I’m republishing a piece I wrote a year and a half ago. Not a word has gathered dust. The stack has lots of new readers, and I want to make this writing available to everyone outside the paywall of older posts. Part of the piece concerns Edmund White, who subsequently died on June 3, 2025 (not because of the piece).

THERE’S BEEN A THEME IN RECENT POSTS OF MINE concerning different kinds of harms to women—thoughts about the male narrators of Bob Dylan’s songs, and thoughts about Rachel Aviv’s piece in The New Yorker, concerning Andrea Skinner, the daughter of Alice Munro, who was for years, starting at age nine, sexually preyed on by Gerry Fremlin, her mother’s husband. Today, in addition, I’m going to comment on a piece by Ian Frazier, about rereading Lolita, published in The New Yorker in 2020, and a new book by Edmund White, The Loves of My Life, a chronicle of his sex life, starting as a boy.

In all these conversations, I’m looking not at individual male humans saying and doing things that harm women. I’m looking not at individual dudes as a way to isolate them as aberrant and restrict them from further circulation. I’m looking not at sex acts because they are sex acts and therefore arouse a separate category of aversion. Sex acts do not arouse a separate category of aversion. Harm is harm wherever it occurs.

I’m looking at the large and loving social embrace that has given harming women a long and healthy pass. I’m looking at the way male writers excite themselves with stories of men learning to be men, stories addressed to other men, and the way these narrators, if they even consider women as readers, are saying to women, I am the thing you should be looking at, me, me me, you should always have your attention focused squarely on my thoughts, my problems with dad, my woes, my joys.

A social trend that does no favors for women.

Sensitivity harassment and sensitivity policing, as in: this thing you are saying offends me, this thing you are saying triggers an emotional condition in me, this thing you are saying hurts my feelings, this thing you are saying you must not say because it makes me feel bad—all this has helped shift the public conversation about harms to women to the realm of the personal and away from the realm of the broadly social and political. It’s devolved to personal offense and individual wrongdoing with an emphasis on weeding out and punishing wrong doers.

It has been a disastrous shift. It’s part of why the pass that allows harming women to continue in systemic ways goes quietly about its business. And if you identify the harm as harm, the zeitgeist will say to you, “I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.” Or it will say to you, “You are a girl and so of course you are prudish and easily grossed out by what really goes on in sex. Grow up. And grow a pair! It’s the way of the world. It will never change.”

Neil Gaiman

With regard to Neil Gaiman and his long lurid history of non-consensual sexual aggression, the only story worth contemplating is the pass. There is no news in his actions. We know what humans are capable of. By humans, I mean their religions. I mean their philosophers and psychotheorists who have sworn oaths on SCIENCE that women are by nature servile sub-humans who are basically asking for it. Anyway, my point is, everyone already knows this is the broad social image of women. Read Nietzsche, Aristotle, Freud, and all the other fuckheads I am referring to. Everyone knows this already and yet the pass continues. Western culture is the pass. You want fewer Neil Gaimans? Work out how the pass operates and the power sources that apply lube to it.

From the department of: But I love women! What did I do wrong? I don’t understand!

Or: When male writers address other men and do not imagine a reader who is female as an actual human being. They do not imagine a female reader at all, it appears. And the publications that love the writing of these men.

Ian Frazier’s piece “Nabokov, Steinberg, and Me”—on rereading Lolita—in the December 7 2020 New Yorker, is about nothing you can put your finger on in a way I admire, so I read every word, as it meandered from Frazier’s memories of driving with his family as a boy from the Midwest to the southwest and stopping in the same motels with shellacked pine walls that maybe Nabokov and Vera stayed in on their flights from Ithaca—motels chronicled in loving and maniacal detail in the Lolita.

Frazier’s mother hated the book when it was published in 1955, and Frazier finds himself dutifully appalled by many aspects of it now, on what must be his umpteen rereading. I can’t remember when I last read the book, but much of it remains, or I think it remains, like a brilliant sheen vibrating over blacktop. I didn’t remember the cruelty of the book’s end with Lolita dying at 17 in childbirth, having given birth to a dead baby girl in an Alaska backwater. Since Humbert (in prison) is going to be dead soon, Lolita must be tossed into the volcano as well—with no one to imagine her—I guess?

Something of the distaste of this dawns on Frazier, although not in the way I am putting it here. He knows he’s supposed to think things in the book are disgusting, but he’s not sure what they are. He thinks it has something to do with the revelations of the #Me-Too movement. The casual way rape is treated in the book, possibly, and that in actuality there is no such thing as a nymphette.

Before wondering and worrying with furrowed brow, Frazier writes about the effect on him of reading Lolita as a young male and the way it instructed him to rhapsodize about the girls who were turning him on. He starts to sound like Nabokov, and it’s creepy and off because he thinks it’s a compliment to a female human—in the past and now—to be looked at as an instrument of male desire and only as that. He doesn’t say this is the way he used to feel. He luxuriates again now, talking to us, in the way he used to feel, and he thanks Nabokov for giving him the syntax.

He writes passages like this: “Tony had a younger sister, Rosa, who was as rosaceous as all girls and women of that name deserve to be. She had long, dark hair and dark eyes, and at an early age she grew into the plum-tinted look so admired by the old-time painters of her ancestresses.”

Frazier doesn’t notice he has no interest in Rosa and what Rosa might be thinking about anything. In thinking about Rosa, the writer goes back to the way she made him feel about himself as a boy and about how she is making him feel again now, as the old man writing the passage. She was an instrument in the past, and she remains an instrument to Frazier.

He’s addressing readers who are male. It doesn’t occur to him a reader who is female isn’t going to care about the way Rosa made the boy feel or the the man feel who is writing. The reader who is female is going to feel that an inert slab of meat, wearing a musty raincoat, has fallen on top of her and she has to push it off as quickly as possible.

Who Gets to Decide the Worth of a Topic?

The other day, I received a press release sent by a publisher. He was hoping to interest me in a forthcoming memoir. It was the story of a man, driving across the country, in search of information about his father’s life. Something along these lines. A man and his father. Two men and their whatever. I thought, Jesus (as it were), another book about men excitedly wanting to know about being men—about being sons or being fathers or some such topic.

I thought of Jesus, himself, and Abraham and God, and I thought for fuck’s sake, enough with these men and their sons and their fathers dominating our thoughts and lathering themselves up in front of us, as if their experience is important or dramatic or interesting, just because it happened to them and they insist it is interesting.

The book described in the press release might be a wonderful piece of writing, sentence by sentence. It might be a thrilling literary narrative. I don’t know, and I will never know, because I am all topped up with stories written by men about being men that are excitedly addressed to other men. Like in all bibles and most literature that has ever been written in any language.

If women are imagined reading narratives written by men about what it means to be a man and that are excitedly addressed to male readers, then women readers are basically in the same position as the women in the hotel rooms of Louis CK, asked to watch him masturbate. Can I masturbate in front of you? ask most books written by men about the excitement of being men, including the story of Jesus and his father and the story of Abraham and his father, and, you know, all the rest.

The Loves of My Life, a Sex Memoir, by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

A few months ago, I was asked to review a book for a national newspaper. I said sure. It was Edmund White’s memoir of a lifetime of gay sex. I started reading it and liked it very much. White is a great and detailed stylist. He can spot a dramatic moment in a memory from a mile away and not only pounce on it but show you, with a skillful layering of memories within memories, the social and political backdrop of a scene’s time and place.

About a third of the way through, I came to a chapter crafted with language about women’s bodies and women’s lives so stunningly arresting it had to be the focus of what I’d write. The language had received a pass from the book’s editor and publisher and for all I know from the newspaper editor who assigned the book to me, although I doubt it because most newspaper editors don’t have time to read the books they assign.

In this case, what I mean by the pass is that no one seems to have pointed out to White what a female reader would experience reading his words. I don’t think his words should have been deleted or edited. I think an editor might have raised the issue with White of what he was expressing, how it contributes to larger harms done to women, and that maybe White’s narrator would contemplate some of this, to at least register for the reader that the writer observes what he is saying.

If White’s erotic fantasy life involved imagining himself debased in the body of a person of color, let’s say, or a person understood to be poor and underclass, White’s editor would have spoken up. Of this I have no doubt. No one wants their author to be seen as a racist or a social imperialist. Describing the female body as a putrid biological condition, well okay then, no harm done to White’s reputation there.

I knew the piece I wrote would be rejected. I sent it in anyway, because I thought what I had written was important. The editor said he couldn’t publish the piece as I’d written it. He said he couldn’t publish the passages from White’s book I quoted, in order to make my points, because they would offend the paper’s readers. So are you digging this? The paper can’t quote writing in a book it assigned that would throw light on the pass—because throwing light on the pass is the offense.

This is the review I wrote.

Pretend you are a woman. Pretend you are me. It’s a thought experiment. It won’t take long, and I promise you can return to being whatever you are, or think you are, or want to be. Pretend you are me, and you are reading The Loves of My Life, a Sex Memoir, by the renowned prose stylist Edmund White, who actually is a great prose stylist, there’s no argument about that, or else how could I have read an entire book that is basically a list of fondly recalled fucks he had with men.

About a third of the way through, you come to a chapter called “Pedro” and you read these passages: “We decided it was exciting to call my ass my ‘pussy’. There’s something so low, so dirty and humiliating, about that word if applied to a man, something so smelly and endocrinal, so soppy with animal secretions, that repulses and shames at the same time. I have no idea whether coño has the same impact in Spanish, but after a few drinks Pedro liked pussy and cunt talk. It felt a bit less abjectly menstrual in another language . . ..

“Sometimes he [Pedro] seemed disgusted with . . . my insatiable need for cock . . ... His certainty that I was voracious reminded me of the nineteenth-century male fantasy of the devouring woman who destroyed man. She was a lioness licking her paws, presenting her inflamed cunt to the poor, bewildered males, despoiling them of their family and fortune by revealing a glimpse of the hairy clam under whitecaps of the lace. Her bed an altar to demeaning, insatiable lust—a huge silver Sicilian raft decorated with pairs of lovebirds and blinded cupids, but capable of witnessing a young man destroy his ambition, fortune, and health, the length of his shaft sunk into the greedy, putrescent origin of the world, bubbling sulphurously amid the overgrown underbrush.”

So, you’re me, an actual female human with the body parts referred to in White’s text, and although it isn’t lost on you the author is showing off the playful leaps of his imagination, it’s not lost on you because you have spent you life seeing your body and the life lived in that body misidentified by male writers to such an exaggerated degree it’s comical if you are in a certain mood. You have spent your life in this situation, and you can feel loathing and admiration at the same time.

What you loathe is not the comparison of an asshole to a cunt. They are two orifices you can penetrate sexually. What angers you is the way the male person happily slums in your sexuality, knowing that whatever disgust he may feel about his own body and sexual acts, he can console himself that at least he doesn’t actually have to go through life in the smelly, menstrual body of a woman.

If you are not in the mood to find White’s words comical, you take it for granted that men, gay and straight, do not tax themselves imaginatively to wonder how their words about women will land on actual women. You are so familiar with this experience, you continue reading, because what are you going to do, throw nearly every piece of writing by a man across the room and watch the bindings of their books break into dust and their pages scatter?

Sure, go ahead. You are free to. I pleasurably read on, finding much to enjoy in White’s often brilliantly detailed scenes of sex before AIDS, before even herpes. White, who is 85, began having sex in his early teens and kept going for decades with boyfriends, tricks, and paid partners, until relatively recently when he tells us he became impotent. Here, he’s conjuring an apartment shared by men he was close to “at the foot of Christopher Street overflowing with greasy wrappers from ordered-in fast food, jockstraps dangling from the shower curtain rod, pink plastic bongs over a reservoir of water, the smell of poppers and vomit, a room full of a couch in many sections, a shag rug with cigarette holes burnt into it, an empty fridge with just a frosty jar of pickles and a Coke can laboring under Pleistocene layers of ice. A toaster oven that no longer worked; a roasted fly was sitting on top of it like a symbol.”

This apartment is every apartment in a certain time and place that doesn’t exist in reality but in the memories you write now. As White flips through the index cards of his adventures, you can go with him, back to when sex was separate in our minds from dying of a disease. You thought about sex with people you knew, people you loved, people you would never speak to—a man I can still see standing in the door of a subway car. I wanted to know what people were talking about when they talked about sex. So did Edmund White.

My correspondence with the editor at the newspaper.

In turning down my piece, the editor was polite and respectful. He suggested I might want to rewrite the piece so it didn’t center on what he called my “reflection on how the book taps into a vein of writing that disturbs you.”

This is what I wrote back:

Thanks very much for inviting me to write for you and offering me the assignment. I’m going to turn down your suggestion to rewrite the piece, although I appreciate your willingness to spend time with me and my work.

I do want to address a comment you made in your email about the White book: “your reflection on how the book taps into a vein of writing that disturbs you.” You characterize my commentary as some form of personal aversion and maybe a set of ruffled feelings, as if my thinking reflects, perhaps, a prudish reaction to graphic writing about sex or is asking the writer for some kind of reform. I couldn’t care less about teaching White, or any male, anything.

The reason I wrote what I wrote, in hopes (very dim, admittedly) the paper would want to publish it, is that White is expressing an understanding of femaleness as degraded and disgusting—a thing it’s okay to defile and revile—that’s no different from the way religions and other powerful forces in cultures and societies have for centuries justified controlling the bodies of women, and the lives lived in those bodies. I’m writing about a gigantically important social and political reality.

It’s a longstanding form of flicking away the political insights of feminism to consign them to the private and idiosyncratic spheres of life. The other day, I posted an anecdote on social media that is, in it’s own way, another example of the point I’m making to you here. The post prompted a great amount (for me) of positive reaction. Your paper might be missing a chance to feed a hunger for the insights I’m making. Here’s the post:

In 2006, I went to a dinner party, and a woman named Julia told the group she’d spent the evening before with two prominent male writers, one gay, the other straight. They’d turned the pages of a book of portraits of Susan Sontag and made no comment except to snicker about the aging in her hands. It had been one thing for Sontag to charge around the world as a public intellectual when she was beautiful and young. The men might have been forced to pay attention to her then. No matter how accomplished and famous she’d become, though, she had still done it in the body of a woman. A body, the men were saying, that was universally considered fair game for ridicule—and ridicule that could be used to discredit her overall. Her mind hadn’t grown wrinkled and shriveled, so they could take her down with her hands.

I always wonder, in the case of an ugly and demeaning characterization of women—one that gets a public pass—how a publication or individuals would react if instead of the words “woman” and “women,” the writer was projecting a hateful fantasy onto a “black person” or “a poor person.” In the case of White, though, the comparison would be empty because it wouldn’t be conceivable. His point is there is nothing so degraded and disgusting in existence he can happily imagine himself to be, no place lower to demean himself than placing himself mentally in the body of a woman. A body he knows he doesn’t really have to live in.

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Meatloaf (not the singer)

YESTERDAY, I WAS EATING MEATLOAF cold from the fridge, not even a plate, right out of the storage bowl, and I thought: How can I honor Meatloaf (not the singer), and I thought: I could tell the story of how Meatloaf came to be.

By the way, Meatloaf respectfully requests that you not ask follow-up questions or introduce him to other Meatloafs you think he would benefit from meeting. He’s a loner. He doesn’t even use a dating app or visit the meatpacking district.

To prepare Meatloaf, one of Richard’s jobs is to fine chop the jalapeño pepper. I have stored frozen jalapeños that will blow your head off soon as look at you, so R fine chops a small amount. He also fine chops the herbs growing on the deck. Italian parsley, thyme, basil, and Thai basil. He cubes the bread. What kind of break? The best bread we have in the house.

The other day it was a sour dough with raisins, so the raisons went into Meatloaf. Also garlic powder, black pepper, salt, hoisin sauce and sweet chili sauce. Also two entire packages of mirepoix from the Hannaford’s. You want to fine dice a ton of carrots, onions, and celery, go ahead.

I tried making Meatloaf entirely with ground turkey with 15% fat. It wasn’t good enough. So Meatloaf is one package of ground turkey and one package of ground beef. The really good kind of ground beef. Are we going to die sooner because of the ground beef? Probably.

All this is dumped on a sheet pan lined with parchment paper. The assemblage is beautiful and big. The important thing is big. We go through Meatloaf like rats on a tear, no matter how big it is. My job is mixing it all with my hand, mix mix mix, squish, squish squish and forming it into a mound that Meatloaf can be proud to call himself. Sort of round and flattened on the top and then slathered with Heinz ketchup on all sides.

Into a 400 degree oven for I don’t know how long and before the ketchup starts to get a few browned spots. The juices will ooze while it’s hot and then thicken again when cool. Richard likes to eat his evening meal hot. When Meatloaf is cold, he’s sort of like a pâté, with all those vegetables marbled through.

Buon appetito!

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1.

I USED TO PRACTICE TAP STEPS while in the subway. Everyone danced on the platforms. The sound was sharp. It’s sexy to cut someone’s hair. When I was a bartender, I was generous with the alcohol. I wanted people to be happy. The brains of protohumans developed for 70 million years, although in the last two million they almost doubled in mass, advancing from the one and a quarter pound brain of Homo habilis to the nearly three pound brain of Homo sapiens. For years in the 1960s and 1970s, I read books with orange spines by women. Virago and Penguin editions. Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Colette, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Violette LeDuc, Jean Rhys, Gayl Jones, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton.

A bird was perched on a curtain rod in the bedroom of my friend Stella. She said, “It’s an English sparrow.” It looked sad. Stella praised her cat for not eating it. She said, “What’s the plan?” I said, “I’ll get a towel around it and carry it out.” We were wearing underpants. I was able to coax the bird from its perch, and it flew around in panic. Stella screamed and hit the floor, covering her head. I said, “What are you afraid of?” She said, “I’m afraid you’ll hurt it.” I said, “I won’t hurt it.” She said, “You really can’t be sure.”

