So Now I Know.

Ever start something, knowing full well that it wasn't going to last forever (and that's okay) and thought to yourself, "Well I wonder how this is going to end."?

Nine years ago today, driving my little car behind a big old truck, both full of my shit (literally just as well as figuratively, I might add), coming across the state line into New Jersey, having made an incredibly spontaneous decision to move my small town cookies to the Big Apple, looking forward to an adventure and having absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into, I asked myself that very same question.

So now I Know.

In a few minutes I'm heading out to Newark Airport to pick up my dad, and tomorrow we'll rent another big old truck, load my shit back up (less literal this time -- not much closet space around here and I have a weird nomadic tendency to move every 16 days -- and a lot more figurative, since I'm older and wiser and therefore carrying around even more useless info than I was then), and reverse routes.

I will have seemingly endless time to ruminate on this, and I'm sure you'll have to hear all about it. The decision was incredibly complicated, overwhelmingly over-thought, and in the end quite simple. It's time to go home.

For a little while. (I still don't really have my commitment issues under control. I'm working on it. Not really.) The long and short of it: I've been away from my family for almost 15 years. I have learned exactly how hard I'm willing to fight to live in this place that is, truly, not for the feint of heart, and I've learned exactly how capable I am of fighting for what I want. Not always getting it, but knowing that I've given it my all.

I don't know how long I'll end up sticking around, where I'll end up next, or what I'll get out of my time there, but I'm really looking forward to it.

That being said... I. Will. Always. Love. You. New. York. God, I love this town. I love my friends here. Ferociously. I have loved acting, the thrill of a good audition, learning the craft from the most exceptional of teachers, challenging myself to be utterly and entirely vulnerable, and the feeling of being right where I'm supposed to be whenever I'm on set. I love the people. Seriously. They're brisk and efficient and colorful and have no patience for bullshit, until you really need them and then they are full of love and generosity and a kindness that I am proud to have been here to experience one horrible, horrible fall day. I love that you can't walk down a street here without hearing live music, ten different languages, and people who are simply in awe of the very place that you call home. I love Central Park and the tiny boutique where I shopped on 9th Avenue and walking the length of Bedford Street and Corner Bistro burgers and City Bistro brunches and the meshing of opulence and poverty at every intersection. I love Shake Shack and the view from Hoboken's pier and cutting through Union Square on my way to the bookstore. I love, truly madly deeply, love New York City.

There is hope here, and I love hopeful places.

On to the next. Stories to follow, my friends.

Year in (Book) Review: This Is Where I Leave You

Looooooved this one... probably not for everyone.
(Also, unrelatedly, I had grand plans to link all these book reviews together, and for the first few I remembered to include hyperlinks to past reviews. That didn't last. Does anyone miss it? If so I'll totally pick it up again; if not, screw it.)

Okay. Jonathan Tropper, This Is Where I Leave You. Young New York guy who's put out several novels, but this is the first of his that I've read. I've heard mixed things about his previous books, which makes me think he's a love-him-or-not-so-much kind of guy. And I love him. (Or, at least, I love this novel.) If I was a super-snide Jewish guy, I would want to have written this book. Actually, being a super-snide waspy white girl, I still wish I'd written this book.

TIWILY (that's cute, huh?) tells the story of an upstate New York 30-something who's having a tough go of it. His marriage is on the verge of crumbling for some horrible, humorous reasons, and the book opens with his sister calling to say that his father has finally succumbed to the cancer he's been fighting. Not being a particularly close family, or a particularly religious one, they begrudgingly join together for a week of sitting shiva, their father's suspect dying request. It pretty much goes downhill from there.

Again, this one's not going to be for everyone. It's a dark topic, with lots of dark offshoots, for starters. And he's a bit crass, by which I am politely saying that he's downright vulgar from time to time. So if that's not your thing, watch out. Me, I can't get enough. Somehow or another, Tropper manages to walk this really beautiful (totally not the right word, but I'm running with it) line between the comical melodrama of a book that was obviously written with screenplay dreams, and this exceptionally raw, true story of a guy dealing with a very beat up heart. And don't we all want to carefully straddle that line between being comically melodramatic and pretty damn real? He is laugh out loud funny in more than a few places. I mean, laugh out loud. He writes dialogue in a way that makes me sick with envy; it's straightforward, stripped down and flows exactly the way it should. A lot happens -- too much, honestly; at some point you have to be okay with not giving every. single. character (of which there are aplenty) some horrific blight -- but he balances it all and keeps it easy for his reader to manage. And it doesn't end completely depressingly, which would have been the obvious way to go. Kudos on that.

