To which Elisa basically says: Well, should that be an excuse for being a myopic and inconsiderate friend? To which Rebecca more or less replies: Who on earth would choose to be this unhappy? Rebecca implies: Now you’re too quick to judge me.Įlisa ultimately suggests that Rebecca’s unhappiness is at least partly of her own unlovely making. Rebecca implies that Elisa is being insensitive, too quick to judge others.Įlisa implies that Rebecca is being too self-involved, too needy. The specifics of their disagreements may be unique to them, but the broad outlines have the ring and shape of the familiar The Wellness Letters are almost impossible to read without seeing the corpse of one of your own doomed friendships floating by.Įlisa complains about failures in reciprocity. In real time, Elisa and Rebecca enact on the page something that almost all of us have gone through: the painful dissolution of a friendship. The final paragraphs are a mess of blood and bone and gray guts.
By the end, the two women have taken every difficult truth they’ve ever learned about the other and fashioned it into a club. They start writing past each other, not hearing each other at all. Deep fissures in their belief systems begin to show. R: I just started writing something called Trying to Stay Off My Meds …īut over time, resentments flicker into view. Their exchanges have real swing to them, a screwball quality with a punk twist. They called this project The Wellness Letters.
#LA TIMES CROSSWORD LEND ME YOUR EARS HOW TO#
And, eventually, they decided to write a book together, a collection of their email and text correspondence about a topic with undeniably broad appeal: how to live in the world and be okay. They sometimes joked about running away together. They took a class in New York City together. The two entered an intense loop of contact. Read: Why making friends in midlife is so hard (Albany! How does one find friends in Albany?) Yet here was Rebecca-the center of a lush social network, a pollinating bee-showing up on campus at Fence’s office every day. She was a new mother, all alone in a new city, Albany, where her husband was a tenured professor. It would be hard to overstate how much that mattered to Elisa.
To Elisa, Rebecca was a glamorous and reassuring role model, a woman who through some miracle of alchemy had successfully combined motherhood, marriage, and a creative life. To Rebecca, Elisa was “impossibly vibrant” in a way that only a 30-year-old can be to someone who is 41. The two women became close more than a decade ago, spotting in each other the same traits that dazzled outsiders: talent, charisma, saber-tooth smarts.
#LA TIMES CROSSWORD LEND ME YOUR EARS SERIES#
She’s also the author of a novel and four poetry collections, including Manderley, selected by the National Poetry Series she has a fifth coming out in the fall.
She’s the founding editor of the literary magazine Fence, a haven for genre-resistant writing and writers that’s now almost 25 years old. Rebecca is someone I knew only by reputation until recently. The same articulate fury suffused After Birth, her follow-up her next book, Human Blues (her “monster,” as she likes to say), comes out in July. I was instantly struck by how unafraid of darkness and emotional chaos she was. She was such mesmerizing company that I rushed out to buy her debut novel, The Book of Dahlia, which had been published a few months earlier. I met Elisa one evening in 2008, after an old friend’s book reading. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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