The other morning, I recapped the last episode of The Queen’s Gambit for Richard. We were in bed, drinking tea. I said at the end, the protagonist chess prodigy teenaged girl is alone in Moscow with a group of old men, who sit outside playing chess at cafés. She plays them. A sense of peace falls over their world. As I spoke, a curtain of tears fell from my eyes. Whatever I told him about, I cried, and I was sad when there was nothing left to report. Who is this girl to me? Every girl who ever wanted something?

“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” wrote Hegel in 1805 in Lectures on The Philosophy of History.

2.

ON SATURDAY, A MAN CAME TO BUY A RUG. He had a happy beard. He said, “This rug is perfect.” I said, “It’s time for it to live with you.” Years ago, a man named Ron Dabb had sold it to me at the flea market on Columbus Avenue. It was a small, handmade piece from Turkey. Ron was a beautiful man, who bought rugs from estates after people died. I liked him very much and trusted anything he said about rugs. I think he liked me, too. Lately, I have been rethinking whether people I thought liked me, actually liked me as much as I thought they did. Maybe they liked me a little less or a lot less.

Why would I rethink something like this? The answer is Richard. Richard has taught me something that may not be true and I am trying on, which is the possibility that when you think someone likes you, you may be misreading the situation, the cues, the social context. For example, a situation in which you are buying something and the other person wants to sell it to you, something like that could color the way their eyes meet yours, the way they hold their head a little closer to you than a stranger generally would, the way they smile when they see your outline take shape as you approach.

Why would Richard instruct me to think twice about a conclusion I’d drawn about my status in the world? Because (one) Richard is generally more observant than I am about what’s going on around him, (two) Richard doesn’t presume anything about the secret feelings of any other person on the planet, including the inner lives of people he has lived with for decades, and (3) Richard enjoys not trusting people because that way he can’t be disappointed if they turn out to be untrustworthy.

Not a single one of these factors applies to me. Still, he’s persuasive and influential, and I’m enjoying rethinking my life. The past is stray cats, anyway, not because I’ve forgotten it. Because I don’t need to overcrowd the experiences of now. Also, it’s the joy of taking part in anything with Richard.

3.

I LOVED THE FIRST SEASON OF THE BEAR. So did a lot of people. My reservation was its focus on Carmy, a sadsack man whose sadsack manness threatened to blow the rest of the action to the margins of its restaurant setting. The way, in real life, sadsack manness, blithely working on the assumption its needs are central and its sadness of interest to others, blows everything else in the picture to the fringes and beyond. That time when Carmy accidentally locked himself in the walk-in refrigerator, they should have left him there.

The show worked because it was also about a crew of people who were sad and wore their sadness privately. They didn’t assume they were central to anyone, including themselves. They were men and women who were uncared for, unnoticed, underpaid, easily exploited, unloved but not unlovable. They were of various ethnic minorities. The show loved them, and slowly, with Carmy as the catalyst for their change (although not his own), the band of social marginals became a practiced crew of restaurant professionals with madly successful culinary results.

Also, centrally, they gained an ability to love the lives they were able to make with each other. Every single character--except Carmy--became a person they could feel good about being because they were part of a team with the others.

The show lost interest in what it set in motion after season one, with the exception of an episode with Marcus in Copenhagen, learning to become a pastry chef, and another episode with Richie in “Forks,” where he learns to manage the front of the house at a Michelin starred restaurant, run with Zen calm by Andrea, played by Olivia Coleman. The Bear kept looking at sadsack Carmy and his stupendously uninteresting family, helmed by Jamie Lee Curtis eating every shred of scenery off every plate and shouting and grimacing as if shouting and grimacing make good drama. [I beg you not to praise Jamie on this post because I can’t be responsible for what will happen.]

The other day, Hulu released the final season of eight episodes in one go, and I watched them. Richard was reading beside me on the couch with headphones on, listening to something else. I liked Season Five. Should you watch it? Maybe, if, like me, you like the moment-to-moment events of a restaurant kitchen. Season five returns to its original strengths: the world of professional cooking and the structural transformations of the members of the team.

By now, they are looking to love life itself, not only each other. Their anger and grief have washed out, somehow. It’s not a mystery, the show says. Working hard and working in a team, where everyone pulls their weight and the whole is hugely greater than the sum of its parts, produce joy and satisfaction that are unequaled experiences. This is what the world needs—love, sweet love. The characters have figured that out.

4.

WE ARE IN THE PART OF SUMMER where the gardens are not yet stressed by the heat to come. Warren Street has filled with visitors, who walk around with their heads turning at this store front or that passerby, the way people do at a resort. Hudson is not really a resort. I used to pass people I liked the look of and ask if I could take their picture. It was a feature I posted called “The Beauties of Warren Street.”

The other day, we were passing a row of people outside Le Perche, when I spotted two men, who were startlingly attractive. The one on the left had orange hair and prominent ears that matched the jut of his cheekbones. His midriff was bare, and his long legs were braided. His boyfriend was beautiful too and had darker skin and a skeptical smile. His smile was the physical form of Richard’s suspicion of everything.

Richard was by now far enough down the block not to be mistaken for someone who could be with me. Things went well with the two young men, and I posted their picture. When I found Richard, he said, “How did it go?” I said, “They were fine with having their picture taken. I signed them up to my Substack.” He said, “Does it ever cross your mind, people think a stranger coming up to them is going to ask for money?” I said, “I was wearing my $1000 sunglasses.” He said, “They might think you were asking for money if you were wearing the jacket.”

He meant the shredding jacket of his I’d fished out of the garbage some years ago and won’t throw away. It has tears in the shoulders from carrying my bag and from being very old before Richard threw it out. Here is the thing I want to tell you. Never in a million years would it have crossed my mind to consider that someone might take me for a street hustler. At a moment like this, you can either reject new information or, again, try it on.

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We are in this together, I like to think.

We are part of a team that makes the whole so much larger than each of us separately, and I love the thing we are making together. It’s more than the posts and the Zoom conversations. It’s a hand reaching out in the dark to find your hand. How we find each other, ask the algorithm. Every day I wake up happy we are together.

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The next Zoom conversation on writing craft is Saturday July 25 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP, please write to me at: lauriestone@substack.com

The focus will be on writing DRAMATIC NARRATIVE. What is it? How you can use it to write fiction, creative nonfiction, memoir, criticism, autofiction, travel writing, monologues, and just about any other genre people have named.

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Allthereness

Yesterday, I had a tooth extraction and a bone graft in preparation for an implant. I needed to drive us back from Albany. Richard hasn’t yet been cleared to drive because of his cataract surgeries. Two old idiots, is how R put it. A right hand to scratch what the left hand can’t reach. I chose nitrous oxide for the procedure.

I thought I might like it as a drifty altered state. You know who you are according to how much of yourself you want to suspend. If nitrous oxide could erase the mistakes of my past, I would be for it. It didn’t make me anxious. It didn’t make me happy. It didn’t make me unhappy. It made me spacey in a way I didn’t enjoy.

I breathed it for a pretty long time, while the surgeon came and went in the room. I think the thing on the chair he worked on with an open mouth was accessible, the way the baby seal pup was I helped rehab in Alaska after the Exxon oil spill.

I didn’t mind being docile. Docile is nice. I was bored by the state I was in. I had access to my thoughts. They were not interesting thoughts. They were the thoughts of a seal pup (I may be overreaching here). I like the feeling of alcohol as an elevator drop. I remember having morphine after a knee ligament was repaired. Morphine, yes, also the drug they give you for a colonoscopy.

________________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD on writing DRAMATIC NARRATIVE: July 25, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout session/slam readings following the Zooms

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about DRAMATIC NARRATIVE is on SUNDAY JULY 26, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt, and others, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

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AI could pass the Turing test but not the Bechdel test.

I LOVE THIS SHOW. So far, seven out of ten episodes have aired. I love the star, Tatiana Maslany, and the supporting cast, all of them, there isn’t a clunker in the batch, and the jangly pace of the plotting and directing. I love it all. It’s funny and deathy. Big stakes all the time. I don’t know why anyone liked Widow’s Bay, which also offers a mix of grim and scare and comedy and is as boring and inconsequential as dirt flaking off a decomposing log. The only thing I’m uncertain about regarding Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed is if it’s stupidly following a long, long tradition of punishing women for tampering with sex. Tampering with sex outside the boundary of sex with a man in an actual body, who decides things.

I am born, and in a jump cut I’m at Barnard College in 1965, and my English teacher turns out to be Kate Millett, who will go on to write Sexual Politics and will help launch the women’s movement in the United States and everywhere else on the planet. What do we want? So many things. What is one of the things we don’t shut up about? Being divided into virginal, good-girl door mats and raging, man-eating whores. We want the sexual revolution to be about us getting off any way we can and with whomever we feel like doing it with, the same way men want these things and people just say about that, Well sure.

The women’s movement is five minutes old, and right away coming at us are movies showing sexually out-front women as killers, lunatics, losers, and sad girls no one will ever love. Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, on and on. You like sex and you are a girl, you get punished for it. You like sex and you are a girl, you force the formation of a society, all of whose laws are organized to control the sexuality of female humans. I’m referencing Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, a six-season love letter to the porn of watching females suffer. You thought I was talking about America, now. That, too.

Tatiana plays Paula, a divorced single parent, who is so loving and on it with her smart-mouthed daughter (Nola Wallace), this kid will never need therapy. At night, alone or when her daughter is sleeping, Paula dials onto a porn site, modeled on OnlyFans, and masturbates with the hot-and-tender assistance of her cam boy Trevor (Brandon Flynn). For about three breaths, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed lets you drink in the handy kink available to women, courtesy of the web, before Paula’s techno-pleasure sweeps her into so much violence, threat, and spaced-out mayhem, you can’t help wonder if you are smelling a rat in all this. Is the show another cautionary tale, meant to scare women into keeping it in their pants? By it I mean their fantasy lives, their erotic preoccupations, and their completely unsecret enjoyment of masturbating?

I don’t know the answer to this question. Maybe it is another rap on the knuckles to women. It’s the brain child of show runner David J. Rosen, who wrote most of the episodes, and director David Gordon Green. It’s their baby, two men. Men understand zero about what they may unconsciously be saying to women about masturbating to porn—an activity a gazillion men enjoy daily. You pay a cam boy, and watch out, ladies, the next thing you know you will discover a dead body, you will be accused of two murders, your ex-husband will have ample grounds to assume full custody of your child, and your job will be on the line because you are preoccupied with a murderous lunatic (played brilliantly as always, by Murray Bartlett), a murderous lunatic who is blackmailing you for more money than you have and, while you are out of your apartment, feels free to eat the food from your fridge you were planning to have for dinner that night.

In the show’s defense—I mean the case for it not containing a censorious, woman-punishing rat—there’s the fact that Paula’s life was a wildly unstable mess before her entanglement with cam boy Trevor. We’re meant to feel that Trevor is a time-out for Paula from all the mess she can’t control. So there is that.

Do my reservations about the possible, dimly-misogynist minds of the show’s creators dampen my pleasure in the acting, the story, the humor, the tense ride, the surprises? Not for one second. Why is that? Because the casting is genius. This show really sharpens your alertness to casting. Take Dolly De Leon as Detective Sofia Gonzalez, who has to be very smart and also wrong—because there is no thriller without mistaken detective work—and she pulls it off with her hard-boiled and absurd one liners. Sofia to Paula: “Thank you for seeing me. You want some cashews?"

Pleasure is pleasure. You feel it, or you don’t feel it. It has nothing to do with anything else. There’s no way of knowing for sure if the rat I smelled is there or isn’t there. What I would put money on—although it can’t be proved—is that it didn’t cross the minds of Rosen and Green that I and other women would have to smell a rat in a story that pairs a woman getting off to porn with a woman’s life going down an enormous crapper. Art seduces you into its world, and sometimes, as in the case of this show, with your reservations intact. I remain seduced, and my reservations remain intact. That this is possible is also a deep pleasure. Why? Because art doesn’t need to care about anything but seducing you.

______________________________________

A little love for stackie?

If you enjoy the writing, I hope today is the day you will jump in with paid support. It’s super easy and this Substack is among the least expensive publications to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you. Please don’t be shy. The number of paid subscribers is part of what determines a publication’s success on the platform. Just write to me at: lauriestone@substack.com

_____________________________________

The next Zoom conversation on writing craft is tomorrow, Saturday June 27 from 3 to 4 EST, and there is still time to RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Everyone is welcome to ask questions about their own writing practice.

I am happy to share everything I know—at least what I think about writing a sentence, writing a paragraph, writing dialogue, creating a narrative voice, a narrative persona, and all the rest. One of tomorrow’s topics is: How do you produce suspense, tension, and amplification, working with language in a way that’s similar to musical composition? How do you learn to hear your music and work it into your pieces?

Also: How you can write through your values and politics instead of directly stating them and turning your writing into a lecture or an instructional manual?

Also: How you can turn any kind of text referred to by others as fiction, nonfiction, memoir, criticism, reporting, travel writing, etc. into DRAMATIC NARRATIVE.

_____________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and finding the music inside you and in a piece of writing: June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

__________________________________

I used to feel thrilled

on a weird and heightened scale when someone I thought was way out of my league took an interest in me, took me up, liked me, was attracted to me, befriended me. It was a mighty thrill, however long the connection lasted. Maybe I thought such experiences were lifting me up in my own eyes, saying that life is unexpected and full of possibilities you can’t predict. Something like that.

I am thinking in particular about a man who was vastly more talented and glamorous than I would ever come to be, who took an interest in me in my early thirties. It didn’t last. I always felt star struck or something like that and couldn’t keep up with the brilliance and seriousness and smarts and fabulousness of the people he knew. I liked it. I felt nervous. I made mistakes. I liked all of it then, and I like all of it now, the fact that it happened, I mean.

This kind of experience can’t happen again because I’m no longer in that category of person to whom such a thing can happen. I’ve aged out. I begin to see there can be such a category. And then you have to think: How do I feel about having aged out?

To be continued . . .

ON DECEMBER 30, 2019, MIKE THOMSON REPORTED ON BBC RADIO 4 that cats outnumbered people in the town of Kafi Nabi, situated in Syria’s last rebel-held province. Forty thousand people had once lived in the town. By the end of 2019, fewer than 100 people remained as bombs shredded the area. People were feeding the cats that were crying from the noise. Each remaining resident was caring for between 12 and 15 animals. Said Salah Jaar, a 32-year-old news reporter for a local radio station, told Thomson, “Whenever I eat, they eat, whether its vegetables, noodles or just dried bread. In this situation, I feel that we are both weak creatures and need to help each other.”

I can’t think of a better approach to life than this one, as we are swept up in the spasms of history. I don’t watch movies and steaming shows about war. Movies about war are always about the wars to come. Pleasure when it stirs feels out of sync with reported news, because it is out of sync with reported news.

Yesterday, the sheep on the neighboring farm were sitting on the ground. Richard thought they knew it was going to rain and were saving a dry spot, like birds on nests. The sun came out in the afternoon, and it was blinding. I’m watching squirrels dart across fields and race up trees. I’m watching the day lilies bloom. I read the poems of a friend. I bought a small Turkish kilim from a woman who looked like a young horse stepping high in new-mown grass. Cats always know their position in space. Their inner-ears contain an internal gyroscope. They have the most flexible spines of all mammals and can right their heads and twist their bodies while falling.

One night in New York, I met a woman at a party who had worked for ten years as a go-go dancer. Her hair was dark and shaped around her face like a cloche hat. She sat with her back very straight, wearing a leather dress that zipped down the front from her throat to the hem. She had been living in Los Angeles. On average she’d earned between $300 and $500 a night, all in cash. She’d moved to the States from Poland and at that time was undocumented, so she’s been unable to open a bank account and had paid for everything in cash, including her tuition to college and later law school.

She said she’d liked dancing. She’d liked the attention. She’d liked using her body in this way, separately articulating legs, arms, head, and torso, and working up a sweat. She said, “I didn’t have to go to a gym. I could eat whatever I wanted.” She would dance for half an hour then take a half-hour break, working for nine hours during a shift. Each dancer had the stage to herself for her set.

During the time she was dancing, she met a man who was married. He threw over his life to be with her and in time bought the go-go bar where she worked. Every so often, police would raid the premises, and the man would arrange to have the charges dropped. The woman was composed and mysterious, casting a calming spell with her soft Polish vowels, and I tried to imagine her onstage, enjoying the dance. She was telling me everyone has a secret life.

Two months after Richard left Yaddo, he took a lease on a house on Miller and MacDowell, in one of those condominium complexes near a series of strip malls. There was a communal pool we swam in and communal hedges of oleander we walked past. On my third visit to Arizona, we were on our way back from the communal trash dumpster when I spotted a black plastic pail in front of a hedge. It looked like a dead stick, and I said to Richard, “Let’s take it home,” and he said, “I knew you would say that when you saw it.”

The house had what is called an Arizona room, which was a small front patio, where there was a hose. I scraped the stick’s brown husk, uncovering a bit of green. I began to water it, and in time it sent up a shoot that unfurled into a palm frond. I recognized the species from a nearby park where we walked and where the palm’s relatives grew wild along the edges of a manmade lake. The park was not really a park but part of the system of washes that collect water during the short periods of massive desert downpours. These were thrilling. The sky would turn a pink the color of desert rock and lightening would crack open the sky. You could feel the thunder move through you the way the lightening would rush down into the ground.

