Sarah Hepola's Blog, page 5

Saturday in New York City

Last Saturday morning, I woke before dawn in the cozy loft bedroom of my friends’ Tribeca apartment. For mysterious reasons, I’ve been waking up early for the past two months, sometimes as early as 3:30am. I badly wish I could sleep longer, but I’ve also grown fond of these dim and hushed hours before the world stirs. I can be quite productive. I write, I respond to emails, I tap around the Internet. I drink one cup of coffee. Strong, with a splash of milk and the packet of Splenda that, despite my mother’s protestations, I have not stopped using.

But staying at someone else’s apartment made the coffee part tricky. The bedroom was tucked away in back and situated at the top of a narrow winding staircase that looked straight out of a children’s book. Every time I climbed those steps, I felt like I was entering Narnia.

The rest of the apartment, however, had a chic modern vibe. The design was an open plan, so the kitchen was within eye shot of the queen-sized bed, so if I were to use the Nespresso machine, with its insistent counterfeit grind, I would probably wake up the two people who had been generous enough to share their space with me. That was no good.

Shortly before 7am, I snuck out the front door and headed into the crisp morning of late fall. I reached into my purse for my wool cap, but I had misplaced it the previous day. The Uber? My editor’s office? Oh well. The sky was a soul-stirring blue. The garbage trucks inched along the curb, making their robot beeps. I walked over to a hotel called the Beekman, where I had eaten avocado toast the previous afternoon while seated underneath a large portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. The place was so blindingly lovely that I worried someone was going to kick me out, though the place was open to the public. I wasn’t some interloper, but it was hard to believe I could ever belong in any place so beautiful.  A vaulted ceiling stretched at least seven stories high, a long glass case was filled with ancient books, the velvet furniture was as handsome as it was comfortable.

“Do you have any coffee?” I asked a woman at the hostess stand in front of the restaurant, and she gestured like a game-show hostess to a silver carafe on the bar, alongside paper cups.

“Oh, I’m not a guest,” I said.

She shrugged. “Help yourself,” she said.

The place was empty except for two women wearing yoga pants and infinity scarves locked in an intense conversation in the far corner. I assembled my coffee, the splash of milk, the thwack-thwack of the Splenda against my fingers before I ripped the packet and poured the sweet white powder into my cup. I took a picture of the restaurant, with a rainbow cube-shaped backdrop of stained glass that was nothing short of breathtaking to me.

“I’m sorry to be that person,” I said to the hostess, feeling her eyes on me as I adjusted my phone to get a better angle. It still gave me a tweak of anxiety to take pictures when someone was watching. Everything, everything gave me performance anxiety.

“Do you want to sit there?” she asked, pointing to the table.

Oh. Yes I did. “But I’m not ordering anything,” I said. “I don’t want to be in your way.”

She looked around her and stretched her hands into the open space. “If we get a party of 50 people, I might have to ask you to move.”

I laughed. The woman had closely cropped ginger hair and fine bone structure and a smattering of freckles across her nose. She had cool glasses that I think had red frames.

I evaluated the spot with my eyes now, instead of my camera. “I mean, having my morning coffee there would be like the completion of a dream I didn’t even know I had.”

She smiled. “We’re bored,” she said in a quieter voice. “Let me do this for you.”

People often ask if I miss living in New York, assuming the answer will be yes, but it’s not. I don’t miss New York, with its exorbitant rent, and lurching subway cars, and miserable weather in both summer and winter, and streets crammed with strangers and all-too-human smells. But I miss the people of New York. My friends, of course, but also the people you meet when you are going from place to place. New Yorkers are often described as rude, but that doesn’t sound right to me. In my experience, New Yorkers are generous, open, street-smart, and exceedingly helpful. But they are also crunched for time, numbed by noise, and indifferent to the chaos unfolding around them. They’re doing their thing. But every once in a while, you find yourself in a small private corridor with a New Yorker you have never met, and will never meet again, and you notice — how easy it is to connect.

“Do you want me to take a picture of you in that booth?” the woman asked, as I unraveled my wool scarf and placed it on my puffy coat in the space beside me.

“Oh no no no,” I said, though if I were being honest, the answer would have been yes, because I had this fantasy it would make an amazing author’s photo — me in front of that eye-popping backdrop — but I had only just woken up, no makeup, hair untamed, and the woman’s kind offer put me too closely in touch with my own ego needs. “Just sitting here will be fine,” I said, and she gave me a curt nod and left me to my coffee and my laptop.

It was my second and final morning in New York City. I had arrived late Thursday afternoon, in the middle of the first snowstorm of the year, and the city had been thrown into turmoil. No taxis at LaGuardia. George Washington Bridge shut down. Tales of people sleeping in their offices, trudging home though the snow from Brooklyn to Queens. I grabbed my Uber at a hectic meeting spot in a cold garage outside the airport with one-percent battery left on my phone.

“You have no idea how happy I am to see you,” I told the driver, as he placed my suitcase in the trunk of his mid-size black SUV.

“It’s bad out there,” he told me, sliding in to the driver’s seat.

“Let’s get to know each other,” I said, and he gave a good-natured laugh, but we did not get to know each other at all. I stared at my phone for the next two hours, listening to a podcast about human evolution, and he turned up the radio, which seemed to only be playing songs by Rihanna, which might suggest I don’t actually know which songs are by Rihanna. I have a long, rich history of bonding with my taxi drivers, but this guy didn’t seem into it. Maybe Uber drivers are different, less practiced in the art of professional conversation, or maybe it was his personality, or the stress of the weather. The guy gave off a vibe like: Traffic is so bad, please leave me alone with it. He avoided the highways, winding along the clogged back streets of Brooklyn as snow pelted the windows, and he dropped me off at the apartment after 120 minutes together with a long sigh.

“Finally,” he said. And I said, in a louder voice, “Finally.”

That car ride cost me nearly as much as my plane ticket. So no, I do not miss living in New York. Life is much easier in other parts of the world. But I do love New York. And I do love visiting from time to time.

I was close to finished with my coffee when my host texted. “We’re up! Where are you?” I told him I’d return shortly, and I gathered up my things. I left a tip I hoped was generous. The friendly hostess was still at the stand, and I introduced myself formally, placing out my hand, and she introduced herself to me. I told her I loved this hotel so much that I was making up excuses to visit. She understood, she said, she loved this place, too. I pointed to the spot where I’d had lunch the previous day, and the couch where I’d sat drinking a cappuccino once. I told her I’d never heard of the hotel before a few years ago, and she said, well, it’s only two years old. I said, wow, I don’t know anything about this place: Who Mr. Beekman is, or who built it, or why.

