I was so happy to be interviewed by Matt Medina on the lovely In Pursuit of Magic podcast. Let’s slow down and remember what’s important, and spend our days doing that.

Keep sharing stories and discovering what we have in common or can learn about each other, and maybe we can create a little more understanding and a lot less hate.

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[From my latest column in 55plusLife Magazine.]

The bus driver made an announcement that the northbound No. 10 would be detouring around several stops due to emergency road work.

Realizing the bus would be skipping her stop, an elderly woman told the driver, “Turn around and go back!” She was small and quite bent, bundled in a long coat and headscarf. “I have arrhythmia!” she shouted.

It was early spring and still chilly. We were off the route in our Bronx neighborhood. Everyone on the bus was being inconvenienced.

Some passengers sought to reassure the woman, “It’s all right, we’ll all get where we are going.”

She was clearly panicked, but it manifested as entitled and bossy. “Stop the bus!” she screeched.

The driver told her he would let her off as soon as possible. But she would be five blocks from her home, she said, and she had arrhythmia!

Some passengers on the bus resented her. “Shut up, lady,” they said dismissively.

The bus stopped a few blocks from my regular corner. I hopped to the curb and the door stayed open; the woman continued on. “This isn’t my stop. You missed my stop!”

I hesitated. She reminded me of my late mom who was also often cranky and misunderstood. I felt for the driver and for the other riders. New York has a heart, but it’s an impatient one. And this was the Bronx.

I looked at the driver. “I can walk her,” I said. “It’s near my house.”

He was relieved. “This lady is going to walk you home,” he explained.

She peeked around the doorway. She’d lost the bus battle but had a potential ally out on the sidewalk.

“Go on, dear, let the nice person walk you home,” someone said.

“I have arrhythmia!” she yelled before climbing down slowly. The doors closed and the bus peeled away.

“I guess we are neighbors,” I said.

“Do you know where I live?”

“It’s just a few blocks back this way, no? You tell me which building number and I can walk you.”

“I have arrhythmia.”

“My name is Susan. I live over there,” I said, pointing.

“I’m Mrs. Newman,” she said, “like the movie actor Paul Newman. You know him?”

“Oh, he’s handsome,” I said.

“I have arrhythmia and can’t walk very far,” she said.

“I understand. Take my arm.”

“What’s your name?”

“Susan.”

“Where do you live?”

“Over there, but I’ll walk you home first.”

“Do you know Paul Newman?”

“Of course, so talented.”

“He’s dead.” We walked in silence for a moment, then she said, “I was at the diner down the hill with my friend Miriam. The bus is supposed to stop so I can walk home.”

“There was a problem with the road. An emergency.”

“Do you know the diner down the hill?”

“Sure.”

“Do you know Miriam?”

“I don’t think so.”

When we got to her building, I asked, “Can I help you to the elevator?”

She straightened a bit, her imminent collapse less dire. “No, I’m going to check my mail.” Seeing familiar territory appeared to calm her.

I smiled and turned to go.

“Where do you live?” she asked again.

“Just a couple of blocks away. Are you sure you don’t need me?”

“No,” she said firmly.

I started toward my own building and thought about the words from Ram Dass: We are all just walking each other home.

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Every night I forget myself, and every morning I have to work at finding myself.

What felt so real and secure slides away like Jell-O on a cutting board. Then, over morning coffee with my cat lying on one half of my journal, I rediscover a life that feels solid and obvious again.

What was that all about? I wonder. You’ve got this! I say. And then it starts all over again.

A lot of this insecurity and fear has to do with the personal fallout from my recently completed memoir, Pandora in Paris, a traumedy about my relationship with my mother.

As a palate cleanser, I’m working on a play. It’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Life of Pi. Man, woman, tiger. Hilarity on a desert island that’s anything but deserted!

I suppose pretending that we never have any doubts is worse than admitting a lack of self confidence.

*Today’s Substack has been brought to you by the Yoko Ono School of Writing, sponsored in part by Picklez the 13-year-old rescue cat.

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Last week, as a war began, I found myself in a concrete bunker with thousands of other writers. Not a bad place to be during Armegeddon.

I attended my first AWP conference at the Baltimore Convention Center. AWP, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, “amplifies the voices of writers and the academic programs and organizations that serve them while championing diversity and excellence in creative writing.”

It also reinforces the notion that writing specifically, and creativity in general, can contribute to and improve the current state of affairs.

We sat in classrooms and ballrooms, listening to panels and taking notes. We heard each other’s words and stories. We devoured tips and tricks to start writing, keep writing, revise, submit, publish and prosper.

It was a groaning board of writing and the writer’s life. Editors, agents, MFA programs, literary journals, independent publishers, pedagogical approaches, university presses. Despite the $6 it cost to buy a Coke Zero, it was a generous, expansive, exhilirating gathering.

I am lucky to already be part of a great community. I work with a couple of writing groups where we share, compare, commiserate and support each other. But to arrive at a place, even a digital venue (AWP has a large online attendance), and be immersed in one’s own people is akin to finding religion.

If I look a little stunned in these photos, I was. AWP was overwhelming in it’s volume, offerings, constant motion, stimulation, and loads and loads of beautiful books at the enormous book fair.

Egged on by my phenomenally talented friends, I approached an exhibitor table with a sign that invited us to Practice Your Pitch to an Agent. I almost fainted while presenting my memoir’s elevator pitch to editor Allison K. Williams and agent Jessica Berg. I’ve published three books and written professionally for my entire career but every book feels like the first. Williams and Berg tagged teamed and propelled me forward with enthusiasm and professionalism. It was a wonderful experience. Kind of like speed dating for books. I recommend it.

