The Up and Down-ness

Hi friends.

A thing I have been thinking about lately is the up and down-ness of life and how you gotta hold onto the good bits when they show up.

Last week I was at a literary festival and I gave a reading from my memoir, specifically this part where, in 2010, I had published my third novel to middling/bad reviews and I was driving cross country supporting this book that no one was buying, doing events in small towns where no one had even heard of me in front of tiny audiences, and I felt like a real desperado the entire time.

And while I was reading it out loud in front of this audience, speaking my truth as it were, someone in the crowd was laughing particularly hard at it and I thought: oh, yeah, this stuff is funny after all, and I can laugh at this now finally, and also: oh, I am not alone in this and really never was even though it probably felt like at the time. God, I didn’t know shit then! And that’s when I was 39 years old!