The Last Few Days of the 30s
A kinda big decade
In my 20s, I was a struggling/barely acting actor who cocktailed at a comedy club in Times Square and was dating an evangelical body-builder and then a working theatre director with a wandering eye. While trying to make it as an actress, I tried my hand at real estate brokering, telemarketing, temping, nannying, and pilates instructing over the course of my 20s, before finally, at the end of the decade, finding myself at last enrolled in an MFA in creative writing, and working for a literary agency, a literary foreign rights scout, and an NYT bestselling author/creator. I met my now-husband. I moved to Brooklyn. I celebrated turning 30 by having dinner with a few close friends and then having a party at a bar I’m sure no longer exists in downtown Brooklyn. I got drunk on champagne. I took happy photos. And then the 30s began.
You don’t need a summary. There were lots of books published. A wedding. Two babies. A pandemic. Unexpected and heart-filling new friends made on long walks in the park where you can say almost anything or outside preschools at pickup when you need a laugh and an anchor. Old friends who you somehow, miraculously, knew were special, even when you were basically a kid, kept with dinners in our apartments or meet-ups at wine bars or the saving grace of FaceTime and and text chains.
Sometimes, it feels hard to know what almost 40 year old me has in common with 20-something me. I am less scared, more outgoing, less desperate for approval, more interested in self-compassion. I moved from chais and mochas to lattes. Amaretto sours and cosmos to proseccos and margaritas. The love affair with cheese has remained. I fell in love with someone kind and easy to be around, for a change. I drew my friends closer, fell in more in love with them, too. I learned how to cook. I still like Belle and Sebastian and Gilmore Girls and The Giver. I still wear too many florals and vaguely mauve sweaters. I stopped flat-ironing my hair and wearing heels every single day. I lost and gained all the postpartum hair twice over. I said hello to two daughters and goodbye to a dog who deserved everything good, and I am still trying new writing challenges.
I recently took an overnight trip to a spa wherein I learned via panicked ER text messages that my already very allergic daughter is also allergic to cashews, but where I also learned I missed pilates. So when I returned, I went to a pilates class. The instructor came around to check our cores, to see where we were engaging. Upon touching mine, she smiled. “Have you had babies?” she asked. It was said not with disappointment, the way we have come to expect our postpartum bodies will be treated. She felt something good there, from the work of delivering babies. Something strong and functional that she appreciated. No one told us we didn’t have to only hate the things pregnancy and labor did to our bodies. No one mentioned that I was an option. When class ended, she said “you’ve done a lot of pilates before,” and I agreed, although it has been a long time since my pilates instructor days, a long time since I have been able to care for my body at all, really, after a challenging high risk pregnancy and the reality of caring for two young kids in a flu and RSV and Covid-full world.
Sometimes, when we think of the things our bodies remember, the ways in which it hangs on to the past or shows the upheavals of our lives, it is through the lens of where it has failed us, how it has been hurt. How it is worse, for what it has been through. For that one single moment in that pilates studio, what my body had hung on to— through labor and delivery, through my pilates instructor past, through the kind of strength it takes to make it through a decade of adult life— was powerful. Recognizable. I was still me, being held up by a practice learned in my 20s and abandoned, but maybe not really.
It felt something more than good. It felt real, like I am, even after the babies and the rest of it, still me. I don’t have to look like the person of 20 years ago to still, actually, be her. It felt like I am a map of experiences, and not just in the ways those experiences have worn me down but also in the ways they have built me up. It felt like 40 is just the thing that happens 20 years after 20, if you’re very very lucky. And it made me wonder what else someone could know about me, immediately, by listening to the way I say a single word or how I hold my head or what I sound like singing karaoke or what I order at a diner.
Which, funny enough, is what writing a character is like. There is something to boiling a character down to their essentials that feels like a meaningful and important part of the writing process. I didn’t realize that I would be able to do the same thing with myself.
Lately I’ve been working on a new novel that has characters in their 30s and in their childhood, and much of the work of writing that novel is in seeing where those characters remain the same, how they are consistently themselves no matter what is thrown at them. It brings me clarity in my writing— to feel contained and clear in that way. And it turns out it is bringing me grounding in real life too. I’m going to be 40 and, hopefully so many other ages too, and there will be things that change but also things that stay the same.
This week, I signed up for a four week art class. I’m terrible at art. But my kid loves art and it’s reconnected me with what is pleasurable about doing it, even if you have no talent. I am embracing what it is to do something because it is fun, and not because it will lead me somewhere. It’s possible I’ve never actually done that before. Working out was to look or feel a certain way. Learning was to enhance my career. Even dating was to find my way to an idea of family I imagined.
Only my friendships— worthy of a newsletter all their own, a book of their own even— have existed without reason, without a goal, with just the pleasure of being understood in the mess and storm and swamp and surrender of life.
But now this art class will just be to do art.
A few days ago, my curious kid with her endless questions was talking to me about hurricanes and the possibility of losing power during a storm. She was scared at first. Overwhelmed by the things in our home that you need electricity for. I reminded her that art doesn’t require electricity and she lit up. “I can draw in the dark,” she said. “I’ll draw faces and they’ll look funny because I won’t be able to see them.” She was beaming. The art, she knew, would be better for the circumstance she would make it in.
The last thing art needs, really, is a perfect moment. Like bodies, like friendships, like families and cities and characters in novels, it might be even better in a truly imperfect one.
Maybe turning 40 is a little like making art in the dark with a beloved and familiar set of crayons, in a well-worn journal. Maybe what we make will be a mess, or maybe it will be an unexpected masterpiece, but probably, really, it will be a little bit of both.
News
LAWLESS SPACES closed out the year with more accolades! It was a Nerdy Book Award Selection, a Kirkus Best YA of 2022 selection, and was honored on ALA’s RISE feminist book project list!
My next middle grade novel, THE WIDELY UNKNOWN MYTH OF APPLE AND DOROTHY, is now available for preorder! It comes out in September, and is about the complicated and life-changing friendship of a descendant of Hera and Zeus and a descendant of Pandora and Orpheus. The beautiful cover, designed by Amy Ryan, Illustrated by Karl James Mountford, is right here and is honestly simply incredible:
Recommendations
We picked up this book from the library a few weeks ago, as Fia is learning about the planets at school, and she asks for it every night. It’s funny and informative and also speech bubbles are really great for kids this age when it comes to figuring out some of the mechanics of reading, since they distill sentences into separate spaces in a way that Fia seems to really appreciate and connect to.
I read this book over the course of a few weeks? months? who knows, reading is hard to pull off these days. But I was a fan of the author’s other novel, STANDARD DEVIATION, and this one scratched the same itch— a compelling and unusual narrator, a deep dive into circumstance, a novel built entirely on the intricacies of the relationships within it.
I have a craft-loving kid, and I got her a Valentine’s making kit from this incredible Etsy shop. It came with everything one could possibly need to make really cute Valentines— a variety of ribbons and stickers and glue and patterned papers and just a great collection of stuff to craft with. We spent the last few weeks making cards for her classmates, and I am perusing the shop since it looks like they have a huge collection of things almost five-year-old Fia would be very very into.
xo