The tentative date for the next Zoom gathering to talk about writing is Saturday, July 22 at 3pm EST. I will send out an invitation to confirm this. In the meantime, if you would like to attend, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com, and I will place you on a list. Richard and I thought we would offer another larger conversation before breaking into smaller groups to practice together. If you are interested in these activities and would like to become a paid subscriber, there is a 25% discount for new paid subscribers in the link below. Last time, we gathered questions ahead, and we will do this again. A reader recently asked me about generating emotion for the reader in a piece of writing. What helps make this happen? I’ve got some ideas to share about this. In your emails, please suggest other questions about writing craft we might want to discuss.
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Gitte
On a train to Berlin, I met a doctor, Gitte, who was beautiful in a worn out way from late nights. She was stylish, with long legs and hair extensions piled high. Her skin was tan and looked very dark against the gleaming white shirt and gold necklace she wore. It was a long journey, and we got to talking.
She was a neurosurgeon who had switched to pediatric oncology, having wearied of the condescension of men in her field. She’d grown tired, too, of the anonymity of her patients, most of whom had arrived at the hospital with head traumas due to car crashes. She’d operate, change a dressing, and never see the person again.
She moved to Canada, entered oncology, and began treating children. Some of her patients remained in her care for years, and as the German countryside rolled along with its neat villages and puffy clouds, she recalled a visit to the grave of a young girl she’d believed she could save. The girl’s mother was pregnant again, and she and Gitte had cried together in each other’s arms. Gitte paled at the memory, and I wondered where the blood had gone.
I knew in a way, but I liked thinking about the body in the company of a person who knew more. When I was 27, for five minutes I considered applying to medical school in order to give my life purpose. Then I remembered what doctors actually do with their time and thought, Do you see yourself doing any of that?
In Canada, Gitte fell in love with a cell biologist, who was studying aging. She said, “All that cells want—whether it’s a healthy cell or a tumor cell—is more.” She was evoking an erotics of aliveness. She was suggesting that existence feels like desire, even on a cellular level and even, maybe, when we’re in pain.
This idea appealed to me. It didn’t give life purpose, but it gave it a form. She described the sex she had with the cell biologist, as if we weren’t strangers, and I felt we weren’t. We were part of a band of restless women who find each other on trains and in hotel lobbies. I was falling in love with her the way I fall in love with people I don’t know. And I can tell you now, looking back 20 years, I’m still in love with her and with the pleasure of sudden intimacy that makes you feel less alone in life, and that, in my case, gives you a life.
One morning in Berlin, we met for breakfast. Gitte had worked all night, caring for premature babies—a rotation required for her to practice again in Germany. Some of the babies had spent only 25 weeks in the womb. She put out her hand, as if holding a pound of butter, to show me how small they were. Their brains weren’t developed enough to regulate swallowing and breathing. She had to take blood from veins too tiny to see. I worried these technologies could make it harder for women to have abortions, and I feared for the development of the small beings. I asked her how it felt to do this work. She threw back her head and stretched out her arms. She was wearing a long sweater and skinny black pants. Her eyebrows were fuzzy and dark, and her dimples were deep. She said, “I feel competent. It’s thrilling.”
She asked me about being a writer, and I described the scene in Stardust Memories when a space alien says to the Woody Allen character, “You want to do a service for mankind? Tell funnier jokes.” She smiled. I didn’t know if she could imagine a life where you sit alone in a room as often as you can with the great joy of solitude, watching the tickertape of your mind flit along. She ordered eggs, a baguette, and coffee, and we talked under an umbrella as yellow jackets buzzed a pot of jam. She was 36, and her life billowed out before her. She had the work she wanted, and she had love.
She and the cell biologist were considering having a child, but she had doubts. She said, “We don’t share a common language.” She didn’t mean German or English. She meant what was big to her was small to him, and vice versa. I remembered the steps I had taken in my mind, leading up to the possibility of having a child. At the time, I was with a man named Gardner, an artist who was much older than me, and who’d said okay to having another baby. His three children were grown. To me, I think—it was a long time ago, and nothing I write about the past is really remembered—what appealed to me was doing one damn thing that would connect me to the great chain of everybody else. Another way of saying this is I wanted to be normal.
I knew—did I really know?—that wishing to be part of the great chain of everybody else was not the same as actually wanting to raise a little person, a job that appealed to me about as much as the labors of a doctor. The idea was just that—an airy nothing. Gardner and I stopped using birth control. There were no steps leading up to and away from having a child. We played Russian roulette. I didn’t get pregnant. I decided nothing.
The cell biologist was older than Gitte and set in his ways. She said, “He thinks he knows what a man is and what a woman is, and he thinks he has science on his side.” She rolled her eyes. A bee got caught in the jam. It extracted one foot, believing it was free, and then another foot got stuck. Gitte took my hand, and I saw green flecks in her eyes. She smiled uncertainly and said, “I don’t take what men say seriously. Men are not their words.”
I thought: If we are not our words, what are we? Then I wondered what we might be apart from words. Gitte was reaching for the everything that doesn’t exist, and I thought, Don’t do it. Don’t give yourself away. Then I thought, Why not?
Gardner Leaver in the first chair he designed.
I will read anything about neurosurgeons because one saved my life in 2015.
After Dr. Tse removed my brain tumor
he visited me every day in the hospital
for a week.
He said I worried too much and lighten up!
I have never met a female neurosurgeon!
“Meeting” Gitte today is thrilling!
I am alive because humans like her learned how to fix brains.
Thank you, Laurie.🧠🙏✍️
I have never met a female neo
Such fun to watch the ticker tape of Laurie’s mind flit along. A writer must be interesting first and foremost, and these essays are the embodiment of interestingness, worth rereading to observe how it comes together.