She said, “Would you like a brochure on the history of the hotel?”

Yes, definitely. She opened up a low drawer, and there, sitting on a stack of manilla pamphlets was something I never expected to see again. A black wool knit cap with rainbow stripes.

“My hat!” I said, and placed it snugly on my head again.

The post Saturday in New York City appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

The age of fertility

I wrote a story for Harper’s Bazaar about the push to educate younger women about their fertility. If that sounds dull, it shouldn’t. Fertility is a thorny topic that touches on hot-button issues about women and their bodies. The push to make women more aware of their fertility is also tied up with a push toward egg freezing, IVF, and other assisted reproductive technologies that are alternately helping us extend childbearing years and deeply complicating them. I honestly don’t know what I think about all this, but it was fascinating to learn more, and try to locate the moral center of such a fast-moving target. Women’s relationship to their own bodies — specifically around the topics of motherhood and sexuality — is the subject of my next memoir, which I sold to The Dial Press/Random House in July. Exciting news, though I still have to write the thing, which won’t come out until spring 2020 at the earliest. This is the first piece in what I suspect will be many looking at the complexities of choice.

The post The age of fertility appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Max, who lived upstairs

In my last year of college, I lived on the lower level of a condo on a side street so quiet it was almost spooky. My two roommates and I spent a lot of our time on the front patio chain-smoking and drinking beer and wine at a bistro table placed there for that purpose. I suppose that’s how I started chatting with Max, who lived in the condo upstairs with two women, neither of whom he was dating, which happened to be the gender configuration of our downstairs apartment as well.

Max was not his name, but I like that name, so that’s what I’ll call him. The not-actually Max was exceedingly cute imho. He had sparkling dark eyes, brown hair he kept at a relatively short crop, and a medium build. He was not going to beat up anyone, but nor was he going to get pummeled. In the movie version of this blog post (which is definitely going to happen), he would be played by .

Max and I used to banter as he maneuvered his key into the deadbolt of his condo. We had screwball-comedy friction. He made an appearance at one of our many parties that fall, and he and I were loosened by booze to the point that our sizzling back-and-forth ventured into double-dare territory. We so clearly liked each other, I said. What was he going to do about that?

We went on a date. An actual date. One evening near the end of December, he showed up at my door in a crisp button-down and khakis and made a joke about being exhausted by the long drive. I was running late. I was still ironing the blouse I planned to wear. Crisp button-downs? Ironed blouses? Who are these drunk college kids? It seems unfathomable to me that I was ironing to go on a date, but I remember the detail clearly. How he walked around the long narrow apartment, inspecting posters on the wall with his hands in his pockets as I completed my oddly domestic task. He mentioned the artist Sandra Bernhard. Did I know her?

“Without her, I’m nothing,” I said. Actually, I only knew Sandra Bernhard because my best friend kept a DVD of her one-woman show on the shelf: Without You I’m Nothing. I’d never seen it, and in fact, I found Sandra Bernhard abrasive and kind of frightening in a way I could not articulate. But I wanted to prove to Max that I was down, and it worked.

He dropped to one knee and clasped his hands underneath his chin. “Will you marry me now?” he said. I laughed and adjusting my shirt over the silver tongue  of the ironing board. He continued, “I know most people do this after the date, but let’s just do it before.”

I was charmed. I was skeptical. Was he like this with other women, or was just with us? I liked the idea of Max being my next boyfriend. For more than a year, I’d been dragging around my sadness after the swaggering chef I’d been living with turned to me one night and said — and it really was this fast, this without warning — he didn’t love me anymore. That guy was like a threshing machine I kept placing my heart into. He would drop by, and I’d let him back in. He would call me late at night, and I’d pick up. He’d pop back into my life only to disappear again. Over and over, the same rejection, like Groundhog Day for the brokenhearted. I liked the twist that Max represented. All this time, I’d been searching far and wide for love. Reader, he lived upstairs.

Max and I went to an all-night diner and sat in a white booth beside a dark window. He ordered noodles, or soup, I can’t remember. I thought he ate them weird, though how you eat noodles or soup WEIRD I’m not sure. But I had this nagging thought: Is he always going to eat like this? Will I ever tell him it’s embarrassing? Is this my future — staring at a smart and adorable man who nonetheless eats his noodles the wrong way?

But I was having a good time. We were natural companions: We watched the same movies, read the same books, made the same pop-culture references (Quentin Tarantino, Monty Python, John Hughes). We headed to a dimly lit underground bar near the Capitol. I was getting pretty sauced, beer upgraded to martinis, the next cigarette lit on the cherry end of the previous one. We were singing to songs on the jukebox and slapping high fives. Afterward, we came back to my place and had sex. I don’t remember much about it. Mostly that it happened.

As we lay alongside each other on the double bed afterward, he told me he was headed out of town for a week, a work trip, but he wanted to take me out as soon as he got back. I liked this plan. I was feeling good about our prospects. But about three days later, I was placing something in the trash can behind our house when I caught him tip-toeing up the back staircase.

“I know this looks bad,” he said, holding his hands up as I stood there staring. “My trip got canceled, and I ended up being really busy, and I knew you thought I was out of town, so I … “

“… started sneaking in to your own house,” I said.

He scrunched his nose. “Can I see you next week?”

I think we screwed up — having sex that fast. Bodies weren’t meant to go from zero to ninety overnight. One minute, bantering on the porch, and the next minute, syncing the parts of our genitalia that make babies. I was twenty-one, the dawn of my casual sex phase, a period that lasted well into my 30s, and the notion that sex couldn’t or shouldn’t be fast would have confused me. What better way to have sex? I thought it was a sign of our passion and bravado. Look at how much he wants me. Look at our blistering connection. We couldn’t keep our hands off each other.

Our next date was in the daytime. Demure, reserved, sober. We sat on the futon of my condo, and I showed him an op-ed I had written for the daily paper, and he pointed out phrases he admired, and gently pushed back on ideas he wanted to question, which delighted me. I like being worshipped, but I preferred being challenged.

And then, we disappeared from each other’s lives. It couldn’t have been easy, because he literally lived on top of me, but anyone can ghost anyone else if they try hard enough. I suspect he started timing his entrances and exits, using those back stairs more often. My ex sauntered back to my doorstep again, and I placed my heart in the threshing machine, certain it would be different this time.

