Bread and Bread

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...

1. is gratitude porn a genre? The other day while driving home, listening to Fresh Air , I decided that The Knick was my new favorite show. Dave Davies was interviewing the creators and a medical historian who’d served as a consultant on the show. I can’t imagine that there are a lot of job openings in the field of medical historian, but I kind of want to be one. If my other career as the person who names nail polish colors doesn’t work out. Medical theater. Apparently the show is set in one of my favorite eras (New York at the turn of the last century, a.k.a. Newsies times) and centers on one of my favorite topics (the weird, dark, earnest trial and error that needed to happen so that I could live to get fake nipples—more on that in a minute). The creators pointed out that the surgeons of the time were seen as gods because they were the main reason people were starting to live past their mid-forties. As gods, they were allowed to poke and prod patients in front of a t...

1. friend(s) vibe There’s an episode of Friends where Chandler breaks up with someone—maybe Janice, maybe not for the first time?—and drowns his sorrows with Monica and Rachel. They teach him feminine heartbreak rituals, handing him a tub of chocolate ice cream and a spoon. “This doesn’t taste very good,” he says. Monica shrugs, resigned: “After a while you switch to low fat.” The low fat nineties. I remember the first date—or date-type thing—I went on after B and I broke up, with an androgynous Ivy League hipster screenwriter I’d met on MySpace. She was witty and sarcastic but nice, and had a great asymmetrical haircut. Her mom had died young. Her dad’s family was among the rich white people who fled Cuba after the revolution, which gave her an intriguing air of both privilege and oppression. When, after two ambiguous date-type things, I confessed that I liked her, she called me up and told me she’d gotten more of a “friend vibe” from me. It would have been a ...

1. a species of orthorexics Yesterday morning a I read a New Yorker article about the Paleo lifestyle —while eating a big bowl of cereal, naturally—and for a second I contemplated trying it. But being a pseudo-vegan Paleo person would mean I could pretty much only eat avocados and things derived from coconuts. Not the worst sentence in the world, but still limiting. Then the article—in its charming New Yorker wisdom—pointed out that Paleo, while healthy, is not really designed for a world with six billion people in it, because oats can feed more humans than mastodons can, and what is really appealing about this diet is the rules. Food rules exist in every culture and are at least as old as agriculture itself, meaning we’re hardwired to be hunter-gatherers, but also to be neurotics. I was like, Touché, New Yorker. Rise of the Planet of the Office Drones. I could feel myself looking around for some food rules to jump start my sagging-if-still- mostly -healthy non-Pale...

I’ve never been addicted to any substances, unless you count food, in which case I’ve been in a shaky kind of recovery for thirteen years. But without belittling actual chemical dependence, I think I have an addictive personality. AK is the opposite—she can go to bed at a different time every night, and her only bad habits have more to do with a lack of good habits. I, on the other hand, can practically feel my brain latch onto a thing—whether it’s a substance or a behavior or a thought—and go, Hey, this could be a good one! Let’s definitely eat ALL the potato chips. Let’s definitely Google ONE MORE DISEASE. The simultaneous feeling of surrender and control is intoxicating. Literally, if I understand how serotonin and dopamine work, which I quite possibly do not. The past four years have been dramatic, and sometimes it takes me by surprise. Who me? The kid who lived in the same house for eighteen years and whose parents watched TV from exactly 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. every night? Ot...

When I was in grad school we did some reading about the theory of the carnivalesque, which basically says that people in power let the peasants get a little crazy now and then to blow off steam and prevent a real revolution. Back in the day, that meant villages would host carnivals where the king would dress up as a commoner and commoners could parade around like kings. The next day they would return to their regularly scheduled program of oppression and plague. Without going into spoiler-level detail, I think this is the idea behind Snowpiercer , Joon-ho Bong’s thriller about a train car loaded with the few survivors of a failed global warming fix that has left Earth frozen and uninhabitable. As you might imagine, things on the train are a little tense. Especially because the “tail car” passengers live in filth and poverty, while the folks at the front of the train spend their time going to raves and knitting in orange groves. The government mouthpiece for the train’s mysterious lea...

Happy 4 th , y’all! What I have learned so far from my morning spent dodging the heat and internetting in bed is that “#merica”/“#murica” is a thing. Blink and you’ll miss a meme. At the risk of being un-‘merican, one of my favorite books these past months was by a New Zealander. But don’t worry, I’ll eat some freedom fries to make up for it. My May and June reading log:   Cover of Wake. The book is as good as the cover. Wake by Elizabeth Knox: One of the strangest and most human stories I've read in a while, this novel starts out like a zombie book (why are the residents of this New Zealand spa town gnawing each other's faces off??) and takes a turn for the existential. Elizabeth Knox is a genius at manipulating point of view, creating a story with a relaxed pace that is somehow also full of twists. The invisible monster wreaking havoc on the survivors of the initial massacre literally feeds off human misery, which is basically how evil wor...

