“I don’t believe in moving on or moving forward,” says author Yiyun Li. “It’s more that something big happens, like the death of a child, but then you make space from within so you can contain that something and still live another life.” In her latest story collection, Wednesday’s Child, Li explores the landscape of loss, a terrain she herself has navigated since the suicide of her 16-year-old son in 2017. Vital and heartbreaking, the stories delve into motherhood and marriage, love and friendship, aging and death, illuminating the struggle to come to terms with the losses that life brings. 

Born in Beijing in 1972, Li earned a BS from Peking University in 1996 and an MS in immunology at the University of Iowa in 2000. She planned to pursue her PhD but changed course when she became interested in writing; she completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, A Public Space, and elsewhere. She has published eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction, among them Where Reasons End (2019), a novel written as a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after she loses him to suicide.

Li is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and director of the University’s Creative Writing Program. Her many honors and awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Windham Campbell Prize, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a PEN/Malamud Award, and a PEN/Hemingway Award. 

Li spoke with me over Zoom about existing in liminal spaces, discovering how loss can expand us, and finding meaning and joy in even our saddest moments. 

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In Wednesday’s Child, the characters are often in between-states, including the liminal period after immigrating to a new country. You’ve lived in the US for nearly three decades. Do you feel rooted in America, or like you’re between America and China? That’s such a good question. I think I feel in between. I don’t fully belong to either place. I grew up in Beijing and left when I was 23, but even when I was there and fully immersed in that society, I didn’t really feel a sense of belonging. At the same time, it was hard to set myself apart from others, because China is crowded and there’s no personal space. I’ve been in America for twenty-seven years now, and though I don’t feel entirely at home here, it’s easier to set myself apart from others. I live among people and I teach, but psychologically I feel apart, and that’s very important to me. 

Why is it so important? I like to think carefully about a lot of things. So I need space—physical space, but mostly mental space. I need to not be in constant communication with people. My ideal way to spend my days is thinking on my own. If I’m with people all the time, I have no time to think, no thoughts.

When you came to the US to attend the University of Iowa, were you planning to emigrate? Yes. There were many things I was not certain of, but one thing I knew when I was in China was I did not want to live in China. The urge was so strong that I never had a moment of doubt. 

Why did you want to leave so badly? There was a lack of resources when I was growing up. Now China is booming, but when I was in college, in the 1990s, it was dire. In my junior year, my boyfriend—now my husband—and I went to a job fair in Beijing. Every single job had a sign that said “Males only.” I thought there was no future for me in the country, or for the country itself, so I decided I must leave. 

One concept in the bardo teachings is that we’re the protagonists of our lives, in the sense that the choices we make determine our trajectory. Do you ever think about what your life would have been like if you’d stayed in China? “If I’d stayed”—that’s exactly how I look at fiction. Fiction is all about someone’s alternative lives. I always think about my characters’ alternative lives, but I’ve never wondered, “What if I had stayed in China? I would have married this person, I would have had that job.” I closed the door to that. There was one moment in my American life when there was a reunion for my middle school. These middle school friends in China emailed and asked me to send my current picture for an album they were making. Of course, I did not send it. 

Do you think of yourself as Chinese, American, Chinese-American, Asian-American? I wouldn’t say I’m Chinese because I did give up my citizenship. I have an American passport, but do I feel American? Probably not. Still, I’m more American than Chinese in the ways I approach the world. I don’t really think of myself as an American writer though. Nor do I think of myself as a Chinese writer because I don’t write in Chinese. When Kazuo Ishiguro first started writing, people were always asking, “Are you a British writer? Are you Japanese-British?” And he said he wanted to be called an international writer. I think that’s a very good way to answer.

That in-between is important. I’m just here in the between, living mostly in the world of books. In that sense, I have a country, made up of books by writers from all over the world. That’s my point on the map.

Who lives in that country? Well, the Russians: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev. A lot of British writers, some American writers. In America and China, there’s this urge to expand, invade, claim property, like how the early Americans pushed westward, but in my country of books, you don’t have to expand: you go in rather than out. My tendency is to go inward, rather than outward.

Not to be acquisitive. Right. I tend to be inquisitive, rather than acquisitive. 

For you, going inward also means exploring the dimensions of loss and grief, as you do in Wednesday’s Child. In the story “When We Were Happy We Had Other Names,” which is about a couple who has lost their son to suicide, you write that perhaps “grief was nothing but disbelief” or “the recognition of having run out of illusions.” How has your understanding of grief evolved as you’ve experienced it and written about it? I used the word “grief” in that story even though I have such a big argument with that word, because its etymology is “heavy burden.” There are certain things that are burdens in life, but I know now that if you lose someone, it’s not a burden. You carry them on. You don’t want to put them down, you don’t want to forget them. 

The other thing, for my characters and for myself, is that grief changes your relationship with time. You feel more patient and have a more philosophical view of how time works. Our lives are so intertwined with time. When we talk about life, we’re actually talking about time: “I have to go to a meeting.” “I have too much to do.” “I don’t have enough time in my day.” Time is the centerpiece of our lives. But now I feel I have some distance from time. Time is important, but if there’s a lot to do and I cannot finish it, it’s OK. 