We repotted the plant into a proper terra cotta pot and named it Palmy, and for fourteen years it moved where we moved, growing into a tree over eight feet tall. In 2019, I didn’t know what would happen to Palmy when we left Arizona for good. The plant had come into our lives at the start of our relationship. It was part of us or it symbolized us in the accidental way we’d met and the way, in time, we’d peeled back the layers of each other. How were we alike? How were we different? One way we were alike is we had both left home at seventeen and never again lived with our parents, not out of anger. We were just ready to go. Another way we were alike was that, as children, we’d lived largely unsupervised by adults. Your parents would let you out the door like a dog. You’d run around where you liked and return home for meals.

The woman who owned the house we had rented for ten years was not a friend to Palmy’s species or perhaps to any palms. The fate of Palmy weighed on me. I think it weighed on Richard, too, although you can’t be certain of a thing like that in his case. The English restraint. The interestingly cold-blooded way he can enter a chapter of life and leave it.

One day, close to the date we would leave, I asked our neighbor Samantha if she would adopt Palmy, and she said yes. Palmy could come live at her house, and all the worry of the move fell away. This is the neighbor I would call from New York when I couldn’t get Richard on the phone and knew he must be having a low blood sugar. Samantha lived alone with two small white dogs. She had worked as a nurse. I would alert her something could be wrong. She would find the secret key we left outside, and she would find Richard, who was either naked or wearing underpants in bed, and she would bring him orange juice. I would hear her on the other end of the phone saying, “Come on, Richard, have some juice,” as she held his head and held a glass to his lips, and I would stay with them until Richard was back to himself, thanking Samantha, and we would feel the good fortune of a neighbor like Sam. I feel it now.

________________________________________

The next Zoom Conversation on writing craft is on the music in a piece of writing. How to find it, and how to play it. THIS SATURDAY JUNE 27 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP, please email: lauriestone@substack.com

Everyone is welcome to ask questions about their own writing practice.

Every writing technique I think about can be taught and practiced. That’s my theory of writing. Nothing magical. No muse, no waiting for inspiration, no trophy of perspiration. No romanticized notion of talent, really. To me, these ideas sound like predestination. You either got it or you don’t got it. In my mind, you can get it, and I am happy to share everything I know—at least what I think about writing a sentence, writing a paragraph, writing dialogue, creating a narrative voice, a narrative persona, and all the rest. How do you produce suspense, tension, and amplification, working with language in a way similar to musical composition? How do you learn to hear your music and work it into your pieces?

____________________________________

Support

The stack needs you. It’s funded entirely by paid subscribers—no angels or grants—and for it to continue and develop, new subscribers need to take a turn. If you have been enjoying the writing for a while, I hope today is the day you will jump in. It’s super easy and this Substack is among the least expensive ones to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you. Please don’t be shy. The number of paid subscribers is part of what determines a publication’s success on the platform. Just write to: lauriestone@substack.com

You get invited to 12 Zoom conversations on writing craft for free. You get past recordings for free. You get to read the entire archive of 317 literary pieces for free any time. You get a free 15-minute phone conversation with me about your writing practice if you are considering working with me one-on-one.

For everyone who is already a paid subscriber, I send love. In other news, is recovering well from his two cataract surgeries. I was a bit concerned, with his acute vision now, he would know what I actually look like. He said he could always see me.

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

______________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and finding the music inside you and in a piece of writing: June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

__________________________________

I THOUGHT RICHARD WOULD FORGET his life in Arizona after we left, and he has, just as I have forgotten my former lives that in retrospect are stray cats. In the future perfect verb tense, we imagine a future that has already passed—one of the great and beautiful gifts of grammar.

WHEN I LIVED IN THE CITY, each morning I would walk down Broadway and up Columbus Avenue, and on Broadway guys sold things passed along to them by the supers. Things left in basements. Art, books, records, rugs, clothes. In this way, the city is a river. I knew guys I would talk to. One day, around 73rd Street, this Hockney is leaning against a wall of books. $10. It lived in my apartment on 99th Street, and now it lives in our house in Hudson. Richard's dad once made a linen jacket for David Hockney, who never sanded his Yorkshire accent. The story is Richard's dad made a linen jacket for a man who said he was David Hockney's cousin. We are all rivers flowing into each other.

A few years ago, on the day of a solar eclipse, a woman in the city said to me, "Try my glasses." I said, "I think I'm afraid of them." I have never been prepared for the eclipse of anything in life. She said, "They're totally black and safe," and she placed them over my sunglasses and said, "Look up." I saw a tiny sliver of moon. Like a cartoon moon. Like a banana. It seemed really far away. She said, "Wasn't that fun?" I said, "Yes." She was excited. We were in front of the Belnord, where I B Singer had lived. Everyone in Manhattan was there with a dog, and the dogs all had their heads turned at the same angle. Free food was offered, as at some point it always is on Broadway.

I had friends who didn’t eat in their apartments. I would open their refrigerators, and there would be leftovers from expensive restaurants. The bits of this and that they had scooped into aluminum tins would grow mossy topiaries because they didn’t eat in their apartments. It was a common way to be safely semi-anorexic. On the road I walk now, I pass a house that had been owned by a priest I met once, and on this property is a small house in addition to the regular house, a small house the size of a playhouse with a miniature front porch, and it is painted a shade of blue so dazzlingly unlike anything else on the road, I call it peacock blue, even though I don’t know if this color exists.

I take advice from people about what show to stream, and the despair of existence falls over me. On the other hand, I enjoyed CB Strike (HBO), a British private eye series starring Tom Burke and Holliday Grainger. The missing leg blown off in Afghanistan. The smoldering-soul-mate-married-the-wrong-guy romance between the leads. The London locations and pubs. I don’t understand any of the plots and don’t care, and you won’t care, either, although why should you take my word for anything? Every day I ask myself, Why can’t you be easier on people? Why can’t you be nicer? And every day I wonder, What are you really asking with these questions?

The summer I was 21, I hitchhiked alone around Ireland. It was always raining, either a fine mist or a splashing downpour, and I got used to walking on lonely roads with a towel wrapped around my head and one of those American raincoats cinched tight around the waist. I was wearing the worn jeans of a boy I had met in London and who had sent me on this adventure, so I would see more of the world than his flat in World’s End. Sometimes, when I was afraid on the road, I thought there was something soft about me. I didn’t have that much of a bourgeois life to slough off compared to the well-appointed girls I’d met at Woodmere Academy and Barnard. Still, I had something to escape, as does everyone, and that is where you find the fun of life.

The Wizard of Oz is one long argument against its stated message of seeking a return to home. No one believes anyone would prefer the black-and-white world Dorothy is rescued from. No one would believe she misses her aunt, who out of cowardice and fake piety hands over Dorothy’s dog to a woman with money and social power. No one would believe the three grown male farmhands are content to work for Em, who scolds them for not attending to their chores. The pleasure in the film are the performances by the great hams of Vaudeville, given set pieces in the movie, chiefly Bert Lahr as the cowardly lion with a Brooklyn accent. That accent is the truth of the movie, the smell of Times Square and urban life, where every kind of misfit missing a heart and a brain and courage sit in the same bar, wanting the night never to end.

Four years ago, I decided to give up my apartment in New York. It meant I would not be able to live there again. New York is where I was born and where I had lived most of my life. I didn’t care if I never lived there again. The apartment itself had been a marriage of convenience.

What I miss about the city is falling in love with strangers. It’s easy to fall in love with a person you don’t know. What you have fallen in love with is the belief that the tiny bit you have learned is who the person is and that you will speak the same language.

I was excited about being a person who didn’t live in New York because I didn’t yet know how it would feel. It was like waiting for the buzzer to ring before a date, and you danced around to Jimmy Cliff singing “The Harder they Come, the Harder they Fall.”

I was thinking about my belongings with giddy anticipation. When I cleaned out the space, it made me feel I was adding time to what I had left. I think what I was imagining is that tossing out boxes of this and that would make me lighter, and the thin rats have a better chance of succeeding in the tests they are run through. It was the opposite of building a garden or writing a piece—or maybe it’s the same.

I remember watching my mother roll nylons up her slim thighs and attach them with little garters that hung from her hips. The hands of humans are converted fins. Our hiccups are relics of breathing through gills.

In “A Journey into the Animal Mind” (The Atlantic, March 2019), author Ross Anderson writes: “We last swam in the same gene pool with the animals that evolved into fish about 460 million years ago, more than 100 million years before we split from birds. The notion that we are kin across this expanse of time has proved too radical for some, which is one reason the ever-changing universe described by Darwin has been slow to lodge in the collective human consciousness. And yet,

“Many invertebrate lineages never developed anything beyond a rudimentary nervous system, a network of neurons dispersed evenly through a wormlike form. But more than half a billion years ago, natural selection began to shape other squirming blobs into arthropods with distinct appendages and newly specialized sensory organs, which they used to achieve liberation from a drifting life of stimulus and response.”

A few years ago, we rewatched Day for Night (1972), Truffaut’s love letter to making movies. Everyone in the film looks young. Even the characters meant to be old look young. Movies are the most important thing in their lives. I remembered having a most important thing I shared with other people—the women’s movement, the Village Voice. In Day for Night, Truffaut is saying goodbye to a certain kind of filmmaking that is freewheeling and financed by people who don’t need to get rich. A friend who is Russian is writing with knowledge and grief about Russia, and I think he is writing about a kind of disappointment that can’t be soothed. People talk about being kind. Maybe they mean give something of yourself away as often as you can.

On Columbus Avenue one day, I was outside a café when a woman approached. I told her I would watch her scooter. She was beautiful. A few minutes later she was back outside and said, “They don’t have what I want.” I said, “What do you want?” She said, “One of those room-temperature pizzas.” I said, “Oh, yes,” pretending I knew how they tasted. I was on a bench with coffee from another place down the street that was cheaper. The room temperature pizzas were made with puff pastry. The people who ate them were young and fit. Maybe they spent the day working off the calories riding scooter in pastel clothes. The woman said, “I need to pee, and they don’t have a bathroom.” I directed her across the street to where I peed. Her front teeth were prominent and sexy. I said, “I’ll watch your scooter." She said, “Really?” I said, “I’m here.” While she was away, I thought about a man who had asked me to forgive him for three years. He had done something shitty to me, and one day I didn’t care, anymore. The next time he called, I told him we could be friends, and so far I have not heard from him again. Maybe what I gave him was enough. Every time I fluff for Zoom, I spray on perfume, even though I think: Schmendrick, that was in a different life.

_________________________________________

I like talking to you.

And as much as I do, the stack needs you. It’s funded entirely by paid subscribers—no angels or grants—and if new subscribers don’t take a turn at support, it will go away. If you have not yet taken a turn, it’s super easy and this Substack is among the least expensive ones to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you: lauriestone@substack.com

For everyone who is already a paid subscriber, I send love.

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

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Zooms conversations on craft.

RICHARD AND I WILL CONTINUE OUR ZOOM CONVERSATIONS ON WRITING for the next several months, focusing on elements of craft and form you can add to your toolkits as creative writers—and as readers.

At the last session, on May 30, the focus was on the difference between “story” and “memory.” I made the spontaneous claim that a memory might best qualify as material for a “story” if the story was about rethinking the memory. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, after all. Using the baby prompts: “sometimes,” “what if,” and “on the other hand.”

THE NEXT ZOOM CONVERSATION IS ON SATURDAY JUNE 27 from 3 to 4 EST, and it will be about layering. Something happens in sentence one. “I drove up to the house that looked haunted.” Or “I went into a deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich.” Or “The first rabbit he saw asked him what time it was.” Sentence one reports an action. Layering happens when a sentence that reports an action works as a baby prompt for the narrator to tell the reader what the action made them feel or think or reminded them of. In this way, the narrator is seducing the reader into interest in the narrator’s mind and associations.

Another way to put this is narrative layering follows the requirement of IMPROV COMEDY, that is “YES, AND.” Yes, this thing happened, and it reminded me of and made me feel . . . and then it’s possible to report another action because the story has moved to wherever it’s landed. It’s not planned ahead. It’s being invented in the moments of writing. That’s why it’s fun.

TO RSVP: email me at lauriestone@substack.com.

_______________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and layering in narrative as “YES, AND.” SATURDAY June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

__________________________________

In other news

On Tuesday, Richard had the first of his cataract surgeries, and it went well. The second one is on Monday, and we are in eye care mode for a bit. The garden is doing well too, and R said he could see the outline of leaves for the first time in a while! Look what bloomed here. I don’t think we’re in Arizona, anymore.

Thanks for all the joy, David Hockney (9 July 1937—11 June 2026).

THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I WAS 50, I went to a holiday party thrown by The Nation magazine and afterward went to a restaurant with an editor I’ll call John and his friend I’ll call Lenny. Yesterday, I came across a piece I’d written about the dinner. I didn’t know Lenny, who was maybe forty-five and tall, with a warm face and crispy, salt and pepper hair that waved at the sides and whipped up over his forehead. At the party, I had noticed him talking to an attractive woman in a slinky black skirt. She was thirty at most. They were flirting.

As the party was winding down, John suggested the three of us go out. He was pretty wasted by the time we got to the restaurant. Lenny was a big deal in leftwing journalism. I honestly don’t remember his real name. Why am I telling you this now? Because the conversation could have happened last week, and it will happen in weeks to come. By weeks, I mean decades. It is always happening.

For John to imagine that Lenny and I could have had anything to say to each other that would promote good will and peace on earth meant he didn’t know who I was and maybe he didn’t know who Lenny was. John had probably never thought about what was important to me. As I think about this now, the first thing that pops up is: Women are supposed to have room in their minds for the interests of people who loathe their interests. The primary interests of women are not supposed to be that important, even to them.

We’re waiting for drinks to arrive when the subject of Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban writer, comes up. Lenny says that Arenas’ criticism of the Cuban revolution is specious because he confused his thwarted homosexual longings with a substantive critique of politics. He says, in effect, the frustration Arenas felt at not being able to fuck his dazzling, macho compatriots was the real source of his disappointment.

Before I tell you what I said, I gotta tell you about the curve of Lenny’s mouth as he spoke. He was smiling with how much he was enjoying the thought he could say anything he wanted at this table and nothing bad would happen to him. To feel that safe, people, I mean just imagine it.

This was thirty years ago, as I mentioned, and I was still at a stage in life when I would gather a bouquet of words dipped in blood and venom, tie them with a ribbon, and offer them up. I said that a minute after the Cuban revolution succeeded, the regime arrested and tortured homosexuals, promoted traditional sex roles, and slammed sexual freedom in general. I don’t remember using the word patriarchal, but I must have. Sorry about that. (In fairness to me, look at the beards.)

“Patriarchal,” said Lenny, “is a buzz word. People don’t understand the complexities, the subtleties of male/female relations. A lack of subtlety is the problem.” He meant my lack of subtlety. He said he didn’t subscribe to feminism. He said, “I don’t take that gender stuff seriously. “Sexism is mislabled, over-emphasized, unimportant, or nonexistant.”

Until this moment, John had been more or less the sleepy Dormouse at the table. He perked up and recalled the time Lenny had edited a special issue on travel for the magazine he wrote for without including nor soliciting a single article by a female journalist. Lenny had no explanation for why it hadn’t crossed his mind to invite women in. He only regretted the flak it had stirred up. It was an oversight. End of story.

A waiter took our orders for food. John asked me how I felt about the holidays. I said Christmas had no meaning to me and Hanukkah felt like a booby prize. Lenny said that Hanukkah, indeed, was a minor holiday inflated to compete with Christmas. He craned his neck over the table and waved an index finger. “Mind you, Jews were caving in only to the pressure of male, patriarchal Christians, not women Christians. Jews weren’t recognizing women Christians at all! Nuh uh. Just patriarchal men!”

Again that smile. Again the confidence that nothing bad could happen to him at this table. Lenny, as I mentioned, was powerful and respected in leftwing publishing, and his views were so, so common and were supposed to go unchallenged because the world these men lived in was a gated community. At a moment like this, at a table with a white linen cloth and white napkins, during a season when people gather to be social and to get along, a female human can pretend not to notice the way the world works, or she can make an excuse to leave the restaurant, or she can place the wellbeing of others above her own bubbling need to publicize what she dislikes.

I said to Lenny, “Do you still have your dick?” He said he did. I said, “Put your hand in your pants to check.” He assured me he still had his dick. He sat up straighter, and his mouth became a squiggle of embarrassment, maybe for me. A bowl of penne was placed before him, and he looked at it, drawing in air.

Mentioning Lenny’s dick was like the jump cut in 2001: a Space Odyssey, when we see a tibia bone thrown into the air by a murderous ape and in the next shot we see a space ship floating in outer space. The key to both moments is economy. Kubrick charts a history of aggression and technology in the quickest possible way. I did roughly the same thing. But let’s pause a moment longer on the dick. To mention the dick is to introduce sex, no matter what else the dick may stand for.

I need to add here that, at fifty, men weren’t paying the same kind of attention to me they had in the past. At the time of this dinner, I didn’t have a boyfriend, and I thought maybe I wouldn’t have one again. One of the things I’m dying to tell you is how happy I am not to be in this state of will they like me and, and why don’t they like me, is it me, is it I’m so difficult even when the subject isn’t politics? I’m so happy to be free of this questioning of myself and questioning of what is going on in front of me. I mean in the sense of Schrödinger cat, who is both either alive or dead with no ability to say for certain which. Lifting off from this caring about whether they like me doesn’t end the confusion about what’s going on. It only lowers the stakes. Do I still play the dick card in similar moments? Of course.

John said to Lenny that maybe his feelings about women were especially raw because of a recent break-up. I said, “She dumped you, huh?” He said, “Not exactly.” I said, “Given your views, how could any woman resist you?” He said, “Correct my views.” I said, “I have better things to do.” He asked if I would talk to him about theater. He was tearing a piece of bread into shards. I said, “What I really want to do is smash your face in.” He said, “You can.” I said, “You have no idea how much force I would use.”