The conference kicked off with keynote speaker John Waters, the filmmaker, writer, and actor. The legendary son of Baltimore enchantingly recalled books read to him as a child. Like Slovenly Peter who learned that children with bad habits like sucking their thumbs were punished horribly by having their fingers chopped off with giant scissors. Waters said he still keeps this book on his bedside table.

I looked it up. It’s real, it’s German, no surprise.

Waters’ funny take and cautionary tales set the tone for four days of exploring the writing life. Most everything at AWP was uplifting and inspiring with talk of resistance, persistence, and keeping AI in its place. Maybe the bots can complete our tax returns while we go on creating.

I recognized myself in Baltimore at this gathering of artists and creators who encouraged each other. Many of us left emboldened to keep writing and trying to save the world.

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I’m sitting in a New York City diner with my best friend from high school, meeting for tea and toasted corn muffins as we’ve done for decades. The place is busy, yet I notice other customers seem to be ordering and getting their food. We haven’t even been offered water or menus.

“Is it my imagination?” I ask Cathy.

We laugh at first and then realize we are almost invisible to the younger waitstaff. A couple of middle-aged women can be largely undetectable these days. (When I say middle-aged, I am thinking 50-something — so I guess the new average lifespan is 106.)

We eventually flag down a waiter and are served our tea and muffins.

“When did this happen?” I ask.

“My cat sees me,” Cathy replies.

“Is it something we’re giving off? A lack of testosterone? Or loss of estrogen that once made us noticeable and now doesn’t?”

We are both still working. And Cathy’s an actress on television. She is actually recognized pretty regularly but often with the question, “Were you my teacher?” So, she’s recognizable, but in a vague sort of way.

“This could be a superpower,” I suggest.

“How so?”

“I mean, we have the ultimate disguise: being unseen. Women our age could be spies and no one would suspect us. What if there were a streaming series where older women’s secret weapon is their stealth and invisibility? They can infiltrate gangs, fight crime, spy for the good guys — because no one knows they are there. We should write a pilot, and you could star in it.”

“Okay, pitch me some ideas,” she says.

“Secret agent crones? Golden Girls meets Cagney and Lacey?”

“Craggy and Achey!” Cathy’s catching on.

“How about Law & Order: Geriatric Unit? Bank robbers are making a clean getaway. No one notices as our heroes pretend to be busy looking for mints in their purses. They easily nab the bad guys.”

“How about the zombie apocalypse? Like The Walking Dead?”

“Yes, but the undead stumble right past our middle-aged heroes for younger meat, leaving the women free to discover the cure for zombie-ism. Call it The Last of Them.”

“Or The Walking Feh.”

“Did you see Tokyo Vice?”

“Yes, many bare-bottomed men!”

“I know! But our version would find our imperceptible crime fighters sneaking into the Yakuza. Undetected by extorters and drug dealers, the women restore peace to the Japanese underworld. We could call it Tokyo’s Nice!”

“Or a Succession-like show: While billionaire scions battle it out for power, destroying each other in the process, the super crones take over and save the conglomerate from going under. We could call it The Gilded and the Aged.”

“A lot of people could relate,” I tell her. “There are so many men and women our age.”

“Now how do we get the check?”

After spending some effort attracting the attention of our server, we pay the bill and stroll outside. It’s chilly, but we decide to go to the park and sit in the sun because no one will know we are there.

Maybe we will solve a mystery.

This is from my latest Laugh Lines column for 55+Life Magazine.

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For a couple of years in the mid-1980s, I worked at Seventeen magazine. I was an accessories editor, Dear Beauty Editor, and finally a trends editor.

Unfortunately the new trends section they’d created and put me in charge of wasn’t panning out. At least that’s what my nice boss, the managing editor, said when she took me out for cappuccino and told me I was being let go. I was in my mid-20s and I’d never been fired.

She said I could leave right away or finish out the month. I’d put in so much effort on the next issue, I said I wanted to put it to bed.

I went back to work for a week or so, stunned, afraid to tell my colleagues. But I was proud of myself for seeing the issue through.

On my last day, the editor-in-chief called me in. She was a former nun, and though she’d eventually married a professional tennis player and favored mink coats and expensive handbags, she ran the magazine like a malevolent reverend mother. She suggested I consider going back to school because I was a terrible writer.

I stiffly muttered that my previous boss at The Washington Post thought I was pretty good. (Maybe she’d heard of him —Ben Bradlee?)

She said, “Well,I don’t know about that. But you can’t write fashion copy.”

I was stricken, terrified, but somehow found the courage to respond. “Since I am such a terrible writer, I guess I’ll take all of next month’s copy with me and say my goodbyes.” (While The Washington Post had computers, Seventeen did not. I had the only draft of the pages.)

This did not land well. The twisted erstwhile sister exploded and ordered me out!

I ran to my office and threw my things in a box while crying. My workmates gathered around.

“I’m not sad. I don’t know why I’m crying.” I tried to put on face powder and pull myself together but the tears kept coming.

Mean boss was coming down the hall, still raging. “Is she out of here yet? I want you out!” she bellowed.

“My stuff...” I pointed.

“We’ll send it to you. I want you out. Stitch!”

Stitch was the elderly security guard who sat by the front desk. He was like a grandpa to all the girls on staff.

“Escort this person out of the building.”

Stitch looked sad. We waited for the elevator. I was hyperventilating. He glanced at me helplessly.

The elevator was full. Lunchtime at this midtown office building.

