A sentence that changed your life for the better.

What if love, alone, is worth remembering.

The horse that lived with my parents, then lived with my sister, and now lives with Richard and me.

“Come, now,” my sister said when she was dying. She had been dying for a while, and this was her last week. It was hot in her house, and at night I’d move to the living room and sleep on the couch. Across the room was the baby grand piano my mother had given Ellen and no one in her family played.

I love a summons. You wouldn’t love a summons if, in your life, you were summoned all the time. To me, a summons is, “Come to the party. Let me blindfold you. Let me guide you there.” My sister is still alive during her last week. She’s still sleeping in her bed, and I lie beside her, and she’s not too weak to talk and laugh. “Tell me what you want,” she says. I always know what I want. I say, “I want the horse.” The statue of a horse on her bureau that belonged to our parents. She says, “Tell Steffanie. She’ll take anything that’s not nailed down.” She means Steffanie can’t get enough of her mother.

To be loved like that is a hand reaching out. All the words expressed since the election form a mean, empty blank. You have to force memory. It’s not really there. Happiness has no history. It doesn’t exist in time. Richard and I play a game. Every day, we ask each other to say three things in the moment we love, just when we love nothing. We’re always lying the way writing is a lie and acting is lie. The thing that is not a lie is the enchantment of language.

Yesterday, Richard pointed out the word trip has two meanings that are opposites. One is to journey out, the other is to fall down, and now there is the drug sense of trip, which is a journey out in the form of a fall. I was illustrating an idea I had about writing by using a sentence he didn’t like. The sentence is, “I tripped over a dead person.” The dead person I am tripping over is my sister. When she said, “Come, now,” I dropped everything. It was so tender. I felt loved, and feeling loved at the last possible moment felt weird and like something you couldn’t feel so much in the moment as see later, such as now as I’m writing. There are things in life that exist only once they have come to mind, and these things do not want to be summoned. They will not come unless there is a gun to your head, and you have to write something.

Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada.

“Who am I?” existed before I did. Horseshoe crabs have existed nearly unchanged for at least 445 million years, well before dinosaurs. It makes you wonder how long you could go nearly unchanged. If you want to know how to flirt with a stranger, talk to a dog. In The Devil Wears Prada, the complexity of Andy’s love for Miranda is a lost opportunity, although we see her bewitchment. It’s exciting to be put through tests to learn if you can measure up. The position of the apprentice, yearning for the approval of the task master, is an under explored drama between women. This relationship isn’t supposed to be important in stories written by men, if it’s even noticed.

The first few days we bought the house, we slept at the house of a friend. On the fifth day, Richard said, “We are sleeping in the house tonight,” and I said, “Okay.” I said, “Really, do we have to?” There was a mattress we pulled up to the bedroom. And there we were, two chickens surrounded by a place that screamed, “Help me.” It was a good example of wanting something in a blind and headlong way you don’t calculate the afterward. This has, in a sense, been the story of my life, or the story of my life I’m telling now, or the story of everyone’s life.

Richard and I have a plan for our old age. We will get two dogs and name them Richard and Laurie. That way, when one of us pegs it, there will be someone to call as you roam the house. I have been recording conversations between Richard and me. In one, he imaged the Three Stooges visiting the baby Jesus instead of the Three Wide Men. I don’t know what prompted the idea, except Hudson was building up to Christmas. In another conversation, he said he was a good sleeper because he didn’t feel anxiety. (I mean, really.)

We have always been the things we watch, or else how could these images have floated from our imaginations? In the early morning, I dreamed that Richard and I were in Paris, staying in the apartment of someone we didn’t know. Suddenly, he was gone, and I had to look for him, because we needed to pack and fly out that day. I searched the streets, annoyed and accepting there would be mysteries in the course of any day with him. Paris didn’t look like Paris, and on the street, I spoke to a stranger with discolored teeth in a pleasant manner. I returned to the apartment and in time the door opened. There was Richard, and life went on.

When we woke up, Richard told me a dream he had. He was somewhere in Europe, and people came to the hotel where we were staying and asked him to come with them while I stayed back. They wanted to consult with him about how to run an organization, maybe a museum. In his recollection, the project was vague but his sense of his competence was sharp. They took him off in an airport shuttle bus, and after that he wandered around, unable to get back to the hotel. I said, “Ah, so that’s where you were. And by the way, you did get back.”

