Mary Tabor's unimaginable lightness of being

Unfixed interview

By experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that.

-Mary Tabor, author (Re)Making Love: A Memoir, The Woman Who Never Cooked, Who by Fire

When I read anything by Mary Tabor, I do it slowly. Deliberately. I liken the experience to being deeply engrossed in a 5000 piece, handcrafted jigsaw puzzle, each piece just as important and gorgeous as the final image. But there’s more. Solving this puzzle will reveal something I’ve never known about life, so while I must go slowly, there’s also an urgency. I know I speak in metaphor but I’ve spent days trying to find the exact words to describe the incomparable experience of reading Mary. It will change you. You will make discoveries. You will feel her own necessary vulnerability hand-in-hand with your own. Her words will guide you along the vertiginous cliff of love, loss and uncertainty with an assured hand that says “It’s painful, but that very pain will save you.”

Mary’s Substack Only Connect is a confluence of her spanning knowledge and experience as an author, professor, radio show host, and columnist, where she shares her serialized memoir (Re)Making Love, fiction, and essays about the arts, books, movies, and all things literary. “Only Connect” is the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howard's End and she claims it’s the best advice she ever got, living this truism not only through nurturing intimacy with writers on Substack but also through her staggering ability to weave together stories of her own pain and seemingly disparate subjects and literary forms. Mary is a one-woman light show of synaptic connections and it was an honor to join the shimmering display for an hour to learn more about her creative process, why she believes writing is a journey of self-discovery and how to find levity in the face of heartbreak and the unknown.

Mary is also “accidentally funny,” and in between Mary’s poised, wisdom-sharing, we burst into fits of laughter, so get ready to learn, feel inspired, and smile.

TRANSCRIPT

Kimberly

Mary, my goodness. I am so excited to have some time with you today. I just want to start off by saying I adore you. And I mean that because you and I've never even met you in person, but your wit and vulnerability are…they're married in such an incredible way that I feel like I just know you. I feel like I've been sitting by your side on a bench my whole life and having conversations. So it is so exciting to have some time with you today.

Mary

I'm so honored to be here, honestly, because your Substack is so amazing. And when I found you, I just couldn't stop reading Unfixed. And I just found you to be this incredibly sweet and openhearted person. So the feeling is, it's more than mutual, if that's a phrase.

Kimberly

Let's make it a phrase today. So let's dive in. You have a lot of different things going on on your Substack. And so I'm going to touch on a variety of them. But the first thing that pulled me in to you and to your story and to your vulnerability is your deeply engrossing, smart, funny, often heartbreaking memoir called (Re)Making Love. And I'm gonna just start with sharing something that you wrote in there and then I'm gonna ask you about that. So you said,

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am not only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? Truly knowing what these words mean has come from the place of not knowing. And by this, I mean that I have had to live this journey without the full understanding of their plain spoken sense. I have had to learn the hard way through the good, the bad, and the foolish that this memoir recounts.

So, I want to hear from you, what you mean when you say that “truly knowing comes from a place of not knowing.” I just love this.

Mary

Well, you're reading the, actually, I wrote this prologue to the memoir after it was finished. And the not knowing has kind of, well, first of all, there's the knowing of oneself that this is actually a memoir of self-discovery, where I learn who I am and how I how I got through this, which was all about self-discovery.

But the not knowing that I'm talking about—and I think that's kind of where you're going with this, is what do I mean by not knowing—so the not knowing has kind of three parts in the sense that I believe that writing should start from a place of not knowing. I think if you have everything figured out, you're going to cut invention. That doesn't mean that I don't think we should edit, that I don't think we should ultimately later have an outline, although this memoir did not have an outline. Maybe that's obvious for people reading it. I don't know. But I have a novel which is quite complex that I'm posting now. And I began that by not knowing and ultimately I did outline it. So that's the first part of not knowing is, is I believe that if you're really truly going to invent, you don't know what you're actually doing when you begin. You're in this process of discovery.

And the second part is that idea of, sure, we need to separate, we need to study the craft. We need to know what we're doing.

Mary

And I suppose the third thing, the third is sort of how I'm funny, how I'm accidentally funny. And that is that I don't remember what I write. So I have a piece that is maybe one of my most telling pieces is the closing story of The Woman Who Never Cooked that is titled “The Woman Who Never Cooked.” And I do not remember writing this. And because I went into a state of what we might call or what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi would call “flow,” and I do not recall, I just came out of the writing and there was this piece of writing. And there it's sat. And that's a wonderful gift. But the funny part of it is that, so sometimes my partner will say to me, there's that great line, you know, “Nakedness has nothing to do with what needs to be done.” And I say, Who said that? And he said, You did!

Kimberly

You’re like, That’s great!

So there is an element of not knowing.

Mary

So that's the first thing in not knowing is that I can't quote myself. And there are writers who can do this, there are poets who can do it, but I am incapable of doing it because a lot of what comes for me comes in a kind of dreamlike state, almost what some might call lucid dreaming. But I think that's a, it's also the gift of art.

