I have a story to finish. I began telling it last week. I’m anxious to get back to it. That work will be emotionally draining and will leave me wrung out. Today I was wrung out from the start.
It has been a dizzying week. I spent all but a day of it living out of a hotel in the city. My girlfriend (the person I’ve now written about a few times dating back to “Some Personal… News?”) was in town. I was in New York because she was.
Every day’s schedule was impossibly crowded with commitments to keep. All of them were hers not mine. The days started early and ended late. What was left each night was only enough time to eat, shower, decompress, and then get in bed in time to catch five or six hours sleep.
It was a long week – mostly for her. I knew it would be. I knew we wouldn’t get much “time together”. In some ways, I was “with her” less than when we are on opposite coasts and have easier schedules.
And that was okay.
I wasn’t there because I wanted her attention. I was there because I knew the attention would be on her. I missed her and wanted to see her… but more than that, I just wanted to support her. She had a week I knew was going to be important, meaningful, and emotional for her. I wanted to play a certain role and offer a certain thing and have her see it and feel it and leave knowing why I had: because I had wanted to, because it had made me happy.
She had written a new book. It was set to come out last Tuesday. She had a daunting barrage of interviews and appearances scheduled. The purpose was to support her new book. She had written something which people could now buy and read. The focus would ostensibly be on the book. On the surface, the appearances were commercial. She had produced a product. It was time to sell it.
A book is a product. As queasy as that sentence makes me as a writer, it is true. A book is a product. You can find it in a store. It has a price. There is a barcode printed on it somewhere. Take it off the shelf, carry it up to the register, pay for it… and you can walk out with it.
Whether it’s Can of Corn – A Memoir or a can of corn for dinner, reduced to its least meaningful minimum, a book is a product.
Purchase it and it’s all yours…
But before that it was all someone else’s.
It was the author’s.
That’s the difference. Very few products are so personally the conception of one person.
It takes an army of people to actually produce a book and get it to market. The publication is a birth of sorts. There are a lot of people in the room. They are all trained and talented and important. They have specialties and play key roles. But the thing being brought into the world is a child conceived by a single parent.
Writing is a fraught exercise. It is both personal and public no matter the genre. It creates a vulnerability. It exposes the writer to critique. It opens them up to criticism and comment which can disappoint or hurt.
When the writing isn’t about the author themselves the vulnerability centers on the work. The book. The writing in it. The quality of it.
Write a work of fiction, you open yourself up to criticism of the story and your telling of it.
Write a book personal to you and personally about you, that vulnerability widens from a gap between armored plates to standing naked before the barbarians.
My girlfriend wrote a book which is personal to her and which contains essays which are personally about her.
The book itself is a “cookbook”. If you want to find it in a bookstore, you’ll have to look in the cooking section. When you find it on a shelf, it will look like a cookbook. Thumb through its pages, it’ll feel like one. It is 346 pages long. On most of them are either recipes or beautifully shot pictures of the dishes.
It is a cookbook… but I struggle to describe it with that term because I know what went into its creation. I know what its author wanted from it. I know what they went through before its conception and during its development. I know what they wanted from it and the message they wanted people to take away from it. I happen to strenuously support that message. And I also happen to strenuously support the author themselves because I think she is amazing and gives very good hugs and I’m in love with her.
So, the whole hectic shebang in New York, all the running around, it was all stuff for her book launch. I was just there to play the role of The Boyfriend. Supporting cast not the star. Happy to be down in the credits.
And, oof, it was hectic production. Tuesday, our day started with a 6:00 a.m. knock on the door for an in-room prep for an appearance on a morning show. She was out the door before 8:00 a.m. and on TV an hour later. Afterwards, she went straight to record a podcast and then went straight to another studio to do another live appearance.
She got back to the hotel in early afternoon. She had put in an intense 8-hour day by 2:00 p.m.. She was exhausted. She should have been. The two of us had been running on fumes since my time in California tending to my dying friend. It had been a long, long month. I think we’ve averaged about 5 hours of sleep a night over the stretch.
She was beat. There wasn’t even time for a nap. And a car was picking us up an hour later. She was scheduled to appear at an event at a theater.
A few hours later, she was due to appear at a theater on Long Island for an interview by a moderator followed by an audience Q&A. She would then stay to take pictures with anyone in the audience who wanted one. The theater could hold 400 people. It was sold out. That’s a whole lot of pictures to take. It was going to be a long night.
Originally, I wasn’t supposed to go.
Back when the event first came up, my girlfriend and I hadn’t even met in person yet. We were still in what now seems like a comically quaint phase of pretending we were just friends while talking on the phone five hours a day and feeling like it had been too short, too little.
She hadn’t wanted me to attend. She thought the travel out to the venue would be a long slog. She thought the event itself would be boring for me. I’d just be sitting around most of the time. She hadn’t me to come because she thought I wouldn’t like it.
I bought a ticket anyway.
I got one of the last ones in the very last row. I didn’t care. I was going to go. I wanted to be in the building.
By last Tuesday, things had obviously changed quite a bit since when I first bought the ticket. I wasn’t the guy she hadn’t met in person who like-liked her but was trying to rein that in while also buying tickets to events three hours from my house just to briefly be in the same room.
I was The Boyfriend now and the existence of such a person in her life had started to hit the entertainment press. Thus, I had come to have a soft officialness which changes things. To the organizers, I was more the ‘+1’ than the ‘friend with a ticket’. Thus, they refused to let me sit in the seat I had purchased and had instead reserved a seat for me up front. I had neither expected them to nor wanted that really.
I tried to push back saying I’d be just fine in my regular seat. They wouldn’t have it, so I somewhat reluctantly acquiesced and gave up the ticket I had bought back when I was just falling madly for the evening’s guest and took the one they had put aside for me.
