Upstate, one of my brothers and his girlfriend drove me to a mall where they installed me at the movie In Providence; I think it was supposed to be a comedy. I stared at the screen, sobbing. At that moment every story was a tragedy.
Too mired in my own sorrows to get interested in anyone else’s, for the first time I was unable to read. Bob lay forlornly, untouched, on a shelf; I had no desire to reflect or reminisce. There was nothing good to be found in it. Every book I opened, no matter how comedic or superficial, came back to me and my failure. There was no escape reading. The morning headlines, Enid Nemy’s “Metropolitan Diary” in the Times, a breezy Vanity Fair article about a long-forgotten Las Vegas scandal, it didn’t matter what—in a miracle of thematic unity, everything managed to be about my heartbreak, every story thread getting tangled in the shreds of my unraveling life. People say that divorce is like a death and, insofar as I felt like part of me had died along with my marriage, they were right.
The week after we split, my ex and I met in our forsaken apartment to divvy up belongings, parceling out furniture and taking turns claiming the antiques we’d splurged on during our honeymoon in Bali and Chiang Mai only eleven months earlier. We hadn’t been together long, but we’d accumulated a lot—the year in London, the visits to France, six weeks in Greece and Turkey; there were carpets.
Hardest to parse were the books. It was easy enough to distinguish his monumental hardcover tomes from my used college paperbacks. We knew which books had come from his personal library or mine. But what of the books we’d acquired together? Mutual dreams were bound together in so many of those pages.
“You can have Joseph and His Brothers,” I offered. We’d both planned to be Thomas Mann completists and had gotten an especially attractive early edition to share.
“Thank you,” he said. I’m not sure he realized that with that I was giving him Us. We had plotted wanting to read it together and he had given it to me as a gift. In returning it, I was saying farewell to any together plans.
Somehow I got us out of our Brooklyn lease, left the starter apartment that had overnight become a morgue, and moved to a sad divorcée’s one-bedroom next to the Morgan Library. Though not properly a public library, it felt close enough. A start on a new page.
I was finally forced back into reading when, in one of life’s great ironic twists, I was asked to write my very first book review, and the book was Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. I almost felt ready to write it. At the moment I was feeling very much betrayed by the American man.
“Oh, dear,” my editor said when I handed my piece in. “Let me show you how to write a book review.” I did have one nice turn of phrase, which he kindly kept.
Meanwhile, a new books editor had joined the Economist, and when I tearfully explained that I might need an extra week to finish my monthly column, she got me on a plane to London, put me up in a hotel on the Thames, and asked me to work on an editorial project involving the magazine’s cultural coverage. I was back in a city that had been ours, but it wasn’t the same place it had been just a year before. I steered clear of our old neighborhood, trying to sear a new imprint on the city so it wouldn’t become a place defined by past disappointment. I didn’t want to lose London. This would become a pattern—getting back up on the bike and revisiting the places he and I had been to, trying to reclaim them. He couldn’t have London, or Paris, or Amsterdam. These were the settings of my story too.
When I finally found my way back to leisure reading, it was to read the dark, sad memoirs of darker, sadder people, any heartbreak more worthy than my own. I read Calvin Trillin’s Remembering Denny, his affecting tribute to a college classmate who had committed suicide. I read Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which the former editor of French Elle dictated using a single blinking eye after a car accident left him with locked-in syndrome, unable to move or communicate in any other way. Misery memoirs made good company.
In my wallowing, I leaned on other people’s resilience. I read Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father by Richard Rodriguez. I read the transgender travel writer Jan Morris’s second memoir, Pleasures of a Tangled Life. I read Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language by Eva Hoffman. I envied other people’s hardiness.
But no matter how hard I tried to dive into other people’s stories, it felt impossible not to get mired in my own, which rattled in my head like a taunting earworm. No matter how many times I tearfully recounted my unhappiness to friends, trying to get it out, it stayed on, preoccupying by day and haunting by night. Maybe I could somehow write it out of me. If I could just get it on paper, I could crumple it up, burn it, throw it away, and get rid of it.
So I enrolled in a personal essay class at the New School. I’d never taken a writing class before because I’d always believed reading was what taught one how to write—but that’s not why I was there. The teacher I chose was Lucy Grealy, who had just written an acclaimed memoir, Autobiography of a Face. A poet and essayist, Grealy had had cancer of the jaw as a child, and a torturous course of surgeries had dramatically reshaped her lovely born appearance. Until you got used to her, you could feel the residual pain, but over time she became beautiful. She had earned that face. And she ultimately helped me out of my myopic despair. She was one of the least sappy or sentimental people I’d ever met, and I was in awe of her.
Grealy’s physical condition could have provided a ready excuse for any difficulty. “This singularity of meaning—I was my face, I was ugliness—though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape,” she wrote in her memoir. “It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it—my face as personal vanishing point.”