Kimberly

So is it challenging? I think a lot of people would go, How do I begin to write without knowing? So walk us through that a little bit, because I would imagine maybe it's just a natural place for you, but there are certain challenges inherent to writing, especially a story where you're almost leading yourself through the dark and you're making discoveries about yourself in the process. How does that work for you? What are the challenges that you encounter by entering your story this way?

Mary

Well, I actually think it's really, I think it's important for all writers to do this. There are some writers who say, for instance, John Irving argues that he has the entire book figured out before he sits down to write it. That's a lot of thinking that went into that. So there was a lot of not knowing, I think, before he had it all figured out. But I actually think that the process involves risk. And taking that risk is where the invention happens. And I give this example when I teach and I'll just do it right now. If I do this little exercise with you and you did these two things, which you don't have to do right now, but I'll just tell you what they are and anybody who's listening can try this exercise. And the exercise is: Write your name. And the second part of the exercise is: Write an alias.

The time it takes to do the second part of that exercise is where the invention occurs. And that's the risk we take when we start. And we have to start from that place if we're going to do something that is going to be both surprising and inevitable for the, not only for the reader, but for the writer. And I think any good story ends that way.

Kimberly

Yes, yes, and actually, I'm that that is such a beautiful statement because the discovery that I feel like—and tell me if I'm wrong—that you made in your in (Re)Making Love is that you discovered something about love.

It is a beautiful love story. And I feel like your understanding of love changed throughout the writing of those pages. You even said, I did not know that love may speak in waves of silence. So you had this, it's almost like you went, the writing of the book was therapy for you, in a way.

Mary

Okay, but the line you just quoted is actually from Lifeboat that I shared with you, which we're probably gonna talk about later. But that line, I don't think that's in the memoir, but I also don't remember what I write. So it's possible it's in the memoir and I don't think it is, because that's another story about, wow, I don't remember what I write.

But I will tell you that what I discovered about love is that, love is the center of the universe. I truly believe that. But what I truly discovered, because I'm married to a man for 22 years and he wakes up one day and oh so Greta Garbo says to me, I need to live alone. A horrifying moment for me, just absolutely broke my heart and he left, okay?

So that happened, but I also discovered through this process of writing and in this case, I wrote this live while it was happening and it was a blog. That's how it began. And then a possible publisher picked it up. But what I discovered through this process is that the loved one, the object of one's love must be set free.

And the other part of that is, we never truly know as close as we are with another person, their story. So I misunderstood a lot about what was going on. And I'm not sure I understand now, but I think I did come to a better place in the world and a better place in myself, which is essentially what I'm saying in that in that prologue, which is, I think I'm quoting Rabbi Hillel in that prologue. It's a very famous quote that you read. Actually, let me tell you who it is, because I say it in front of the book that, I'm just gonna pull this out right here. And so this was actually a book which has this kind of… let me take this off. Okay. So it has this cool cover. And so the prologue is from Rabbi Hillel, but it's been famously quoted by Primo Levi and by John F. Kennedy.

So it's a very unusual quote that's not original with me. So I don't want anybody to think I wrote that, because I didn't write that.

Kimberly

Let's go back to make sure that we are all on the same page here. The quote that you're talking about is the one I opened up with where you began with, If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? Okay, got it. Got it. Great. Well, I wanted to follow up on that actually. My brother had this quote, it was a painting above his bed or maybe it was in the bathroom even and maybe you know this quote I think it was something from Winnie the Pooh—If you love something very very much let it go free if it doesn't come back it was never meant to be yours and if it does love it forever. Was that Winnie the Pooh?

Mary

I don't know, but that's exactly my point. That's exactly what I learned. I learned that it's really important to just let go and to believe that love is the center of the universe. I didn't know if I would find a happy ending. I mean, I was heartbroken through most of it, as one can tell, although it is, as you said, it's oddly funny.

Kimberly

So you don't intend to be funny because that's one of my questions. You have to tackle in a lot of your work these really heavy themes, betrayal, love, death, but there is absolutely levity there. And that's not something you ever intended.

Mary

Yeah. Well, I’m never, there's no second career in standup comedy for me. I'm never going to be—I'm accidentally funny. So as an example, there's a story, I have a collection of short stories, it's called The Woman Who Never Cooked. And in this collection of short stories, there's a story that people either love or they hate. It's called “Sine Die.” It has diagrams in it and stuff like that. But anyway, in this story, there's this—I once was once teaching a graduate class, if you can believe it, there's a PhD in creative writing. I think that's crazy. But anyway, I ended up teaching in this program and I'm invited at a separate event somehow to—cause one doesn't read one's work to your students—but anyway, I'm invited to read this story and I'm reading the story and I get to this place and there's two sisters. It's fictional in a lot of ways, there's a lot of autobiography in it, but it's fictional. And there's two sisters and they're pretending that they're prostitutes and they meet this farmer and the farmer takes them for a drink. And the younger sister says, Let's go to a, we'll go to a room, you know, so they're going, they're going to do something like that. But in any case, the dialogue operates in some way where he says, He says to them, I'll pay for the room, but nothing else. And the older sister in the story says, If he pays for the room, you're a whore. And then the younger sister says, That would make you my pimp. And I read this and everybody laughs and I didn’t know that it was funny. But it was funny because these are two sisters who are really bound very closely to one another. And it was funny.