Even with the crowd, I could not control my weeping. I blindly stepped into the lobby and, like a guardian angel, my sister appeared. She worked nearby at Conde Nast. I must have called her earlier, and she ran to my aid.

I fell into her arms. I never saw Stitch again.

I spent three days in bed. And the next 20 years as a freelancer.

*with props to Janis Ian

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I graduated from Georgetown in May 1984 and immediately started working as an assistant to the fashion editor of The Washington Post.

I hadn’t planned to work at a newspaper. I hadn’t planned anything. As my classmates were being scouted for investment banking jobs or applying to grad school, I secretly thought I might waitress for a while and think it all over.

The fact that I landed a job at the Post was serendipitously related to my junior year in Paris and to my dad, the former publisher of Women’s Wear Daily James Brady. His old friend, the designer Emanuel Ungaro, had invited me out a few times in during my semester abroad because my father assumed I would not know how to take care of myself at age 20. He wasn’t completely wrong.

Emanuel treated me to dinner, drove me around the Arc de Triomphe in a Mini Cooper (to certain death, I assumed, the way the French drive), taught me how to curse in Italian, how not to shove food in your face after taking a sip of super special red wine, and how showing up as yourself is better than dressing like a disco queen. Short in stature but big in charm and elegance, he also tried to seduce me. Isn’t that what Frenchmen do when they are asked to look after someone’s daughter? It was all so European. But I was not used to this world. It was my father’s world and I was an outsider. I was also the “good girl” of Tom Petty’s yet-to-be-written song “Free Fallin’” —I loved Jesus, my college boyfriend and America, and stayed true to all.

When I returned to Georgetown, an item appeared in The Washington Post one Sunday morning. Nina Hyde, the fashion editor of the Post, had interviewed Ungaro for her weekly column about a new perfume he had created called Diva.

“What’s a diva?“ Nina asked him.

Ungaro responded, “I met a young girl, Susan Brady, a student at Georgetown who wants to be Secretary of State. That’s a diva.” I did tell Emanuel that I aspired to become Secretary of State. I was attending L’Institut des Sciences Politiques, the elite school for government studies. I took all my poli sci courses in France because I thought the students at Georgetown were too competitive. Yet I dreamed of one day being appointed to travel the world in the service of humanity and unity.

Nina pointed out in the article that I was the daughter of Ungaro’s friend, the influential editor James Brady. Dad knew Nina Hyde. He was friendly with the Post’s editor in chief Ben Bradlee. Newspapermen and women knew each other.

I read the Style section every Sunday, mostly the wedding announcements, but never imagined my naive aspirations of engineering world peace would lead me to work for Nina—a brilliant journalist, mentor, a tough and phenomenal woman—the week following graduation.

When I called Nina to thank her for writing about me, she asked me out to lunch. We met at the Madison Hotel across from the Post building on 15th Street NW and, over chef salads, she peppered me with questions about my post-college plans. I said I had no idea. She raised an eyebrow. I needed to work on my interview skills.

A few weeks later Nina called to say her assistant was being promoted to copy editor. Would I be interested in “shlepping shopping bags” to fashion shoots and typing up stories. “You can type right?”

“I’m an English major!” I laughed, accepting the position.

It wasn’t a lie. I typed term papers all the time. What I didn’t know was that I couldn’t type under pressure or when being watched. I’d soon discovered that when Nina dictated a story to me or stood over me as I typed a letter, I froze.

Once, Nina was at the fashion shows in Milan and didn’t have an office to write up her reports and send them over the wire. Her editor told her to call me and dictate. And in those early days of computers, your editor could see what you were writing as you wrote it.

Nina started reading her notes, “Today in Milan the designer Georgio Armani unveiled his fall collection with elegant colors and textures…”

I typed: “today in milan the dsigner getiorio aermabi unveils his collectin for gall rrahturing cobrang colowns and textures.”

The Style editor, the formidable Mary Hadar, came running across the newsroom yelling, “What are you writing? What is Nina saying? What’s happening?”

“I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it! I’ll remember what she’s saying!” I cried, cradling the phone with one ear, typing with one hand and waving off my boss’s boss with the other.

Then Nina said, “Okay, read it back.”

It was baptism by fire.

They didn’t suffer fools at the paper. I learned very quickly to step up. I worked hard. Maybe I was a nepo baby—my dad was an important journalist—but before long I had bylines, firmly encouraged by Nina. My first article, about clothes for dogs, was called “Dog Togs for Yuppie Puppies.”

When I foolishly left the Post to work in magazines in New York, Nina threw me a farewell party in the newsroom. Even Ben Bradlee came, but I think it was because there was cake. I was on the receiving end of true warmth from the paper’s seasoned professionals—these writers, editors, photographers and staff who had and would continue to cover history, and would not let democracy die in darkness.

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In early February of 1964, I was in a hospital in Paris. The Paris part is not that unusual since my family lived there at the time. The circumstances of my being in the hospital were somewhat grossly unique since, a few weeks earlier, a gigantic wooden door in our old French apartment had slammed on my tiny toddler finger, rendering it even tinier.

That part was traumatic. Mostly for my mom who found me with my digit hanging off and had to bandage me and run through the streets of Paris, finally ending up at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of the city. I was born in that hospital, nearly two years earlier, and with all my fingers intact.

The attack of the French door occurred around Christmas so by the time February rolled around, I was on a routine hospital follow-up visit as the doctors tried to coax the finger to mend, microsurgery not yet in vogue.

So, there I was, 20 months old with nine-and-a-half fingers, sitting in the waiting room of the doctor’s office in the American Hospital in France with my dad and four other patients. The four other patients were John, Paul, George and Ringo.