For years after college, I thought about Max. I was in quite a dry spell by then. The years of 22-26 were like one long Sahara Desert for me. I drank a lot. I gained a lot of weight. And neither of those got me out of the desert any faster; they probably extended my stay. Whenever I looked back on the men I had drunkenly collided with, Max was the one who had the most boyfriend potential. Did I mention he volunteered at a hospital? He used to come home wearing these blue scrubs, which gave him this adorable George-Clooney-on-ER vibe. Max had “good dad” written all over him. I imagined the two of us watching HBO shows and cracking jokes about minor characters that only the two of us got. On Sundays, I would fold laundry as he rolled the trash can out to the curb.

Where was he now? What was he doing? Try to remember the unknowable terrain of the pre-cell phone, pre-social media age. People just: Disappeared. Somewhere in our mid-20s, a friend ran into him at a bar. She said: Hey, didn’t you used to live above Sarah Hepola? He said: Oh my God, do you know her? How can I get in touch with her? I was not the only one, apparently, who considered our time together a little too short.

Max and I went on a third date. I was 27, and recently back from four months traveling around South America, which had given me a glow and a newfound confidence in my own body, and I was about to leave on a five-month road trip around the country by myself. Having spent so much of my life feeling stuck in one place, I was turning into something like the opposite. A woman who never stood still.

We went to a Tex-Mex restaurant and shoveled chips and salsa into our mouths. He looked just as I remembered him: Cute, slightly formal in his dress, eyes that gave me a zap. After dinner, we sat in the front seat of his car, and he slid a CD into the player with a slightly overlong and self-conscious explanation about how he had gotten into trance lately and that was probably uncool and I would probably hate this song, but OK, just listen.

Austin was a music snob’s town. You couldn’t like a band without someone telling you why it sucked, and I hated that. Everyone deserved to love whatever music stirred their soul, but let me tell you, I didn’t like that CD. It wasn’t terrible, just — not my jam. I sat there nodding slowly, but my mind started to wander: Is he always going to listen to trance? Will I ever tell him I don’t like it? Is this our future together — the two of us stuck in a car listening to DJ Tiesto?

We drank too much. Again. We had sex at his house. Again. Wouldn’t you think I might have learned my lesson? But I didn’t know there were lessons to learn. We bumble through the corridors of our own history. We do our best. The most vivid memory I have from that night is how I left near midnight, and drove back to the place I was staying, and I called to let him know I’d made it home safely, and we wound up on the phone with each other for another hour. We just couldn’t stop talking. I sat on the carpeted floor of the bedroom I was renting, the black telephone receiver cradled against my ear and mouth, his warm baritone swiftly entering my body. I find this memory so warm and sad at once. How close the two of us could be, but only at a distance.

And that’s the end of our story. That phone call was the last time we ever spoke to each other. I did hear about him from time time. After I returned from that long and luxurious road trip, I met a woman who had gone on a few dates with him. They’d met on an online dating site, which had only just become a thing. She described him as hard to pin down. I said that sounded right. It’s been fifteen years since I saw him, and I don’t remember his last name, so I’ve never been able to look him up, but I like to think he’s someone’s dad, someone’s husband. I like to imagine him rolling out the trash to the corner on Sunday night in one of those laundered button-downs.

For a long time after I stopped drinking, I blamed alcohol for these thwarted romances. Alcohol blasted me into bed with people, and then it blasted me right back out. If only I hadn’t been drinking! And it’s certainly true that booze rocketed us toward sex when we probably would have been better served by a gentle nudge. But the more sober I get, the more I can see that alcohol was only my cover story for the fears and ambivalences and furious switch-streams that underlie so many complicated human attachments. If I hadn’t been drinking so much — would we have ruined it another way? If I hadn’t been drinking so much — would I have known him at all?

I guess I could see this story as a tale about two people who should have played a larger role in each other’s lives. Then again, I could also see this story as a tale about two people who were meant to be together for exactly three dates — and nailed it.

The post Max, who lived upstairs appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Pictures of people with their eyes closed

I bought a framed portrait of a woman at a vintage store several years ago. I had been walking through an aisle crowded with peeling cabinets and rusty kitchen utensils when the portrait grabbed me. The woman’s eyes were closed, but she was smiling, and I wondered what the story was behind this disjunction, between the deliberate nature of the framed print, formal as a senior year photo, but the accident of her closed eyes. Why choose this picture to frame? Surely there were others.

A picture of a woman with her eyes closed is a glitch borne of the camera’s lickety-split shutter speed, the intrusive flash of the bulb, or the human need to blink 15 to 20 times a minute. It’s a mistake. And yet the portrait was weirdly compelling: The woman had these perfectly arced eyebrows, her brown hair piled on her head in an intricate bun, beehive-style, a debutante neckline that revealed her ivory shoulders. Everything about that photo was perfect — except for the part where she shut out the world the moment it captured her.

“Who is that woman?” a friend asked me, after I hung the portrait on the wall near my bed.

“I don’t know,” I said, staring up at the image. “But I like her.”

“I like her, too,” he said. He was more than a friend, if I’m being honest. “But I wanna find out who she is now. Don’t you wanna find out who she is?”

“Not really,” I said. I wondered if this was some fundamental difference between us. That he was seized by the urge to know her. And that I felt like I already did.

When I was 18, my drivers license picture was me with my eyes closed. Kind of a dick move on the part of the DMV, which has never been known for its acts of charity. You’d think someone behind the counter might have said: Hey, ma’am, let’s take another. But no. The plastic card showed up in the mail a few weeks later, and there I was: My face blasted out by the camera flash, my eyes closed in mid-smile. The picture was cropped so close that you could barely make out the dark blonde of my hair. It wasn’t a bad picture, exactly. But I felt foolish when it arrived, like the camera had caught me in the embarrassing act of being human.

Also, as far as IDs went, that photo was next to worthless. The eyes are so central to what make us uniquely ourselves, along with the hair — if you cut out both, well, that picture could have been anybody. I used to hand it to bouncers at the 18-and-up clubs, or clerks behind the counter at 7-11, and they would stare at the thing for a long time. Then I would close my eyes and tilt my head forward while smiling, and say, “See? Look. It’s me,” and they’d compare the drivers license image to the one I was replicating, and then hand it back and say, “Ahh, OK.”