And there's another place in the book, I have a story called “The Burglar.” It happens to be one of my most favorite stories in the collection. But there's a couple and their house has been burglarized. And the couple go out to dinner. And the woman has imagined the burglar as re-entering her life in some way. It's in the story.

They're sitting at dinner and they're finished dinner and they're about to order dessert and the woman blurts out The burglar! and the husband says—they've just been talking about her mother's strudel and the way her mother made strudel—and the husband says something like this, because I can't remember exactly, but he says something like, Okay, the burglar and strudel, let me think, you want to steal a dessert? And people laugh. I don't know that it's funny.

Kimberly

When you're writing this, you're not laughing? Like, there's nothing that's tickling your funny bone as you're writing.

Mary

No, I'm not purposely doing it. It just happens. When I go back, I mean, I always say to all of the, I've done a lot of teaching and what I say to my students is that editing is always a secondary task. That doesn't mean that it's not important. It is important, but it shouldn't be done as the primary function of the writing process because that's the way we get in the way of the invention, because we judge ourselves. And we say to ourselves, Oh I know I'm supposed to “show don’t tell” whatever the hell that means. And I talk a lot about whatever that means because I think that's also widely misunderstood. But when we get in the way of that process of invention by judging ourselves and thinking, I need to fix this, I need to fix that, we cut away all of the, and I don't like the word, subconscious, I like the word unconscious. It's like dreaming. And that's where, and you must know this from writing Unfixed. Don't you know it from, I mean, didn't you feel things bubbling up?

Kimberly

Yeah. absolutely.

Yeah, it has to me, to me, the need and the emotional sensations and the physical sensations in my body precede the understanding. And that's just how I operate in the world. I've never been a strategist. And so it's very rewarding to hear someone as brilliant as you operates that way as well, because for me, it feels like I'm sometimes like fishing in a great lake trying to find the one fish in the pond, you know, at the bottom. And it's a big dark chasm in there. And so letting that process that sometimes is preverbal exist before the actual words bubble up. With you, I get the sense that the words...

Mary

I have to say something here. I mean, your memoir is so beautiful and wonderful and it has so many readers. It's incredible. You are a really gifted writer.

Kimberly

Thank you. Thank you, Mary. That means so much to me.

Mary

I don't say that lightly either. I've been teaching for a really long time and I don't say that lightly.

Kimberly

Thank you.

Wow, I hear that and that's like, I will remember that forever. I never ever intended to be a writer. I just put this up on Substack because I thought it would be a convenient place for my family to read it. It never was supposed to be something that, you know, the majority of my readers, I don't even think most of my family did read it. I think it's all of you that ended up reading it. So thank you.

Mary

My pleasure.

Kimberly

Let me pick at this beautiful writer's brain of yours a little bit more because one of the things that, I mean you're definitely not a stranger to pain and loss and those themes are very very close to the surface when you write and you're also at the same time able to pull in and maybe this is the invention that you're talking about again these really disparate events, topics, media. It's kind of staggering to me how you're able to put all of this together and all these genres and literary forms. And it goes back to the title of your Substack, which is Only Connect. And it feels like you are always making these connections. And that's part of it.

Mary

I don't think I've ever thought of it that way. I think of it as connecting with someone like you and finding people. It's such a community of intimacy, ultimately, because people are so open and vulnerable on Substack in amazing ways that that to “only connect” is the epigraph to Ian Forster's Howard's End. And I think I say that it's the best advice I ever got, “Only Connect.”

That's what I meant, but I never realized what you just said that that's what I'm doing. And I think you're right that I do that, but I didn't ever thought of that before. Thank you for explaining that.

Kimberly

It's layered. Your connecting definitely has layers. And I thought, well, this makes perfect sense because yes, that's what we're doing here on the literal plane of creating community and all of that. But your brain, like if I could see your frontal lobe, you have so many synaptic connections happening. And I think I just want to know, as someone who doesn't see, I don't have that happening. I want to know about your sort of writing/gathering/gestating process. Are you always taking down notes and or do you just have a fabulous memory? How do you keep this all straight?