I really, really ate this one up (obviously, since I just finished Committed two days ago) and that'll probably tell you something about me. I have no idea what, though.

Year in (Book) Review: Committed

Hmmm. I've been worried about writing this one from the moment I started reading. A bit close to the bone, but we’ll figure it out, won’t we?

Our latest book review is Elizabeth Gilbert's -- she of Eat, Pray, Love fame -- newest. Committed was handed to me by the same friend who gave me Ms. Gilbert's first memoir, just a few years ago but before it had reached the masses and Julia Roberts.

A quick backstory: I sat down for lunch with one of my closest friends, Ariel, who happens to be an avid reader with impeccable taste in everything from art to friends to shoes to literature. I soak up every single thing she says and does. One key difference in the way she and I approach books and movies and the like is this: once the opening credits have rolled, or the first page has turned, I'm in. I can't stop reading or watching once it's started, which means I've wasted many an afternoon on a less-than-interesting or well-made creation. Ariel has no such patience. If it doesn't grab her, she's on to the next thing that might. So, when she began reading this little book that all sorts of women-type folk were reading and saying things like, "Oh, everyone will see themselves in this book" or "Oh, it's like she was talking just to me" or "Oh, It's as if she was writing about my life," Ariel looked at me and said, "I don't feel like she's writing about my life. I feel like she's writing about yours." So she stopped reading, handed it over, and I lost myself in a fantastic true story about a woman who loses herself a little in a marriage she's rethinking, then loses herself a lot as she turns away from it, and then somehow manages to find herself again. I relived some nights crying on the bathroom floor, spent some new nights crying on a different bathroom floor, and finally felt good to have gotten some stale tears out of my system. Nowadays it's garnered so much attention that it's probably hard at this point for Eat, Pray, Love to live up to the hype, but if you've not read it I really encourage you to give it a try. It's truly touching.

Which leads us to a similar lunch, just a few weeks ago, where Ariel handed me the next of Liz's books. Without giving much away from either story, Eat, Pray, Love ended somewhat happily with our author finding love again, with a man as equally determined never to remarry as she was. Ah, romance and skepticism, such strange and amicable bedfellows. Committed picks up shortly thereafter, when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security puts in their two cents and tells the lovebirds -- one of whom happens to not be an American citizen -- that they will, in fact, need to marry. At least if they ever want to spend time together in this great country of ours again, that is. So, Committed tells the tale of a couple "sentenced to marry" and how the author comes to terms with an institution that she feels has really, really let her down. Or perhaps... vice versa.

Ariel couldn't get into the book because it felt a bit "textbooky" to her, and she's absolutely right. Liz Gilbert is, in the case of these two particular books anyway, a journalist. She's telling a very true, factual story. And in this book, she is literally trying to research a good chunk of Western Civilization for its thoughts, ideas, and input on marriage, as she tries desperately to convince herself that the very thing that nearly destroyed her the first time won't, in fact, finish her off this go-round.

I know how she feels, in a way that Ariel and her close-to-perfect husband Lew (I can say that because he's not my husband) will (I sure hope) never know. When a marriage doesn't work, and when you man up and take a good share of ownership in that failure, it cuts you in places and ways that seem unhealable. To know that you've caused pain, pain like a death, to someone whom you love(d) above all others at one point... it takes out your soul for a little while. Melodramatic, I know, but not overstated. And being told over and over and over again that you're in good, epidemically wide-spread company is hardly comforting. People telling you, after the fact and ad nauseum, that the could have seen it coming because you two were too young, or his mother was too involved, or just that hardly anyone makes it in marriage so why did you really expect to, only makes you want to hit them. Even if it’s your own grandmother. Especially then. There is, I'm afraid, no solvent for those wounds. You just have to wait for the scar, and try not to pick the scab while you wait.

I have found myself, for most of the nine or so years I've been divorced (a shocking revelation to all you readers who estimated my age at approximately twenty, I'm sure) telling myself I'll never get married again. There's a lot of self-preservation there, and a lot of pride on the line, because honestly who wants to get their heart shattered twice, or fuck something up beyond all hope of repair twice? But that's for me and my shrink, should I ever have the money or the insurance to procure a shrink. This case, this book, is about the lovely Ms. Gilbert being told by her government that, no matter how adamantly she argues, she's got to either get married or kiss her honey goodbye. I don't think even a note from her shrink would've been able to help. So (and here's where the "textbooky" part comes in) she decides to take their imposed exile as a time to study up on why most marriages fail, how some marriages eek through, and how, every so often, we get stopped in our tracks by the romance of two old people who can't imagine a day without their soulmate.