The Beatles had just played the Olympia in Paris and were set to go to America the following week to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show. They had to get innoculations to cross the ocean and the American Hospital was (and still is) a pretty good hospital.

My dad knew who they were and I suppose he wondered if they’d have any staying power. He was only in his early thirties at the time but, having fought in Korea a dozen years earlier and danced to the Big Bands as a youth, he was certainly a generation apart from these fab rockers. At that time, he and my mom were into French chanteuse Edith Piaf and American singer/swinger Sammy Davis, Jr.

The Beatles, my dad said, pretended to be very afraid about getting their shots and commented that I, on the other hand, was quite brave. They played with me and made a fuss over the huge bandage on my little hand until I was called in to see the doctor.

My reaction to these mop tops who were about to become four of the most famous people in history? I toddled back to my dad, who still wore his hair short from his service in the Marines, and pointed at the nice young fellows. “Ladies,” I said.

Years later, as a preteen, I grew to idolize them along with everyone else, and formed a Beatles fan club with my sister. Actually, my sister and her friend Kerry were the co-presidents of the club and I was the first–and only–non-presidential member. There was a difficult entry exam consisting of Beatles trivia, which I luckily passed, but my sister took to blackballing me whenever I got on her nerves. In the beginning, all blackballing was Beatle-related. If she was, say, playing Sgt. Pepper for the 356th time and I suggested we listen to something else, she would become enraged and ask, “Are you asking me to turn off a Beatles record? Blackball!”

Sadly, the power that came with being co-president of a Beatles fan club drove my sister insane and her blackballing became increasingly irrational and capricious. If I refused to fetch her a snack from the kitchen, for example, she’d declare, “Get me some cookies or you’re blackballed!” The majority of our Beatles fan club activities consisted of my sister throwing me out of the club, then reinstating me.

The 1970s brought other Beatle sightings. Well, near misses. My sister and I spent several weeks one summer sitting across the road from Linda McCartney’s father’s house in East Hampton, Long Island, hoping Paul would show up. There was a high hedge blocking our view but we could hear the sound of tennis balls popping off racquets on the other side.

One afternoon, my sister had been on a solo stalk when she came flying through the front door of our rental house, ran into the living room, grabbed her copy of Rubber Soul, and ran back out again. She breathlessly informed me that she had heard McCartney on the other side of the hedge. That famous Liverpool voice that had crooned “Michelle” and “Yesterday” was yelling at his kids: “Mary, Stella, get off the court!”

We squealed and jumped up and down. Then we hopped on our banana bikes and sped out to meet the Beatle. We never did see him but I was quite sure, if we had, he would have remembered me and asked me how my finger was doing. This would have most likely enraged my sister and resulted in me being blackballed again.

The half-hour in the hospital waiting room when I was a baby remains my biggest Beatle sighting. Perhaps I was the only American girl that year to have them all to myself—in a completely innocent way, that is.

It’s a famous family story. I don’t really remember, which is probably a good thing because then I would remember the pain of losing my fingertip. But the details of the incident are burned into my mind to the point that I can see my wee self, my dashing father in a Savile Row suit, the lads from Liverpool joking around as we’ve all seen in those early press conferences, sitting together in a spare 1960s hospital waiting room as one era ended and another was about to begin.

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The Yankees seemed to win it all every year in the late 70s. My sister and I stay up every night watching the games on a small TV in our room. We’d rather watch the Bronx Bombers than do anything else.

Our dad is picking us up and taking us to see the Yankees play the Dodgers in the World Series. I have a new telephoto lens for my Nikon camera and am loaded up with black and white film.

I don’t remember the circumstances except that, even though they were very upsetting, they did not seem super unusual. Did I even expect it? A smooth pick up and drop off would have been out of the ordinary. We are not little kids. We are teenagers.

There is some tug of war in the entryway of the apartment. Did our mom say we couldn’t go, or that one of us couldn’t go? Our dad is getting tense in that way he always gets. Oh for godsakes. Teeth clenched, not knowing what to do. He has a big important job and makes serious decisions daily. But he doesn’t know how to deal with our mom.

Maybe she counts on the element of surprise. A power play. How was this not worked out in advance? Our dad has tickets for a certain time and day. He is coming to get us. We are ready. How does she throw a wrench into the whole thing?

We are crying. But my mother seems vulnerable somehow. I say, “I’ll stay. I want to stay with her.” I give my camera to my sister and she says she will take photos for me. There’s a hasty call to a friend. “Susan’s not feeling well. Can you go to the World Series?” Not what my dad wants. Do they have fun that night?

I really want to go to the World Series. But I also want the scene to end and I end it by throwing myself and my desires under the bus. “I don’t want to go to the game anymore.”

Later, I’ll develop the film and print the contact sheets in our high school darkroom. Thurm, Sweet Lou, Louisiana Lightning. I still look at those images with sadness and bitterness.

The best, best thing turned into chaos and crying, a test of loyalty. It was like Sophie’s Choice meets Pride of the Yankees.

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When I was a kid, I saw one episode of The Fugitive. We weren’t allowed to watch “grown-up” shows so all I remember was David Jansen working under an assumed name in a laundromat while trying to bring his wife’s killer to justice.

During tense family car rides, which were basically all family car rides, I would watch the trees and brush whiz by along edge the highway and imagine running through to the other side where there would be a town. I’d get a job in a laundromat under the imaginative alias Sally Johnson and, even though I was ten, they wouldn’t be able to tell that I wasn’t an adult. I’d work there figuring out the rest of my life until my cover was blown, and I’d have to move on.