Mary

Okay, I used to have, you know, when I was a lot younger, I did have a fabulous memory. And I will tell you a little bit about that as a little sidebar. I mean, I had such a good memory that I would have in my Smithsonian, when I was teaching at the Smithsonian Museum has an adult education program and I taught in it for over a decade. And there would be 75 people in my classes. And what I could do is I could, I would just go around the room the first day and I would talk to people really briefly and I would get their name and then I would tell everybody, 75 people here, I'm gonna name all of you. And I could do it. I can't do now. There was a memory. I would walk into my classroom and they'd be teaching and someone would say something about King Lear and I'd say, let’s turn to page 157, that's where that quote is. I mean, I had that kind of unusual memory, but that is completely gone. I mean, like I couldn't remember the third thing I was telling you about knowing. I couldn't remember that. Okay, so things go away as we age.

But the thing is that I do, I read a great deal and I believe in, and I watch a lot of film and I believe in reading and watching everything. I'm pretty much indiscriminatory about that. That doesn't mean I don't decide and know what I think is great. I do, and I do make those judgments about books that I read or films that I see and I write about those. But for the reason that I have this disparate interest in kind of the world, I have never been bored. That's one of the things I often would say to my children. You're bored? I've never been bored. I mean, there's always something to see. And so for me, it's easy to insert a romantic comedy which kind of seems silly and at the same time quote T.S. Eliot and at the same time take those romantic comedies and complicate them by what life is really like. And that all seems completely natural to me to then turn to a grim fairy tale and combine that the grimness of those fairy tales, which are a lot grimmer than most people think that Disney made them, and to put all those things together and it just happens. And I don't understand how it happens. That is kind of the mystery. That's the mystery. If I could say this to anyone who's watching this who's in a workshop or who is beginning to write, You need to watch out for teachers who throw the baby out with the bathwater because the invention often comes imperfectly.

And it needs to be protected, not killed. And workshops particularly tend to do that.

Kimberly

How do they do it? How do they kill that process?

Mary

This is really interesting. I hadn't thought that we would talk about this, but Alice Munro just died. And

Tara Penry

who's really wonderful and has a Substack called Quiet Reading, invited a number of us personally, directly to write about Alice Munro. And I have done this. It's going to go up on June 13th on the memorial of her death. She won the Nobel Prize, for those who don't know, she won the Nobel Prize in fiction for writing short stories only. But Alice Munro was this incredible genius of a writer. This is somebody who's, there's just nobody in the world who's like her and there have been a lot of tributes written about her, but I didn't do that. I did something very different, which you'll see on the 13th. But one of the things I wrote about is that she took one of her stories to, against her better judgment, she took one of her early stories to a workshop at UVic in Canada. And one of the students in the class savaged it, absolutely savaged it. She did not write for one year after that savaging.

In addition to that, Grace Paley, this is an even worse story, but Grace Paley, this wonderful, also short story writer, didn't write novels, but this absolutely fabulous writer, had a teacher do it to her. That's even worse. And so when that happens in workshop, you need to, it's like going to, I'm not saying that workshops are therapy because they're not, okay? They're anything but, but it's like getting the wrong therapist, okay? You need to get out of that room as fast as you can. I mean, can you...

Can you even imagine that Alice Munro wrote 14 books, would stop writing for a year because someone said that's just the kind of stuff that a housewife would write. I mean, savaged the piece. And that's the way it happens because people sit around and there's kind of a community think that operates in the workshop. It's the worst. And I have an MFA degree. I've lived through workshops. I taught workshops for many years, but I'm a very different kind of teacher.

And my advice is don't quit, keep writing, and find yourself someone who understands how it should be taught with care, with great care, and with great protection.

Kimberly

Yeah, and enthusiasm. I'm remembering an interview I did with

Mr. Troy Ford

the lovely author of Lamb and creator of Q-Stack. And he said in his interview that I think it was a middle school teacher. He wrote something that he was excited about and he shared it and they just same thing. They just crushed it.

Mary

Teachers can be brutal and they don't realize how the harm that they're putting on this tender process. It's just wrong.

Kimberly

Yeah, tender. I love that word tender and I relate to that word. I don't know if it's I use it a lot. I think when I comment on Substack. I’ll go, Oh this is so tender and I really mean it legitimately. I don't know if it's like offensive to some people, but it really is like when something is tender to me, it means it's raw and it touches me.

Mary

Well, tender has a double meaning. I think it's the double meaning that you're keying in on because tender has this emotional meaning, but it also has the meaning of something that's easy to break or easy to hurt. So when you're using the word tender, you're identifying the vulnerability inside of what you're reading. And whenever we see that on the page, it's real. It's real in memoir, it's real in fiction, and when we see it, we know it and we love it and we live with it. It's how the story transports.

Kimberly

And that's the kind of reader I think that you draw. I'm assuming that the people that are drawn to both your memoir and your fiction, they're looking for those tender moments. What would you say, what kind of reader is drawn to you?

Mary

I can't know that for sure unless somebody tells me. And I now, I'm a big writer of fan mail. So for instance, I've written Colm Tóibín a fan letter. I actually emailed him and he actually wrote me back immediately. I mean, we all should think about the importance of doing this because even famous people like Colm Tóibín who I think is poised for the Nobel Prize, he was so appreciative of what I had written. So it's important to tell people that you feel this tenderness and vulnerability. And that's one of the things that Substack does through comments. It allows that to happen.