So grief has created a feeling of expansiveness. That’s the opposite of the common idea that grief narrows your world. I’m working on a piece for the New Yorker, and I was just talking with my editor about this. We were discussing the word “anguish,” what we feel when we lose someone. I looked up “anguish,” and it means “narrowing.” But in my experience, even though it feels like narrowing, it’s the opposite. Grief doesn’t narrow you down, it expands you. 

What’s it like for you to write about grief? My editor and I were working recently on a nonfiction piece of mine that dealt with a loss that I’d experienced, and she said, “When you write, you’re putting the words under anesthesia. You’re putting the story under anesthesia, and then you can do dissections.” We weren’t so much looking at the life story behind the piece as looking at words, at commas, at adjectives. Just by paying so much attention to how the story is written, or how the words are arranged, you’re removing yourself to a certain distance. It’s either before or after you write the piece that you feel the feelings in it.

In a recent New York Times essay about love and the death of your son, you say, “I raised myself as a warrior queen.” What do you mean by that? People say, “You had to overcome a lot to become a writer.” Maybe so, yet I don’t look at it that way. Losing a child, though, is a big thing. The most important lesson I’ve learned is that there are moments when you must have willpower. You have to make a meal, or not only a meal but something delicious and attractive, even as you wonder, “What’s the point of a nice-looking meal?” Or to take another example, there’s the willpower to garden, even when you wonder what the point is when life can be so terrible. People are dying in Israel and Palestine—what’s the point of planting flowers? 

It’s easy to feel there’s no point, and doing these things anyway is willpower. You have to have some will, and you have to use it. That’s why I say I’ve raised myself as a warrior queen. I may not have a lot of ambition or desire to communicate with people. I don’t want a lot of things. But the one thing I want is to have this willpower. I live by it. So many horrible things happen, but you still have to hold your life together. And what holds life together are the little things. When you’re really sad, you can find joy in baking a cake or doing some gardening.

In spite of the tremendous loss you’ve experienced, you have a lovely, upbeat manner and are quick to laugh. Even the saddest story has a funny moment, right? My biggest regret is that very few reviewers say my writing is funny. I would like people to see the humor in my writing. The ability to laugh is one of the most important things. And I do laugh, all the time. You have to, even at the saddest moments. 

I also make a huge distinction between sad and unhappy. Unhappiness and joy oftentimes do not coexist, and unhappiness is more like a bitter state, which is not good. But I don’t feel unhappy. I feel sad. I can say I’m very sad. I have a sad story. But I’m not unhappy, because sadness and joy can coexist.

The post On Grief, Willpower, and Finding Happiness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Sun House, David James Duncan’s first novel since 1992, is nearly 800 pages and took him sixteen years to write. It’s a wide-ranging tale of the search for meaning in a world where “biocide and geocide are high on the list of disasters,” and “we’re…having our hearts repeatedly broken by a human assault on the planetary tapestry of life that’s fast building toward an inconceivable climax.” Longing for a different kind of existence, the characters in the book (a student of Sanskrit, a folk singer, and a restaurateur, among others) come together to create a new community on 4,000 acres in Montana—a “solvent, spiritually awake, thirty-person dryland lifeboat.”

Duncan was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1952. His first two novels, The River Why (1983) and The Brothers K (1992), became best-selling cult classics; both won the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and The Brothers K was a New York Times Notable Book. Duncan’s other work includes a story collection, River Teeth (1996), and a book of essays, My Story as Told by Water (2001), that was a finalist for the National Book Award. 

On a beautiful fall morning, Duncan spoke with me from his home in Missoula County, Montana, about why he wrote Sun House and how he has made his way forward during bardo periods of struggle and impermanence.

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How did the idea for Sun House evolve? There are so many ways. One is that I’ve raised two daughters. They’re 30 and 32 now, and I have a first grandchild. Because of her love for the earth, my younger daughter majored in environmental studies here at the University of Montana. Information poured over her, but it dismayed me to see she was being given no cause for hope. 

I’ve led an unusual life and have discovered causes of hope that aren’t familiar to the younger generation. We didn’t need another op-ed saying our consciousness needs to change—instead, I wanted to bring my tools as a novelist to storytelling that depicted people in moments when they’re experiencing a change of consciousness with their senses and their intuition, their hearts and minds. 

The bardo teachings can help us find meaning in the face of the challenges and losses we encounter in life. What has your search for meaning been like? It started when I was 13. My 17-year-old brother, John, who was my closest friend, died of an unsuccessful heart surgery. He was my hero and protector, and he was gone. I ended up becoming friends with a fellow two grades ahead of me, a brilliant guy who got into Stanford on a full ride. When he left for college, there I was at this incredibly boring, violent Vietnam-era high school in suburban Portland. The worst of the teachers were racist and sexist, unintelligent and fierce, and I wanted nothing to do with any of that. 

I started exchanging letters with my friend and reading the Stanford Humanities curriculum—I was bombing out of high school and reading the novels of Hermann Hesse and other greats. There was a desperation that drove me and began to help me. When a teacher at my high school realized I was committing academic suicide but reading great works, she got me into a new scholars program at Portland State. I graduated from high school with a 2.7 GPA and from Portland State summa cum laude, because I was allowed to study topics that aligned with my spiritual seeking.

