Dear Readers,
This is the long-awaited “Fall 2024” issue arriving in January 2025. Here is part of the reason why—in addition to the arbitrariness of print publishing deadlines in the current era, the second half of 2024 contained more panic, rupture, and change than any previous year of my life: a sudden divorce, urgent move, dropping off son at college, overseeing son’s leaving said college, spending half the week as writer-in-residence at Smith and the other half building new normal in new rental in New York City.
That I had been living with the form but not the content of an intact, loving family for the last fifteen years was initially hard to believe, but as I settled in to being a solo parent again and slowly noticed I didn’t miss my former life, I had to admit that perhaps I’d deceived myself. The breakup is too fresh for personal insights meant for public consumption, but reading Sarah Manguso’s newest novel, Liars, certainly came at the right time for me to begin to understand how I’d gotten myself into this wifely mess in the first place.
I reviewed Liars in this issue, but many books mystically centered me this past year. I’ll mention three others: First, Miranda July’s All Fours, which depicts a couple that bonded over the glorious project of their child but don’t have a real curiosity about each other anymore, and maybe never did. Or, at least, the narrator’s husband appears to have a squelching effect on her life force. Second, I finally read the brilliant critic Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson. These profound essays were published in 2006, but I was inspired to read them after seeing MJ on Broadway (amazing, by the way, with a book by Lynn Nottage) and remembering how massively Michael had imprinted on me as a kid. Great artists always tell us who they are over and over in their work, if we are willing to look. Third, The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz (I also loved her books The Plot and The Latecomer), narrated by Anna, a wife who quietly but decisively refuses to self-sacrifice. Anna is completely unneurotic about writing, beauty, success. Like Merle Hoffman (from the abortion roundtable in this issue), she does not suffer from impostor syndrome, and this is thrilling to witness.
I was also thrilled to witness my writing students at Smith. To a one, they were serious and creative, with open minds and real questions about how to live meaningful lives. Whenever the puffy Jacobins of the new Trump administration clogged my brain with testosterone replacement therapies and naked bids for the approval they never got from their fathers, I’d read Smith student work and feel quite a bit more hopeful. My familiar home and routine vanished from my life this year. The destruction left space for me to fill, and what I have added thus far, I quite like.