But in terms of answering your question, I think that my perfect reader is someone who really wants to be in the process of discovery and doesn't feel that he or she has all the answers and wants to go on the journey. And that's someone who's perfect for me because I'm on a journey every time I start to work. So that's who I read, that's who I love on Substack.

That's why I love your work because the journey was incredible. Really, Kimberly, it was incredible. And it continues, the documentary too. The documentary is so stirring and what people say is just so moving about people. For those who don't know, Kimberly is writing about people with chronic, is doing a documentary with people about chronic illness and it's a marvelous, marvelous, marvelous video.

Kimberly

It's been an incredible journey. And just side note, it was intended to be an actual feature length documentary, but the pandemic, it started during the pandemic. So we had to shut down operations and just do these distant recordings and interviews. And it became almost richer in the process because of that, because certainly the duration was longer than just these two day interviews. And it also established a safety for the subjects because they were able to do this in the safety of their own home by themselves.

Anyway, so yeah. So what I wanted to say, this is, going back to what you said about discovery, your readers want to discover something while they're reading you, maybe discover something about themselves. And that is such a beautiful thing to say. And bells just went off when you said that because that's what I get when I read you. And one of the things, one of the aha moments that I had with you that I will never forget is when you, I had the privilege to read one of your deeply intimate pieces and without speaking to it directly, because I know that you're still shopping it. I want to explore the essence of it and it just, holy cow, Mary. I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I have, it's anyway, So the overarching message when it became clear to me, I was so excited. As you know, I texted you, I was like, my God, Mary, I get it. And this piece that…

Mary

Maybe the only person in the world who got it, I don't know. We'll see.

Kimberly

Well, it is such an important message though. It is so important. And I, so the piece is called Lifeboat and it's about grief. And most people will just assume, okay, lifeboat, great. This is sitting on top of the water. It's got the coping mechanisms in it and all the things that we do to keep ourselves from drowning and being pulled under. And you don't stop there. You don't stop with the cliches.

Finally when this piece wraps up I it just like I said, I had to sit with it for a moment and I realized the lifeboat was your grief and that realization is It reminds me of my own statement “when broken is the fix” when the pain when the suffering when the angst, that is actually what is saving us. So I'm going to stop talking. Tell me about this revelation for you.

Mary

Okay, okay, I will. I want to first say that I recently read a book by Julian Barnes, whom I also love, and I love to name wonderful authors because I admire so many great writers. And Julian Barnes wrote a book called The Levels of Life, and in it, it was after his wife died, and he says that every love story is a potential grief story. I don't think I ever understood the meaning of that, but to come back to the Lifeboat piece that I wrote. For those who, nobody really knows this, because it's really hard to talk about, but my 46 year old son died. And he died a while ago. And I wrote this piece, it took me a long time to write it. It's lyrical and it operates on the basis of kind of notes, that there are some 22 notes in the piece. And what it's about is that I thought I was drowning and the grief, by diving into it as if I had a choice, was like a boat on the ocean of loss. And I think it's an important thing in our Western culture to understand about grief because most people want us to move on and get over it. And I'm not saying that I wasn't living, but by experiencing deeply and profoundly the grief, I floated on this ocean of loss. And I felt saved in my life by that.

And so I wrote this piece that keeps getting rejected by literary magazines, but we'll see. It's out at a couple more. Eventually, maybe I'll give up and do something else with it and maybe it'll be out on Substack, but I am trying, I do think it's one of the better things I've written. I think it's highly original, it's unusual, it makes these kinds of connections you've been talking about that I do, it does that and they build on each other and it's brief, it's short and I'm praying that a really wonderful literary magazine will take it, but who knows? This is a world of rejection.

Kimberly

I want this to happen, Mary, unless it's supposed to look differently—we talked about this, it's so visual. Like part of me thinks you need to hire like some amazing animator and create an Oscar winning animated short because this is such a profound story of loss and love and the discoveries that you made through that.

And I understand why— I'm mad that that's getting rejected—but I understand in the sense that I too, when I'm sending out this message of “broken is the fix,” 99% of the people are like, what? No!

Mary

I love that phrase, “when broken is the fix.” I mean, it's hard for us to go through life without something breaking and usually it's your heart.

Kimberly

Mm-hmm. And to, to instead of going, well, how do I fix this to realize, to go within it, like you said, to dive into it and to discover what it has for us instead of like what that woman said in the last film I posted instead of what it is doing to us, what it has for us. It's such a different, approach.

Mary

Well, it's similar with everything I write. The whole idea of what the world does to you is actually not a great subject in my view. This is my personal view. Because that's the view of the victim. And I don't write stories about victimization. And I didn't write this memoir about being victimized, although I had to straddle a very dangerous line of possible revenge in this story, in the memoir.