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One day while pursuing MFA degrees in creative writing, my friend Ilyana and I found ourselves in the bookstore at Vermont College of Fine Arts, looking over the publications written by our talented faculty.

Opening one novel, I noticed our professor’s birth year on the copyright page. “Oh my God, Chris was only 30 when he wrote this. Man, I’m so behind!” I was 29.

“Susan, it’s not a race,” said the younger, wiser Ilyana. She was a promising writer when she came into the program, publishing short stories that were raw and brave.

By the time I graduated, Ilyana was already sick but we didn’t know it. After my cohort’s commencement ceremony, we celebrated but she was low energy, had no apetite. I held her cold hands and said, “Ily, your fingernails are blue. You have to go to the doctor when we get back to New York.” We were neighbors in Brooklyn.

She did, and at first was told she had pneumonia. Or maybe it was stress, all in her head. An emotional young woman. Finally, when she was so weak could only get in and out of her walkup apartment building by sitting on the stairs and scooching up or down one step at a time, she went to the emergency room where they X-rayed her lungs. There was a cancerous growth across her entire chest.

She would die within a year. She was 27.

She gave me a postcard when I got my MFA, a semester ahead of her. The image was a vintage New York subway car in the 1970s. On the back, she wrote that she hoped I wouldn’t mind if she looked over my shoulder as I wrote. I graduated in January 1993 and I feel her with me, just over my shoulder, all the time.

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I recently heard the clinical psychologist Diana Hill, interviewed on the podcast Insights at the Edge, about discovering one’s deepest motivation. She discussed a brief exercise from her book, Wise Effort, which asks the reader to write a one-star “nightmare” review of oneself, and then compose a five-star rave. Dr. Hill notes that what we regret often points to what we care about.

I took the challenge, limiting each review to one page in my notebook.

⭐My Bad Review of Susan

Susan spends a lot of time feeling sorry for herself rather than addressing things with action. She knows she’s limiting herself but ignores that in favor of the familiar, “Oh, what’s the use? Others have already done this better, and I’ve missed the boat.”

A lot of us encourage her and compliment her work, not just to flatter, but because her words really speak to us. That she discounts the value of our opinions and genuine awe over what she can do through writing is a slap in the face.

We are tired of waiting for her to emerge. I mean, we’re all busy, too. She’s nice and everything, but life goes on.

She has some great kids, and that’s big. But now what, Susie Q?

Does she even know?

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐My Five-Star Review of Me

Susan always has a smile. People feel they can approach and trust her. Even strangers find her empathetic.

She’s done some brave things in her life that were truly difficult. She prioritizes her mental health, refusing to be tired and sad all the time. She values education and loves teaching and encouraging students to recognize their own wonderful stories. She started a small publishing imprint and gave authors a chance to see their books become reality.

She cares about community, running for public office and contributing her time when she was super busy raising children.

And she loves her kids, every one of them!

She gave a lot to a difficult marriage and tried hard to be a good partner, putting her needs aside. She thought that’s what life was. She was mistaken.

She worked hard to connect with her mother and never gave up caring for her. She forgave her dad, and let him be himself, and loved him for who he was. She embraces being a friend and makes her best effort, despite her neurotic complexes.

(And that’s the rave. And it doesn’t mention writing.)

Let’s go into 2026 with new awareness, and kindness to ourselves and others.

Inspired by Insights at the Edge, hosted by Tami Simon, founder of the multimedia publishing company Sounds True.

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2020: I’m in my rented Paris apartment waiting for the coffee to brew. I pick up a wooden spoon from the counter and put it to my lips. Then I remember.

When I was in the fourth grade, I baked a loaf of bread for the first time. It may have been the only time. I’m not much of a baker.

It was a school project, and my mom had to get me my own baking supplies. My wooden spoon had a piece of masking tape to show it was mine and not my mother’s, the one she sometimes chased us with.

But on the day I baked the bread, she had us pose for pictures. She grabbed her Kodak Insamatic camera when we came in from school and must have suggested, “Make it look like you are thinking about baking the bread.”

So I put the spoon up to my mouth and held up the loaf as if to say, “Hmm, good idea!” Then Fiona got in on the act, eyes wide with excitement standing next to me, admiring the bread. We were still in our school uniforms.

I remember my mother told me the bread was delicious. She’d grown up near the Silver Cup factory in Astoria and could always smell bread baking. She and her siblings probably ate store bought bread because their widowed mother was always at work.

This was a sweet moment. Mum made a big deal. She had to have film already in the camera. And those plastic flash cubes. I can see in the photo she’d taken out the fancy glass cake plate we only used for birthdays and placed a paper doily on it.

She was recalling a pleasant childhood memory as she captured a pleasant childhood memory for us.

I wrote this when I was 57, standing in a kitchen in Paris with a wooden spoon to my lips, transported back to that moment when my mom was happy and proud.

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I traveled to Lourdes in southern France this summer to see the grotto where the Virgin Mary appeared eighteen times to 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous in 1858.

I was so moved by the devotion and respect I witnessed at the shrine that I reclaimed Bernadette as my patron saint.

When I was a tween, I chose Bernadette of Lourdes for my confirmation name. An uneducated child who tended sheep was chosen to hear directly from the Blessed Mother. I found the story completely inspiriational.

Bernadette was threatened, mocked, and even bribed in an attempt to make her recant what she described. She was very brave and became a nun, giving up true love with the boy she liked who became a priest. At least that’s what happened in the Jennifer Jones movie version.