My search for meaning has also been very wound up in the natural world. I went to the all-night party on the last day of high school but the next morning drove into the Cascade Mountains and hiked up to a lake, where I spent ten days by myself. The following year, I spent a hundred days mostly alone in the Wallowa Mountains, seven and a half miles from the nearest road, blissed out, charging around in all this gorgeous dolomite and marble in the northeast corner of Oregon. The year after that, when I was 20, I made a pilgrimage to India. 

You experienced something remarkable in the bardo period after your brother died. What happened? I wrote an essay about it called “The Mickey Mantle Koan.” My brother John’s hero was legendary New York Yankees baseball player Mickey Mantle, and when it was clear my brother was dying, my mother wrote to Mantle and asked him to please send John an autographed baseball. Mantle did. I expected a sports relic from a hero would have some kind of healing property for my brother, and for me, but this baseball—which said, “My best wishes, your pal, Mickey Mantle”—happened to be dated on the day of my brother’s death and arrived on the day he was being embalmed. That timing threw down a gauntlet. 

I called the essay “The Mickey Mantle Koan,” because, like a Zen koan, the effect I expected from the baseball failed to occur. That failure, that pain, led to an intense visionary experience. One day after John’s death, I watched a World Series game with my father. Had John lived, he and I would have gone out in the front yard after the game and played catch under some towering Douglas fir trees. After watching the game with my dad, I was alone in the house, looking out the window at where John and I used to play, when I saw my brother catch, then throw, a baseball. It was that simple. In that moment, I remembered how little John and I had needed to be happy: two scuffed-up old mitts and a grass-stained ball. I then fell through a floor inside myself, landing in a deeper, brighter chamber in which something much more than brotherly love was conveyed: Who’s to say we need even an old ball to be happy? Who’s to say we can’t do with less? Who’s to say we can’t still be happy—with no ball at all? And I was happy. Broken-openly hence boundlessly so. And with that wave of happiness, the koan was solved.

Another period of loss you’ve experienced is the end of your long marriage. How did you get through that difficult time? There’s a poem by Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying,” that helped me a lot. It’s about Icarus. Loosely paraphrasing, Gilbert says people forget that when Icarus fell, he did not fail. After all, Icarus flew! When he fell, he simply came “to the end of his triumph.” That phrase helped me see the end of my marriage in a positive light. Anybody who knows me and my ex knows we were great parents, our daughters are wonderful people, we have a delightful grandson, and we remain friends. 

The main disorientation I experienced was losing my home and the twelve acres on Lolo Creek, where we’d lived for twenty-nine years. I had a relationship with a mile of that trout stream that I sorely miss, involving birds, wild animals, and all the maintenance I did to make the place safe. Creeks have been important to me since I was 8 years old, when my dad took me to one for the first time and handed me a nine-foot-long bamboo fly rod. We started walking up the creek, and I suddenly understood Jesus’ phrase “the kingdom of heaven is within you”; I felt I was walking deeper and deeper inside myself. I’ve worn waders and walked probably a couple of thousand miles in flowing waters since. A rod is almost optional. In keeping with what my friend Jim Harrison wrote in “Cabin Poem,” I want to finish my life disguised as a creek.

Now I’m living nearby on another trout stream. Sunlight is on the water at this moment, blazing like liquid mercury. Gazing at the ceaseless flow is a refreshing, orienting activity in the middle of a workday.

“I reached a point where I’d been writing it for so long that the only way out was through.”

The creative process is a kind of bardo between-state. In the acknowledgments in Sun House, you talk about an early draft of 600 pages where you were bogged down and struggling, mired in what you call the “middle muddle from hell.” When you hit difficult stages while writing Sun House, how did you keep going? If forward momentum wasn’t coming, I sometimes had to wait for my consciousness to evolve more before I could fix the problem. 

Did you ever think the book wasn’t going to work? No. I reached a point where I’d been writing it for so long that the only way out was through. To stop would have been like stopping as you’re descending from a high peak. You can’t decide to just stay up there on the slopes. You have to finish the journey. 

In the bardo teachings, not being distracted is essential to moving forward. Was it easy for you to stay focused on the book? Once I got through the “middle muddle,” it was surprisingly easy. Writing for me is a spiritual practice I love deeply. The Buddhist monk in the temple isn’t going to suddenly fall off her zafu. She’s going to sit there till the sesshin is over. Storytelling at its best is truly a practice. 

In Sun House, there’s a reference to Borges’s poem “The Just,” in connection with “the invisible structures that enfold ordinary folks whenever a little love or grace flows.” The poem, you say, is about “a man ‘who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished,’ a man who takes pleasure in tracing the etymology of a word though it takes time, two workmen on their lunch hour enjoying a game of chess in a silence so deep the only sound is the sliding of their pieces…” What are things, aside from writing, that make you feel present in this way? I’m a closet musician. I play piano and Appalachian lap dulcimer, with custom dulcimers that I’ve electrified so I can sound like Eddie Van Halen snuck up into the mountains and is raising hell back in some ravine. But mostly, I spend large amounts of time walking. I’m drawn to being a mountain wanderer, hiking long miles on trails, communing with wild creatures.