Ultimately, I would sometimes actually put the word shame in, I don't know if you remember this because you've read the whole thing, but I would sometimes say This writer writes in shame. I would feel the risks are so great in memoir versus fiction because one is putting oneself on the page without the cover of fiction, fiction provides a privilege that extends what one can do with emotional truth. It does that. That's the power of writing in that form. But what memoir does is, I was the subject of my story and I was writing about a man who had left me and I wrote some things that are kind of difficult for me to remember and difficult to read. But the way that the writing works for me, and it's very different from this conversation that we're having here. I write things that I would never say, that I would never be able to talk about in conversation. That's its gift and that's what releases us. We also have to take great care as we do this, but safety gets pushed out of the door. Safety's gone when I start writing.

Kimberly

So then once you're finished writing, let's say you enter in and you're feeling the shame and deep vulnerability and then the words come out and you let yourself go there. When it's done, does the shame come back or the vulnerability, does that come back or does it really sort of almost like this cathartic process that works through that once it's out on the written page?

Mary

Well, actually, I can't operate it all through catharsis. Where the catharsis part operates, that's why it takes, for me, there's five years between life and art. So let's take, for example, the story, I don't know if you've read the story “Sine Die,” but in the story “Sine Die,” I wrote it after my sister had died. And I wrote it five years after she died. I wrote Lifeboat five years after my son died. So I don't see catharsis as part of the process at all. It's a very different place. So when it's done, that's when the editing Mary takes over. And that's when I can put it away for a while and I read it with a cool eye. And if I think I've hit it, and sometimes I actually do think that, it's a lot of times I think I need to trash it. But occasionally I think I've hit it.

That's when I don't feel shame, I feel a sense of joy, really. Of the creation of something other that has left myself. That's where the lifeboat comes in. And that's where the grief and writing about the grief comes in. And that's where the saving comes in. Because something other gets created and the memory is still there. But the hope and the life and the joy of whatever we shoot the moon with art. We always shooting for the moon. Whether we succeed or not is for others to judge, but occasionally we sense that this doing gives its rewards.

Kimberly

Yes, we shoot the moon with art.

Mary

Didn’t you feel that with what you wrote?

Kimberly

For me it was also cathartic because I was, I'm still in it. I'm still dizzy. I'm still discovering the family. I wasn't right in it because that was the, you know, those first two years were just hell on earth. And I was like, Ack, what's happening to my life? So then I was just isolating and wallowing in this place, but the writing process really helped me see things that I couldn't yet see. However, that writing process was five years ago and then it just sat on a drive and actually going back chapter by chapter and publishing it on Substack, that was when the feelings that you're talking about happened where I could finally go, Okay, I'm free from this. It's got its own life now and part of that I think was in the sharing with other people.

It almost took on more universal themes instead of just being my own.

Mary

Isn't that the gift of this place where we're putting our work, is that for, you know, there are writers who are super famous and, you know, very well known, but most of us are barely heard of? And so, you know, most of us get seen and we see others and we make these incredible connections. Just as the one I'm making with you here today, which is so, it's a kind of generosity that is its own gift.

Kimberly

It really is. I don't know if we've just found like a sweet little corner on Substack and if this is our experience with a handful of people or if this is happening everywhere on Substack, but it is truly special.

Mary

It is, and I give great kudos to

Chris Best

for thinking of it, for coming up with this idea, which at this point has no advertising and is being found. Initially, I think there were mostly writers on it, and I completely misunderstood it. And the writers, they were paying—George Saunders was paid to come on. Wonderful, brilliant writer. Lincoln in the Bardo is one of the books I read when my son died. I mean, I read it in one sitting during the night. I just couldn't get through the night without reading every page of it. And so originally that's what it was. And now there are readers on Substack in addition to writers. And there are people who want to write and want to do this and want to be a part of this community. And I think it's startlingly amazing. And I hope it stays without advertising. We'll see what happens.

Kimberly

For that experience to be able to read something that you love and then engage with the author. How many times am I reading at night before I go to bed and I have an underlining things and then I can't tell the author in that moment what that meant to me. So it's changed how I read, absolutely.

So I want to talk about rom-coms with you because I love that you bring this into your memoir and obviously, some people challenge rom-coms and say it oversimplifies love and they offer unrealistic narrative arcs to relationship. But I definitely, I love the parallels that you draw in your memoir to some of the rom-coms and some of your favorites. So how do you reconcile this unrealistic narrative arc with the messier parts of your life?

Mary

Okay. And I love this question because the rom-com works on, even the best ones work on a kind of formula. So there's two people and both of them have been screwed by love and neither one thinks that love works and they're looking for, they just don't think it's possible. And then somehow they have the meet-cute or whatever. And then, they discover each other and everything turns out perfectly. Okay. So that seems silly. And yet when I was brokenhearted, what I did was I watched a lot of them because I was so sad and I was in the, I was in the worst, ingenue, foolish state of heartbreak and so weepy, I couldn't quite believe it. I couldn't stop crying.