Anyway, I thought she was all that, and French (or Occitan as that region near the Pyrenees is called), so when we all got around to choosing our names in 7th grade, I proudly announced my choice.

My mother said, “Bernadette!? Susan Winston Bernadette Brady?! That doesn’t sound right.”

This was the only chance I had to choose a name for myself. I was a Susan born in 1962. To this day, I have about seven Susans as best friends. You couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a Susan back then.

Bernadette was the antidote. I thought my mother would be pleased I even had a favorite saint. But she wouldn’t hear it. Perhaps she once worked or went to school with an irritiating Bernadette.

What I witnessed in Lourdes this past August was faith. Thousands of people processing with candles at dusk, reciting the rosary in many languages. Whether they were sick visitors (les malades) there for the healing waters, pilgrims praying for loved ones, or spiritual searchers, the scene was beautiful, sacred and inspiring. All because of a child.

I read that Bernadette Soubirous, who became Sister Marie-Bernarde, was asked how could she quietly exist in convent life after what she had experienced. She said a broom is used to sweep a place clean so people can see or understand. When one is done with the broom, it goes back behind the door. She had served a purpose, and embodied humility.

Needless to say, I let my kids choose their confirmation names, even when one of the boys chose Zacchaeus, after the despised and diminutive tax collector who climbed a tree to see Jesus. Jesus said, “Come down, Zacchaeus, I am breaking bread with you.”

Was he a saint? “Well, Jesus had dinner at his house,” my son explained.

Good enough for me.

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Our parents knew Coco Chanel. Our dad’s position at the fashion trade paper Women’s Wear Daily meant he got friendly with some of the top couturiers during his four years in Paris.

Chanel, who was almost 80 years old, took a shine to our handsome father and used to have him sit with her on the stairs at her famous couture house and tell him which designs were important that season. He knew about the industry, though I don’t think he innately understood why a pair of slacks or a blazer was significant. But he was a good reporter.

Occasionally, he was invited to Chanel’s apartment for dinner, likely a calculated move on her part. And in the early 1960s, you had to invite the wife.

“The old woman droned on interminably,” my mother told my sister and me, remembering sitting on a footstool at the knee of their host and nearly nodding off. With two babies at home, she’d have to be up early. “Thank goodness, at a bare minimum, I had a little black dress I could pop on.” She also said that Chanel offered to babysit for us.

When our parents were leaving Paris, Chanel gave Mom an onyx cigarette case from her mantel piece. Another time, the designer took off the necklace she was wearing and gifted it to our mother. We still have the pieces to prove these famous family stories.

My sister and I discovered another remnant of Chanel while cleaning out our childhood apartment after Mom died. In a chest of drawers, we found a small plastic box of prescription capsules from Switzerland, dispensed to Mademoiselle Gabrielle Chanel. Labeled procaine hydrochloride, which is novocaine, the red capsules were to be taken orally as antidepressants and an antidote for aging. A few pills were missing from the blister packs. Had Coco taken them? Or had our mother?

In 1968, we were already living back in New York, but Dad was still traveling to Paris for the collections. Had he confided in Chanel, “Florence is really depressed, and our marriage is on the rocks.” Did the couturier hand him the box of pills and say, “Maybe these will help.”

Chanel died at the Ritz in Paris in 1971, where she’d lived since a German officer arranged it during the war. Draw your own Nazi collaborator conclusions.

Dad flew off to the funeral. We stayed in our apartment on 89^th Street above the 5&10 store, and Mom made us Bumblebee tuna on Wonder Bread.

There was a power imbalance. Aside from witnessing the unseen private life of a historically significant person, was there any upside to my mother knowing Chanel? Maybe Mom kept those pills to say, “This happened. I was part of something. At least Chanel tried to save me.”

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The day after we buried our mother’s ashes adjacent to, but not with, our dad’s remains, I received a message telling me that I had failed.

I’d gotten my sister to agree, after 18 months of indecision because we were afraid to do the wrong thing, to bury our mom near our dad’s plot in East Hampton.

Our parents were estranged for most of their 50-year marriage but never divorced. In later years, they got better at tolerating each other, so I thought they could be eternally tolerant. We’d held a small graveside ceremony with just immediate family, and my sister brought spades and daffodil bulbs to plant in hopes they would bloom in spring.

The next day, I lay on the floor in the back room of our apartment. I was exhausted trying to process finally putting my mom to rest. The little room off the kitchen was my office and a spare room since our middle son left for college. Looking under the bed from my vantage point on the floor, I realized our son finally got all his junk out from underneath it when he moved to Brooklyn. Plastic bins and shoeboxes filled with baseball cards, computer cords and camera equipment. I was impressed.

The only thing left under the bed was my mother’s metal box – the kind used for important papers in case your house burns down. Every mom has one. I do.

I slid it out, sat up on the floor, and opened it. I’d taken a look through the box when she died but I couldn’t remember what was in it. Birth certificate, Social Security card, expired passport?

I noticed a small handwritten piece of paper torn from a memo pad. The raggedy edges caused my hand to pause over it. She kept everything – check stubs from 1958, envelopes with notes written on the back, receipts from department stores that went out of business decades ago. So it could have said, “quart of milk, cigarettes” or “call handyman about leaky faucet.”

But it said, “I want to be buried with my maternal grandfather in Sunnyside.”

You know that scene in The Sixth Sense where the dead person shoves a box out from under the bed, revealing a terrible secret and scaring the bejeezus out of everyone? Yeah, that one.

Eighteen months of trying to figure out the right final resting place because we didn’t want to make her mad. Now, 24 hours after putting her in the ground – the wrong ground – come precise directions. Or worse, a correction.