It was in the front row right on the center aisle. Jesus. I felt like I was on stage too. I knew some of the people around me figured out I was “The Boyfriend”. I felt so… visible. If I could’ve slunk off to my original seat in the back, I would have.
It wasn’t that I am uncomfortable with the kind of transitive attention that comes from being in a relationship with someone well known and recognizable. I just have no personal interest in it. It is neither a feature nor a bug. It is merely something that comes with the package. There is no being ‘the boyfriend’ without being ‘The Boyfriend’. I very much want the former. I just accept that comes with the latter.
Left to my own devices, I would have sat in the back. In the end, I was glad they sat me where they did. I got to take in the night in a way I will long remember.
On stage right in front of me, my girlfriend was funny and warm and affable. She had the crowd leaning in and laughing aloud. I was surrounded by the sound of it. She gave thoughtful answers to personal questions. They drew the kind of clapping you hear when things are resonating at differing levels across an audience. Some are clapping louder than others because something had landed harder, more personally, for them. They had been reached.
The crowd applauded when she walked on stage. They applauded louder when she walked off.
Her cookbook… the one I said I so fully supported because I knew what went into it, what it took, what it meant… It is a work of both a period of time and a moment in it. When my girlfriend first started writing it, she had just come through an excruciating time in her life. She had lost both of her parents and the father of her adult son with whom she had reached a good place after their divorce. Her cooking show had been canceled. And she had exited a second marriage which had grown toxic – but only after an agonizing divorce which, thanks to COVID, had taken five years instead of two.
She had been through hell.
I know a thing or two about stretches like those. I had my own Year of the Phoenix where people close to you die and things fall apart and everything in your life just… burns down. I know the weight of grief and the way it compounds with multiple losses.
I don’t think it is possible to fully understand what it is like to go through a sequence of just battering life experiences one after another without going through it. Its effect isn’t just a multiplication. It isn’t just “[effect of losing one person] x [# of people lost]”
It isn’t the same emotions of individual crises just amplified. It isn’t just emotional even. It’s also physical. The cumulative effect literally impacts your body, your brain, your function. It literally diminishes your ability to see color. The sky literally looks less blue to you because your brain actually sees it that way.
My girlfriend had been through a brutal stretch. Along the way, she could have cloistered herself away. She could have gone underground… hid from the public… hid her pain.
The world is not kind to tender souls. It is not. It is not merciful on the wounded.
People… society… the media… are not kind to the vulnerable, It is worse when the person hurting is a woman… and it is somehow worse still when the person opens themselves up to public view and shares their pain.
My girlfriend knew incredibly well that to be open was to invite a whole swirl of negative things. She knew she could just put on a ‘competition smile’ and keep right on walking in the endless shallow pageant of ‘The Entertainment Business’. She didn’t.
She chose not to…
Instead, she showed her pain and talked about it. She posted vulnerable videos on Instagram where her pain was palpable. She dressed down rather than up. She wore little makeup and shot the videos in t-shirts and sweatshirts. She was real and honest and raw in the worst year of her life and then in the next.
She didn’t mask; she showcased.
She didn’t present; she revealed. She shared.
Her cookbook is a product of that period of time. It is less about the reaching of a summit then having survived a great and terrible fall and found one’s feet again.
She has been through the absolute ringer… and when it was the hardest and felt the worst and was almost too much, she dug down deep and did hard work. She got to the root of things and waded through hard histories. She ran towards the labor of healing not away from it. She hurt like hell and worked like hell to not hurt.
And she let the public see all of it.
I have just so much respect for that. I think it takes a remarkable strength, a courage. It takes an inner drive towards some useful purpose which is important enough to you to outweigh the absolutely certain negatives that come from having made public one’s pain.
On Tuesday, my girlfriend talked a little bit about the things I just referenced above. She speaks of them freely and often – and what she talks about resonates with people. It helps them. It makes them feel connected and less alone and more capable of getting past their own hard things.
At one point after the moderated portion when the audience was free to ask questions, someone stood up and introduced herself. She worked in the mental health field. She had a question but before asking it, she said she thought what my girlfriend has done through her openness these last several years has done some of her followers an immeasurable good.
I choked up immediately… because I knew my girlfriend would choke up. And then she did. I could see it on her face, hear it in her voice. I’m glad she was the one with the microphone rather than me. I would have needed a minute.
It was a moment that will likely be memorable to no one other than she and I – and maybe only to me. That’s okay. It was a moment to remember.
At the end of the Q&A, my girlfriend thanked the audience and said her goodnights before adjourning to take pictures. The crowd roared in hearty applause and I just soaked it all in.
I had a feeling I have only had one other time in the past ten years. The prior time was when my son was ten years old and in a drum line that was performing for the first time. They played halftime at a college football game. I stood in the middle of the crowd and just watched my son’s troop blow people away. I will never forget how the applause afterwards felt.
Getting to be in the middle of a crowd watching as they love someone you love, it is something. It is something. It is just so wholly joyful, so fulfilling, it is almost overwhelming.
Last week was crazy. It was exhausting. It was surreal.
It was also special and important and memorable.
For me, Tuesday night will stand out.
I was supposed to be the guy in the last row crazy about the woman on stage. Instead, I was the boyfriend in the front row just drinking up the joy of seeing her get the roses. She deserves them. She has earned them.
Man, the feeling of seeing her get them… get that love and support and applause… it was just the best.
And she thought I’d be bored.
You made me tear up and sold a 'cook book'. You both make my heart sing. xo Cj
What a wonderfully written piece. I was in the audience in Phoenix this month when your girlfriend spoke. It was wonderful to see and hear her honesty. I've struggled with what she's struggled with. It hit home. I'm not surprised you two are together.