I was dating this one guy — well, dating is not the word — and he saw the picture one day when I was pulling out the ID from my wallet, and he snatched it from my hands to get a closer look. “I love this picture of you,” he said. That guy had an artsy-oddball streak, like so many people I am drawn to, a way of seeing the world that was slightly off-kilter from the rest.

“That picture is the worst,” I said, snatching it back.

“No no,” he said, still looking at it in my hands. “Look at you, wow.”

I slipped the ID back in my wallet, but my perspective shifted a tad that day. I stopped being so embarrassed by the picture, and began feeling more intrigued. He was right. That photo wasn’t embarrassing. There was something about its unintentional nature, its failure of glamour, that made it all the more interesting and real.

I don’t have a picture of that drivers license anymore, sadly, but I stopped hiding and destroying pictures of me with my eyes closed after that. I came to like them. I often put this photo in my dating profile, because I think it looks joyful. The accident of my closed eyes in mid-laugh disrupts the sense of the picture being posed, which is one of the most uncomfortable aspects of amateur photography: The twisted arm of its happiness. Smile, goddammit, smile.

I stumbled across this photo of my father taken when he was about 19. It looks a lot like the one I took at the DMV, which makes me wonder if he and I share a propensity for blinking under a bright camera flash, as we share a propensity for sneezing fits early in the morning, and bouts of silent churning anxiety. People think I look like my mom, and I do, but my resemblance to my father is stronger. I have his facial structure, his smile, his eyes. My dad always says he looks foolish in photos, even the ones where his eyes are open, but I love this picture. He looks like the young man who would grow up to be my father. He looks happy to me.

I wonder if the reason I’m drawn to pictures of people with their eyes closed is that I can stare at those photos without feeling voyeuristic or seen in return. Isn’t that weird? That I am creating a social contract with a picture? Or maybe I like that the camera can freeze a moment the eye cannot, remind us we are always changing, blinking and un-blinking, a constant state of flux, and the real mistake is thinking we ever stay the same.

The post Pictures of people with their eyes closed appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Indelible in the hippocampus

I did not expect to write a story about the contentious nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.  Some of my best friends are lawyers (did that sound weird?), but this is not my territory, riveting as the drama may be. But on Thursday, I watched the hearing, sitting on my parents’ couch from 8:30am to 7pm, at which point I left not because I was tired of watching, but because I was hungry and wanted sushi. That evening, I told my friend (a lawyer) that I would probably write about the Kavanaugh case, but not today. Not now. Then I woke up at 3am the next morning, sat my laptop, and wrote this.

The post Indelible in the hippocampus appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

The gala, alone

I was trying to get a picture of the red neon pegasus outside the Omni Hotel. I was standing on the sidewalk, in my high heels and the dress I’d worn to the gala, angling my phone to capture the Reunion Tower in the background, whose lights were flickering in such a way that if I timed the shot right, it looked like a crescent moon.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” A man’s voice, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw him approach.

I’d come to the gala alone. There is something stomach-sinky about dressing so fancy only to arrive by yourself, standing in that long check-in line reading Apple News, informing the woman giving out the table assignments, “Nope, just me.” But the evening had been fine. Nice, actually. In between the rosemary chicken and the auctioning of spa treatments, I’d made friends with a woman at my table and her teenage daughter, who rested an elbow on her mother’s bare knee as the three of us spoke. I left shortly past 10pm, hips swaying in a slightly exaggerated manner as I clacked down the long corridors, tapping my iPhone against my palm and scanning the premises for a less ordinary picture.

The red pegasus caught my eye as I headed out the hotel entrance, past the shiny women in short skirts and the clusters of men in suit jackets but no ties. I made my way to a cement island, where I took a few shots and scrolled through what I’d captured.

“Ma’am?” the guy repeated, as I endeavored once more to get the framing right.

I thought he was about to hit on me. Embarrassing, but true. That old line cast into the water: Can I offer you a drink? Isn’t it a little  early to go home? I had a queasy relationship with that kind of attention, like it was wanted and unwanted at the same time. I was so thirsty to be noticed, so quick to take offense. I turned toward him with my best “thanks but no thanks” face only to discover he was wearing a uniform.

“I know you’re trying to take a picture,” he continued, “but a protest is headed this way, and if you don’t move, you might get stuck in the middle.”

“A protest?” I dumped my phone in my purse without closing the camera.

“Yes ma’am, they’re headed to WFAA.” He pointed to the TV news station, whose neon call letters I could see from where we stood. “They’re protesting the Botham Jean situation.”

The story had been everywhere that week. An off-duty police officer (young, white, female) shot and killed a resident of her building, Botham Jean (young, black, male), in his own apartment under mysterious circumstances. I’d read a story while I was standing in the gala check-in line. The headline said: Mother demands justice for son.

“They’re on their way now,” the man said, pointing toward two cop cars with swiveling lights as they pulled alongside the curb, and I felt torn between staying, and witnessing something, and leaving as soon as possible to avoid traffic. So much of the past few years had been navigating what felt like diametrically opposed worlds: all this superficial, navel-gazing, cupcake-eating, Netflix-streaming Internet-addled decadence — and really serious shit. I’d never had so many conversations about everything and nothing. The meaning of fascism. Failures of the criminal justice system. Kim Kardashian’s ass. The poop emoji.

I decided to leave. My feet pinched in the heels, which were gold-flecked and spiked. I headed briskly toward the meter where I’d parked my car, only to realize I was on the wrong street. Dammit. I was completely turned around. A helicopter battered the air overhead as my eyes swept the grounds: Crowds, entrance, valet. Where was my car again?

The Omni is a long thin rectangle of a building with Vegas-y neon stripes alongside the sides. It reminds me of Xanadu. I think it’s been in Dallas close to ten years now, but the place still seems new to me, a surprise on the skyline. I walked back in the direction I came from, pretty sure I was headed in the right direction, and my mind drifted back to the only time I’d been inside one of the hotel rooms, many years ago.

That was an interesting night. A friend was in town, someone whose work I admired, and the two of us had dinner and fell into a deep conversation, heavy with the complications of life. We didn’t want to stop talking, so we went back to his room on a high floor and sat barefoot and cross-legged on the king-size bed, lights dimmed to maintain our campfire vibe. It was not romantic, and yet it was terribly romantic. I remember walking to the window at one point, placing a palm against the cold pane and how mesmerizing the glow of the blue neon was up-close, like staring into the future, or the 80s version of what the future was supposed to look like. My friend walked up slowly behind me, and I felt his arms encircle my waist, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to shake off the terribly sad story he’d just told me, or if he was trying to nudge our evening in a new direction. My body flinched ever so slightly at his unfamiliar hands. I was in love with someone else, and for that matter, so was he, but this energy had grown between us, and I wondered for the slightest second if this was where our story would change — but no. It was only a moment, a slow rocking motion, the two of us looking out at the cement wonderland of Dallas before we slipped back to our ordinary lives. I still thought of that night from time to time — how unexpected the shape of intimacy can be.