And so I would watch them and I would feel better. At the end I would cry again because I didn't see that happy ending coming, but they helped. So I think there's something in the world that, I so miss Nora Ephron. I think Nora Ephron, you know, a tribute to Nora Ephron needs to be written and maybe

Erin Carlson

is writing one today, I don't know. But she writes a Substack called You've Got Mail and it's a wonderful, it's a terrific Substack.

And so for me, the part of the romantic comedy was—take it, and I think I may have already said this today, but take it and complicate it. Complicate it with what really happens in life. And then you've got a story. And why not?

And we know when we read any story that it's going to end. It's kind of like what I said earlier about every love story is a potential grief story, which is a quote from somebody else, from Julian Barnes. But I'm still saying that we know that the story, when we watch a movie and we get immersed in it, or when we read a book and we get immersed in it, we know that that narrative is going to end.

That similarity always struck me as a metaphor for existence. And to search through existence and to try to create some sort of meaning and order to the ? of existence is what art does. It's what a great painting does. It's what a great book does. It's what a great film does. It's what a great song does.

Kimberly

I'm digesting that because I, that's just such a profound statement, Mary. And there are so many ways that we resist that end. There are so many ways that, and so in a way, art is kind of a way for us to enter that, the mortality of our existence with appreciation. We can see the beauty of it. Art allows us to see the beauty of impermanence.

Mary

Exactly. Beautifully said.

Kimberly

It took me a minute to get there. It finally, it finally got there. But I love that that rom-coms offered you glimpses of that with levity, with hope. Yeah, I mean, what a great it's-

Mary

Right. And I critique some of them while I'm writing, you know, in the memoir. I have criticisms of a number of them, you know. I take some of them to task. I still love them, but I take them a little bit to task.

Kimberly

If you had the number one rom-com if you, do you go back and watch them over and over again? Are you one of those people that if you have a favorite you watch it multiple times?

Mary

I do I watch them over and over again, but I buy them and I keep them in Apple TV. I buy them to save them if I love them. And I suppose, and I don't think that this is the best one ever, but the one that I watched the most is the second Thomas Crown Affair with Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo, which I absolutely love this film. I just love it. And there's a lot of discrepancies and things that don't make sense. You know, there's a way he folds the painting in the beginning of the movie and you know, How did he fold the painting and take it home? I don't know. This is impossible. You know, I see those things, but I still that's that's one of my favorites. And then there's, there's the high the higher end of the spectrum would be a wonderful book that's made into a movie Room with a View by E.M. Forster. You know, someone called it romantic comedy, but it's hardly that. It's so layered and so complex in the writing. And it's also, it's a beautiful book that Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who actually I think she won an Oscar for, she actually won an Oscar for her writing, but I think she also won an Oscar for the screenplay of this film, or maybe it was Passage to India, I'm not sure, but she did, for the Merchant Ivory team she did all of the writing. All of the dialogue in that film is straight out of the book. Absolutely straight out of the book. And nobody knows that unless they do a comparison. I've done the comparison.

Kimberly

Wow, this is, let me just ask you a quick question about your past. So in your, you have a PhD in, you have an MFA.

Mary

I don't have a PhD. I have a lot of education, but I have two master's degrees.

Kimberly

Right, okay, and one of those is an MFA and you've spent a lot of time teaching writing, and so when did this all turn into you writing? I mean that was, that took a while.

Mary

It came really late. It came really late. And I recommend to everybody else who's listening, don't wait. I also say, don't quit. And I also say, don't wait. Because I waited for complicated reasons. And also when I began writing, part of it was I needed to make a living and it's hard to make a living through one’s writing, you have to be super brave and I wasn't that brave to take all those chances and I had children and I had to support them. But the waiting also had to do with a kind of lack of self-belief. I knew I had this gift. I knew I had something.

And I just didn't know how to get it out there. In 1987, the first piece I ever wrote was published. And it was, it was, it was a miracle moment that gave me the sign. My youngest child was 13 years old when it happened. And I'm Jewish and I was invited to a, and I was working in corporate America. I had a long corporate, I had a teaching career and then I had a long corporate career in which I oddly kept getting promoted in ways that made absolutely no sense to me and made the job more and more difficult and a place that I really needed to get out of. And there's a story related to this which we probably don't have time for, but I could tell you that at some point. But in any case, when this happened, I was invited to talk about experiences on the High Holy Days. And my name ends with a T, so I was last and there were three other people and the rabbi was somebody who talked incessantly, okay, just incessantly. And I read this little piece and he was struck dumb, he couldn't speak. And then we go, he's like, I can't believe what I just heard. I mean, he actually said that. And then afterwards there's this little gathering on the Shabbat where people drink wine and they make a toast and they take the challah and whatever. And people said, So you're a writer! And I said, No, I'm not! But I sent it out. And I sent it out to the New York Jewish Week, which is maybe long gone, but it had 250,000 subscribers. And they took the piece, and they not only accepted it, but they put it on their editorial page, and they illustrated it. And I thought, OK, I think maybe I'm doing it. I think maybe I know what I'm doing. And it's not the greatest piece I ever wrote. And the acceptance, by the way, the acceptances run something like 33 rejections to one or more. Okay. So this was a sign that I, that I could do this, but I still had to wait.