Reader, I know. I’m thinking the same thing you are. Did I really say this? I’m sure I did. I wrote notes about the dinner after it happened. The words I quote out of my mouth I said. What are we to make of this? I don’t know about you, but I see a woman waving her own dick around, and I don’t have a problem with that view. In waving my own dick around, am I flirting a bit, I mean the violence of the image, to wipe that smile off his face? I was catching the men off guard on purpose. Men don’t expect women to introduce violence like this, and it’s useful to do it because most of the violence coming at women and gay people for being female and gay is invisible to these men.

Arenas was first arrested in Cuba in 1973 and convicted of “ideological deviation” and publishing his work abroad without government consent. After a later arrest, he was confined in El Morro Castle for thirteen months and kept in solitary confinement in a cell infested with rats and bugs that was one meter high, meaning he couldn’t fully stand up. In 1980, he escaped to the US, where he lived and wrote. On December 7 1990, he committed suicide in his apartment in New York. He was 47 and had late-stage AIDS. In his suicide note, he wrote: "Due to my delicate state of health and to the terrible depression it causes me not to be able to continue writing and struggling for the freedom of Cuba, I am ending my life. ... My message is not one of failure, but rather one of struggle and hope. Cuba will be free. I already am."

What I said must have worked on Lenny. I mean, listen to what he says back: “You can,” meaning you can smash my face in. What was going on in that mind of yours, Lenny?

I can’t explain why we kept sitting there. Every so often, you find yourself in the Buñuel movie The Exterminating Angel, where people come to a dinner party and can’t leave, even while various farm animals come through the door. I said to Lenny, “You are a dinosaur who doesn’t know he’s sinking, because everywhere you look you see yourself.”

He asked me to understand he had levels. I should trust this, I shouldn’t be so simplistic. Even his remarks about Christmas had levels. One of his brothers was a born-again Christian. There had been a break between them, and he suffered during the disconnection. It was important for the brothers to stay close, he said. Their parents had both died in a hotel fire when he was fourteen and his younger brothers were eleven and eight. He said this had made the Christian brother crave community and stability. A distant aunt and uncle had come to live with them. Lenny didn’t say what this had done to him.

Talk about I didn’t see that coming! The dick card didn’t stand a chance against the parents died in a hotel fire card. When Lenny spoke about his family, I felt like a person coming off a high to see the mess you’ve made in the living room. (Lenny’s story also saves me from coming off a hero in this tale.) The death of Lenny’s parents hadn’t turned him into the kind of man he loved being. And his emotions were still the center of attention, but I mean, his parents had died! I reached out a hand to him and instantly regretted it. What a girl. What a girl thing to do.

John looked surprised. He hadn’t known these things had happened to his friend. How could he not have known? What is wrong with men? We continued on to coffee, the three of us. Lenny and I never saw each other again.

What have I learned since this meal about nights like this? Nothing. Another dinner like this is going to happen, I am going to find myself in another Buñuel movie, and what are you going to do about it?

________________________________________

Female friends

EARLIER THIS WEEK, A FRIEND POSTED A LINK to a podcast with Fran Lebowitz, where she talked about her oldest and dearest friend. They’d met in grade school, and through all the divergent roads their lives had taken, including the fact her friend was a Republican and had become a billionaire, their affection and intimacy were still alive and functioned in Fran’s life as a pillar. I could see in the way Fran evoked her friend—who still called her Francie, a name she’d dropped by the time she was twelve—I could see it was Fran’s curiosity about life, her ability to love the weirdness and mysteriousness of people’s difference, that renewed her love for her friend and earned her friend’s love in return.

A little while ago, Richard and I were talking about the role of friendship in our lives. He said he hadn’t expected to stay closely tied to friends. He hadn’t grown up that way. The expectation was you stayed tied to family. You showed up for them at births, marriages, and deaths, as well as at all the calendrical celebrations laid out each year. The issue of success or failure as a friend wasn’t front of mind to him.

In my family, friendship was no more encouraged as a pillar of life than it was in Richard’s family. My earliest memories are of meeting little children and gravitating toward them. If they invited me to their house, I said, “Yes.” Yes, yes, yes. Was I looking for escape from my family? Not at first. Every summer, starting at age five, I was sent to sleep-away camp for two months. I loved it. I loved being part of a group that was different from being in my family. In my family, I was the youngest and not taken very seriously, it seemed to me. Maybe I was. I’m not blaming people for anything. The drive outward to what my mother would have called “strangers” was in me always, as far as I can make out.

Friendship, not family, has been the great pillar of my life, and the great pillar of my life is sometimes a space I see more as an outline than a solid form, not because people have died—although that’s also the case. The great pillar of my life is sometimes an outline rather than a solid form because people move out of your life and you move out of theirs. Richard says this is the natural current of life, people come and go in your experience, as you need them or they need you, and then they go elsewhere. Yes, sure. I feel this way toward people I’ve let go of. Who are they? I can’t remember, really. It’s the people I still love and miss who are the pillar—and the people I have more recently met.

For this reason I watched all the seasons of My Brilliant Friend (HBO), sitting bolt upright with attention. Here are these two girls, Lila and Lenu, who remain connected to each other no matter what else happens to them. From the time they are born, they are told that everything that happens to them will be more important than their connection to each other. And each day they discover it isn’t true. Nothing will be more real or intimate—not parents or children or lovers—nothing will show each she has been seen. It’s funny, a secret about girls that is seldom dramatized and every female knows.

Lila says to Lenu, after she becomes an author: “It’s a bad book. Your first book was bad, too. If you don’t do well, what will be the meaning of my life?” The women are Gogo and Didi on the sets of two different plays, Lila in the town where they grew up outside Naples, Lenu in Florence with a man she should not have married. To each woman the other is: You are the person I’m supposed to talk to, even when I can’t stand you, even when you are unreliable. You are always I can’t stand you, always unreliable, always the person I carry in my head. Never bored.

On the phone, before Lenu’s getaway from her marriage, Lila tells her that her lover Nino will leave her because that is what Nino does. Lenu already knows this. We always know this, and sometimes a kiss is what we need to shift us from point A to point B. Lenu’s daughter Dede is her mother’s id puppet, aware of her feelings even before Lenu can admit them to herself. It’s like Lila is watching her through her little girl.

In season 3, we watch the insights of feminism slither into Lenu and rouse her to action. She sees her marriage was a detour. The children are not who she is. They are who they are. She will always be loyal to Lila, the sine qua non of the existence she’s been able to claim. The scenes in this period are rapturous in their pain. The politics of street-thug fascisti and larger fascisti are a permanent pandemic in Italy. Lenu is beginning to understand this as a feminist, married to an academic who isn’t interested in the connections between big lies and little lies, big murders and little murders.

Throughout their lives, Lila and Lenu remain connected even when they aren’t connected, and by the end of the series, when Lila has disappeared and Lenu is an old woman, too, she finds a doll left for her by Lila, a doll the children played with when they were tiny and hatching the plan of their lives. The plan of their lives was to marry each other, no matter who else they married. The plan was to marry each other so they would share a reality about what life was, no matter what others claimed was important and they knew was not important. When Lenu finds the doll, she knows Lila still loves her and that the plan they hatched was the only way they could have lived. Lila is still saying to Lenu: “If you fail, what will my life have meant?”

____________________________________

Your support makes this possible.

I love writing for you. I think all the time about what works in a post and what readers may respond to. I think about these things in a way that’s different than ever before. In a way that’s more intimate and calibrated, even though I never know what will touch you and engage you. It’s always better to roll the dice. Every post is an experiment.

I love knowing you care enough about the project to support it. To the paid subscribers of this stack, deepest thanks. You are the reason we have completed almost four years.

If you have not yet taken a turn at support, I hope today the smell of the pie cooling on the sill will draw you over. There are lots of benefits for paid subscribers listed as you scroll down, and this stack is one of the least expensive ones to support on the platform. When you pay for this writing, you are saying you want to see literary writing and feminism as one long ribbon.

If you want to make a smaller contribution than the subscription, let me know, and I will arrange it. Please don’t be shy, and email me here: lauriestone@substack.com

________________________________________

Zooms on craft.

RICHARD AND I WILL CONTINUE OUR ZOOM CONVERSATIONS ON WRITING for the next several months, focusing on elements of craft and form you can add to your toolkits as creative writers.

At the last session, on May 30, the focus was on the difference between “story” and “memory.” I made the spontaneous claim that a memory might best qualify as material for a “story” if the story was about rethinking the memory. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, after all. Using the baby prompts: “sometimes,” “what if,” and “on the other hand.” That is basically what I did in the first story about the restaurant.

THE NEXT ZOOM CONVERSATION IS ON SATURDAY JUNE 27 from 3 to 4 EST, and it will be about layering. Something happens in sentence one. “I drove up to the house that looked haunted.” Or “I went into a deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich.” Or “The first rabbit he saw asked him what time it was.” Sentence one reports an action. Layering happens when a sentence that reports an action works as a baby prompt for the narrator to tell the reader what the action made them feel or think or reminded them of. In this way, the narrator is seducing the reader into interest in the narrator’s mind and associations.

Another way to put this is narrative layering follows the requirement of IMPROV COMEDY, that is “YES, AND.” Yes, this thing happened, and it reminded me of and made me feel . . . and then it’s possible to report another action because the story has moved to wherever it’s landed. It’s not planned ahead. It’s being invented in the moments of writing. That’s why it’s fun.

TO RSVP: email me at lauriestone@substack.com.

_______________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and layering in narrative as “YES, AND.” SATURDAY June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

I LOVE THE WALKS WE TOOK IN THE DESERT. I love the pink powder of red rock that coats you on the trails. I love the rocky emptiness and sparse vegetation. When I tell myself to leave, I don’t leave. I can’t tell you what movie my life would be if I left when I told myself to leave. Maybe the novels of Thomas Hardy or the movie with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr, where she winds up hit by a car.

When Gardner was painting trompe l’oeil designs at the Helmsley Palace Hotel, we worked the graveyard shift from midnight to five AM: marbleizing columns, sponging clouds onto domes, applying gold leaf to moldings. In the lobby, we saw the late-night action of hustlers and sharks. Upstairs we had access to winding back corridors and secret attic rooms. After I met Richard, I wondered if you could start a new life at 60.

In real life, Julia Child was probably more of a perfectionist than the way she is portrayed by Meryl Streep, with endless good cheer, in the movie Julie and Julia, but I don’t really know. Years ago, on Monhegan Island in Maine, I said to Richard, “We are married in the presence of the sea and sky.” I said it three times, and he believed me. He unwrapped a chicken sandwich, and a seagull moved over to where he was sitting on a rock. They stared at each other. If Richard had lost focus even for a second, the bird would have known what to do. One of the things I find interesting about Richard is he doesn’t give animals a break for being animals.

A number of years ago, my best friend got married in my house and entrusted me with the top layer of her wedding cake. In a year, she would return to the house and she and her husband would eat the cake. This was a long time before I’d met Richard. I hadn’t known it was a thing to do with with a wedding cake. Months passed, and one night when I was hungry and alone, I shaved off slivers of the cake, convincing myself it didn’t look that bad. Then it became a habit, tiny slivers each time. I was carrying around the box in my mind. It was glowing. I was afraid to open the freezer for any reason. There would be the box. The beautiful box in its fancy thick cardboard. The box looked like something you could eat, too. I would slip off the ribbon in a way I could get it back on. There were chocolate fingerprints on the cardboard. What did I think would happen when my friend opened the box and saw the cake had been tampered with, you could put it? I thought she would find it funny even though I knew she would not.

In my early twenties, I went to see Lila Karp in her house in the West Village. She pronounced the letter “A” with a broad English accent. It didn’t bother me. She was on the top floor of a brownstone in a big bed. I made tea in her kitchen while she stayed up there. She kept brown sugar in a little crock with a peel of lemon in it. I thought this was a wonderful idea. I was collecting ways to be in the world, and I enjoyed being made of clay. In retrospect, I enjoyed it. Or maybe not even in retrospect. Maybe in this moment I feel like putting a loving spin on everything, because why not.

In 1970, on my first trip to England, I arrived at Victoria Station and found a nearby bed & breakfast. I stayed there a few nights, and then the owner told me her sister had a bed & breakfast in Willesden Green for only a pound a night. Her sister’s name was Mary. Mary Smullin and I became friends in a way that did not end. The sisters were from Ireland. I don’t know how old Mary was in 1970. Her house had many rooms for visitors. The most wonderful room was on the first floor. Glass French doors opened onto a brilliant rose garden, tended by Mary’s husband. There were also roses in the front. It was one of those houses in London, where the city looks like a village. Mary told me she was the oldest of nine children. She never saw her mother resting on a chair. When Mary was eight, she vowed never to have children and she kept the vow. At breakfast, she served enough food to last most of the day, and if you were around in the afternoon she’d make a pot of tea and offer you cookies or cake, and you’d talk about your lives. In the basement, where I’ve saved all the letters and cards I’ve ever received, are the Christmas cards and notes from Mary, sent until I don’t know when they stopped.

Six years ago, when we bought the house, there were areas no one could pass through, even with a machete. Over the course of months that turned into years, we turned the land into a park of sorts gardens and trails. We couldn’t stop cutting branches, raking the ground where the branches fall, and digging out masses of rotting logs and tree trunks that had been sitting there for maybe a hundred years. Richard’s Fitbit would say he’d walked like 100 miles every day and burned enough calories to light up our house for a week, while if I was lucky my Fitbit would say I’d walked like maybe a mile and burned zero calories. The pleasure of clearing the back was so great I said to Richard, “I’m afraid we’ll get so involved with this area, we won’t have enough time or energy to plant the front gardens and take care of them.” He said, “Yes, we will.”

One day, he approached me with sadness and confusion on his face. He said, “I was cutting a bush and a long vine snapped back and lifted off my glasses.” I said, “Don’t move.” He was coming to find me when I arrived at the brambles we’d been clearing. He said, “I felt it slip under the temple and spring back.” I said, “Are these the same glasses I found in the flower pot in the garage?” He said yes. He can’t see without glasses. He pointed to where he’d been working. All his glasses are delicate and cost more than a car. They could have shot off anywhere. I looked around, and there they were, sitting in a pile of clippings and branches, and we went back to work.

_____________________________________

Crowd source

A CROWD OF HAPPY PEOPLE IS STILL A CROWD THAT CAN SWALLOW YOU. It was like drowning for a long time, when you can’t get out and still you are bobbing on the surface with heads as far as the eye can see. I could see pretty far. If you are trapped, your vision improves. All your senses do. The sound was a swam of loud bees. I was hungry. I like hunger usually, the feeling of being in a waiting room and anticipating the time you will pass through to a restaurant, a bar, a stand of street food in Thailand.

I was bored. More than anything I was bored by the political fervor around me no one could take seriously because each word was a bee. We were there, all the lonely people, to say “no” to something hurting us, while no one could agreed on “yes.” Everyone was drowning while holding in the air their own private “yes.”

The most interesting feeling was the fear of never getting out. It broke through the boredom and was something to enjoy. I hated everyone for pressing against me with their “yes,” at the same time I loved everyone for sharing with me the gleaming clarity of our collective “no.”

I had never been trapped like this before. I was part of a giant pulsing single organism that could move a few inches or so, this way and that, without a plan or a pace maker of its own. A crowd like this is an emergent system, like the human brain and like traffic patterns on a roadway.

A woman even smaller than me was beside me. I’ll call her Robin. Robin red breast. Robin Hood. I said, “Let’s pretend you’re sick, and I need to get you to a hospital.” She said, “Good idea, mami.” I loved her. Her skin was caramel. She had a slight accent. I wanted to laugh with joy of being with her, the joy that in one sentence I had found a partner, a mate. Isn’t that everything in life. A partner to share an adventure with. I shouted out as loudly as I could, “My friend needs to get to a hospital. Please give us room to get out. She’s had surgery, and her stitches are bleeding.”

Concerned faces were all around. It was beautiful. It was magical the way the crowd parted. I almost believed what I’d said. When you tell a lie and people believe you, the air turns pink and everything feels possible. You know you are a rat and lower down then a rat, and you remember the joy of the rats in the Subway, making a meal of pizza crusts and gnawed chicken bones down on the tracks. All I’d had so far that day was coffee. I thought if we get out of this, Robin and I should go get lunch.

We kept moving forward, although forward was hard to gauge. Was there an edge to the crowd? Theoretically, there would have to be. There were thousands and thousands of us, but we did not cover the entire square mileage of Washington DC. I had to keep shouting, “Please let us pass, my friend is ill.” I was afraid someone might call an ambulance but not so afraid I would stop. I could see Robin wanted to laugh as well. She was a good actor. She kept a straight face. She gripped her side and bent her head down. How was it possible I had found someone so perfect for me?

NOTE TO READERS: This is a fictional account, produced by a prompt at the workshop on Saturday to write about something scary and exciting at the same time.

____________________________________

Zooms on craft.

RICHARD AND I WILL CONTINUE OUR ZOOM CONVERSATIONS ON WRITING for the next several months, focusing on elements of craft and form you can add to your toolkits as creative writers.

At the last session, on May 30, the focus was on the difference between “story” and “memory.” I made the spontaneous claim that a memory might best qualify as material for a “story” if the story was about rethinking the memory. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, after all. Using the baby prompts: “sometimes,” “what if,” and “on the other hand.”

