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Lying is a delightful thing, for it leads to the truth. —Fyodor Dostoevsky
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The view was all trees and sky. I couldn’t help but wonder . . . Dream house? Or private prison? There were certainly plenty of secrets to keep locked inside.
“What kind of people are they?” Libby asked. If I hadn’t known her for fifteen years, that might have seemed a vague question. But I knew exactly what she was after. Are they fancy? Are they connected? Could it be useful to know them? This was LA, after all. And I was in the movie business.
I’m sorry for your loss? Why do people say that? The loss is the least of your problems. It’s the pain that follows we should be sorry for. A loss is an event, a moment in time. But grief is relentless—a simmering flame that can be stoked by a whisper. It burrows down in the deep recesses of your heart, then surges up like bile, filling your lungs until it hurts to breathe.
I probably needed therapy, but anyone who’s seen Good Will Hunting knows people who become therapists are the most fucked-up of all of us. Plus who the hell has the time?
The Eagles nailed it: Hollywood is the Hotel California. You can try to check out, but once the business gets its claws into you, it’s impossible to leave.
As I watched her tuck the last few items into her $2,000 tote, I wondered why rich people bothered doing Christmas at all. What’s the point when you can just buy whatever you want?
I remembered my Sunday school teacher talking about how so many things in life are both a blessing and a curse—how mountains do not rise without earthquakes, how the tragedy of the original sin gave us the blessing of free choice. Even the crucifixion of Christ himself was both—he was murdered! But his death allowed him to rise and live forever as our savior.
My personal blessing and curse pulled at each other like two pit bulls tearing at a bone. I had a sour feeling in my stomach that was growing more putrid every day. It was only a matter of time until those warring dogs pulled me to pieces. But in the meantime, I had Louis Vuitton.
If I believed in God, I might have said, God willing. Luckily, I don’t. Because if I did, I’d have to accept that we were probably both going to hell.
After a lifetime of long winters, I loved the idea of California. I told myself it would be temporary—a break from the cold, an adventure in La La Land. With my mother gone, and my brother wrapped up in his kids and his God, I was already adrift—why not float in an ocean of beautiful people under perpetually sunny skies?
When people die “suddenly,” it can mean any number of things: a heart attack, an aneurism, a plane crash, a car crash, a boating accident. He could have committed suicide (often the case) or been murdered (very rare). Or maybe he was just really old? Holly was good-looking enough to be a trophy wife. A million possibilities ran through my head, I just wanted to know.
I had a complicated relationship with my life. I loved California and this neighborhood, but to look like I belonged here took a massive amount of effort.
Never in my life had I met someone as rude and condescending as my new neighbor Holly Kendrick. What kind of person rejects an offer of friendship? A person who is hiding something, that’s who. And I was determined to find out what it was.
Guilty feelings can be boxed up, but life has a way of jostling them free. For some they leak out slowly, seeping into the deep crevices of your conscience, haunting your dreams until you die. For others, they build up like steam in a pressure cooker, threatening to blow you wide open. This was not going to go away. The only unknown was who was going to slow rot, and who was going to explode.
As I turned on the shower, I was smiling, because I thought that sushi was a sign that things were looking up. Thinking back, it’s kind of incredible how very wrong I was.
Everything about the evening confirmed what I already knew. I was a complete and total fraud. I didn’t belong in this house or this neighborhood. And I was not going to be friends with Libby. I was both an outsider and a prisoner in my own home. They could never know what I’d done, where I came from, who I really was. I could never be close to anyone. I could never again be myself. This was the life I’d chosen with my lies and my crimes. The only question that remained was if it was worth living.
We both knew she didn’t have to do this. She could have insisted we pack up and leave. But she didn’t. Because she was gloriously stubborn and fiercely loyal and the best wife a man could ever hope for.
Letting go of that diamond felt like someone had died. Not a human being with skin and bones and blood in her veins, but a complex persona that had been meticulously crafted and shaped for almost forty years.