So that was in ‘87, and it wasn't until 1996 that I quit my job and went off to write full-time. And I quit without knowing that I would get accepted anywhere. I had been taking some courses at George Washington University. I had walked into first Faye Moskowitz’s class, and then she just, she said, well, You can't stay, but you can stay for one session and she threw out some postcards. And she said, Just write something. And I wrote something. And she's reading the postcards. And as I'm leaving, she said, You can go pay for the course and come back. And then she told Maxine Claire, just take her. Just take her. And Maxine Claire said to me, after I took her class, these are two wonderful people in my life. And I'm at this big corporation in DC. And Maxine Claire said to me, I have nothing else to teach you, but I'm going to work with you for the next six months for free. And I'll meet with you once a month. And at the end of the six months, she said, you really need to go and get an MFA degree. I've got nothing else to teach you. There's no place else for you to go here in the university. You need to be doing this with your life. And I couldn't really get out of my job at that point because I still had so much I needed, you know, I had children to educate through college. So it took a while.

But I say don't follow my example. Don't wait. Don't wait.

Kimberly

But you knew, so you were waiting, but within that waiting there was a longing. Am I hearing that?

Mary

I've been writing since I was a child. But I didn't ever think that it was, I'm reading Henry James and I'm reading Edith Wharton and I'm reading Hemingway. I'm reading everybody I can get my hands on and I'm just thinking, well, I could never do that. But it turns out that maybe I can.

Kimberly

Boy, can you ever marry. And you have, your gift is unique. There are a lot of writers out there and I am in love with so many of them, but I, and I have a shelf over here of all of my favorites. Your style, your voice, I could pick you out of a hundred authors. It is so fresh and unique and fun. It's the way you're talking right now. In fact, it's actually even listening to you. I feel sort of this like bubbly joy, but it does not dismiss, I feel the joy, but I feel the vulnerability. I feel they both, they're married so beautifully together and you and your voice.

Mary

I guess you can make me blush, you know, you know I'm blushing.

Kimberly

I okay, so my last question here and this is, because you've been giving so much wonderful advice, but this is also a little advice for fellow writers. You have a statement about writing memoir and the risks and the challenges involved and speaking specifically to like when you're writing about your relationship, you don't want to crush the other person. So you say I don't mean the writer must crush another, I mean the writer must crush herself.

So any advice on how to crush ourselves or to get out of our own way?

Mary

Basically by not knowing, I'm going back to the not knowing and I do remember the third thing, I'm not gonna tell you it now, but maybe we'll add it later. But basically by not being sure that you have all the answers. TS Eliot, I think it's in the East Coker in the four quartets says that, “Do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly. Humility is endless.” And I think the key to writing a really good memoir is having that level of humility and lack of certainty. It's certainty, I think, that belongs in great op-eds. When we're certain that we—even great op-eds often are not certain, as we can read the newspaper today, pick up the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and the op-eds are not going to have clear certainty in them. But they're selling direct, which is not what the writing does. But for the memoirist, and I don't actually think of myself as a memoirist, I think of myself as a storyteller. It's just that the memoirs, the chapters were so short, it made it possible to post them on Substack and use that as an entree to Substack. But I think of myself as a storyteller. And all of this, the crushing of oneself, has to do with a kind of belief in discovery, not answers, which comes back to the not knowing.

Kimberly

And that's why, my gosh, I think, and I'm gonna say I really do, and I have to fact check this, but I really do think your memoir was the one that said, I did not know that love may speak in waves of silence. I think that was from your memoir, and I'm willing to be wrong here, but I think you said that because there was this long period of silence between you and Dee. And at least this is how I interpreted it. And that while there was not a knowing of what's going to happen and will we be back together and how's this going to work? The silence was speaking to you both about the love and which is also like you're saying you were willing to be crushed to just be in this great sea of the unknown together.

Mary

Well, perhaps that's what I meant, but I still declare that it's in Lifeboat.

Kimberly

I'm sure I'm wrong. I'm just overlaying things.

Mary

It is what I learned and maybe that's how it ends up in the Lifeboat essay. I mean, maybe that's how it ends up. I did learn that, that the waves of silence are informing and a gift. And we have to live in that quiet place to create.

Kimberly

So beautiful, Mary. Thank you for spending this time with me. Great, great wisdom you share with all of us. And in such a fun way, I feel like everything that you share is nurturing us with wisdom, but it's palatable to all. It's like, Okay, let's jump on this. I'll just keep gushing here if we don't turn this off, but I truly mean this. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Mary

You are a gift to the world, let alone to my life. I'm so glad to know you. Thank you so much. My heart to you.