THE NEXT ZOOM CONVERSATION IS ON SATURDAY JUNE 27 from 3 to 4 EST, and it will be about layering. Something happens in sentence one. “I drove up to the house that looked haunted.” Or “I went into a deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich.” Or “The first rabbit he saw asked him what time it was.” Sentence one reports an action. Layering happens when a sentence that reports an action works as a baby prompt for the narrator to tell the reader what the action made them feel or think or reminded them of. In this way, the narrator is seducing the reader into interest in the narrator’s mind and associations.

Another way to put this is narrative layering follows the requirement of IMPROV COMEDY, that is “YES, AND.” Yes, this thing happened, and it reminded me of and made me feel . . . and then it’s possible to report another action because the story has moved to wherever it’s landed. It’s not planned ahead. It’s being invented in the moments of writing. That’s why it’s fun.

TO RSVP: email me at lauriestone@substack.com.

_____________________________________

Money

WHEN YOU GET PAID BY A PUBLISHER OR A MAGAZINE, you don’t have to talk about money publicly. Of course, as anyone who has ever written for a book publisher or magazine knows, when I use the term “get paid by,” I am speaking allegorically and in the comic framework of hyperbole.

Nearly four years ago, when I launched “Everything is Personal”—a title meant as a joke because everything personal is also political and social—it was suddenly possible to get paid through a subscription model. That is: individual people. To reach these individual people, you have to talk publicly about money.

No one wants to do this.

Please chip in whatever you can afford as a one-time shot or start a paid subscription. If you want a one-time shot and not a subscription, let me know and I will tell you how to do it. If you can start a subscription (you can cancel it any time), hit the “subscribe” button below with a steep discount for new people.

In the old format of payment, you didn’t really get paid (except at the Voice if you were on staff). In the new format of payment, you have to ask people for money directly. If you enjoy my work, please help keep the stack afloat. Without new people taking a turn, it can’t continue.

__________________________________

Material reality.

MAYBE PEOPLE WHO ARE YOUNGER THAN ME CAN’T BELIEVE that people who are old, like me, could be having a great time in the moment and assume we live in our memories. As you age, all sorts of assumptions about aging fall away, the same way that every moment of your life as a female human offers you an example of what’s false about your gender assignment.

I find myself very little interested in the past, except as material for writing a scene. I feel a sense of freedom from the past, including my past mistakes, losses, and disappointments, that may have been developing for a while and I have recently become aware of.

I simply don’t care that much about what happened before now. I’m in the moment pretty much all the time, and if not, then I am looking ahead with excited anticipation at what comes next for me and for the world.

Given that, at a social and political level, the present is bleak and mean and composed of gray goo, it’s perhaps tempting to retreat to the past. I don’t go there. This might be a trait of my character. It might be a characteristic of being the age I am—I will be 80 in October. It might be owing to the fact I don’t have children or much of a generational sense of my place in time. I’m not that interested in knowing what might be termed a cause or a prompt or a provocation for the sense of things I’ve arrived at. I’m just reporting.

_________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and layering in narrative as “YES, AND.” SATURDAY June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

______________________________

We’ll put our woodpecker up against your woodpecker any day. One hour’s work.

LAST WEEK, WE VISITED MASS MoCa, a giant museum in North Adams Massachusetts that was formerly the Arnold Print Works, a textile mill and plant for printed fabrics. Twenty-six enormous buildings are set around acres of land. Imagine a giant space that, both inside the galleries and outside on the property, reduces you in scale to the size of a mouse.

I have no problem with the scale or the type of animal. I am growing smaller every day, owing to shrinkage by age and a spinal injury from six years ago, when I was pulling a mattress going backwards, unaware there was a step behind that could trip me. As for the mouse, many years ago when I was visiting a friend in California, she pointed out we had similar, ferrety Jewish faces. We looked nothing alike, but the rodent image has stuck. Looking back, I’m proud I didn’t try to wriggle away from her comparison. It’s so uncharacteristic of me to go along.

When Richard and I decided to leave the museum, we were on the third floor of the main building and went through a hall that said EXIT. It led to a door and stairs, and down we went, only to find another set of doors that looked like they wouldn’t open. The door we’d gone through said you couldn’t get back in. Both doors in front of us had signs with cautions and restrictions. I opened the one that said Museum Personnel Only. I mean, what could they do, throw us in jail for impersonating a curator?

The opening of wrong doors discomforts Richard. First, he wouldn’t be caught dead impersonating a curator. His stance as a scholar of museums is pitched against what he sees as the snootiness of curators, who hold themselves above the interests of visitors. Whether or not this is true and whether or not this is true at MASS MoCa is something you need to put out of your mind, the way I do, because if you put it in your mind, you find yourself the size of a mouse, roaming around and never getting out of the cavernous thoughts of Richard Toon.

Through the illegal door, we found ourselves outside the museum. On one side were the towering brick walls of the building and on the other side was a concrete barrier beside a rushing river. The sound was beautiful. I had an impulse to record it on my phone. We were now, in our lost state, creating our own art performance, in which we were also figures in an installation called, “Lost Beside Water and Bricks.” I said, “Let’s walk. Cars are able to drive along this path. We’ll have to come to a place where the cars enter, and we’ll be able to get out.”

Richard doesn’t like to be lost. Not anywhere. He once wrote a piece about museum maps that say, “You are here.” His argument against this is that when people look at a museum map, for the most they are already lost and have no idea where “here” is. I don’t mind being lost. Maybe I even like it. Maybe I like it because I imagine, as a mouse, I will be able to squiggle out of any enclosure. Maybe I like the comedy of encouraging Richard on. Richard is not a mouse. He has no mouse in him. If I had to select an animal for him, I would stop trying to think of one because as soon as I’d suggest it he’d say, “Certainly not.”

It was a day we hadn’t walked much yet, and here we were, exploring the grounds, except we weren’t really exploring anything because we were in spaces people aren’t supposed to be in. We came to gates you couldn’t open and gates you could open with more paths and fences beyond and still no way out.

We started to think about the people who had worked in the buildings when they were used for manufacture. MASS MoCa is an example of what architects and geographic planners call “adaptive reuse,” where buildings that were once sites of commerce are transformed into spaces for culture and art. Dia Beacon is another example. So is Tate Modern. The thing about these spaces is that the reality of the industrial past and the lives lived in that past tend to be erased, even as the structures remain. Where, indeed, is “here.”

It turns out more women than men worked in the Arnold Print Works. In the late 19th century, these women typically earned 91 cents to $1.00 per day, and if they stayed on the job about $300 a year. And the men? Women consistently earned about 58% to 60% of what adult male textile laborers earned. Was any of this visible in the art museum? It’s visible here.

Richard and I kept trying to get back into the museum, so we could properly leave the museum, but all the doors were shut. I stayed cheerful. It’s my best quality in times of dislocation for Richard. I love the fact he doesn’t trust my judgment at all and at the same time will go through a door that says, “Do not enter.” He will also eat a piece of cake with a note that says, “Eat me.”

______________________________________________

ONE NIGHT YEARS AGO, a friend invited me to a screening of Marnie, the Hitchcock film released in 1964. Tippi Hedren plays a woman termed “frigid” and “a kleptomaniac,” and I was reminded of the innocent past when Freud was taken seriously and people in casual conversation quoted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Sean Connery also stars. His character falls in love with Marnie, even though she can’t stand being touched. He blackmails her into marrying him and sets about sorting her out. I thought the best line in the movie was the last one, when Tippi says to Sean: “I’d rather be married to you than in jail.” It was as much as she could cough up, although she didn’t sound like she meant it.

The most disturbing part of Marnie is when Sean Connery’s character forces himself sexually on Marnie. It’s a complicated scene, partly because Connery is a walking piece of sex, and part of the frustration the film builds is denying this man erotic success. Marnie doesn’t fight him off but the next day tries to drown herself in a pool. Two writers quit working on the screenplay, unable to convince Hitchcock to cut the scene, explaining the audience would lose sympathy with the male lead. Hitchcock, who could not escape the poignant bitterness of his obesity and who was famously obsessed with Hedren, who refused him, sacrificed his film to a personal thrill. The movie is a child sent to camp with all the wrong clothes.

The friend I went to see the movie with is younger than me. After the screening, she said she’d lived every moment of the film. We stood beside a piano. Slabs of blond hair curtained her face. Her lips were full and symmetrical. They looked like the wings of a moth. She asked what I thought of the film. I said, “It got tiring for me.” She looked sad. We left the theater and went to a bistro, where a man she liked was the chef. She said he had bought her a slice of pizza on a recent visit. She said, “Does that mean something?” I said, “Definitely.”

When we arrived at the bistro, the chef was spooning a reduction over grilled lamb. He saw my friend and flashed a big smile. He was very attractive under a giant beard. When we were seated, I said, “He’s beautiful but not so much the beard.” She said, “I love the beard!” I was happy we would never want the same man. The chef sent over small plates of food for us to taste. I ate a shrimp wrapped in a tiny crepe, topped with crème fraîche and tied together with a sliver of chive, and I was reminded of a remark by Raymond Queneau. He said imaginary stories deal with love, true stories deal with hunger.

____________________________________

ON JANUARY 7, 2020, ElIZABETH WURTZEL DIED OF CANCER AT AGE 52. Shortly after, I was asked to write a brief tribute to her. I was struck by the way she often feared she would be punished for feeling pleasure. I continue to be struck by the marketing to women, especially, of “adult life”—which is code for open your hand and let fly away all your hopes and dreams for yourself. It’s code for have a baby, become a mother, shut up unless you are suffering and we can enjoy it, and even then shut up. Here’s what I wrote about Elizabeth:

Among her accomplishments, Elizabeth Wurtzel was proud she’d never so much as kissed “a man for any reason besides absolute desire.” This isn’t really possible in the life of a female human, but hats off to her for the aspiration. And for admitting she lived for pleasure, despite the pressure to hate herself for still sleeping on a futon. She saw that the hyping of “maturity” and “adult life,” especially to women, meant the exchange of restlessness for “a padlock of security” and “Tiffany silver you never use.” The world is a scare machine for women who stay girls, and Wurtzel sometimes felt scared she had lived the wrong way. At her best, she knew life was more fun staying skeptical as long as you could, and everyone was going to die, anyway.

An additional thought: It’s interesting, I’ve lived so much longer than Wurtzel got to live and the older I get the more confirmed I feel without ambivalence about claiming as much freedom as I could from the social changes ushered in by the women’s movement.

__________________________________

RICHARD AND I WILL CONTINUE OUR ZOOM CONVERSATIONS ON WRITING for the next several months, focusing on elements of craft and form you can add to your toolkits as creative writers.

Last Saturday, the focus of the conversation was the difference between “story” and “memory.” What is the difference? I made the claim (I thought of in the moment) that a memory could well qualify as material for a “story” if the story was about rethinking the memory. Maybe it didn’t happen that way. Using the baby prompts of “sometimes,” “what if,” and “on the other hand.”

The next ZOOM CONVERSATION is on Saturday June 27 from 3 to 4 EST, and it will be about layering. Something happens in sentence one. “I drove up to the house that looked haunted.” Or “I went into a deli and ordered a pastrami sandwich.” Or “The first rabbit he saw asked him what time it was.” Sentence one reports an action. Layering happens when a sentence that reports an action works as a baby prompt for the narrator to tell the reader what the action made them feel or think or reminded them of. In this way, the narrator is seducing the reader into interest in the narrator’s mind and associations.

Another way to put this is narrative layering follows the requirement of IMPROV COMEDY, that is “YES, AND.” Yes, this thing happened, and it reminded me of and made me feel . . . and then it’s possible to report another action because the story has moved to wherever it’s landed. It’s not planned ahead. It’s being invented in the moment of writing. That’s why it’s fun.

TO RSVP: email me at lauriestone@substack.com.

__________________________________

Please help the stack continue.

Do you have it in you to turn down this punim?

To all paid subscribers, thank you for making this possible and taking a turn at support.

Everything is Personal (because everything is also political) is among the least expensive publications to join. Click on the subscribe button, and see.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you. Don’t hesitate. I mean it: lauriestone@substack.com

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use the Substack website on your phone through a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

____________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY and layering in narrative as “YES, AND.” SATURDAY June 27, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, June 28, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

______________________________

What is your name? Iris. Iris what? Iris Murdock.

A WOMAN ON FACEBOOK OFFERED ME PLANTS, and when I went to pick them up, they weren’t there. Before reaching her house, you drive past a stretch of rusting machine parts, hundreds of them, a rusting graveyard and warehouse, the way living things are both existing and waiting to die, a slow disintegration we don’t see moment to moment.

You turn onto her street, and her massive property extends from the ghost town of rust. Wrecked cars and parts of tractors and other farm equipment line the driveway and rise up from other sections of the front yard. There are piles of wood, splintered and towering upwards from palettes and broken sheds. From the road, the inorganic occupies more space than the plants you can also see, growing in beds and near the house down the driveway. Iris stalks and bushes of bleeding heart, and other kind of perennials so well established they don’t need that much care from humans. The whole place radiates a sense of building up and tearing down as simultaneous experiences, and again, you’re reminded of how existence works the same way, and you see a mind at the center of it, living amid this arrangement, a mind at peace with entropy and chaos.

I’ve been here before and never met my benefactor. I’ll call her Emmy. She leaves me plants at the top of her property on an old milk can. Our garden is a collage of plants donated by neighbors and friends, who’ve been working their gardens for a long time. Emmy and I have never spoken. We exchange notes on messenger. She’d mentioned that her husband had had to go into the hospital for treatment of a tick disease. I thought maybe she was in the house and had forgotten to leave the plants.

We eased down the drive, and I got out of the car. A small dog was barking in the house. No one came to the door or to a window. I walked around the back. It was packed even more densely with abandoned wooden structures and wrecked cars. Still growing beautifully and happily were plants in beds that also extended far on the grounds. An unopened bag of mulch was lying near a hydrangea bush. Further along was a bag of garden soil.

I sent Emmy a message we were there. She didn’t reply. I turned the car around, and as we were coming to the end of the drive, a car pulled up and went down to the house. I parked on the road and walked back. A young woman got out and also a woman who was much older with light colored hair. She was wearing a cotton dress that went past her knees. A summer frock from wall paper in the 1930s. She looked around and stood back.

I told the young woman why I was there, and she smiled. I’ll call her Andie. She was a sun all by herself. Sparks of warmth shot off her. She leaned forward a little from the weight of her joy. “Oh my goodness, I’ll call my mother. My dad’s been in the hospital, and she’s picking him up. It must have taken longer than she expected. Here’s what I’ll do. Give me your address, and I’ll bring the plants to you when she comes back.” I said, “You don’t need to do that. It’s too much.” She insisted I give her my address, and she typed it into her phone. She said, “It’s not far, it’s no trouble at all.”

Of course it was trouble, if you thought of the word trouble meaning I want a life free of encumbrances. What if you wanted a life that connected you in the moment to anything that was happening to you. What if you didn’t think of some people as strangers and thought of everyone as people who are not strange to you.

The older woman moved forward. I’ll call her Stella. We were now standing in a circle. Stella said, “Do you need any prayers?” Andie could see on my face this was not a question I was often asked. She might have wanted to say to Stella, What you see in front of you there, Stella, is urban Jew. They don’t know from prayers.

Prayers were what Stella had to offer, the way Eddy had iris plants and Andie had a delivery service. What did I have to offer? The pleasure of being there. Things around me started to look yellow, there was so much light on the spot. Is pleasure a thing to offer? It might be a thing. While the cars and towers of junk were slowly converging into air, my delight was expanding. I said to Stella, “Well, Richard is having cataract surgery in a few weeks, so maybe you could help with that. Also, I had a tick disease myself a few years ago, and I’m hoping not to have that happen again.”

I started to think of other things Stella could pray about, and then I remembered at the supermarket you’re only supposed to take one cookie from the plate of free samples. Stella nodded and said she would pray for me. I wondered if this was something she was always ready to do or if she had to organize a special energy to talk to Jesus, or whomever she asked for these kinds of favors. Were they favors? Or more like the thing that was happening between the three of us, a stroke of generosity that made you forget that at some point you were going to be a machine part rusting in a plot of land overgrown with crab grass.

Back in the car, Richard asked what happened. I said, “I met the most wonderful people imaginable. All they wanted to do was help me.” He said, “Do you think the jacket could have something to do with it?” I was wearing the jacket Richard had many years ago tossed in the garbage and I had fished out. The shoulders were frayed. The sleeves were rolled up. I love the jacket so much I lose sight of the way it lends a vagabond aspect to my appearance. When I forget I present as a vagabond, I can go anywhere and I can say anything to people I don’t know and pleasure will result. When I told Richard about Stella’s question, he said, “You could have asked her to pray for a new jacket.”

___________________________________

Hacks

In the final episode of Hacks, Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder are remarkably real and tender as two women of different generations who deeply love each other for every right reason. It’s a romance that’s seldom given its due dramatically, although it defines our lives.

____________________________________

The Next Zoom Conversation on writing craft is TOMORROW! Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST

The next Zoom Conversation is on the difference between “Memory” and “Story”— To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Richard and I will offer you ideas on how to free your writing from “heroes” and “victims.” We will do this step by step, no secrets withheld and all tricks of the trade revealed on how to keep engaging the reader and how to create the illusion of thought-in-action unfolding in real time. Questions about your own projects are very welcome. You an think of this as a clinic, and we will be continuing this format for a while. The more concrete your questions, the better.

_____________________________________

Please help the stack continue.

To all paid subscribers, thank you for understanding that this is the work of a paid professional, not a free service or a gift.

