Chipping Away at Life Goals, One Piece at a Time

​Nine years ago, when I began writing a personal blog, I could not have imagined that it would lead to dinner with Augusten Burroughs and his husband, Christopher Schelling, at their haunted house in Connecticut, but here we are. Wearing surgical gloves, Augusten places a plate of vegan burritos in front of me and my husband Paul and says, “Connecticut's first murder conviction without a body took place ten miles from here," which strikes me as odd. How can there be a murder without a body?

As if reading my thoughts, Augusten says, “Wood chipper. The pieces found in the river implied that the victim could not have survived."

He sits down at the head of the table, smiles, and says, “Bon appétit!"

My blog was more of an online diary and a poorly written one at that. So I read works by my favorite authors, attempting to learn the magic by studying the construction of each sentence, paragraph, and page. I read Augusten's best-selling memoir, Running With Scissors​ multiple times, and then consumed Dry, Magical Thinking, and Possible Side Effects.

The meatless burrito is one of the best things I have ever tasted.

“Isn't it wonderful?" Augusten asks.

I am seriously beginning to believe that in addition to being a witch, as he describes in Toil & Trouble,​ that Augusten is also a mind reader until he says, “I mean the murder. Isn't that wonderful?"

It is wonderful in the sense that I am delighted to discover that this is precisely how I expected one of my literary idols to behave. It all began with a hope to publish something other than what I forced my immediate family to read. When The Huffington Post​ picked up one of my essays, I thought I had reached the pinnacle of my publishing career.

“A significant percentage of me is Neanderthal," Augusten says, “according to a DNA test."

But here is the thing about dreams, they evolve. After I published the piece, and many others in The Huffington Post​, I set my goal on seeing my words in print and published an essay in The Boston Globe. After that, it grew into a desire to publish a piece in a literary magazine and then finally to write a book.

“A friend of mine, who never reads, told me I should read this book called The LIE," Augusten says.

After I finished writing my memoir, I sent a chapter to Dan Jones, who is the editor of Modern Love at The New York Times. Within 30 minutes of the publication of that essay​, Christopher Schelling, who, is both Augusten's husband AND his agent, contacted me.

I thought when my book was published that all of the hard work had been completed. However, looking back at all of the essays, interviews, podcasts, and readings​ that took place in the year proceeding publication, I can see pieces of me spread all over the globe.  

“This friend said that the writing in your book reminded her of me," Augusten adds.

This is it. I am dead, which is wonderful in the best possible way.

I killed it.​

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Coming Out on Live TV

Last summer, I was pruning the boxwoods in our garden in Maine, when my neighbor Irene, a retired schoolteacher, and self-professed book maven walked by and said, “Hey, Edward Scissorhands, I saw your book in the New York Times.” 

I waved the shears at her and said, “Thanks!”

She dropped the hand she was using to shield her eyes from the sun, and scrunched up her face contemplating my reply, Thanks?

“I mean, so what did you think?” I corrected myself.

“You ready to be the poster child for all of this?” she asked.

“Um, sure, yeah,” I replied.

She raised one eyebrow and displayed a closed-lip smile. It’s a look I’ve seen before, typically, when my youngest daughter, Marisa, uses a phrase I don’t understand. Something like, “Ugh, Dad, you’re such a stan.” She’ll give me that look, and I can read the question in her face before she asks, Do you even know what that means?

“Um, sure, yeah.”

I published a book, a memoir about my personal experience. I wasn’t the first person to come out later in life, or as I like to say, Fashionably Late. That always gets an eye-roll from Marisa.  

Irene didn’t say anything, but I could read the question in her facial expression, But really, are you ready?  As she walked off, she shouted, “William Dameron tamps down the tall grass of untold experience,” echoing a sentence from the New York Times Review. That phrase has become somewhat of a joke in our household. We use it any time we try something new, like when I tell my husband, Paul, I tried a new pork chop recipe, and he’ll say, “Tamping down the tall grass, huh?”  

Since that summer day, I’ve received emails almost daily from people who’ve read my book. Most are kind, a few decidedly not, but almost all of them state the same thing: they feel heard. I reply to every single one. It is not something I take lightly. While I may have written one of the first literary memoirs about a person coming out later in life to his spouse and family, I am not the first one to do it. I can joke about many things, but I stand in awe of those who come out, often in environments much more hostile, sometimes life-threatening.

As queer people, we make a decision every day whether to come out or not, to co-workers, new neighbors, a manager, new clients, or even the taxi driver. It gets easier, but there is always that split second thought, is it safe?

Recently Philip Schofield, the host of This Morning, in the UK, came out on live TV. In light of those events, The Times published an excerpt from my book, and the BBC interviewed me on the Victoria Derbyshire program. Because I joined by skype, the studio didn’t want to consume the bandwidth by sending their video back to me. While I was being interviewed, I didn’t get a chance to see what the studio looked like. Maybe that’s a good thing because when they sent me a screen capture later, I certainly looked like the poster child for coming out and also? it reminded me of a scene from the movie Edward Scissorhands when he appears on a TV program.

In that scene, an audience member asks Edward if he has ever considered corrective surgery. “Yes,” he replies quietly. Then, another audience member stands up and says, “But if you had regular hands, you'd be like everyone else.”

That line slays me.

