), a shallow lagoon inhabited by microorganisms—three hundred thousand per gallon—that glowed when anything touched them. After a bumpy van ride to the water, our guides,   Carlitos and Joshua, led seven kayaks of tourists—mostly Californians—into the dark bay. We all had blue lights clipped to the front of our boats, and Carlitos had a green light in his springy pontyail (guys with would-be Afros can rock the ponytail look so much better than guys with thin, silky hair). When we dipped our paddles in the bathtub-warm water, they made bluish white trails, like glow-in-the-dark bubbles. The kayaks across from ours had thin glowing lines at the spot where yellow plastic touched water, like Hondas bound for a late-night racetrack. Zigzagging fish became bolts of lightning. When we cupped our hands, we cradled stars. I decided A...

As soon as I saw Cathy step out of her car in a short aqua dress and tall gold heels, I remembered that this was the premiere, not just a screening, of Decoding Annie Parker . I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, utterly fried after four non-stop days that included a twenty-four hour trip to San Francisco. But Cathy was really excited about this, and about introducing me to some of her buddies from FORCE , the support group for BRCA-1 and -2 ladies, which was presenting the movie about the search for the breast cancer gene. ( And the Band Played On for cancer, was how I thought of it—except when I’d seen that movie, AIDS and disease of any kind seemed incredibly romantic and distant to my immortal high school self.)   AIDS movie! Cancer movie! My stance on FORCE was: Awesome that it exists, but it’s not my thing. First, because it’s Cathy’s thing. I wasn’t very supportive of her struggle with her fucked-up but undetonated genes, because I was busy picking shrapnel ...

Huntington Hospital looked like a hotel, a huge peach building spanning a block, with a turnaround island and two towers connected by a footbridge over the entrance. I don’t remember if there was a fountain, but it definitely seemed like there was a fountain. An easel held a sign outlining maternity ward visiting hours. A big promotional poster showed a new dad cuddling a dark-haired baby. Someday, I thought, maybe, maybe we would be here—or at another hospital—to visit our baby and his/her birthmother . But on Thursday, the day of my ovary-nixing surgery, it was just cruel. I sat quietly with AK in the pre-op room. A blonde, middle-aged nurse named Becky asked me to pee in a cup: the standard-issue pregnancy test they give to every woman of child-bearing age prior to any surgery. It was time for my big performance. “Is there something I can sign instead?” I asked. “I think so, but I’ll have to ask your doctors. They might refuse to do the surgery.” “I mean, ...

Meghan O’Rourke has an essay in this week’s New Yorker about her experience with an autoimmune disorder called Hashimoto’s. I only diagnosed myself with it for a second while reading the article, which is progress for me. I’m lucky that I’ve never had a mysterious constellation of symptoms that takes years to diagnose, and I’ve never had serious pain related to illness. My own sicky situation isn’t even technically chronic, although it is in a de facto way.* Hashimoto's makes your thyroid all wonky. And talkative? Nevertheless, the article resonated, and I felt grateful for yet another role model—a sicky-smarty who has managed to navigate illness, even to let it change her, without letting it define her. My favorite quotes: “In your loneliness, your preoccupation with an enduring new reality, you want to be understood in a way you can’t be. ‘Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him,’ the nineteenth-century French writer A...

1. kozara I took Nicole out for her birthday Friday night. We spent the first few minutes staring at the menu, trying to figure out what “kozara” was (Japanese tapas, it turned out). “Sorry,” she said. “How are you?” It was the voice she used when she was tired, but trying to hold onto her manners. “I’m good.” “Sorry, I’m just shaking off the week. Work , you know?”  “No worries,” I said. “I’m shaking off the week too. My week was fine, but just, you know, Friday.” If you go to Bar Hayama, order the spicy tuna and crispy rice. DO IT. That week I’d gotten my teeth cleaned and slogged through the building of an online grant management system at work and gone to the hard yoga class and fought with AK about arriving places late. Earlier Friday afternoon, I’d realized I only thought I’d paid my credit card bill last month, and I could no longer say to myself, Yes, but I ’m going through cancer treatment. “Seriously,” Nicole said, and we went back to studyin...

1. you always hurt the ones you love Friday night my dad called to say hi, and I mentioned something in passing about fearing a recurrence of cancer. Although I’m prone to medical anxiety, I think it’s safe to say that every person who’s had cancer and who thinks about the future wonders if that future will include cancer. But my dad took this as his cue to launch into a pseudo-scientific list of reasons why I would live to be 112. It’s what he needs to tell himself—and I get it, because a lot of the time it’s what I need to tell myself too, and sometimes it’s what I need him to tell me—but I wish he would admit it’s part of assuaging his own worry. Instead, he says things like, “I’m concerned you don’t have a realistic picture of your prognosis.” We had a calm, if lengthy, conversation about managing anxiety; at one point I said, “I know you hate emotions,” and he was like, “I do! I do hate emotions!” And then I hung up and felt too tired to clean the house or pack for our tr...

1. waiting for the bus I spent five hours cleaning the house yesterday. It was my first Real Cleaning in a month, and it felt heavenly. Don’t get me wrong: AK rose to the occasion while I was recuperating. She gave the floors her signature polish and kept the living room uncharacteristically tidy. It kept me feeling sane and loved. But feeling sane and loved isn’t the same as feeling in control. My mom was a stress cleaner too. We’re both one trauma (and, okay, a lot of laziness) away from being characters on Obsessed , bathing in bleach or arranging the DVDs by color. Who needs control when you can see your reflection in the sink? In 2002, when I was living with B, a man in a jacket that said “Coroner” knocked on our door. The coroner never stops by to tell you that your party is too loud, you know? Our good friend and upstairs neighbor, Tania, had been hit by a bus while crossing the street on her bike. (This always adds an extra layer of weirdness to certain canc...