This Substack is among the least expensive ones to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you. Don’t be shy. I mean it: lauriestone@substack.com

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use the Substack website on your phone through a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

____________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY, SATURDAY May 30, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

__________________________________

Brooklyn

ON THE PLATFORM FOR AN F TRAIN, I asked a man how tall he was. He said he was 6 foot 10. I told him he was beautiful. We were both in love with life. I went to a part of Brooklyn where the sky hangs big over dark parks and streets. It was cool and drizzly. I had an umbrella but no sweater, and I moved quickly. I went to a bar to meet a friend. I said, “Anything that feels good is good.” I knew it wasn’t true as soon as I said it, but what are you going to do. It was a little bit true. My friend said, “Do you think that anything that feels bad is bad?” I said, “Do you mean like grief?” He said, “Maybe.” I said, “No, I don’t think things that feel bad are always bad.” I once took care of this man’s dog while he went skiing. I placed my hand on the fur between the dog’s eyes, then moved over his head, across his neck, and down to his tapered waist. The dog had the waistline of a long-distance swimmer. So did the man. I love the beauty of indeterminacy. Anything I have written worth your time is a love letter to something.

Joanne and Paul

THE LAST MOVIE STARS (HBO), IS A SIX-HOUR DOCUMENTARY series about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, directed by Ethan Hawke. Without any great plan of muckraking or outing anything—but simply because of a political shift that looks at the past with different questions—Hawke shows us a famous man who got very far without exceptional talent, and he shows us a woman with far more talent and ambition who didn’t get nearly as far. He says she was cheated.

In fleeting moments, Joanne speaks to this, sometimes in startlingly direct statements, among them, if she’d had her life to do again, she wouldn’t have had children—she means the three she and Paul had. Paul also had three children with his first wife, and Joanne often took care of the six of them. She makes this statement with the qualification that of course she loves all the children, and it’s clear in their interviews with Hawke they feel the same about the parent who was there for them. Joanne says this because of what the choice cost her—missing out on this opportunity and that opportunity. Missing out. Also because it wasn’t really a choice, rather a wave called being a female human in the time she lived and worked—she was born in 1930 and is still alive—a wave that discouraged women from questioning the value of their desires.

She was the big star with the undisputed acting ability when she and Paul got together. She was certain she wanted to act from the time she was very young, and came to New York City to press herself against the world. She met Paul in 1953, during a stage production of Picnic, and she knew immediately she wanted him, although he was married. She and Paul were a couple for six years before Paul ended his marriage. Joanne looks and sounds different in every role. Paul looks the same and sounds the same in every role.

Near the beginning of episode two, Paul offers an insightful commentary about his sexual power on screen. He says it’s Joanne’s invention. They were brilliantly and poetically hot for each other. It’s one of the delights of the series to see this. Her desire for him and his for her turns him on onscreen. He knows he’s beautiful to an extraordinary degree. I mean, what the fuck, that Greek-statue mouth, and the way he walks in that slim body. He also knows he doesn’t feel much for other people, and they can sense the wall of him almost immediately. He says people are attracted to him and then cool quickly because nothing rises off him back to them.

He’s the opposite screen presence from a man like, say, Humphrey Bogart, who wasn’t beautiful but whose playful joy you can feel in his scenes with women. You know this guy was present, listening, inhaling the person he was reacting to. Paul confides with a grace that characterizes his manner on screen and off that his sexiness isn’t real. It’s something invented for the movies, and he knew that his limits as an actor made this other thing he could do on camera—make people want to fuck him—very important for what audiences were responding to and would keep him working.

The documentary is ultimately Woodward’s story. She’s the person who is knowable—through her interviews on camera, her off-camera recorded interviews, and the performances we’re shown from movies, TV, and the stage. As an actor, she is inventive all the time. She’s creating something in the moment and during rehearsals with other actors. You see her thinking reactively and feeling reactively. The series illuminates her great work as an actor and offers a keyhole into a long marriage that placed far too much burden and responsibility on the woman than on the man to show up for a life with kids.

She married Paul, knowing he was an alcoholic. She determined to have him, knowing he was married to someone else and had three children. She was the Joni Mitchell song “Case of You”—she could drink a case of Paul, darling, and still be on her feet. Hawke’s doc doesn’t raise any of the rumors it’s easy to Google that Newman had affairs with many women and men—according to Paul Newman, the Man Behind the Baby Blues: His Secret Life Exposed (2009) by Darwin Porter. Among the people on Porter’s list are: Janice Rule, Eartha Kitt, Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Susan Hayward, Lana Turner, Natalie Wood, Vivien Leigh, Montgomery Clift, Jack Lord, Steve McQueen, James Dean, Tony Perkins, Sal Mineo, Brandon de Wilde, and John Derek. True or confirmable? I don’t know. What’s easy to imagine is the impossible time Newman must have had swatting people off him. Also pleasurable to imagine, Joanne’s arousal by that great, gorgeous hunk of whatever that made her willing to stay with him.

Even after she could not have remained in that kind of thralldom because, among other things, Paul was drinking to near blackouts every night for many years, she retained the memory of that attraction. It was a smell that was never going to be washed off. Good for her for feeling it. I’m making this up. I’m telling you a story, based on what I saw in the six hours Hawke presented.

On camera, Hawke, himself, is a great, goofy fanboy of Paul’s. He wants the watch Paul owned and that someone at an auction paid fifteen and half millions dollars to buy. He admires Paul’s long career in front of the camera, as well as the extended periods he spent deeply involved in progressive politics and with his great, philanthropic venture, Newman’s Own products, whose multi-million dollar profits go entirely to supporting at-risk children.

For decades, Paul’s physical beauty persists with startling, even spooky consistency, given his drinking and aging. He also remains guarded and walled. He knows this about himself, and he knows it’s a disadvantage as an actor, which we can see in the clips we’re shown. Mostly he stands apart from another person, not touching them, not even much reacting to them, and he says something, a speech or a monologue. Or he’s acted upon. Maybe he’s most intimate on screen with Redford, whose presence is even more an absence than Newman’s is. Ah, the erotics of shadowy men on screen and off. Off screen, their allure quickly fades, unless you just like looking at someone.

Paul emerges in the series as a man who knows things about himself, even if he can’t much share himself with other people. The drinking and race car driving, with which he became obsessed, drown the voices of other people, who might be asking for something. He knows he let Joanne do all the work of parenting. He knows it wasn’t fair. He tries to do better at various stages. We are who we are. We are what the world lets us get away with being.

Skilled actor or not, it’s hard to take your eyes off Paul on screen—except maybe when he’s playing against an actor like George C Scott, who lights up your insides with the way he chews the scenery. It’s like swallowing a jar of fireflies. Paul comes off intelligent and politically engaged. Standing up against racism and speaking out in favor of gay rights were things he wanted to do as much as make movies. On camera in the parts he played and in interviews, he can be charming, and witty, and self-effacing, but no one is quite there.

He stayed with Joanne because she was home and family and a place to locate himself when he wasn’t on a racetrack, or a film set, or a campaign trail, or in an alcohol haze. I love seeing Joanne’s ardor for him. It just knocks me out, the way sexual attraction wakes up a person to everything inside them that stays asleep without the experience of this altered state. Her desire for him gave him a shape to enter. He tries to become what she sees. He says this in the film. He’s grateful to her for this, and she delights him as well, to the extent we can see this man lose himself. Sex itself is private, and I’m happy to imagine they had many great fucks together.

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Darling

WHEN DARLING (CRITERION) WAS RELEASED IN 1965, everyone said it was charting the cynicism of the world and the headlong, icy way modern women went after what they wanted. (We did?) It was directed by John Schlesinger, with a screenplay by Frederic Raphael. Seeing it now, the question you can’t help asking is: Why does Julie Christie wear so many scarves over her bouffant hairdo? Julie’s character, Diana Scott, is looking for a way to dodge domesticity and get to the party of life, and her way is through men, which leads her back to some house or other, although she doesn’t foresee this. We never do.

To be honest, the movie did stir memories of the time we all married Italian princes we had had like no conversations with and dressed up in gowns to eat alone when our husbands went to Rome to visit mama. We were bored. So bored. Bored, bored bored. Everyone adjusted their voices to the clipped, fake upper class, crackly accent of Audrey Hepburn. Even Julie Christie adjusted her voice to the clipped, fake upper class, crackly accent of Audrey Hepburn. We (girls) represented the fallen world and the vacuousness of the vacuum that had opened between drab, postwar England and the swinging whatever poking up from the dead land. We (girls) represented vacuousness in every movie made, because that’s what we were made to represent. (Maybe not every movie. Don’t quote me.) Directors looked at us with distaste and fascination. Obviously.

The best moment in the film is Julie beginning her affair with Dirk Bogarde by sticking a finger in his mouth as he sleeps on a train. Bogarde is beautiful and great to watch. Laurence Harvey, another love interest in the film, ghouls around, his mouth an unbroken line. And there we were, pacing the ancient stone paths of the castle we’d finally moved into, breaking hearts like the porcelain figurines we smashed to the floor, and wondering how in hell we were going to get out of this one. Julie got an Academy Award that year as best actress.

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The Birds

IN ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S THE BIRDS (1963), the birds are irrelevant. They aren’t scary, and they aren’t interesting. They are kind of funny, the way they sit on the trees and playground equipment, looking like the extras they are, bored and beady-eyed. The interesting thing about the movie is the plan hatched by Tippi Hedren as Melanie to snare Rod Taylor as Mitch. It’s fabulous. I wish I’d thought of it and had had the chutzpah to pull it off at some point in my life.

Meet a hunk in a pet store. Pretend to know about birds when you know nothing about birds, not even canaries. Run outside to memorize his license plate. Call your father at the big newspaper he owns and have his inside people track down the owner of the car. Buy him a set of love birds and a cage. Drive 60 miles along the Pacific Coast Highway to Bodega Bay in your chic convertible with the top down. Find out the name of his younger sister by paying a visit to Mitch’s gorgeous ex, played by Suzanne Pleshette, who is also so besotted by Mitch she has decided to live in Bodega Bay, just to be near him, and become the local school teacher, where her job is to coach the kids an interminable song. Why??? Rent a boat so you can sneak up to the house where Mitch’s mother and sister live. Steal into the house and leave the birds. Then hide in the boat to watch his reaction.

Everyone keeps saying to Tippi, “You did that? Wow, that’s nuts. You don’t even know him.” They say this before they are distracted and picked off by the birds that attack in waves like a malarial fever. Of course Tippi doesn’t know Mitch. He’s the obscure object of desire. No one gets to know him. He isn’t in the movie to be known. He’s in the movie to be what female characters typically are in movies made in any period—the obscure object of desire.

The scary part of the movie is Mitch’s mother, played by Jessica Tandy, who looks beautiful and appears to be about the same age as her son. First, how does she come to have two children who are roughly 30 years apart in age? Her daughter is played by Veronica Cartwright, who will go on to have a long life in films playing some kind of character part. The scary thing about Jessica Tandy is all she can say, with a quavery voice, is, “I’m frightened.” She’s too frightened to drink the tea Tippi brings her in bed, as she flails around in fear. She’s frightened the birds will come to the school and eat her kid. (Reasonable fear.) She’s frightened she will be left alone, even though Mitch comes to Bodega Bay from San Francisco every weekend to be with her, leaving no time for him to get involved with women. Jessica Tandy’s eyes are more alarming than any bird.

As far as the birds go, most of the trouble Tippi gets into could have been avoided. The obvious rule here from the get-go should be: Don’t go outside. The birds can peck themselves into houses, sure, but it takes them a pretty long time. You don’t need to help them out by pointlessly going for a smoke and ducking into a pay phone. You don’t need to stay, transfixed by the kamikaze action of the birds that have filled the upstairs bedroom, when you could open the door and move into the hall.

The blood in the movie looks fake and cheesy. I have to say I loved the stilted register of the dialogue. It has that choked, Mad Men vibe. Tippi has that I can’t really act frozen quality Kim Novak had and that clearly worked like letch-nip on Hitch. Suzanne and Tippi have a few scenes together, and Suzanne is so sexy and fine you hope the women will get it on before Suzanne gets pecked to death. Rod has his charms in his cargo pants. Everyone thinks it’s the man’s job to fight off the birds, and it does give him something to do. Also, no Black people were harmed in the making of this movie. No Black people appear in The Birds.

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Old Times

The other day, I read two posts on social media about women considered old. Old women, old ladies. They were around my age, 79. If you are a female human—and many other kinds of human—your life is a trail of insults leading to someone else deciding what you eat.

One of the stories I read was reported by a granddaughter, the other by a daughter. The stories were meant to be heartwarming chucks under the chins of the older women for their pluck and gumption. Both contexts, however, were so horrendously narrow, the older women came off damned by too much praise.

In one story, a woman secures a toaster offered to new customers of a bank by threatening to close her account, walk around the block, and open a new account. In the other story, a woman in a care facility wrangles a dish of ice cream restricted from her diet, only to take it to her room and throw it away. Her daughter asks why she went to the bother, and the woman says, “They should be asking me what I want, not telling me what to do.”

Why have the younger women chosen to share stories of tiny, personal rebellions as if they are feats deserving awe? Because it’s normal and unconscious to patronize the old, just as it is to patronize women of any age, girls, the poor, the disabled, the homeless, etc.

Recently, a friend gave me a gift of a day at a spa. The woman who worked on my body was about my age. She told me how common it was in her line of work to be insulted, also intimidated or made to feel unsteady in other ways, but mostly insulted, assumed to be stupid or a kind of sex worker, and she told me what she does with the anger that rises up in her. She conducts conversations with herself, remembering she can detach from the ways people see her. She doesn’t have to fold their views into her sense of self, and when she’s able to create a barrier between herself and these hurts, her senses sharpen.

She asked if I felt anger. I said, “Enough to power New York City.” She suggested I use her practices. I told her I thought they could help in my personal dealings but probably not with the larger world. It’s hard to know how to live. To speak to the injustices of the world, I think you need to register insult and not let it float by. Insult isn’t floating around, anyway. It’s eating the world. Now, I have entered the category of the old, where I may be assumed to be X while in reality I am neither X nor Y. I am also not neither X nor Y. In this category (as well as others,) if I’m called by a name I don’t think of as me, I’ll look into the eyes of the person and say, “I’m not your slum.”

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The Next Zoom Conversation on writing craft (Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST)

The next Zoom Conversation is on the difference between “Memory” and “Story”—on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Richard and I will offer you ideas on how to free your writing from “heroes” and “victims.” We will do this step by step, no secrets withheld and all tricks of the trade revealed on how to keep engaging the reader and how to create the illusion of thought-in-action unfolding in real time. Questions about your own projects are very welcome.

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Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

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I POLISHED A CUP I FOUND AT A YARD SALE, and the name “Gertrude” gleamed out in a calligraphic font. My friend said, “It was Gertrude Stein’s cup.” I said, “The Steins would not have bought their daughter silver plate.” My friend said, “It was a gift from the gardener.” I ran my finger over small dents, where baby Gertrude had flung the cup to a cold stone floor and laughed. My friend said, “Don’t sell it.” Gertrude said, “Money is always there, but the pockets change.”

THE OTHER NIGHT, WE WATCHED THE HUMAN STAIN (Kanopy), starring Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman. It was made in 2003, and Nicole looks dewy and less self-conscious than she will come to appear before the camera. The movie is based on the novel by Philip Roth, and the plot is preposterous, involving a black man who passes for white and leaves behind his black family. This man is ultimately accused of making a racist remark (it’s not) in the college classroom where he teaches, a charge meant to expose the idiocy of campus language policing and thought fascism. Roth’s novel was published in 2000. It’s interesting to be reminded how long this atmosphere has taken higher education hostage.

None of that is important in the film. What’s important is the way this man’s erotic nature is returned to him in a late-in-life romance with a much younger woman. He quits his job. His wife dies. And now, freed from the trappings of the life he made as a “white” professor, he’s returned to thoughts of his first great love, a white woman he didn’t tell he was black until he brought her home to meet his mother. He’s been freed to think about that romance, the woman, their sex life, and his love of boxing as a young man. The boxing and the sex go together inside him as passions he thought he had to “clean up” to become “white.”

The “stain” on his life is that he continues to lie about himself, almost until the end, when he tells his young lover the story of who he is. In combining boxing with sex, Roth moves into the territory of Hemingway and Mailer, two male writers far more anxious about their sexuality than Roth was. Like them, Roth comes up with a story in which there is a woman on the planet who looks like Nicole Kidman and is happy having sex with a man who looks like Anthony Hopkins at age 66. This is the vanity of Roth and men like him—to invent female characters who could exist only in their erotic fantasies.

What’s interesting is, the actors make it work. You believe these two people could find each other and love each other. You believe in the ways our erotic natures come in to help us and soothe life. The back story, as they call it, for Nicole’s character involves even more pain and loss than Hopkins’ character goes through. She’s alone enough, scared enough by a menacing ex-husband (played by Ed Harris in his wild-eyed mode), and poor enough to be open to the tenderness offered by the older man. What makes the movie wonderful to watch is these two people—two actors, yes—who speak to each other and look at each other with so much nuance, we enter them.

The sex is meant to be a life-altering experience for the man, but the movie doesn’t show them making love very much. It shows them in bed talking and reaching out a hand, conjuring more intimacy than we mostly see in sex scenes. This makes them seem more genuinely attracted to each other, the way attraction and intimacy work in real life, in small moments that build slowly rather than in bursts of sexual fury on desk tops, kitchen counters, elevator walls, and other desperately uncomfortable surfaces. Without speaking a line of dialogue, Hopkins can register six unfolding emotions on his face.

ROOM AT THE TOP (1959)

ONE NIGHT DURING COVID, WE WATCHED ROOM AT THE TOP, and it’s immediately mesmerizing and smart about how human beings are. Laurence Harvey is tall and beautiful, and he enters the scene as a knife. The title refers to class. The movie seems to be about class, and it is in a sense. It’s about what happens to a person who can’t feel who he is apart from his rage. His rage about a cheating system that has fixed the odds of a life like his.