I heard her angry voice, “You girls don’t know your asses from your elbows. You are your father’s daughters.”

Telling my sister was not an option because she still had shovels in her car.

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My mother said this to me during a phone call in 1988, and I wrote it down. Then I forgot about it, perhaps to survive, to deny that my mother ever spoke to me the way that she did, consistently, until her death.

Don’t get me wrong. She could be nice. But she could also be very mean.

I recently opened a journal from when I was in my 20s, when I lived in Brooklyn and wrote freelance articles for women’s magazines. My mom still lived in our childhood apartment in Manhattan.

I found the transcript from the call. It was not a conversation. That’s why I could take notes. It was a soliloquy, a monologue. I don’t remember what set her off. I had probably spent time with my dad (always problematic) or I may have landed a writing gig (like father, like daughter) and told her about it. I had somehow betrayed her.

I couldn’t respond. I rarely hung up. I was trapped.

She said:

“Nothing terrible will happen to me if I don’t see you or talk to you. You are a detriment to my health. You don’t look like me and you don’t have one of my genes in you.

You couldn’t teach another person anything. You don’t care about anyone. I have great peace of mind when I don’t talk to you.

I brought you up and did a damn good job and that’s that. You two are exact duplicates of this man. Nature played a very dirty trick on me.

You opportunistic, bloodsucking nonentity.

You are rude, crude, mannerless and I don’t want any more of it. My one wish is that I had left you and your sister with your father years ago and never, never looked back.

Do me a favor. Do not call me to tell me about any stupid story you are writing or anything else.”

Saying the worst possible thing calmed her down. Like the poet who scalded her own arm to remember she was alive – I believe it was Adrienne Rich in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. Except it was my arm being scalded.

My mother repeated her stories for decades, from one century into the next, from one millennium into the next. Too deep to repudiate, the pain was embedded, institutionalized like Mount Rushmore, blasted out of rock.

I write about motherhood. I thought it used to be my topic and that, at this stage in my life, it has to be something else.

No. It’s still motherhood.

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I may have mentioned that I submitted a very short essay containing some problematic family lore to an anthology with the theme of Hope and Despair, and it was accepted. It comes out tomorrow.

Not that my extended family will necessarily read it. It’s published by a small UK press, and even we writers who are in it are maneuvering to get copies on this side of the Pond without paying monumental tariffs. I won’t reprint what I wrote here because the publisher is donating all proceeds from the book to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and that’s a good cause.

In the piece, I describe briefly how, when I was a child, a relative molested me at his home, on Thanksgiving Day, 1972.

I was 10. It lasted maybe a minute. Inappropriate touching, fondling, I knew it was wrong. I always told myself it was not a big deal.

I never told my parents. Or anyone.

But last year, during a conversation about what caused our mother to be so damaged, I told my sister about our uncle. After five decades. That’s what the two pages in the anthology are about.

Maybe some of my relatives will want to read it now.

The author Elissa Altman (Poor Man’s Feast) has published a book about memoir and what stories we have permission to tell. She once revealed a family secret that she didn’t even know was a secret and was summarily excommunicated by a slew of relatives.

It seems the rule is that if it happened to you or directly affected you, you can tell. But that doesn’t mean people won’t be upset. The collection containing my essay is titled Look Away Now, a warning that what you are about to read might be graphic, awful and something you never wanted to know.

Would it be easier to read about if it had been a stranger, say, in a dark theatre? My experience was just as brief and isolated. And it happened to occur during the annual screening of a rented movie, projected in the finished basement, where the entire family gathered. Four generations worth—my accoster's own mother (my nana), his wife, children, and grandchildren. His sisters and their kids. My parents, too.

I am telling now because it didn’t ever feel safe to tell my parents. I feared blowing up the family, as if it wasn’t already a hot mess. And I’m so tired of pretending things didn’t happen.

Very often, when we were kids, our mom delivered up a series of monologues to my sister and me that included the deepest of ancient histories...her own childhood. Her eldest brother's violence and cruelty toward her were never forgotten or lessened with time.

Then, with a seeming disconnect every Thanksgiving, our parents, even after they had separated, packed us up and drove us an hour or so to the cruel brother’s house. Most of my 17 first cousins were there, too, which made it fun in a way. But it was never peaceful. The attempt to create a Kennedyesque holiday, complete with touch football game, was always punctuated by some drama: a fist fight, an arrest, a car chase, a dog attack, multiple falls down stairs and, once, an in-law dragged by a horse. All incidents were minimized—“Everything’s fine!”—and eventually even laughed about.

So why is what happened to me even worth mentioning? Why open a Pandora’s box when people might prefer to preserve a tidier version of our family get togethers?

Because I’m Pandora, and it’s my fucking box.

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My pilgrimage to the Boulevard Jules Sandeau was meant to be a quick peek. That’s where I lived with my roommate Susan Ministri in the early 1980s. The French family who rented us a small bedroom called us les deux Suzannes, the two Susans.

Susan had gone back several years ago when she was ill with cancer and told me the apartment was now a bridge club. I don’t know how she got into the building but I’m sure she talked her way in with a smile. She was a determined and hilarious person.

On my visit to that address in early August, the intercom system next to the entryway seemed uncrackable, no apartment numbers. But I noticed up and down arrows. A directory. The first thing that appeared when I arrowed down said Bridge Club. I pressed the call button and the big iron door buzzed open. I was in.

A stern-looking woman held open the wooden door to the rez de chaussez droite, the ground floor apartment to the right.

“I’d like to see your club,” I said in French. “I used to live here.”