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Adorable Little Stories and Great Big Books

Years ago, when I told Paul I was going to start writing this blog, he cocked his head and said, “OK.” I had heard that tone in his voice once before when I told him my attorney suggested he sign a prenup agreement. What he said then was something like, “OK, give me that stupid agreement. I’ll sign it.” It wasn’t indignation or resentment, it was bemusement, like don’t worry, you can keep your Franklin Mint Star Trek plate collection.

I narrowed my eyes and said, “You don’t think I have anything valuable to say?”

“Sure I do, sweetie,” he replied reaching out to finger the top button on my shirt. “But, what are you going to write about?”

“I don’t know,” I said, swatting his hand away and looked up at the ceiling like the answer might be hidden in the rafters. “Stories.”

“You’re going to write adorable little stories?” he asked.

The truth is, I really didn’t know what I was going to write, but after that comment, I was for damn sure going to write something, and whatever it was, it would make the world sit up and take notice. It would make Paul bow down before all of the beautiful words piled up at my feet. It would make the angels weep.

What I wrote was the first crappy blog post that I forced Paul to read and that you can still find here. I will never remove it because it makes me laugh with its oh so noble sense of purpose. And also? It lets me know how far I have come.

After that post, many stories followed and then they jumped onto The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Salon, various other places and then to The New York Times. But this blog is where I fell in love with writing. It has been my proving ground, my laboratory to experiment in until I finally figured out what it was that my stories so desperately needed to convey: It is never too late to become who you were meant to be.  

Lately, the posts on this blog have been few and far between, but don’t worry, dear reader, like Evita Perón, the truth is, I never left you. Early in the mornings and late at night, I have been writing something a bit longer than a blog post. On July 1st, 2019, more than a decade after I came out, my debut memoir, TheLie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out will be published by Little A. It’s not an Adorable Little Story, but I hope you will love it as much as I do, as much as I love Paul.

When I finished writing the book, after my agent said, “Slice your heart open and let it bleed out onto the page.” After my editor who is also a poet, coaxed from me the most difficult, and beautifully terrifying words I have ever written, I gave the book—my quote-unquote Star Trek Plate collection—to Paul.

It was the story of my destruction and my creation, the story of Us, my precious. I waited. One day passed without comment, then two, then three freaking days. On the fourth day, I was about a ten on the anger scale and cranking it up to twenty-five. On the fifth day, we boarded a cross-country flight to California together, and I imagined how I would ignore Paul for six and a half hours and flirt shamelessly with the cute flight attendant. And then he pulled out his iPad, sat it on the little folding table and opened up my book.

“You are not seriously going to read this while I sit next to you are you?” I asked.

He clapped his hands like a kid with an adorable little toy. I looked through the window at the clouds below us, stealing sidelong glances at his face and at his finger scrolling through the pages of my life. After six hours, he attempted to swipe left multiple times. We sat in silence, the only sound my beating heart and the hum of the engines.

“The period end period,” I said.

He stared straight ahead.

“WELL?” I asked.

The startled passenger on the other side of Paul shifted uncomfortably in her seat, angling her body away from us. If he didn’t know how much I detested the word, Paul might have told me I sounded a little shrill.  He held up his finger, like give me a minute. I’m about to sneeze.

Look at him, I thought. Look at that same old stupid Maine t-shirt he always wears.

I glanced back through the window at the tiny roads stitched into the landscape, at how they crisscrossed in seemingly senseless patterns. I thought about all of the years invested in this book, all of the pain. When I looked back at Paul, he pulled that stupid old t-shirt up to dab his nose, to wipe his cheeks, to blot his eyes.

Look at that face.

How could I not love that face? That old t-shirt. That old Paul. My husband.

My weeping angel.

  

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Acceptance

I tap on the imaginary brake pedal.

“Honey, it still doesn’t work,” Paul sighs, staring straight ahead.  The eye roll implied in his tone is hidden behind his sunglasses.

“Well, we need to get it fixed!” I say with mock alarm and then add “When my book is published you won’t have to drive me to work anymore,” nodding as I survey the dirt encrusted snow mounds passing by the car window.  The snow is brown this time of year, with splotches of yellow, like frozen lemonade; the byproduct of zealous dogs marking temporary territory. I wince at the thought of urine soaked sidewalks, the snow like a black- light highlighting the DNA no one wants to see. 

 “Will I have to cook your meals, clean the house and wash your nasty little underwear anymore?” He asks.

“You are the man behind the man,” I say magnanimously, not fully appreciating the subtext until I say it.  This time Paul uses a finger to lower his sunglasses on his nose so that I can see that he has decided to focus on the innuendo.  My one raised eyebrow tells him to get his mind out of the gutter, but he knows that is where I like it.

Smiling, I return to my thoughts.  Having just completed a memoir writing class my focus lately has been looking at my life through the dual lenses of memory and meaning. My goal: to write a short memoir piece that would be accepted for publication in a literary magazine, which has been accomplished and will be published in the fall.

What else can I achieve?  There is only one way to find out.  Less time to write blog posts, I’m afraid, but more time to write chapters.

“Who will play you in the movie?”  Paul asks. 

I consider his question as I look through the car window.  The snow melts and the sun paints the topical waters orange.  Palm trees whisper in the wind.  I dip my toes into the pool and breathe in the heady jasmine scented air.

If you are going to dream, dream big and dream in color.

 

 

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