1. my health and fitness app may have a few things in common with the fictional mean god in my head Good morning, internet. I have been counting the minutes till this morning for about two weeks now. We spent last weekend on a short, lovely trip to the Bay Area for our friend Mikko’s dance party—sort of a fortieth birthday party, sort of a mini summer camp, sort of a party to tell all his friends and family members how much he loved them (a small piece of me was like, Is this the part where Mikko tells us he has an incurable disease? Luckily, there was no such part). Everybody dance now. NOW! Mikko, Chris and AK dance so good they're blurry. We also got to see Pedro and Stephen’s new West Oakland flat. We’re so sad that they’re not in L.A. anymore, but at least they were courteous enough to move to the one city where ninety percent of our non-L.A. friends seem to have congregated. I love me some one-stop shopping. West Oakland walk with Sugar the sweetheart p...

Lovely cover, lovely book. Sandra Hunter ’s Losing Touch is a quiet book that unfolds as life does—in lonely moments and poignant ones; matters of life and death are written in cups of tea, mechanical beds and long distance phone calls. Nevertheless, Hunter’s first novel began as something of a thriller for me, because something is wrong with protagonist Arjun Kulkani’s leg, and he has good reason to believe it could be a type of motor neuron disease, his family’s genetic curse (British doctors initially dismiss the immigrant’s self-diagnosis, because they believe a disease that’s common in India must be the result of some third-world problem that could not manifest in England). As a hypochondriac whose fears have, on occasion, proven right, I was filled with dread on Arjun’s behalf. Each chapter is named for a symptom: “Reduced Deep Tendon Reflexes” or “Weakness of the Facial and Tongue Muscles.” Like any slow, degenerative illness, the cruelty of Arjun’s disease is that, in...

We’re back at the airport in Nadi, Fiji, where the guys in aloha shirts playing calypso guitar are giving me flashbacks to last week’s blues. It’s hot, crowded and dirty—there are random chip canisters and plastic plates scattered about, and the lighting and the signage have the aura of cheapness, yet nothing here is actually cheap. I just paid six Fiji dollars (however much that is) for my third-choice flavor of melted ice cream. So yeah, we’re ready to be home, although after my Huka Falls meltdown, I did manage to pull it together again. AK was sweet to me, told me the turbulent blue and white water was like our feelings—she was jokey but touched by her own metaphor and the bigness of nature all around us. AK in the backseat with her Dramamine, Cheryl with her schnoz, Emily at the wheel. We drove back to Auckland through the cow-speckled countryside. AK slept in the backseat and Emily and I talked about the comforts of history. “It’s all stories,” she said. “That’s ...

The saddest selfie ever! It’s our last full day in NZ. Right now we’re at Huka Falls, a highway-wide river whose white and pale-blue rapids generate fifteen percent of NZ’s power. And I’m the idiot who’s on a park bench journaling and crying because of all the baby stuff, and lack thereof, we have to go back to tomorrow. AK and I talked about it in the hotel a little bit this morning—poor Emily. We talked about AK’s dislike of Zoey and Jim’s tactics and my feeling that my calling in life is to weather heartbreak, and the absurd romanticism of that idea. The shitty thing about open adoption, and the reason I will never be poly-amorous, is that it’s not enough for two people to be on solid ground, to love each other and to have worked through our shit. Three or four people have to be there at the same time. And it pisses me off, endlessly, that what’s good enough for other people isn’t good enough when I do it.

1. spaaaahhh After we all finished our travel journaling Thursday night at the Irish pub, we kept talking, and Rachel came up again. I asked Emily how, exactly, that year had shaped her. She was living in Moscow, Idaho, and teaching in Pullman, Washington, a place she hated, and Rachel’s death simply but vividly underscored the fact that life is too short to waste. She didn’t want to fuck around, but she was also kind of trapped. A coworker who had also lost a good friend told her: “This kind of experience gives you a clarity not everyone has access to. But it fades—the challenge is to keep it close to you and let it inform your life.” So Emily bided her time and went to therapy and the gym, and made herself the kind of person who would be ready to take full advantage of better things when they come along. I want to let the whole baby/cancer experience inform my life the same way. I don’t have the luxury of dreaming my life will be perfect and waiting until then to enjoy my...