In Los Angeles, the city marches on as a permanent paradise, a facade that requires it to desperately pump water in from other regions to nurture the foreign flora that make it so appealing an imitation of life. It is a city that was literally built to construct lies upon, the old photographs of movie sets of brilliant cities set against the background of a desert betraying the unreality of its current beauty. It is then that I am grateful for the brutal and increasingly endless New York winters that crack the skin to the point of bleeding, proving the existence of a beating heart below.
Like Maria on her drives into the desert, I picked up a habit of running to the Atlantic at 4 a.m. along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. The destination is Coney Island but only because it happens to be at the edge of the city; it is there in the morning lights that I am often struck again by a parallel to the story in my own life. It is there that I have resisted my resistance to feeling too heavily reliant on writers like Joan and the women they breathe something like life into to give a narrative arc to my life, to make it more than nothing. To still play. Of Play It as It Lays, she said specifically that it is “a white book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams.” And so it is where I put my collection of bad dreams, both the ones that I lived and the ones that came to me in my sleep. And so I think of that birthday week and the tulle dress and the man with smoke in his voice as the time I thought I was abandoning the cunning appeal of a sleek and serpentine desert, but was actually stumbling into it.
I return often to the woods and how sincere James had seemed when he proclaimed the superiority of the city of his birth. He said he would stay forever, as if he were not only the city’s proud resident, but its heir apparent. But Joan also said, in her book The White Album, “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” And I have loved New York more radically by staying, by giving it more credit than it deserves because it is more easily broken than the desert because it is has more life within it. It is at dawn, looking into the blackness of the Atlantic, feeling the harsh winds and witnessing the unforgiving tides that bring a chill to the city, that I feel this place belongs to me now. And it is then that I am certain I dwell on a safer shore.
Acknowledgments
I am forever grateful for the steadying confidence and saintly patience that my agent, Adriann Ranta, had in my work long before anyone else had either. To witness Libby Burton’s ability to combine the editorial precision of a surgeon with an exuberant confidence in me rivaled only by my own mother’s was an honor and a privilege. The team at Grand Central Publishing, including production editor Carolyn Kurek, copy editor Deborah Wiseman, along with Lisa Honerkamp, Shelby Howick, and Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, who have echoed Libby’s enthusiasm and support with their work to make this book possible, has moved me profoundly. I can only hope to repay them in kind.
I want to thank my parents, Gail and Robert Massey, for eschewing the parental tradition of steering children away from creative professions and being the first true believers in my stories. My sister, Nova Massey, has been a source of love I can fold into and the only rock I am allowed to crash against as many times as I need. To the sisters I found later in life, Phoebe Anderson, Natasha Lennard, Alana Levinson, and Charlotte Shane: Your kind hearts and fierce minds are miracles the world hasn’t earned but I’m glad it has in it anyway. Craig Reynolds, I am so grateful that we found each other as I was stranded in the middle of this process and that your love and confidence brought me safely to the other shore.
To Olivia Hall and Evan Derkacz, the first editors who ever took a chance on a writer with the disjointed interests and the out-of-place divinity school degree: Thank you for taking a chance and for remaining strange. To my editors at BuzzFeed, Doree Shafrir, Arianna Rebolini, and Isaac Fitzgerald: Thank you for molding my essays into shapes that resonated with audiences I never knew how to reach.
To the small army of friends and supporters I have in my life willing to read my drafts, humor my rambling pitch ideas, and reply thoughtfully to my text message scrolls of insecurity and frustration: You have meant the world to me and helped me make my place in the world. So thank you, Lola Pellegrino, Kate D’Adamo, Emily Genetta, Melissa Gira Grant, Morgan Jerkins, Rachel Syme, Rachel Vorona Cote, Arabelle Sicardi, Cheyenne Picardo, Taina Martinez, Mychal Denzel Smith, Maria Bowler, John McElwee, Paul Lucas, Safy-Hallan Farah, Heather Havrilesky, Molly Crabapple, Matt Stupp, Suzan Eraslan, Rebecca Traister, Ashley Ford, Ryan Jacobs, Fariha Roisin, Meghan Daigneau, Lauren Clyne, Meaghan O’Connell, and so many more whom I have forgotten and will realize the moment I reread this list in print.
And finally, to the women who star in this book: Thanks for being a more stunning, ferocious, and wild gang of imaginary friends than I could ever dream up myself.