I could see my car on the street now. I clicked past the valet and the people clustered at the entrance. “Nah, nah, they’re not violent,” a guy in a Polo shirt was explaining to a couple, who held hands and nodded. “They just want to be heard.”

The sky started to rain. It had been doing this for days. Short, silent bursts that were over in a few minutes, so that I’d walk out of the house and see the wet cement, my car covered in droplets, and think: When did that happen? A man in a yellow slicker that read POLICE DEPARTMENT stood on the curb, anticipating the action that had yet to arrive. He turned toward me as I approached.

“I’m going to my car,” I said.

“That one?” he asked. It was the only non-cop vehicle on the street now, and I nodded.

He halted the oncoming traffic with the confidence of a man carrying a firearm. The cars rolled to a stop as he shone a floodlight on them, and then he nodded for me to join him in crossing the two-lane asphalt. “Thanks so much,” I said as I neared the driver’s side door. “I didn’t expect an escort, I appreciate that,” and he disappeared again without saying a word.

I slipped in the front seat and pressed the engine button, and the stereo roared up with the ELO song I’d been listening to on repeat all day. A major key, followed by a minor key, followed by resolution: A narrative arc in three notes. I hit a button on the console screen, and the song jumped back to the beginning again. My windshield wipers squeaked out of time across the pane.

Back in my driveway, I slipped on the flip-flops I’d left in the floorboard of the driver’s seat, because walking on the gravel drive will wreck a pair of good heels. I dangled the pretty gold-flecked shoes from my crooked fingers as I unlocked the door to the carriage house where I have made the last seven years of my life.

“Hello baby,” I said, dead-bolting the door behind me and taking a seat on the stairs beside the cat who had come to greet me. She turned in a circle against my leg, though I never understood why, like maybe she wanted to touch all the parts of her against me at once.

“Hello baby,” I said again, scratching the spots behind her ear where she couldn’t reach. “I’m home.”

The post The gala, alone appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Palm readings, past present and future

I was walking down West 15th in Manhattan when I saw the street fair, and a sign caught my eye: Psychic Readings, $5. The sign was old and maroon and marked by excessive cursive, like a laminated menu that hasn’t been updated since the 80s. The woman in the fold-out chair waved me toward her. She was in her late 40s perhaps, thin and tan with long black hair and piercing blue eyes. She hled a cigarette between two fingers.

“Do you take credit cards?” I asked.

She stubbed out the cigarette, like she was already prepping. “Cash only.”

I was in New York for work. The night before, I’d gone out with a friend who promised we’d get our Tarot cards read, but we never did. Astrology had become fashionable among my friends, even the intellectual ones: Star charts, palm readings, energy healers. (Story for another time: How many women call themselves atheists, but believe in astrology. What’s going on there?) At parties, we gathered around the cards like teenagers at sleepovers. It was part entertainment, part nostalgia, part return of possibility — change was coming, like a celebrity headed to town — and maybe every once in a while, you learned something about yourself. But last night, my friend and I hadn’t gotten Tarot readings after all. We had dinner and walked to the High Line and talked about marriage and feminism and political systems, a fascinating conversation that had nonetheless left me with a hankering for the frivolous and the supernatural, like when someone announces you’re getting ice cream, but the ice cream never comes.

I took a seat, and the woman immediately pulled out a white placard with three price points. The cheapest one said, “Palm readings, past present and future, $45.” This was a considerable up-sell from the sign’s bargain-basement promise of “psychic readings, $5,” but now I was here, and I didn’t feel like arguing, a bit of human civility she must have seen coming. Psychic, indeed.

“I don’t have that much cash,” I said, standing up again. “Let me get it and come back.” The walk to the ATM would give me time to reflect on whether I really wanted to drop $45 on a palm reading. It was my birthday, and I didn’t mind a splurge, but forty-five bucks? [whistle sound]

“You can get it afterward,” she said, waving her long thin hand, and I found myself unable to argue with her logic, the extension of consumer trust. Why not? I thought. What was the harm? I dumped my purse down on a nearby chair and overturned both of my palms. My hands were small and pinkish and the lines across them suddenly seemed deep and dramatic, a series of plot twists.

“Tell me your name, and your birthday,” she said.

I told her my first name, and I listed a date which happened to be the exact calendar date.

“Happy birthday,” she said, smiling, and I noticed her overbite. “So do you want to hear everything? Even when it’s bad?”

I thought about how the palm contains the life line, how it always creeped me out that the length of your life might be foretold in the folds of your flesh, like the last line of a book you were carrying all along.

“I do,” I said. I am like this: Give it to me straight.

She began speaking quickly. It’s hard for me to remember now all the things she said: I was a compassionate person (true), I was having trouble sleeping (true), I was successful (thanks), I had been contemplating a big move but the move would only rearrange the furniture, it would not alleviate any real problems. I nodded as she spoke.

“What’s the big move?” she asked.

I stared down a side street that stretched toward the Hudson River. “I think about moving to another city,” I said. “I think about other things.” I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to divulge. Some psychics have a soft touch, like a massage therapist or a talk therapist, but this woman had an abrupt efficiency. I never felt any intimacy with her, even as she held my hands in hers, maybe the closest I would get to a human being all day.

Her phone started buzzing, and she pulled out an ear piece from the top of her bra and cradled it in her left ear. “Sorry, I have to get this,” she said, and walked to the far corner of the tent. The conversation sounded tense. “You were out of contact for four hours,” she said. My eyes wandered to the other psychic, a blonde in her late 20s, speaking to women as they passed. Women, always women. I thought about how, a couple days ago, a male friend asked why so many women he knew were obsessed with true-crime podcasts and reality shows about serial killers, sexual violence, the gruesome ways a person could die. I told him I thought rom-coms and true-crime were like two sides of the same coin. It was so easy to get sucked in by the fantasy: What might happen to you.

The psychic sat down again, stuffing the ear piece back in to the top of her bra, and she said, “I’m sorry, that was my kid,” and I told her it was fine, even though it had made me uncomfortable.