You were committed to activism when you were younger. What role does it play for you now in living a meaningful life? I broke the story about a gigantic Canadian mining company that was going to put a cyanide heap-leach gold mine in the headwaters of the Blackfoot River, which is the celebrated river in Norman Maclean’s book A River Runs Through It. That battle was like a Paul Revere ride: Something terrible is coming! Something terrible is coming! It helped marshal a whole bunch of people, and we knew we had a good chance of winning once Native American tribes, ranchers and their cowboys, and the Rotary Club of Missoula were on the same side. Now cyanide heap-leach gold mining is banned in Montana, a huge victory. In another major victory, we prevailed against ExxonMobil’s attempt to turn three wild and scenic rivers into the main corridor between the Pacific Rim industrial countries and the Alberta tar sands. 

But my feelings have changed in the last decade. I feel my narrative writing has done better work than my activism. On tour for Sun House, I experienced again and again that The River Why and The Brothers K, which are about the search for meaning, really stick in people’s minds and hearts. When I was at Powell’s City of Books in Portland recently, people started talking during the Q&A about relatives or children named after characters from both novels. The best moment was when a woman said, “My parents didn’t believe in ultrasound, so they didn’t know the gender of their first baby, but there was a name in The Brothers K they loved. That’s why I’m here to tell you I really like being a 24-year-old woman named Everett!”

What are you working on now? A big book of narrative memoirs and essays that got stuck in the chute while I was finishing Sun House. I also have two novels in the works. One is an ambitious comedy about reincarnation. The other is a graphic novel in the same meter as W. B. Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” [recites]:

“I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout…”

To me, this poem takes place in a bardo. Aengus commits his entire life to the search for beauty, which many wise souls have equated with truth. I want to write this epic graphic novel to honor my beloved Eucharist animal, the wild salmon of the Pacific. They’re in the throes of extinction throughout the interior West, but I’m determined to celebrate the sense of wonder they’ve given me.

You’ve got a lot of projects going on. When he was in his 70s, Philip Roth stopped writing and began spending his time reading and going to concerts and seeing friends. Do you think you’ll stop writing at some point? If I make it through my 70s, I doubt I’ll be attempting to create masterpieces in my 80s. I love a lot of people and want to share the mysteries of life with them for as long as I can. But I’ll also be writing something or other for as long as my joy in the gift allows.

The post On Searching for Meaning and Solving a Koan of Loss  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Isabel Allende’s latest novel, The Wind Knows My Name, is a story of displacement, exile, and moving forward. It’s about Samuel, who in 1938 escapes to London from Nazi-occupied Vienna on a Kindertransport train; Leticia, who survives the 1981 El Mozote massacre in El Salvador and journeys to the US with her father; and Anita, a girl from El Salvador who is separated from her mother at the US border in 2019 and must find a new home. Allende knows what it is to lose your country: she fled Chile after the 1973 military coup in which her father’s cousin, Chilean president Salvador Allende, was overthrown and died, and she has never again lived in her homeland. 

Allende burst onto the literary scene in 1982 with her first novel, The House of the Spirits, a family and political saga set in Chile that became an international best seller. She has since written twenty-six books that have been translated into over forty-two languages, with more than 77 million copies sold. Her many honors and awards include induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2004), an Honorary Doctorate from Harvard University (2014), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014), and a PEN Center Lifetime Achievement Award (2016). 

Now 81, Allende spoke with me from her home in the San Francisco Bay Area, her two rescue dogs lolling outside in the afternoon sunshine. We talked about uncertainty, change, and coming to terms with endings. “I have had no control over the most important losses that I’ve experienced,” Allende said. “The military coup, the divorce of my parents, my father’s abandonment of us, the death of my daughter. I could give you a long list. The only thing I can control is how I react, so I just plunge into whatever comes and say yes to life. What’s the worst that can happen? It’s already happened to me.”

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You’ve lived in Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, Lebanon, and, for many years now, California. Do you feel settled in California, or do you feel like you’re between places? Physically, I live in California, but I’m completely Chilean. Although I lived in Chile for a short time considering my long life, it’s where my roots are, my memories of childhood. I don’t know if I’m in a between-place, but I have a feeling of going step by step along the trail that is my life. From where to where I don’t know, but I’m walking.

Do you miss Chile? No, but I feel a strong connection to the crazy geography of my country. Chile is long and narrow, a mesa between two incredible geographical phenomena, the Andes Mountains and the harsh Pacific Ocean beating against the rocks. The drop to the sea is as high as the mountains. They say that Chile is so narrow that one day we’ll just fall into the sea. 

The driest desert in the world is in the north, and all the astronomical research sites are placed there. The air is so thin that you can see the angels at dawn and the stars that have not yet been born. Then there’s a beautiful central valley, and then the south, which to me is the best part. There’s old forest, more than 600 volcanoes, and pristine lakes and rivers. The landscape in Patagonia is gorgeous, so untamed that it’s like another planet.