He moves from his bombed out town in the north to a town in Yorkshire with more opportunities for work, and he sets his sights on the daughter of the richest industrialist in the area. He knows he is sex, and the daughter is his ticket up. Using sex to advance is more often a plot device attached to women than men, and it’s one of the ways that Joe, the character Harvey plays, is a complex outlier. Joe is 25. Harvey was 31 when he shot the film.

He was a Lithuanian Jew born Zvi Mosheh Skikne. His family had moved to South Africa, then, after the war to the UK, and something of the heat of learning plummy vowels warms his performance, which needs to be lightning as partner to the fabulous Simone Signoret, who is so fucking sexy and alive in her part, another social outlier in an unhappily marriage. The movie just wants to keep looking at them together.

Joe is callow and brutal, even sometimes with her, and too late he learns from her there’s no life in life without bowing to your erotic nature. The truth of your erotic nature is actually something the class system can’t touch, if you don’t let it.

It’s a great film—especially for knowing this. We watched it on Criterion. Jack Clayton directs. The screenplay is by Neil Paterson and Mordechai Richler (uncredited), based on the novel by John Braine.

Simone won an Oscar as best actress that year, the screenplay won for best adapted screenplay, and Harvey was nominated as best actor. Even when Harvey is as alive as it’s possible for him to be, with that caramel baritone, you can see how a few years later he will be perfect as the robotic assassin in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

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I like talking to you.

Everyone who is already a paid subscriber, thank you for keeping the stack going and thank you for understanding it’s the work of a paid professional, not a free service or a gift. It’s funded entirely by paid subscribers—no angels or grants—and if new subscribers don’t take a turn at support, it will go away. This Substack is among the least expensive ones to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you: lauriestone@substack.com

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use the Substack website on your phone through a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

__________________________________________

The Next Zoom Conversation on writing craft (Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST)

The next Zoom Conversation is on the difference between “Memory” and “Story”—on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

Richard and I will offer you ideas on how to free your writing from “heroes” and “victims.” We will do this step by step, no secrets withheld and all tricks of the trade revealed on how to keep engaging the reader and how to create the illusion of thought-in-action unfolding in real time. Questions about your own projects are very welcome.

__________________________________

A little while ago,

I CAME ACROSS THIS QUOTE FROM JUDITH THURMAN, speaking to Rhonda Garelick in 2022: “You are invisible as an old person. It helps to accept that. I like to be invisible. I was in India with my son and some friends, about seven years ago. And I was often alone in the dining room, since my son and the others would go off. And there was a loneliness that was interesting to me. People didn’t strike up conversations with you. Or they try to flee. Maybe they think you’ll latch on to them and bore them. I think the old woman sitting alone at the restaurant or the café table is in some sort of strange bubble of her own.” —New York Times

In the past, when I’d gone to artist colonies, I’d gone to meet people. We’d stay up drinking and flirting and wondering what comes next. A pack would form. I don’t know how it happens, a mix of people of different ages but no one I remember the age I am now. If I were at a colony these days, would anyone cool and younger want to talk to me? I don’t feel invisible, as Thurman says she does. I feel the opposite of invisible. If you are invisible, people want to talk to you, the way they want to talk to ghosts and to themselves.

I have nothing to tell younger people things they don’t already know or will learn in the ways people learn things moving through time and space. Their experience is theirs and should be, as mine is mine, shaped by who knows how many forces and cultural currents I was aware of and not aware of. There is only one good thing to want from other people, who cross your path or sit beside you at a meal. Can you make each other laugh. If you find the same things funny, even for a moment, time stands still and you forget everything but the moment you are in. This might be true.

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A few years ago, “The Paris Review”

posted a link on Twitter to a piece I’d written about “I’m Your Man,” the song by Leonard Cohen. It was part of a series they ran on love songs for Valentine’s Day. A man, a Brit I could tell from his spelling, commented, “Is this what passes for music criticism at the Paris Review?” I wrote back, “I was wondering when the first prick was going to pipe up. Congratulations, it’s you.” He wrote a quick apology, and I left it at that.

Did the Brit think he needed to defend Bob Dylan? I had mentioned in the piece that Dylan addresses his songs about women to other men. The Brit thought he could be insulting and superior to me and no harm would come to him. Pretty much the way Bob is insulting and superior to women in many of his songs. No harm has come to Bob for that, either.

How many ways are there to tell a woman to shut up because you think no harm will come to you? A woman I know recently said to me, “You write so much!” She didn’t say what you write is garbage. She was saying make yourself less visible. She was saying, Your visibility hurts me.

I remember consciousness raising in the 1970s. I don’t remember what I got out of it except the pleasure of hanging out in a room with other women. What I remember in the room with other women is feeling part of something larger than me that also included me. Everything was personal for everyone and therefore everything was also about how the world worked, not just how you worked. I remember the scorn from others that attached to us like cat hair for this way of organizing. The scorn took the form of: “Is this what passes for politics?” And: “You say too much about yourself.”

People post on social media to feel less alone and to make public what we have been told to keep private. Where women are concerned, the word “privacy” is code for, “You, don’t open your mouth, no one cares what you think.” Also, it’s code for: “You should be ashamed.” The lives of poor people are seldom lived in privacy. They are picked at and scrutinized. The privacy of men and of people with money and power is protected. That’s what Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein counted on. Another term for the protection of this privacy is “the pass.”

Is this what passes for public conversation? Is this what passes for social commentary? Yes, muthafuckas. Bite me.

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Rembrandt didn’t paint clouds.

Every morning I wake up, I understand I’m not returning to my former life as a human being. Every morning is a one-way door.

Yesterday, Richard and I got Covid boosters. When we got undressed, he peeled off his band-aid. I said, “I like to keep mine on.” He said, “I know you do.” If you have the nature of a child, you are going to grow old the way a child grows old, without prior experience.

Near where we live, sheep used to graze in a meadow. The sheep are gone. When we pass the meadow, we say, “I miss the sheepies.” This morning we woke up very early, the way we do most days, and I ran outside to look at the plants. Once you start to look at the plants, there is no end of yanking out weeds and deadheading flowers and cutting iris buds for a vase.

I see my father at the health food store on East 52nd Street, owned by my sister’s husband. My father would open the place early in the morning and serve smoothies and other breakfast foods to the customers. As a coat manufacturer, he’d worn hand-made suits. In the health food store, he wore Izod shirts with little alligators and sports pants.

He doesn’t care how much food I take and he pays for. I think my life to him, the writing and different men, was queer and acceptable in the same way I was. Before he knew my mother, he’d been a traveling salesman on the road, and I remember him telling me about women he’d had sex with. I remember this in a way that may not have happened, although I think it did.

I thought of him as tender and warm and sensitive. I don’t know how he wound up that way. I don’t know how I wound up the way I did or how Richard wound up the way he did, yet here we all are.

When I read stories set in a French chateau or an Italian villa, where meals are eaten on patios and lawns under striped awnings, where for every meal three courses are served on gleaming plates, vegetables from a nearby farm, eggs from local chickens, charcuterie sliced paper thin, cutlets sautéed with capers and butter, glasses of wine, mild breezes cooling summer days, a family and their guests or the young inheritors of wealth with a houseful of sexy, happy, bored, and terrified people, I think about the servers doing the work.

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Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY, SATURDAY May 30, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

Lyrics to “I’m Your Man”

If you want a lover
I’ll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I’ll wear a mask for you
If you want a partner, take my hand, or
If you want to strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I’m your man

If you want a boxer
I will step into the ring for you
And if you want a doctor
I’ll examine every inch of you
If you want a driver, climb inside
Or if you want to take me for a ride
You know you can
I’m your man

Ah, the moon’s too bright
The chain’s too tight
The beast won’t go to sleep
I’ve been running through these promises to you
That I made and I could not keep
Ah, but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or I’d crawl to you baby and I’d fall at your feet
And I’d howl at your beauty like a dog in heat
And I’d claw at your heart, and I’d tear at your sheet
I’d say please (please)
I’m your man

And if you’ve got to sleep a moment on the road
I will steer for you
And if you want to work the street alone
I’ll disappear for you
If you want a father for your child
Or only want to walk with me a while across the sand
I’m your man

❤️❤️❤️

FEEL LIKE A BIT OF TRAVEL? Grab a coffee. Look out the window. Tiny green things are poking up. How do they know how to do that each year?

How are you feeling? If you were here, I would listen to your thoughts, and we’d both feel less alone. I would ask you to say three things in the moment you love, and I would tell you three things in the moment I love. I will tell you now. I love the way writing stops time. I love those cheese and onion things I made last night from a video on Instagram. I love this photograph of Fran Lebowitz I am looking at right now.

It was taken by Peter Hujar in 1974 when Fran was twenty-three. She’s in her childhood bedroom, half sitting up, leaning on her elbows, and she is looking at the photographer, who is standing at the end of her bed and seems to have awakened her. On the wall paper around her are large polka dots. There are smaller polka dots on the sheets. The whole image comes off like a study designed by Krazy Kat. Her dark hair falls to her shoulders. Her face is sleepy and also alert, the face of a woman who has just had sex or who was dreaming of sex before the photo was taken.

The picture conjures all the sultry sexiness that shapes that time in our lives. Really, it’s the headline of our lives. Even if you think this isn’t true of your life, it is true of your life.

Look at Fran, and you will see yourself on one of those mornings. You will remember a bed and a sense, for a few seconds, of not knowing quite where you are or whether the floor is the ceiling or the walls are the sheets, and someone or no one (but a picture in your mind) is standing at the end of the bed, looking at you, for a reason that’s mysterious and that delights you, and you will feel you don’t need to do anything else that day. Everything that needs to happen outside you has already happened inside you, and you will be right. I love this picture. It is also the skill of a great photographer to stir these associations.

I wanted to share these feelings with you today because I wanted to feel happy and alive at the same time you were feeling happy and alive. You are the figure at the end of the bed, and I am in the bed, wondering what we are doing together. Or you are in the bed, and I am the figure with the camera, showing you a moment of your life that is also my life.

My fears about the world are your fears about the world. The overturn of Roe and other infringements on the rights of women define the worth of every female human on the planet. In 1968, I thought it would always be 1968 and we would remake the world, just like that. Sexism, racism, war mongering, you name the rusty nail of existence, we would make it go away. I was wrong and I was a little bit right.

My doubts about myself are the same doubts I’ve always had, and it’s funny to live long enough to know some things are stable. Let’s go back to the bed. Sleep seems a waste of time. I’m writing from a bed now, propped against a wall of pillows. I never used to write this way. I’m watching the light on leaves outside the window. I hear birdsong because I live on a farm road. I don’t miss the city I used to walk as if it was the map of my body. I miss everyone I’ve ever loved.

I had a friend for many years who told me when we first met I’d said to her, “Let’s tell each other everything.” I don’t remember saying such a thing, but I could have. This friend and I for a long time learned to tap dance under the guidance of a famous tap dancer, and we would drink afterward in a bar in Soho, and I would look at the color of her lipstick and the way she tied a scarf at her neck and I would think I was the luckiest person on the planet to be there with her in that moment.

In 1972, when I was teaching at Hunter College, a student came to see me after a three-week absence from the class. The student said, “I didn’t want you to think I’ve been away because I didn’t like the class or you. I have long depressions. Two weeks ago, I tried to kill myself with pills, fourteen Nembutals, but right after taking them I went straight to the hospital. My psychiatrist says I didn’t really want to kill myself, but I really did. I’ve done it before. Once, I stayed in bed for a year, gently touching my arm. You’re very nice. I don’t mean to burden you.” She said she liked the course very much, had no desire to do anything, and felt numb. She said, “Sometimes, I don’t feel anything when I pinch myself.” I started to say something in response and stopped. I understood she was speaking intimately about herself, only herself. She said, “My doctor says I think I’m sicker than I am.” Her hands looked tiny. She said, “I’m amazed you can stand up before a whole group of people and be so energetic and coherent.” I said, “Often, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Over the weekend, we had a houseguest, and at a point we were talking about times in our lives we had been a suitcase at the airport on one of those conveyor belts. Someone had placed us there, and we were tootling along to who knows where. It was the feeling of movement you hadn’t exactly agreed to.

When I was nineteen, I married Bruce. I knew I shouldn’t do it. I didn’t know how to get myself out of it. I didn’t want to end my relationship with Bruce. I wanted to live with Bruce in an apartment we had found downtown, and my father said he would co-sign the lease if Bruce and I got married.

This is not a story where anyone is to blame. It’s about looking back and seeing what it’s possible to see after 50 years. Many girls who had grown up like me would have figured out a way not to be the suitcase. I knew them at the time.

As soon as I agreed to get married, I felt bad about myself. I could see in the agreement some sort of trade I was working out, and I knew it was a trade no one should make because it was dishonest. I didn’t want to get married, and I was getting married, so why did I do it?

I felt bad because I think I was making a calculation about getting the apartment and leaping into something I imagined as a fancy and sexy adult life in New York City. I was ready for that, or I wanted to be. Maybe. I don’t know. A few months before Bruce and I got married, I told him I thought we should try seeing other people. That’s what people our age were doing. And then I got married. As if it were a plane that was leaving the airport? As if it was a hand in a poker game I was eventually going to get dealt?

I return to this decision often because I won’t ever be able to understand it. What I can promise is I felt bad because I was in a lie. Part of me likes the girl who wants things. Another part of me feels depressed by what she’s willing to do to get things she thinks she can’t get any other way.

At 19, I had already met Kate Millett, who was my teacher at Barnard, and I felt disgusted with myself when, in February 1966, I told her the news. She called me Mrs. Zimmer in class. Every time I heard these words, my stomach would knot, and I wanted to say, “You have mistaken me for someone else.” She had not.

Maybe what I’m looking back at is a time I didn’t know how to avoid becoming Mrs. Zimmer. I didn’t know how to skip past that phase. Until the women’s movement, the thing that wasn’t the thing I did with Bruce was being a woman who was used by men, gloriously and glamorously perhaps, but something like an artist’s wife, a model, a muse, a wild girl on the path to bitterness, not a person with a life of her own.

That’s what we learned to make for ourselves and for other women in the movement a minute later that would be starting and I would enter—a giant plane big enough for all of us that was leaving the airport.

_______________________________

I like talking to you.

And as much as I do, I need to mention every so often the stack is the work of a paid professional, not a free service to readers or a gift. It’s funded entirely by paid subscribers—no angels or grants—and if new subscribers don’t take a turn at support, it will go away. If you have not yet taken a turn, it’s super easy and this Substack is among the least expensive ones to join.

I know money is tight for many people, and if you want to subscribe and need a further discount, just email me, and I will work out an arrangement with you: lauriestone@substack.com

For everyone who is already a paid subscriber and is keeping this thing going, I send love and more love.

NOTE!! To start a paid subscription on your phone, you need to switch out of the Substack app and use the Substack website on your phone through a browser such as Safari or use your computer.

___________________________________

Streaming now.

THE ENTIRE STORY LINE THIS SEASON for Amanda Peet’s character on Your Friends and Neighbors (Apple TV) is that she is going through menopause. That’s it. Week after week. The entire story line for Eunice Bae’s character is that she’s pregnant and not in her first youth. Hot flashes and vomiting. That’s it. Week after week.

Dear male writers of the show, Here are some excellent story lines you are squandering for the male characters: Testicular tissue mass decrease, decreased level of the male sex hormone, problems getting an erection, decrease in the elasticity of tubes that carry sperm, enlarged prostate glands, slowed down peeing and coming, lower sex drive, and MORE!! You’re welcome!

≈≈≈≈≈≈≈≈

Tom Burke

Every so often, a man will go into you. Maybe not you. Some of us, then. If not you, bugger off. Just go and bugger off. I'm here to praise Tom Burke. He is always sexy. It doesn't matter his part. Some people just are. Some men just are. He is great in Legends (Netflix). I loved it. Everyone was great. The story, based on true events, is about four customs inspectors learning to become spies and preventing the delivery of two tons of heroin from entering England. You have to pretend their success wasn't an asset to Maggie Thatcher. She's not that big a deal in the thing. Anyway, if you have nothing better to do than lie back and think of sex, here's some Tom.

________________________________

The difference between MEMORY and STORY.

If you are interested in knowing more about this idea, Richard and I are hosting a Zoom conversation on the topic on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. This is a FREE BENEFIT FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS. To RSVP, please email: lauriestone@substack.com.

We will offer you ideas on how to free your writing from “heroes” and “victims.” We will do this step by step, no secrets withheld and all tricks of the trade revealed on how to keep engaging the reader and how to create the illusion of thought-in-action unfolding in real time. Questions about your own projects are welcome.

____________________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY, SATURDAY May 30, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

Tea leaf

I STOLE A TINY NOTEBOOK from a bookstore that didn’t like me. You feel your worthlessness as soon as you walk through the doors. The way the clerks eye you. They’re at a party in a downtown loft, giving you an interval of time that isn’t measurable, before scanning for someone more important behind you. You hear it in the coffee grinding in the café, a noise so loud it tells you your conversation is insignificant. You feel it the price of a muffin in this place, or for that matter the price of a tiny notebook Frabriqué en France with tiny pages lined like a grid, a price that says you have lived the wrong life if an $8 muffin gives you pause or, similarly, the $18 cost of a tiny notebook with a paper cover, not even a tiny leather cover, makes you angry in a way you recognize as a form of defeat.

It was one of those cold, damp days in New York City that remind Richard of the England he left permanently for the weather, with its memories of rooms so cold your back would be freezing as you tried to warm yourself before a small, bleak coal fire. He left for the weather and the British class system. That day, all he’d eaten so far was leftover Chinese food from a carton out of the refrigerator. He was being a good sport. He doesn’t like cold food. Anyway, he was going to need to eat something in the bookstore café, a muffin and a coffee at the very least, and honestly I was happy we were out of the cold and that among the muffins was one with blueberries, Richard’s favorite. He grabbed seats for us, and I went to the counter to order and pay, and at this point nothing criminal is stirring in my thoughts.