She looped her manicured fingers around my wrists again and pulled them closer to her eyes. The afternoon had become blustery, and wind blew her black hair across her face so that she had to keep breaking one hand away to tuck the hair behind her ear.

She continued reading my past present and future: I once had a soul mate, but he was gone now (damn). I had a partner out there whom I had passed by twice and he was not coming back again (double damn). There were two people blocking my path to happiness — one male, one female. Who were these people, she wondered?

I said I didn’t know. I honestly had no idea.

“Who’s _________?” she said, offering a common male name, and I laughed, because just a few days ago, I had been writing a story about a kid in a day care where I once worked named __________, a little boy I was completely besotted with and whom I often thought about over the years. The mention of the name startled me, but I figured you could play a game of name-darts with any middle-aged American woman. Who’s Dan? Who’s David? Who’s John?

“He’s a little boy I knew once,” I said, and she let it drop there.

She told me I was spiritually blocked. Badly, badly spiritually blocked. She told me I put on a face for the outside world, but inside, I had pain I wasn’t showing to anyone. She said I was suffering, and I was surprised to find myself nodding along, agreeing with her assessments: Yes, suffering, yes, pain, yes, blocked, so blocked. She asked if I’d ever gotten a psychic reading before. I told her I had, about two years ago. She asked why I hadn’t let this person help me, and I was a bit lost for words: Umm, because that person was a psychic? 

“I don’t know,” I said, staring at an empty table in the corner of the tent.

“This person wanted to help you, and you denied their help. Why would you do that?”

It was a strange position, to find myself defending an infraction I didn’t really accept I had committed. “I guess maybe I was busy,” I said. It’s a human reflex to answer a question, even a ridiculous one. Something you learn when you become a journalist. People detest awkward silence.

She reminded me of the two people blocking my path to happiness. She told me she could find the names of these people by 9am tomorrow morning, but I would need to buy seven crystals and meditate on them tonight. Seven crystals! She was so bold, so fearless in her fleecing. I could never do this job. I would be cringing the entire time. Well, maybe, if you don’t mind buying the crystals. Meanwhile, she was insistent: You MUST buy these crystals. She locked eyes with me and did not flinch.

“I think I’m going to pass,” I said. She still had her fingers looped around my wrists, which made me feel like someone had lasso’d me into position.

“But why?” she asked, sounding a bit hurt.

I looked up at her again. We were so close we could have kissed. “I think $45 is as much as I want to spend today,” I said. Ugh, this had gotten tense.

“Why do you worry about money, when money has never been a problem for you?” she asked.

Ha. Now I knew she was a fraud. Money had long been a problem for me, and always would be — in no small part, because I did things like drop $45 on a street-fair palm reading. I started a few sentences I didn’t know how to end. I just think …  Maybe it’s that … Finally I said, “I’m going to pass on the crystals, but thank you.”

Women want to be nice. We are socially conditioned to be nice, and life brings us face to face with an endless parade of people who will take advantage of this inability to say no. It’s a subtle coercion, a low-level predation: The cosmetic industry, the diet industry, the medical industry, lusty men in low-lit rooms. I know what you need. I can give you what you want. It has taken me a long time to get the hang of the word — small and potent, stark and beautiful. Just two letters: No.

I know there’s a time in my life when I would have bought the crystals, just to avoid the discomfort of having to say no to a woman I would never see again, just on the off-chance there was something to this woo-woo business, an insurance against unknowable fate and unpleasant interactions. I was glad to discover that, at 44, I was not that person any more. I thanked her, got her money at the ATM, and placed the folded bills in her palm.

I walked away empty-handed, a birthday present to myself.

The post Palm readings, past present and future appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Gus the dog.

My brother’s friend spotted the dog in the park. Shivering, starving, skin pocked with flea bites.

“Someone needs to take this dog home,” the guy said, and my brother — perhaps even surprising himself — got an idea.

My brother and I never had a dog growing up. Our family rented a modest home, and the previous tenants had a labrador that clawed up the hard woods, so the landlord was kind but firm on this point: No dogs. My mom even called one night, using her nicest voice because, you see, her kids were begging for a dog, maybe please this one time. No dogs.

Josh and I got a cat, an aloof creature who spent most of her time outside. We got a hamster, and when that hamster died, we got two more hamsters. But we never had a dog. Because of that, I’ve always been a tad awkward with dogs, the way I imagine college students might be around babies. They’re cute, and I know everyone likes them, but what exactly do I DO with them?

Back in the park, Josh scooped up the scrawny little guy in a cardboard box. This is the part where Josh is supposed to play hero by taking the dog back to his own house, except that isn’t what happened. Josh had only recently moved back to Dallas from London, and at thirty years old, he wasn’t sure how long he’d stay, or what job he’d be doing next month, so he took the creature to the two people whose stability he trusted far more: My parents.

My parents had moved from that old rental house shortly after I graduated high school, and now resided in a lovely orange-brick house across town that belonged only to them. They were out that afternoon, but Josh placed the dog in the back yard, and left a note taped to the door. “Careful — guest outside.” Beside those words, he drew a dog.

Pretty much any etiquette book ever written will tell you that you should not give someone else a pet. Never, ever give a pet. So it was technically a huge mistake that Josh gave my parents that dog, and yet, like a lot of things in life, the story took on a glint of divine justice. Because for the next sixteen years, my parents cared for that dog in a way few people could have managed. He was a badly damaged dog, after all, who would never outrun the shadow of whatever violence he’d experienced before my brother found him. He behaved as badly traumatized dogs do: He barked, he bit, he whimpered. Even a vet, who had seen no small share of challenging dogs, once said to me, “I don’t know how your parents do it,” but they did it, because they’re those kinds of people. And also, because they were an old couple inching toward retirement without any grandchildren, not even a whisper, not even a hint. There was a big empty spot where the next generation should be, and the dog curled up and took a nap in it.

They named him Gus. My mother had been reading a book on Sweden, and so they actually named him Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, but we called him Gus. I was living out of the country when Gus arrived at the house, a fluke of timing that would shape our relationship, because he always treated me as an interloper. He growled when I came to the door. He snapped at me a few times when I tried to pet him. Meanwhile, he loved my brother beyond beyond. He twirled in circles when Josh arrived, stood on his paws and danced. It activated all my sibling rivalry: Josh, always Josh. My parents did not really love my brother more, of course. But Gus did.

“He’s a good dog,” Josh would say, stroking his silky blond hair.