In The Wind Knows My Name and other novels, including A Long Petal of the Sea and The Japanese Lover, you write about bardo experiences like displacement and the search for home. How would you describe your own experience of exile? When I left Chile after the military coup in 1973, I was fortunate to end up in Venezuela, which was at the time a rich, generous, hospitable country that received millions of immigrants from all over the world. Still, it wasn’t my country, and it took me a long while to adjust because I was always waiting to go back to Chile. For years, I lost myself. I thought maybe I should not have left Chile, because it was so difficult to adapt to another place, and I felt so frustrated that my life wasn’t going anywhere. Things didn’t change until I wrote The House of the Spirits.

I’d been living in Caracas for eight years when one day I received the news that my 99-year-old grandfather, who raised me from when I was small, was dying in Chile. I started a letter to him that became The House of the Spirits. The action I took in my grief was to try to write something that could prove to my grandfather that I hadn’t forgotten all the family stories he’d told me about our crazy relatives. I remembered everything, and all of those relatives are in The House of the Spirits, with different names.

Before you left Chile, you were working as a journalist and met Chilean poet and Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda. Did that meeting play a role in your becoming a writer? In 1973, I went to interview Pablo Neruda, and he said, “I would never let you interview me. You are the worst journalist in this country. You put yourself in the middle of everything. You cannot be objective, and I am sure that if you don’t have a story, you make it up. Why don’t you switch to literature, where all these defects are virtues?” The only thing that registered was that he had said I was the worst journalist in the country, but I knew he was saying it tongue in cheek and I didn’t pay much attention. When I wrote The House of the Spirits, I didn’t even remember what he had said. 

Did you feel like you’d made it as a writer when The House of the Spirits became a best seller? The success of that book didn’t mean I was a writer. My agent said, “Everybody can write a first good book because they put everything they have in their heads and their lives in there. You become a writer with the second book and the ones that follow.” I wasn’t a writer yet—I was just someone who had written a book. It was only after I’d published three books that I wrote “Writer” for the first time, with hesitation, when I had to fill in a form and state my occupation. I didn’t want to seem arrogant. If I’d been a man, I would have said I was a writer before I’d ever written anything. 

After publishing seven works of fiction, you wrote a memoir, Paula, about your daughter’s death from porphyria at the age of 29. When you finished the book, you found it hard to write again. How did you get through that period of mourning and creative struggle? It took a while. I had three grandchildren who were born at that time, which helped pull me out of my grief. Also, I remembered I’m a journalist by training and I can write nonfiction about almost anything. I tried fiction for three years after Paula’s death and couldn’t write at all, so I wrote Aphrodite, a book about aphrodisiacs, about love and lust and gluttony, a subject as removed from pain and loss and illness and death as possible. The research was fun because it was about eroticism and food. Many people said, “How can you write something like this after Paula?” Exactly. I needed to write a book like that to get unblocked.

You also went to India. I went with a friend and my husband. Being out of my comfort zone in that incredible place, assaulted by color and noise and people, helped a lot. And something happened that was life-defining. We were in Rajasthan, and it was dusty and hot, so the driver stopped the car to cool the engine. My friend and I walked over to some women standing next to a tree. They were very poor, with a bunch of kids who were mostly naked. We were communicating by touching, and they touched these silver bracelets we’d bought in the market, so we gave them the bracelets. As we walked back to the car, one of the women came and handed me a bundle of rags. I thought she wanted to give me something in exchange for the bracelets, so I said, “It’s not necessary,” and tried to give the bundle back. She wouldn’t take it, so I opened it, and inside there was a newborn baby. It had a raw umbilical cord—I don’t think it was a day old. I kissed the baby and tried to give it back, but the woman wouldn’t take it. The driver came running, took the baby, threw it to another woman, and dragged me to the car. I asked him, “Why would that woman want to give me her baby?” And he said, “It’s a girl. Who wants a girl?” That has haunted me for thirty years. What happened to that little girl? What happened to that mother who knew the baby had no life ahead of her, whose poverty was so extreme the baby probably wouldn’t even survive? 

I just stood there, but my daughter Paula would have done something. I’d been trying to think of a way of honoring her, and what happened that day in Rajasthan gave me the idea to start the Isabel Allende Foundation. It’s fed with the proceeds from my books, and we focus on projects that help women because women are most at risk. 

The bardo teachings tell us not to cling when something is over, that we can only move forward when we accept the truth of our situation. As you’ve faced change and endings again and again in your life, has it become easier for you to let go? Yes, because I’ve had to do it so many times and start from scratch. I fell passionately in love with my first husband, and we were together for twenty-eight years. When it didn’t work anymore, I said goodbye, with no anger, no resentment, no bad memories. Whatever he’d done to me, it didn’t matter anymore. Why carry it with me? 

And as you get older, you have to let go of a lot. You have less mobility. It’s hard to get to places because you don’t want to drive at night, or the parking in San Francisco is difficult. You start becoming more rooted. First, in your neighborhood, then in your house, then in your bedroom, and then in your bed. You have to let go of your looks. You look at yourself in the mirror and you think, “Who’s this old lady that got into my house?”