She studies a great number of cultures, asks a lot of interesting questions, and between you and me still doesn't seem all that convinced at the end of the last chapter that this is for sure going to work. I'm glad no one told me a few years ago that I had to do it again. Yes, it's clinical, in that it's full of facts and history and study. But it's also really touching in that it's full of one woman's willingness to open her own life --fears, hesitancies, doubts and all -- up to the rest of us, and be vulnerable on our behalf. If you're married, I think this'll make you feel really good about it. If your not, I think this'll make you feel really good about it.

And my favorite part? She dedicates the book -- a book about marriage; about singular, exclusionary partnership to (in this case) one man -- to the twenty seven women in her life who have helped her define what being a woman means, above being a daughter, or a sister, or a friend, or a wife. And it seems that they must be a pretty smart group of women, because it seems that they've helped her do just that. Define herself. I know some women like that.

Year in (Book) Review: The Lost City of Z

A couple of debatably interesting things about me:

1. I think I can do pretty much anything.
2. I have rarely, if ever, actually done much of anything.

I'm speaking mostly on brave and adventurous type things, rather than general life accomplishments. I am that strange breed of person who sees anything, hears about anything, dreams up anything, and says, "Well shit. I could do that," with no real resume to back up said claim. I am, therefore and by definition, a blustery person. I have a tremendous wanderlust and an unused passport. (That’s not hyperbole, that’s true.)

The first time I questioned this -- myself, you might say -- was a few years ago, about three pages into Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air. (He is best known, I think, for his book Into the Wild, which became such a successful film. Jon is, by definition, not blustery. Read: he actually walks the walk, and then talks about it. I just keep talking.) I have no idea why these kinds of adventure books are so interesting to me, but I eat them up. Somewhere in what I'm pretty sure was still the introduction of Into Thin Air, an account of a tragic and dangerous 1996 summiting of Mt. Everest, Mr. Krakauer started describing the shit -- literally, I'm not just being a potty mouth -- that was running through the streets of the town on the way to base camp. Meaning, pretty much before anything approaching adventure, really still hundreds of miles away from adventure, there was poop on the ground. I read that far and said, "I'm out." Nothing he wrote in the following pages -- nothing in the retelling of frostbite, of freezing to death where you stood, of falling thousands of feet -- convinced me that a vigorous mountain climb was in my future. Some people are just braver than me. I'm not happy to admit that, but seeing as I've only skydived (skydove?) once and that was just to impress a boy, I don't land in any annuls on the bravest people ever. But they are inexplicably fascinating to me.

So, having exhausted all of Krakauer's adventure tales (I'm starting to suspect he's just a braggart.)(No, not really, I’m just jealous. Please read them, they’re excellent.), I picked up David Grann's The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Grann is a writer for The New Yorker and got himself so fascinated by the subject of this book, a 1920s explorer who went and got himself disappeared, that he trekked off to the Amazon himself in search of answers. And probably bones. That's cool.

I didn’t find myself as drawn in as I did with Krakauer’s books, but it’s still pretty damn exhilarating to think of some guy in 1925 climbing onto a boat in Hoboken (yay Hoboken!) and landing, over and over again, in Brazil, searching for the mythical (maybe) city of Z/El Dorado/heaven on Earth. It’s educational. It’s historical. It’s exceptionally well-researched. Telling the story from several different perspectives -- author Grann’s, subject Percy Fawcett’s, and a couple of other “Fawcett freaks” -- the book draws a very vivid picture of what this territory must’ve been like in the early part of the 20th century: completely daunting terrain, little to no method of communicating with the outside world, hostiles who are probably more confused than angry about why some really tall, really pale dude just showed up in their back yard. Fawcett is almost a caricature of an old-fashioned explorer, complete with safari hat and flouncy pants and a beard, except that he’s real. He’s probably the one who formed that “explorer” image into our heads, actually. Creating a wonderfully complete picture of his life, Grann introduces us to Fawcett’s marriage, his work relationships, his followers, his children, and his ancestors, all of whom have a unique take on the man. He seemed to me equal parts selfish, brave, foolish, driven, stubborn, and called to something higher. I kind of love a guy like that.

In other words, the kind of guy who hears about something and says, “Well, shit. I could do that.” And then actually does.