The house I lived in for a month in 2005, built by the architecture firm Salazar Davis and installed in the Flux Factory.

In 2005, I accepted an invitation to write a novel in a month while living in a house built for me in an art gallery. A small house built by architects and designed so that visitors could look in on me doing whatever I would be doing. They could look in on me because I was an exhibit as well as whatever else I was.

I didn’t think about how I would feel being looked at. It seemed like what I had to give to the experiment. It was someone else’s idea, someone else’s art project, the way a play is someone else’s art project if you are an actor, and the way the world is someone else’s project if you are a female human. In other words, my feelings were mixed.

I was 58, and at 58, I was the oldest person in the Flux Factory, where the gallery was housed. At that time, the Flux Factory was an artist collective and commune in Long Island City, Queens. The residents—there were about twenty—lived in little rabbit rooms off several public spaces furnished with worn velvet couches and steam punk pipes and hardware.

The fashion sense was boots and leather. The faces bored and expectant at the same time, a kind of cool I had always regarded with delight and apprehension and I had never tried to achieve it. Nothing bored me, and everything scared me. You had to apply for the gig. I got the job because I was a little bit well known and I am easy to get.

There were two other writers in the show, Ranbir Sidhu and Grant Bailie—excellent writers and warm companions—each in his own house in the art gallery, and on weekends the public was invited to hear us read installments of the novels we were writing. We attracted quite a bit of press attention, and each week the crowds that came swelled larger. Celebrity chefs, some of whom used food as their art, cooked dinners for us each night. The food was beautiful and all you want. We weren’t supposed to leave the Flux Factory for the month we were installed. We had a place to exercise, like a prison yard.

Before I entered the experiment, my friend Esther had said, “You’ll hate it.” She meant living with other people and hearing their sounds. She meant seeing the water splashed on the sinks and floor of the common bathrooms we used. I was happy the entire 30 days I was there. I didn’t have to ask myself, “What are you doing with yourself, and where are you going next?” I didn’t want to leave when our time was up.

I want to tell you about the heart break of dismantling my beautiful house, and then I want to tell you about the joy of looking back at such an experience. Did I think I could write a novel in a month, or even a draft of one? Did I think I could write a novel in all the time I had left to live?

In this time of oy, please keep independent literary publishing alive. There is only one way.

This space will remain apart from blame, theories, and noise.

This space will seek to arouse pleasure and thought. If love, language, and a love of language offers you more range of motion, that makes me happy.

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Prompty People

Here are two prompts for you to play with and perhaps combine in one piece.

What was the last chance you took?

Describe the the mood you are in since the election with an action or an image—not with abstract nouns, not with adjectives, not with emotion summarized in a word. It also can't be a complaint or another hot emotion such as rage. Instead, imagine the mood going to a bar, let's say. What would it order? What would it wear?

PLEASE DON'T POST YOUR WRITES IN COMMENTS.

These are for your enjoyment. You are welcome to share them on your posts, in “Notes,” or in any other social media you like.

Richard about to pounce on a galette with apples and cheese.

The next ZOOM Conversation for Paid subscribers, on writing craft, is on Saturday November 23 from 3 to 4 EST. To RSVP, please email me at: lauriestone.substack.com

Also for paid subscribers: If you would like a recording of the last Zoom Conversation on creating an ORIGINAL VOICE, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com

Every sentence has a biography. Every sentence tells you about the life of the narrator through their vocabulary, their inclusion of foreign words, their syntax, grammar, and punctuation, their comic outlook, the music in their cadences. These elements swirl into a distinctive sound with the ability to seduce the reader into continuing. How do you make written language register with the immediacy and intimacy of spoken language?

Richard and I have rescheduled our upcoming LIVE ZOOM TALK, presented by My Five Things for Sunday, DECEMBER 22 from 8 to 10PM EST. It’s called, “How to write a seductive first sentence”—about feeling pleasure as you write and producing pleasure for the reader. After you register, you can attend the live talk and also watch the video as often as you like. Everyone is invited.

Here is the link register and to learn more about our talk: https://myfivethings.com/class/how-to-write-a-seductive-sentence/

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