You divorced your second husband in your 70s. A lot of people would fear getting divorced at that age, thinking they’re too old to find someone else and they don’t want to be alone. Did you feel afraid? Not at all. The worst that can happen is to remain in a marriage that isn’t working. My mother wanted to be a widow for ten or fifteen years, but my father didn’t die. Anything is better than that. I’m not afraid of being alone and, of course, I can support myself. 

Do you have regrets? I regret a couple of stupid things I did where I hurt people. But I don’t regret my life. When I was 19, my parents were appointed ambassadors to Switzerland. They wanted me to go with them, and I said, “If I go with you to Geneva, I’ll lose my boyfriend, and I love him.” My mother said, “You have to go to university and have the experience of Europe. You can get married later.” But I didn’t listen. Would I have had a better life if I’d gotten a diploma at the Sorbonne? Maybe, maybe not. In any case, I chose to marry the wrong man. Do I regret marrying him? No, because I had my two kids, Paula and Nico. How could I regret that? 

In The Wind Knows My Name, Samuel ends up adopting 7-year-old Anita and he gives her a medal of courage that was given to him before he fled Vienna many years earlier as a boy. Is there an object you’d like to pass on to your son? No, nothing. I have 24,000 letters that I exchanged with my mother. When I die, probably my son Nico will burn them. Fine. Done. The other day, my agent said, “We have to talk about your legacy. What are we going to do with all your manuscripts and papers and letters from readers? Some universities in the US want to buy them, or you can keep them in Chile.” I said, “Look, I’ll be dead! Do whatever you want.” I’m not attached to anything material, because I’m not going to take anything with me to the other world. I will just go when it’s my time, free of worries.

The post Saying Yes to Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On a recent summer afternoon, novelist Andrew Sean Greer spoke with me from Tuscany, where he was visiting an ailing friend in her 90s. “These may not be her last days,” he said, “but they may be my last days with her. I’m here to be present for whatever may be happening now, and to be joyous with my friend because she’s the person who taught me to try to make a funny story out of everything.”

Greer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for Less, the comic story of Arthur Less, a struggling gay novelist on the cusp of 50 who’s traveling the world to overcome romantic heartbreak. The sequel, Less Is Lost (2022), narrates Arthur’s further adventures, this time as he journeys across the US to escape relationship and money problems. With humor and pathos, the novels explore love and loss, time and aging. The author of seven novels, Greer has received the California Book Award, an NEA grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has taught at Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Born in Washington, D.C., in 1970 and raised in Rockville, Maryland, he divides his time between California and Italy.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Greer and I talked about how coming out at 19 changed his life, what made him turn to humor after writing serious novels, and why he likes happy endings. 

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Bardo is about living an authentic life. When you were 19 and home from college for winter break, you came out to your parents. What was that like? This is such a great thing to talk about for me. I was lucky to be gay because it gave me an opportunity to separate from everyone’s version of who I was supposed to be, and gave me an awareness of when something isn’t right for me. At that time, 1989, it was such a giant thing to say you were gay. Everyone took it as if I were saying I was from outer space. 

It was hard but also incredibly liberating for me—and for my mother, who came out to me right after I came out. She was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household in white America and raised me in a similar way. We both grew up with rigid ideas of what you’re allowed to do, and both of us let go of those ideas when they felt so uncomfortable they burned. 

By the time I was 17 or 18, it had become intolerable. Being gay just wasn’t in the air enough for me to be able to pick out what was going on, and I was having suicidal thoughts, a crisis of authenticity. Since then, I’ve been very aware of the feeling of inauthenticity, of phoniness, in different ways, like in a relationship or when I’m writing. The feeling of misalignment is deeply upsetting, and I’ll do anything I can to fix it.

What’s an example of it when you’re writing? Over the years, I’ve put away showy language and plot devices, stopped trying to get attention, and gotten a lot calmer and funnier. When I wrote Less, my friends said my writing finally matched my personality. I’m proud of my earlier books, but they’re heavy. There was a point where I snapped, and I thought, “I don’t want to tell it that way anymore.” It has to do with getting older—no more smoke and mirrors.

Less was a book I assumed no one would read, and very few publishers were interested in it. But I’d reached the point where I just wanted to make the thing that was in my head. I was like, “No one’s looking. It won’t be a hit, but I don’t care.” I was very proud of Less when I finished it, and even if it went nowhere, I promised myself I’d be pleased. That was great, the feeling you really want as a writer. 

And then you won the Pulitzer. Had you ever felt like being a writer wasn’t going to work out? There have been two times in my life when I felt I was never going to make it as a writer. One was after my first novel, The Path of Minor Planets, came out and no one reviewed it. The second was after my fourth novel, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, came out and no one reviewed it. 

What kept you going? My writing is what’s always gotten me through hard times. If the writing is causing the hard time, the only way to get through it is more writing. To stop the writing would not occur to me. Maybe also my vanity is so enormous that nothing can destroy it. That’s possible. But the pleasure I get from writing, even if just the struggle of it, makes me feel like it’s my actual emotional life. It’s not that I’m a person who’s constantly creating on cocktail napkins, but when I’m working on a book, it gives me a reason to live, like that selfish thing where many of us novelists are careful when crossing the street—we don’t want to be hit by a bus because we have to finish the book. The world needs your book, so you have to stay alive.