It may not be very liberated of me, but I wanted to take care of Libby in every way—emotionally, physically, and financially. Part of what made me fall in love with her was that she “just knew” I was destined for greatness. She built me up. She made me feel invincible. Even when things started to go south, she never lost faith. She was like a champion athlete who assumes she can’t lose because she never has. Failure was never part of her lexicon, so it didn’t seem possible to her. And so it became impossible to me.
grief isn’t like sadness. Sadness is thick, like a heavy fog that clouds your vision so you can’t see any of the good things around you. But grief is something else. It’s not fog, it’s a storm. It rages inside you, tearing at your organs, pulling at your heart, lungs, skin, until they feel like they are going to rip wide open, exposing the most delicate parts of you, leaving them bloody and raw. Grief is savage, like love. I think maybe it’s the same thing as love? It’s love that is trapped inside you, a bird that can’t spread its wings so it flaps violently in protest until it’s exhausted and
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Discovering I wanted to live right when I was about to die, now there’s irony for you!
Why on earth would I want to die? I had a great life. Now all I had to do was figure out how to save it.
I didn’t know I was crying until a tear rolled onto my lip. It was in that moment that I realized, somehow, and completely unexpectedly, Holly had become my somebody to “only care” about. And I didn’t know what the hell I would do if I lost her.
The blank page is a wondrous thing. Many writers fear it. They hate starting a new project. They procrastinate for days, weeks, or even forever. But I love the blank page. I love being in a state of boundless possibility. I love the reminder that—even as a mere human—I have the ability to create whole worlds. Writing is a superpower. Writers conjure human emotions—horror, sadness, exhilaration, despair—simply by arranging words on a page. Churning up a person’s emotions is a great responsibility, and I have never taken it lightly.
She’d tried to sound hopeful that everything was going to be OK, which was supposed to make me feel better, but only made me feel worse. Because if everything truly is going to be OK, you don’t have to say it. And if she’d truly believed it, she wouldn’t have been crying so hard.
This isn’t real. Things like this don’t happen to people like me. Tragedies befall damaged people. I am healthy, hardworking, good. This can’t be happening. Not to me.
A man will go to extreme lengths to protect himself from pain. He will lie, cheat, steal, or even resort to violence in order to save himself. It’s how, as human beings, we are wired. It’s in our DNA. Until we have children. Then our focus shifts from protecting ourselves to protecting them. It makes perfect sense. We are today, but they are tomorrow. Our kids are our future, our legacy, a chronological extension of ourselves.
My mother had no shame about encouraging her daughters to marry for “lifestyle.” It’s not that she didn’t believe in love, she told us. It’s just “foolish” to fall in love with a man who can’t take care of you. Because, as she put it, If you don’t love your lifestyle, inevitably you will fall out of love with your man. She told us this because she genuinely believed it. And based on the choices they had made, it appeared my sisters believed it, too.
Everything that made this ghoulish white vessel my dad was gone—his opinions, his thoughts, his warmth. This body was just Dad’s temporary shelter, which he made his own through workouts and haircuts and silly smiles, but now had no purpose at all. So where is my dad? Where did he go? How could a lifetime of thoughts and wisdom vanish into nothingness?
I thought Romeo and Juliet was stupid when we read it in tenth grade, but now that I knew what it felt like to want to die for someone, I totally got it. That’s how I felt about Logan. And I was pretty sure that’s how he felt about me.
My dad always said love dies in dishonesty. If you can’t share your true self with someone, he once told me, you’re wasting your time.
Tragedy has a way of bringing people together, especially when it’s born from a treacherous secret.
I hate when people dismiss the loss of an object because “it’s just a thing.” Things are important. They give comfort, shelter, style, identity. The sum total of your things is a road map of your life. They show where you’ve been, what you accomplished, who you loved, who loved you back. They are an expression of who you are. You can learn a lot about a person by their things. Material things are not what’s most important in life, of course! There is nothing that makes me happier than my child’s laughter or her hand holding mine. But anyone who says they would not cry if they lost their
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A good actor is a master of deception. Sometimes we get lost in the role, and the line between what’s real and what’s imagined gets blurred. I’ve never fallen in love with a co-star, but I understand why it happens. If you’re really good at pretending to be in love with someone, sometimes you fool even yourself.
I knew now it was preposterous to think a princess would want to live in the castle without her prince, and that I was cruel to have suggested it.