She stepped back, and asked me in.

“You used to live in this building?”

“No, in this apartment.”

“It was 1982,” I said. “Mille neuf cent quatre-vingt-deux.” The French have a unique way of counting and they don’t make it easy. 1982 is expressed as one thousand, nine hundred and four twenties plus two.

“Oh you were little,” she said placing her hand atop an imaginary toddler.

“No, I was in university.”

“C’est impossible,” she said. “That’s forty years ago.”

“Yes, I’m certain of the date.” I thought I might be reciting it incorrectly.

“I am 63,” I said.

“Oh,” she said raising an eyebrow, “then that’s possible. You look good.”

“Thank you,” I laughed. “You are now my friend. My name is Susan.”

“Françoise,” she said with a bow of the head. “Would you like to look around?”

We walked through the place. It was so strange, the familiar turn in the hallway. Our tiny room way in the back. It was all exactly the same except now the rooms were occupied by bridge tables. Sue’s side of the room by the door, mine by the window to the courtyard. I told Françoise about les deux Suzannes.

I took out my phone. “May I take photos?” She agreed.

“The kitchen hasn’t changed,” she said with an eye roll. “Pas de tout.” Not one bit. I was delighted by the dated cabinets and appliances.

I thanked her sincerely, telling her it was a happy time for me and the other Susan.

She said it was nothing. Her pleasure.

I left and stopped to take video of the lobby, then started to walk away. Françoise came out for a smoke. I put my bag down on a window ledge so I could quickly call up my Instagram.

“If I may? I have photos.”

She graciously said, of course.

I showed her a photo of Susan and me in the exact place Françoise and I were now standing at the front door. And then a picture of us embracing in the bedroom we’d just left.

She nodded and smiled. I thanked her again.

I turned down the street, and it overtook me. Tears I couldn’t stop. I hadn’t told the woman that Susan died in 2019. Was that why was I crying? For Susan. Or for myself and her family losing her. Or for our lost innocence. All that potential we had at 20. So much still ahead of us.

I was embarrassed to be seen crying, afraid that someone would feel sorry for me. At the same time I realized, no one in Paris is looking at you. Just be. I forced myself not to hide the tears. To let myself feel whatever it was I was feeling.

I’d come back to Boulevard Jules Sandeau alone. Instead of two women in their 60s having a raucous time at the scene of our youthful shenanigans, there were no more deux Suzannes. Just la seule Suzanne, the only Susan.

It took some moments for the sadness to diminish, the tears to subside. Then I walked the route we took every day to NYU in Paris, our school on the Rue de Passy.

And I kept going.

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So my master plan to stay in my childhood apartment while visiting Paris turned out to be too good to be true. Actually a scam of sorts.

I left my phenomenal writing retreat in Montpellier and took the TGV (très grande vitesse or super duper fast) train to the capital. I’d paid for my Paris lodgings as agreed through booking.com a week earlier. The contact at the property told me he would send a video describing how to get into the apartment before my arrival.

I started texting, WhatsApping, and emailing the owner as my train sped northward.

I’m on my way. Eager to receive instructions.

About an hour from Paris, looking forward to my stay.

Then I started calling but the calls didn’t go through.

I arrived at the Gare de Lyon and hopped the subway. I emerged in the familiar neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine where I’d rented an AirBnb five years ago. This time, I would be staying in the exact building where my parents lived when my sister and I were little.

I texted when I exited the metro:

In the neighborhood now. About ten minutes away.

Crickets.

I got to the address, surrounded by a high fence and requiring a code or a key fob for entry. There was no directory. I couldn’t even try a random apartment without knowing the number to punch in. No one was going in or out.

I looked up at the building where my life began.

I’m outside the gate, I texted into the void.

I was not going to get in. I wheeled my suitcase over to a bench. It was after 6 pm. It had been 104 degrees when I left Montpellier, and Paris was almost as stifling in the early evening.

I opened my phone and looked at hotels on a map. This neighborhood was making me depressed. I didn’t want to stay here anymore. As a college student, I’d lived in the nearby 16th arrondissement, not a bad walk on a nice day, about a half hour. But I was done walking. I zeroed in on a place called Hotel Boileau in the southernmost part of the 16th, an area called Auteuil near the Roland Garros tennis center and Bois de Boulogne park. They had a vacancy. I called an Uber.

The Boileau (pronounced bwah-low) was a sweet boutique hotel on a quiet street near the Seine. I walked in to the tiny lobby where a young man sat at the reception desk. It was a Sunday night and quiet.

C’est moi! I announced. It’s me!

He smiled and waited for more information. J’ai besoin d’une chambre pour quatre nuits. I need a room for four nights.

They had one room. Maybe the smallest room in Paris but with a balcony. Jethro the desk guy, now my BFF, set me up. I was safe and housed for my tenure in the city. The Boileau also served an amazing breakfast and was in a perfect location.

The next evening, more than 24 hours after I was supposed to check into my childhood building in Neuilly, a text from a Paris number popped up on my screen. It read:

I’m sorry but I was unconscious yesterday. I had an accident and didn’t have my phone. I can refund last night and let you in now.

I didn’t know how to respond. What does that mean? I’d already emailed a request for a full refund. Is this code for I got drunk and fell down? Had there been a legitimate accident?

I took a breath and typed back:

I am sorry for your troubles and wish you the best. As you can imagine, left sitting on a bench outside the apartment, I was forced to make other arrangements for the next four nights.

He understood. I got my refund and, in spite of the bumpy start, I had many adventures during my three full days in Paris. Including getting into another apartment where I had once lived. But that’s another story.

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