A central question in the bardo teachings is how we can find meaning in the face of obstacles. How has writing in a humorous way helped you do this? I turned to humor because my normal, serious way of writing was getting me to clichés. I found that humor was very connected to the deep things in life—if you meet real comedians, you’ll see this. Steve Martin, for example, he’ll want to talk with you about exactly what you and I are talking about rather than tell you a funny story or a joke.

Humor makes me face hard things and not think about them the way I did before. I see them from a much greater distance and realize that with anything awful, there’s got to be a funny part. When I was writing the Less books, I tried to think of the worst, most humiliating things that had happened in my life and put them in the books in a funny way. 

Along with the humor in the Less books, there’s a preoccupation with love. How do you feel about love? In Less, there’s a couple who, after twenty years, says, “I think that was good, don’t you? Wasn’t that wonderful? Let’s part.” And I surprised myself because that’s what my husband and I did after I wrote that book. Not because of the book, but I was clearly thinking, “What’s the right way to do love?” It sounds easy as I talk about it now, but it was very difficult. 

I think about love a lot. It’s something I care about and want. And I’ve gotten old enough to only want the kind that will give me freedom and support, not the other kind that seems so sexy when you’re young, that’s about possessiveness and manipulation and control. 

The bardo teachings encourage us not to fall into denial. We often stay in relationships that aren’t working, telling ourselves things like we’ve been together for a long time, nothing’s perfect, tomorrow will be different. But you recognized your marriage was over and you left. Yeah, I’m proud of that, though my husband and I were on the same page. I think the harder thing is to leave when you realize you’re not a good fit with the other person but you’re so in love with them. There’s still passion and chemicals and doubt: “Could I fix it? Could I make it work? Could I change him?” 

In bardo, we make choices and, in that way, decide our path. Do you have the sense that you’re living out your fate, or do you feel like you’re in the driver’s seat? I make choices rather than just let change happen and then have to fight against it. I’m not a brave person, it’s just that I’m aware of the feeling that change is happening and I have to go with it. I’m so afraid of being caught in a life I don’t want, or wasting time and energy in a situation that’s pointless.

I’m certainly not strategic, but I try to plan my life based on an instinct about what should come next, along with an awareness—almost an expectation—that there will be some outside force that will change whatever does come next. Like, I decide to move to a small town in Italy and that puts me in the right place for the next opportunity, whatever that may be. I don’t know where that is between fate and being in the driver’s seat, but it’s how I think. It’s not how I was raised, which was to plan everything out to the end—and which is how I used to write my books. I’ve found it’s better in writing my books to have an idea of what the ending is, and then just follow my instinct about how to get there.

“I think being present and attentive is the artist’s whole job.”

The Less books have happy endings. Was that a conscious decision? Definitely. For Less, I wanted a gay literary novel with a happy ending. It’s hard to find that kind of book, and I thought we deserved one. I thought, “There’s a lot of sad gay books out there, and they’re awfully good. But since I’m making it up, why not make up something that’s going to give people a sense of joy at the end?” I like books that end happily, like what you see in Jane Austen. And I wanted a happy ending for Less Is Lost. In fact, in the German translation, the title is Happy End! So many readers wrote to me on Instagram during the pandemic, and have approached me at events, to tell me how grateful they were to have a happy ending for the Less books. And no one’s given me crap about it yet, so I will continue. 

The Dalai Lama says the purpose of life is to be happy. Do you agree? That sounds exactly right to me. It’s wise and deceptively simple. 

Are you happy? Over the course of my life is hard to say, but right now? For sure. That’ll change very soon—like later today. I try to be aware of when I feel happy and say, “Well, this is wonderful. I’m having a lovely conversation with you. I’m working on a new book. I’m in this beautiful artist’s room with a view in Tuscany. I love my boyfriend, who’s downstairs. I had a great lunch.” I’m like, “Enjoy this. Sit for a moment with it.”

I’m not good at being present—I try my best, but I wish I were better at it. I meditate. At the beginning of the pandemic, I started doing transcendental meditation with my friend Daniel Handler, the Lemony Snicket writer. It’s been wonderful. He’s in California, and we meet every day on Zoom and meditate for twenty minutes.

Again and again, The Tibetan Book of the Dead says, “Do not be distracted.” The idea is that we can move forward only by being present and paying attention. I think being present and attentive is the artist’s whole job, and I hope meditating helps me do that. Proust believed that the role of the artist is to capture what other people retreat from because it’s too painful for them to be present with it. The artist collects it for them and reproduces it, and then they recognize it in a far less painful way. I just love that.

When the pandemic lockdowns started, a writer friend said to me, “I’m working on my novel, but it seems pointless with these protests over the George Floyd murder. I don’t know if it’s worth it to be a writer.” And I said, “Pay attention. It’s your job. You can pay attention to the details of pandemic life, or of the protest, or of absolutely anything. But do not freak out. That’s what everyone else is doing, and we need to be there, maybe not to create something that will help people right now but that will be of benefit to them later.” It’s only paying attention to the actual details of life, not a hot take on something but a considered take on something, that’s going to help someone in the future. I’m not a calm person, but it’s calming to think, “I can be here and record carefully. That will be my role in this.”