“For you,” I would say. It was my childhood all over again. Playing military games is fun … for you. Taking standardized tests is easy … for you. Stuffing me in a closet is hilarious … for you.

But having a highly sensitive dog in that house changed my interaction with the place. For years I’d been accustomed to coming and going whenever and however I pleased, but now, I stood at the front door as I heard my parents scurrying around inside so they could yoke the dog before I entered: “Do you have Gus? Where’s Gus?” Once, I was peckish in the middle of the afternoon, and I pulled out a hunk of brie from the refrigerator when my mother took it from my hands. “That’s Gus’ brie!” she cried.

The phrase — “That’s Gus’ brie” — became a joke between my mom and me. I was tickled by the 21st century lavishness, the high yuppie camp of it. The dog had his own BRIE. What my mother actually meant was: That’s old and crusty brie I use to hide the dog’s pills inside, but I preferred thinking of it as the moment a perfectly good Camembert was knocked out of my hands and given to the canine King of Sweden

The dog was handsome, I will give him that. Golden hair, big brown eyes, and an enormous swishing tail that looked like pampas grass. “Oh you’re dog is so cute,” people would say, and my parents would swiftly have to intervene before anyone tried to pet him. My parents tried their best. He wore a muzzle for a while. He went to obedience school, and I’m pretty sure he failed. But nothing they could do could change his fundamental mistrust of strangers. He was loving to my parents, over the moon about my brother. It was just dumb luck that he saw me as I often saw myself. As an outsider.

I bribed him with bacon. I fed him cheddar. Like any dog, his principles only took him so far. Peanut butter, pork fat, chicken grease: He would be putty in your hands. After a few years, he had learned to tolerate me, and by ten or twelve years, he was something close to happy upon my approach. I never felt closer to him than in the last three years of his life, when the fear and hyper-vigilance was replaced a contented lack of awareness, maybe a touch of dementia. He was sweet then, and I would sit on the hardwood floor with him, stroking his velvety golden fur.

“You’re a good dog,” I told him, and kissed his nose.

My parents were out of the town when the dog bottomed out. The vet clinic that was boarding him called Josh and me, and we drove up to find him: Barely breathing, eyes blank, luxurious golden fur shaved and skin scarred up with bed sores. Josh carried him on a pillow and put him in the passenger seat of his truck, and they drove to the park where he had once found him, all those years ago. Josh bought Jack in the Box, a final meal, and they sat on a picnic blanket, and Josh ate some fries while Gus mostly lapped at his water. Even fast food wasn’t fun anymore. He was ready to go.

I joined them afterward at the clinic, and we sat on the cold tile floor on either side of him, saying our goodbyes. He was so tiny now. He must have looked a lot like he did when Josh found him, and yet a decade and a half had passed. I had moved away and come back. Josh had stayed, and built a whole career for himself here. There had been romances and meltdowns and career highs and professional crises, and the dog — to my own surprise — became a part of the family. It was tough to let him go.

“He’s a good dog,” Josh said, stroking his fur.

“He is,” I said.

The post Gus the dog. appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Pictures of roads you haven’t been on yet

A couple years ago I started taking pictures while I was driving. This is a terrible habit, one I would never endorse, and completely borne of the social media age, with its tug toward performing rather than experiencing your life, trying to pin down exhilaration for later consumption as opposed to enjoying it in the moment, but also: I thought the pictures looked cool.

I was doing this on road trips, when I was by myself, and the roads were so empty that even if I lost control of the wheel (which I never did), I would have only spun out and into myself, a one-car pile-up. I texted the pictures to friends, which made me feel less alone, like my view was shared, although the lens had a way of flattening the landscape, rubbing out the magic by at least a third, like one of those blurry dots on a black canvas when you were trying to photograph the full moon.

But I found something so satisfying about the clean lines and hypnotic geometry: A road you have not been on yet. A story still untold. There is a visual in the 2012 movie version of On the Road that makes this point exactly. The character of Jack Kerouac is staring down the unfurling highway in his 1949 Hudson Commodore, and the image fades — so perfect it’s almost eerie — into the close-up on a typewriter ribbon poised over a blank piece of paper. We watch as the key hurtles upward and thwacks onto the page. One more journey.

This is not the actual picture, but it looked something like this:

The movie made little impression on me, but that image sure did, and I often think of it when I’m driving long stretches of asphalt. It’s particularly fitting for a writer so eager not to break the electric current of his creative process that he clickety-clacked his tale onto twelve-foot long scrolls, so that his novel unspooled like the American highway itself. “I felt like an arrow that could shoot all the way.”

A few years ago, I read one of those buzzy pieces where writers share the most embarrassing books they once loved, and no fewer than five guys chose On the Road. Only Ayn Rand received as many votes. I suppose it’s inevitable that a book wildly overpraised by one generation would become a book wildly reviled by another, but the list made me sad. On the Road has problems, for sure, but seeing Kerouac chucked into the scrap heap over and over was like watching a kid throw an old beloved teddy bear in the Dumpster because it’s missing an eye now.

John Jeremiah Sullivan basically makes this same point when he chooses On the Road: “Some books were written especially for young, pretentious people — Look Homeward, Angel is another — and they have their own strange greatness, one that in order to live requires you leave it behind. What they show us about the evolution of personal taste counsels greater skepticism toward future judgments.”

We change. Our loves change. Our lives change. But there’s nothing embarrassing about that.

I didn’t mean to write a blog post about Kerouac, but I guess that’s what happens when you sit down in front of an empty screen with little idea of where you’re headed. That is the exhilaration, the maddening improvisation, the magic trick of the written word: You start typing, and sooner or later, a story comes out.

The post Pictures of roads you haven’t been on yet appeared first on Sarah Hepola.

Status

I wish I could remember how she came to me, what detail opened the door that I would walk through to meet her. Did we have a friend in common? Did she name-drop some magazine? This would have been 2011, or thereabouts, and my inbox was a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles were always winning. And yet, I wrote her back:

Hi Anna. Nice to meet you. I’d love to have you write for Salon sometime. 

I don’t have the emails anymore, so everything I recount here is from memory, and the memories are not particularly sharp, because why would they need to be? She was just a freelancer. But a few details stand out. The email, for instance, where she told me she had a two-book deal. I was trying to sell my own book at the time, and I noticed anyone who’d beaten me to the punch. The writing world is such a polite bloodsport, all of us toasting each other on Facebook and at cocktail parties, but I kept a private grudge list: Who had been published, and where, and how. My brain was an up-to-the-minute ticker tape of everyone’s literary status, but hers came as a surprise. Who knew? Anna March, some random freelancer, had a two-book deal.