Richard loves the coffee and the muffin. A silver gray light is falling on us through the giant picture window. The food has enough carbohydrates to keep him going for a few hours, and he will want to walk more when we leave, which makes me happy because there are few things I love more than walking with Richard in a world capital. Some kind of sexy energy overtakes us as he reports yet another stunning insight he’s had about Foucault or, at this particular time, Deleuze and Guattari, the French philosophers he’s reading and the reason he wants to prowl around the bookstore.

What is it about this man and philosophy? You would think our mental leanings, being so opposed, would have ended things between us a long time ago. It shows how strong some love can be and reminds me of those video clips that may or may not be faked by AI, and if they are I don’t care, it reminds me of those videos where you see a gorilla, let’s say, tenderly cuddling a chicken.

It’s when Richard goes off to look for books and I idly swan around tables of notebooks and pens and other fancy writing chazerei for sale near the café that I see the tiny notebooks. They are so tiny, I can place my phone over one and slip them both into my winter coat with the roomy pockets. It takes a moment. It’s not a plan or thought in the frontal cortex. I don’t need a frontal cortex for this maneuver. It’s funny I mention this because just this morning I was saying to Richard we should model our lives on the way animals live, happy in the moment, or wondering how to survive, but not thinking about human politics. Since we already have a frontal cortex, I’m not sure it’s possible for a human to live this way, unless, for example, you grew up feral like Kasper Hauser. I’ll bet Deleuze and Guattari would be able to advise me.

We’re outside the store, just a few feet, really, when I say, “I stole a notebook.” Richard says, “Why?” I say, “I don’t know.” All I know is I’m going to confess as soon as we leave the place. He says, “You’re going to get me deported. They’re going to come after you and take me in for questioning, and the next thing you know I’ll be shipped back to England, and they won’t want me there either.” I say, “I love the notebook.” I show it to him. He says, “Not even a mouse could write in that.” I say, “I didn’t steal it to write in it. I stole it so I could tell you.”

________________________________________

A smell you remember

IN MY EARLY 50S, I WAS IN LOVE WITH A MAN NAMED CAL, and when he ended things with me, I thought about people I had hurt and felt sorry for my actions. I don’t know if I loved Cal. Cal was more like a condition. I’m thinking now it would be difficult for someone to be with a person who experienced you as a condition. So, Cal, if you are reading this, you get credit for hanging in there as long as you did.

It wasn’t long, even in dog years, and during the time I knew Cal, it was hard for me to eat because I didn’t know how things were going to go. I wasn’t relaxed. I wanted to be, but you can’t make yourself relax. Relaxation is the opposite of making yourself do anything. This must have worn Cal out. At the time, I didn’t have enough extra brain cells to look at things from Cal’s perspective. It may have seemed like I did, with all the thinking about Cal, but all the thinking about Cal was to figure out how I could be with him.

The main benefit of Cal was not eating. I looked really good, not counting the ragged expression on my face. I once watched a cousin of mine stop eating. We didn’t have a name for it then. I’m seventeen, at a party for the family on my father’s side. My cousin Tessie is twenty-two, and she’s at a table outside where people are eating. There’s a grill. The thing I remember is Tessie’s father slicing a piece of charred fat from a steak, holding it in the air, and saying, “This, I know she’ll eat.” He brings the charred fat to the plate in front of Tessie, and she smiles shyly.

To me, Tessie is thrillingly thin. Her thinness is like approaching the Grand Canyon. You come to the edge and look down at the vastness beyond you. I’m dizzy with wonder at the space her thinness fills. No one can resist the smell of charred fat. Not even Tessie. She picks up her knife and fork and cuts the fat into small pieces. She eats the way anorexics eat, which is something I want to be able to do. I want to be anything but the person I am. Maybe not anything.

What is the relationship between wanting Cal and wanting the thinness of Tessie? They are the same wanting—a wanting that, in its forcefulness, has to defeat the wanting of not-wanting. Lately, Richard and I have been asking if there’s an essential self we carry around through life. He thinks we’re always changing, and the thing we are at any one time is relational. Meaning, you are the self that took off on that plane, sitting beside the person in the next seat. What is the wanting of not-wanting? In the case of Cal, it’s a cool girl he can get near enough to love? In the case of Tessie, food is the great wall of China obstructing a leap into the Grand Canyon of thinness. What I’m talking about is the comedy of girl. What I like about the comedy of girl is: I didn’t create it, and it’s not personal.

_________________________________

A story is something you make as you are sitting there.

If you are interested in knowing more about this idea, Richard and I are hosting a Zoom conversation about the difference between MEMORY and STORY on Saturday May 30 from 3 to 4 EST. This is a FREE BENEFIT FOR ALL PAID SUBSCRIBERS. To RSVP, please email: lauriestone@substack.com.

You can ask questions in real time about your projects. We will have suggestions for ways to transforms things that have happened to you or other people into material for dramatic narrative that keeps the reader reading.

You can start for as little as $2.50 a month. I know money is tight for a lot of people, and if this is the case for you and you want to attend, please let me know and we will figure something out.

There are lots of benefits for paid subscribers including a free 15-minute conversation with me about your writing goals, free invitations to monthly Zoom conversations with guest artists, free access to the entire archive of 307 pieces, and more.

__________________________________

Hi, Mom,

You were beautiful. You were funny, and you could laugh at yourself.

_______________________________

Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY, SATURDAY May 30, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

__________________________________

Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

__________________________________

The Marriage Dividend, notes from the first year is coming out this fall!

I am delighted to be publishing again with Steve Mitchell and . I was on the phone this morning with Steve, and he said one of the things he likes about the book is that the narrator and the Richard character are the ages they are and at the same time the book is not about aging as a thing, a landscape, a menu, a launch into outer space.

I want this book to make you happy, and if that happiness is anything like the pleasure I felt putting the book together, that will be a large accomplishment.

I will be offering discounts for pre-oders soon. The pub date will be late October or early November ahead of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The image is the cover of my previous book with Scuppernong Editions—you will notice I later stole for the title of the Substack.

TO CELEBRATE THE 200TH BIRTHDAY OF FREDERIC CHURCH, Olana, his giant estate overlooking the Hudson, invited the world over for free ice cream and popcorn. There were also tours of his house and gardens, and you could have all the time you liked walking the miles of winding trails. At the visitor center, we were encouraged to make party hats. Guess who said, “I’m not wearing even a conceptual hat.” Richard was willing to be seen walking the grounds and passing people with me in the hat I made. The jaunty angle was his idea. It was much remarked on.

The air was warm. During the walk, we recalled other walks together at the Djerassi colony in Northern California, the walks around the little lakes at Yaddo, walks in the Lake District. We stood at the top of the hill outside the mansion, with its sweeping views of the river and low mountains in the far distance. It’s finally spring. Not so fast. It’s still cold at night.

I said, “From now on, let’s ignore anything we hear from other people about our age. Let’s just be us as we are inside us, inside our bubble.” He said, “Don’t you already live that way?” I said, “No. Today, I don’t think people saw me in a particular way because of my age, but you don’t know. You can’t tell unless they put it right in your face.” He said, “You can’t tell what anyone is thinking, ever.” I said, “There is something consistent in each of us, and yet neither of us believes in the concept of ‘the self’ as a unified field. Each of us is whoever we are today, looking at how people see aging.” Richard said, “You were the only person who wore their hat all day. Not even other children wore their hats all day.”

________________________________

The more of less.

THE OTHER MORNING, RICHARD AND I WERE TALKING about things we’d gained from having limits. Anyone who’s written a sonnet or a villanelle knows the strange freedom you get from guidelines with restrictions. I thought, for me, getting together with Richard, where the stakes for him were high, made me feel, in our early years—when we were slowly getting to know the wildly unfamiliar landscape of each other—I thought whatever is happening, this is not one of those times you say to yourself: I can get out of this, all I have to do is leave.

In my mind, it wasn’t an option, not only because of needing to keep anteing up in the poker game we were playing. I kept trying to imagine my life returning to what it had been before we met or assuming a different shape without Richard, and a black screen would lower. I could not see this life or me in any life, really, and so that was the limit.

This had not happened to me before. I was in my early 60s, and this had not happened because before was before I was in my early 60s. That’s part of it. Maybe, that’s all of it. In any case, the feeling of restriction was fantastic. What a relief. It was a party with cake. You have fun at a party with cake.

Richard thought that for him, as well, there was the factor of, Oy, I better make this work to justify all the mishegas I caused. I don’t believe he expressed this in Yiddish, but to that effect. I proposed something else as well, having to do with becoming a type-1 diabetic.

I thought for him there had been a kind of weird freedom in the diagnosis. He was twenty-three and had just started university at Leeds. The weird freedom, I proposed, is why he’s been such a good citizen of the illness. Having a condition that imposed restrictions (about how to balance food and insulin) was freeing in comparison to the restrictions of the British class system he’d grown up in, restrictions that are demoralizing and punitive and teach you to comply before you know who you even are. The class system judges you and evaluates you as lesser all the days of your life. Richard took on the restrictions of diabetes that contained no evaluation of him. This illness simply occurs, the way weather does, and inside the illness he has always managed his actions according to his experience, not according to anyone else’s established controls. In that sense, it was liberating. He said, “You may be onto something.”

___________________________________

When you least expect it.

I’M ABOUT TO CONSIDER A SUBJECT THAT WILL PROBABLY AROUSE YOUR SYMPATHY and even worse, your reflex say that you feel all the same emotions. I already know that. That’s the reason I’m writing this. The topic is insult you don’t immediately experience as insult, and when you do it lives in your window as a sick plant you will nurse and nurse and never throw out.

A little while ago, I scrolled past the post of a man I was once friends with, not close friends, more or less professional friends I would hang out with from time to time. He hosted a series where he interviewed people before a live audience. When a book of mine was nearing publication, I asked if I could some time be a guest. He said, “You’re not famous enough.”

I really enjoyed mentioning this to Richard. We were still in bed. I said, “I have so many stories like this I love to think about.” I told him four or five that were right there. There was the time a “friend” pressed me to buy an expensive ceramic pot from her dear artist pal, who lived near us, but the “friend” didn’t want to introduce me as someone the artist might like to know. There were the multiple times editors of publications asked me for the contact information of a more famous person I knew and didn’t suggest I might ever receive an assignment myself. One woman I knew, again not a close friend, called to tell me about a fabulous party she was planning. Not to invite me. To ask me to recommend caterers. That was a two-tired insult. I didn’t qualify as a guest or as a caterer. There was the time I was at an event with a woman I hadn’t seen in a while. We went way back as writers and blah blah, and when she stood nose to nose with me, all she could think to say was, “How’s MORE FAMOUS PERSON YOU USED TO BE CLOSE FRIENDS WITH?”

I said to Richard, “What’s the enjoyment for me in these stories?” He said, “Ultimately, it’s the enjoyment of seeing the way you are seen. Catching a glimpse of it because the person is unconscious of what they’re doing. It’s a sudden shock. It’s not instantaneous. There’s a gap, a moment before it registers, Oh, I’ve just been shot. Then you feel the bullet.”

I thought, yes, the pleasure is in a certain recognition of where you stand, even though where you stand isn’t good. It’s the same with aging, the thing I wrote about recently of finding you have become invisible to a certain kind of man—actually all men who are strangers. There’s a disparity between the way you see yourself and the way it’s brought home you are seen. If you are a female human, you have training for this all your life. In the case of being Girl, the disparity is a form of misidentification. In the case of these insults, I don’t feel misidentified. I’m being told how I appear in the eyes of the larger world.

The shock is in realizing I have over-estimated myself. My fantasies, conscious or unconscious, are being stripped away. In the moment of insult, you are the clown, who has been pompous. Oh, dear.

Well, happily, the insight lasts only for a moment. It doesn’t wake you up for long. That’s why, with each insult, there’s a fresh hestitation followed by a fresh sting. It’s not knowledge that can stick! Knowledge that can’t stick is comedy! To see that you are helpless to know certain things in a solid way—to see at least this thing clearly, stirs a kind of pleasure. I guess.

NOTE TO READERS: If in the comments you write the equivalent of a CARE emoji or an ANGER emoji, I will never forgive you. Those responses insult this chunk as a piece of thought. That’s what it wants to be. It does not want to be a bid for commiseration. In this moment, my feelings are not hurt. I’m writing about the phenomenon of hurt feelings and what they stir. If my feelings were hurt, this would be complete dreck.

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Which brings me to the next topic: the difference between “MEMORY” and “STORY.”

Richard and I will be offering a Zoom conversation about Memory and Story ON SATURDAY MAY 30 FROM 3 to 4 EST. You can ask questions in real time about your projects. They may include ways to consider stuff that happened to you and that you are still carrying around and think might qualify as a subject. Will it? How to transforms things that happen to you into material for dramatic narrative and still keep the reader interested. We have suggestions. TO RSVP, PLEASE EMAIL ME: lauriestone@substack.com

The MONTHLY ZOOM CONVERSATIONS are a benefit to PAID SUBSCRIBERS. You can start for as little as $2.50 a month. I know for a lot of people money is tight, and if this is the case for you and you want to contribute, please let me know and we will figure something out.

There are lots of benefits for paid subscribers including a free 15-minute conversation with me about your writing goals, free invitations to monthly Zoom conversations with guest artists, free access to the entire archive of 307 pieces, and more.

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Another memory with an oy that has served me!

I WAS IN MY EARLY TWENTIES, and I hadn’t published anything, I don’t think, and I was in a women’s writing group. It was one of those gatherings feminists were creating all the time, and it was so exciting to have these meetings to go to. I was writing poetry I think in those days, and maybe some stories. I didn’t know what I was doing.

One of the writers in the group was Alix Kates Shulman, who was a big star after writing Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), which I thought was great, and I thought she was great. She was friends with Kate Millett. She was a big deal in the movement and in the writing world.

I have the sharpest memory of one of the meetings. It’s stayed with me all these years. I read a poem, I think, and afterward Alix was clear about what she thought didn’t work and what she didn’t like about it. She wasn’t mean. She’s not that kind of person. She wasn’t pulling any punches. Other people said different things, some liked what turned Alix off. I didn’t know how to take in what she was telling me. What she was telling me was I wasn’t good enough and also she was telling me how I could be better.

When she was talking to me, all I could feel—I think, I mean who the hell knows—was disappointment I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be. She was 100 percent right about it all. The specifics don’t matter. I think what rubbed her the wrong way is what can still push itself into a piece of my writing, some kind of show-offy thing. She was 100 percent right about it all, and slowly, over years, I saw what she was talking about.

By the time I started writing for the Village Voice, a few years later, the thing I had taught myself to do—I’m giving myself credit for this, anyway—was listen to any feedback from writers I respected, any suggestion to make something better, any information about what was missing or swerving somewhere incomprehensible. I had incorporated the things Alix had told me, and I had learned to listen. When you are learning to speak like no one else, you learn to do that from all the other people who sound exactly like themselves.

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Happenings for paid subscribers:

UPCOMING ZOOMS, always on Saturdays from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com

LAURIE & RICHARD, on the difference between MEMORY and STORY, SATURDAY May 30, from 3 to 4 EST To RSVP: lauriestone@substack.com.

Here’s a little teaser for this conversation:

Here is a trick. If you want to create the illusion of intimacy between you and the reader, write like you’re talking to someone right in front of you. You were walking, and there they were, on the street, and you grabbed them up and said, “Let’s have coffee,” and while they were sitting across from you, you told them about something you were in love with telling them, that’s why you wanted to spend this time with them, to show them something you love.

The trick I’m talking about concerns syntax and vocabulary. Dickens, when he wrote dialogue, he would say it out loud. He would write the way someone would speak. I’m saying do this with everything you write. Turn it all into dialogue, or a monologue.

Scan your writing for words no one would use in speech and find other words that someone would use in speech, and as far as syntax goes, break every rule of grammar if the rule of grammar applies only to written language. Forget that. The reader will hear you and understand you, because they are sitting right in front of you.

To attend one event or receive one recording, with no future payment obligation, you can buy a “coffee” for $4 at ko-fi.com/lauriestone

Breakout sessions following the Zooms with guest artists

The BREAKOUT SESSION following the Zoom conversation about MEMORY and STORY is on SUNDAY, MAY 31, from 3 to 4:15 EST. THERE ARE STILL PLACES. There is a cap of 10 at each breakout. You are invited to share a piece of your own writing of around 400 words. The SLAM readings are thrilling impovs—we make a work together larger than the parts! The fee is $30. To sign up please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

There will also be a BREAKOUT SESSION on June 1, following the Zoom conversation on the difference between “memory” and “story.”

To request recordings of past Zoom Conversations

with Steven Dunn, with Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall, with Francine Prose, with Sophie Haigney (of The Paris Review), with David Cale that includes a reading from his hit solo theater piece Blue Cowboy, with poet David Daniel, with Daisy Alioto, publisher of Dirt , Michael Klein, and Marga Gomez, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

Working together one to one on your writing or starting and growing a Substack publication.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about a project you are working on or for guidance in gaining confidence and freedom in your writing practice, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.

If you would like to book time to talk one-on-one about STARTING AND GROWING a Substack publication, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. I can help you through the software, choosing a title, art design, and ways to gain readers.

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Please “comment,” ”like,” and “share” below. Your engagement helps the algorithm notice the stack and gain a presence here for feminism and literary writing.

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The brilliant has kindly republished my piece about awaiting the party for outside Cipriani’s, and here is the link: https://dirt.fyi/article/2026/05/coming-of-age

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