I have this other memory. A conversation with a friend who’d worked with her before, and I asked about Anna. “She’s a bit of an edit,” my friend said, “but she has provocative ideas.”

A bit of an edit. Every magazine has writers like this. One of the many revelations of being an editor is how SLOPPY some of my fellow scribes could be. At Salon, our staff writers were impeccable, intimidating in their polish, but the freelancers could be a heavy lift. Even contributors with serious name recognition could turn in drafts laden with typos and half-baked ideas. Did they not care? Did they just assume someone else would clean up their messes? At first, stuff like this sent me into a panic — what to do? it’s a disaster! — but after a few years, I secretly came to enjoy it.

Call me a masochist, but look: You work with a writer who never has a comma out of place, and you are basically the person who copies and pastes. You work with someone like Anna, who has promise but needs assistance, and you feel: Necessary. Maybe even important. Anna was lavish in her gratitude: Thank you, you’re amazing, couldn’t have done this without you. I was working behind the scenes much of the time, only pushing out a couple essays a year, and the stories I edited became a kind of salve for my ego. “I loved that piece,” a colleague would say, and I felt a bolt of satisfaction, like the compliment really belonged to me.

The first hint I got that something might be off with Anna happened right after my own book deal. I finally did it: Sold my memoir to a real-live publisher in July 2013, and I arrived home one day to find an enormous arrangement of orchids on my front porch.

“Holy shit, X sent me flowers!” I thought, because inside my foolish heart, there is always some X, and the fragile, girlish hope he might romance me in this way, but no. I opened the card. It was signed Anna March.

Anna March? The freelancer? But I barely knew her. I waited a day before writing a warm but measured thank you, and she emailed back quickly that if I ever needed a place to write, I was welcome to stay at her beach house.  Another thing you come across in the writing world: People with secret money. Family money, trust-fund money, who-knows money. Most writers can’t pay the rent on their work alone, but they have these fancy lake houses, two-story lofts in the city, summer homes whose mortgages are definitely not being covered by those $150/piece Internet fees. It was good, I thought to myself, to have a rich friend with a surf-side getaway. I kept her invitation on the back burner, a break-in-case-of-emergency retreat.

That Christmas, I received a mysterious plywood box in the mail. It was about the size of a small sled, and quite heavy. I can’t imagine how much it cost to ship. Inside was easily a hundred dollars of expensive chocolates. Chocolate-dipped pretzels and chocolate-dipped toffee and I seem to remember some high-end cocoa, all of it wrapped in that elegant way of needless silk ribbons and a zillion pieces of tiny accordion paper that whispered of money. I did not think this package had come from X, and as I unloaded the bounty on my kitchen counter, I knew exactly who sent it. So weird. Why me? Anna March.

My Anna March story is different from other people’s Anna March story. Theirs are more enraging: Money promised and not delivered, writing workshops canceled at the last minute. Hopes dashed, futures compromised, trust broken. The LA Times story that ran Thursday, reported by Melissa Chadburn and Carolyn Kellogg, exploded in my social feeds, and suddenly it seemed like everyone had an Anna March story. A long trail of petty deceptions and low-level grifting: She never did have that two-book deal, she was badly in debt, and changed her name at least three times. So my Anna March story isn’t much of a story at all. I have no beef with the woman. In fact, she was generous to me. In searching my Gmail for any recent correspondence, I came across her offer to throw me a cocktail party in LA the next time I visited, though she later rescinded it, saying her life was a bit of a mess. Apparently quite the understatement.

I feel sad for Anna. I feel worse for the people she’s conned, of course, and I wish to God she’d taken all the money she blew on top-tier chocolates and USPS shipping costs and paid a few people what she owed them, but I feel sad for Anna, too. Or Nancy. Or Delaney. Or whatever her name is now. I was a liar once. When I was a little girl, I lied about tiny things, but also big ones. I told a friend that the teen actor River Phoenix had called me, much like Anna once told her friend that Bob Dylan had called her, and OK, I was 13 and Anna was a grown woman, but the lie came from the same withered place of wish and diminished self. The idea was that if this were true, I would have value. The idea that if this were true, I would be special.

The last time I saw Anna March — the only time I saw her in person, actually — was a book event I did in Portland in April 2016. Anna had organized the event, which required me flying myself across the country, putting myself up in a hotel, none of which was paid for by her, but I agreed to it because the event sounded interesting, and because one of the panelists was Cheryl Strayed, a writer I greatly admired, and I liked the idea of being on a panel with her, seeing my name on a poster that had her name as well. (I would be special.) Anna may have bungled many events over the years, but this one went swimmingly. Powell’s was packed that night.

Anna and I were chit-chatting before things got started, and she said, “I wonder how many dick pics I’m going to get after this is over,” which I found to be a very odd comment. I was personally anticipating zero dick pics, which has long been my average. Anna is in her 50s. She reminds me a bit of Roseanne Barr.

“Wait, why do guys send you dick pics?” I asked, and she made a face of exaggerated annoyance, like: Why do guys do anything?

I turned to the writer beside me. “Do you get dick pics after book events?”

Her eyes went wide. “No! Why, do you?”

I’ve been reading a lot of Tom Wolfe lately. His death earlier this summer brought on a bout of nostalgia. And Tom Wolfe’s animating theory, inspired by the work of Max Weber, was that human behavior can be explained as a competition for status. Such a competition is intense in the writing community, in part because status is so hard to come by. And so the literary world becomes studded with people like Anna, who exaggerate their importance, boost their credentials, flaunt their generosity as a bait and switch for their need. They tell you they’re friends with Malcolm Gladwell, because someone must be. They tell you they went to the National Book Awards, because who could say they didn’t?

Con man is short for confidence man because that’s the feeling they inspire, and confidence is what most of us writers desperately want — staring at our stubborn manuscript in basements and offices and darkened bedrooms across the land, wondering: Is this any good? Will anyone care? Should I just stop now? Someone who will reach out in the darkness and say: You can make it, and I will help you.

I don’t know where Anna March is now. I don’t know who she is now. But I hope she makes amends for what she’s done, I hope she finds some peace, and I hope she’s taking notes. Because if she could ever drop the act and get real about who she is and what she’s done?

She’d have one hell of a story.

The post Status appeared first on Sarah Hepola.