In Less, you wrote, “At ten, we climb the tree higher even than our mothers’ fears. At twenty, we scale the dormitory to surprise a lover asleep in bed. At thirty, we jump into the mermaid-green ocean. At forty, we look on and smile.” What about for you now, at 52? What’s the bold thing to do? You won’t find me climbing anything or jumping off anything. I’ve done all that and don’t have to prove myself anymore. A lot of things that people try to get me to do, I might be like, “I’ve done that plenty, thank you. I’m going to go to sleep tonight.” Or I might go out dancing.

The post Creating a Sense of Joy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dani Shapiro’s new novel, Signal Fires, revolves around a secret that has life-changing consequences for a family living in a small New York town. An exploration of endings and moving forward, the book resonates especially deeply because of Shapiro’s own experiences with impermanence: the death of her father in a car accident, the loss of her mother to cancer, the serious illness of her only child, the revelation that her father was not her biological father, and, most recently, her husband’s cancer diagnosis. “Each time, I felt grief over what was happening,” she says, “and a parallel mourning for the self that had lost a layer of protection, a measure of innocence.”

Born in New York City in 1962, Shapiro grew up in New Jersey and studied writing with Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College. She has written eleven books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the best-selling Inheritance (2019), a chronicle of her journey in the wake of her discovery about her father. In 2019, she launched a podcast, Family Secrets, that now has more than 30 million downloads. Inheritance was named a best book of 2019 by Lit Hub, Vanity Fair, Wired, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and Signal Fires was named a best book of 2022 by Time and the Washington Post. Shapiro has taught at NYU, Wesleyan, and Columbia, and appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul Sunday, the Today Show, and PBS NewsHour.

From her home in Connecticut, Shapiro spoke with me about coming to terms with change, living in the present, and why she finally feels aligned with the trajectory of her life. 

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The bardo teachings say that after we die, it can take up to four and a half days for us to accept that the life we knew is over. In the bardo from birth to death this means we may struggle to accept endings, like the breakdown of a relationship or the loss of a parent; unexpected endings are especially hard to face. What have the sudden endings in your life been like? Slow Motion, my first memoir, begins with the moment I received a phone call that divided my life into before and after. I was 23, young enough to believe that life contains only one of those moments, and that the phone call about the car accident that killed my father and seriously injured my mother was that moment for me. But if we live long enough, we have a parade of such moments. The most recent before-and-after moment like this was when my husband was discovered to have a serious form of cancer. That first night after it was clear what we were entering into, my husband was snoring, so I went to our son’s room. Our son wasn’t living at home, and I climbed into his bed and wept. It’s a room that holds who I was as a young mother putting my 3-year-old to sleep, and I was lying in the bed of that 3-year-old, who was now a 17-year-old. It was as if there was a thunderclap of time, and suddenly I had a grown child and we as a family were facing the profoundly unknown. 

How did the experience of your husband’s illness change you? I have a feeling of deep knowledge, of walking with joy and gratitude and compassion and connection while carrying the awareness that life is so utterly fragile. When my husband was sick and we didn’t know he was going to survive, I had coffee with Sylvia Boorstein, a dear friend. She told me the parable of the monk who’s walking through the forest and realizes he’s being chased by a tiger. He gets to the edge of a cliff, and there’s nothing to do but get eaten by the tiger or jump off the cliff. Except there’s a vine, and the monk climbs onto the vine and sees a perfect ripe strawberry on the vine. He also sees a mouse that’s crept out from a crevasse in the cliff. The mouse is munching on the vine, trying to get the strawberry, so the monk plucks the strawberry and eats it.

The moral is that we are all always on that vine. It’s something I knew when my father was killed in the car accident and my mother almost was. I knew it again when my precious only child was very sick as an infant, facing terrible odds, and we had no reason to think it was going to be OK. I faced it again when I discovered that my dad, who raised me, was not my biological father. And again when my husband was diagnosed with cancer.

Sometimes endings are gradual rather than unexpected. What are endings like for you when you know what’s coming? My mother was 80 when she passed away from cancer in 2003. For about six months there was no question what was going to happen, and she and I shared that knowledge. As painful as the final moment was, it didn’t have the same quality of shock as losing my father in a sudden, violent manner when he was in the prime of life. If I can have a preference, I prefer knowing and being able to prepare, being able to say goodbye.

With all the endings you’ve had to face, do you feel more accepting of the inevitability of endings in life? Yes. There are people who deny that endings are unavoidable, and sometimes I envy them because they seem to be having a better time—I’m joking! I don’t envy them at all, because when the time comes, they’ll have a complete lack of preparedness. The pandemic taught us this. I have friends who could not tolerate the fact that their plans had changed, that they were in lockdown, and that everything had, in an instant, shifted for everyone. 

The pandemic was a bardo, a time when the life we knew abruptly came to an end and we were thrust into a new reality. As difficult as times like that can be, they also give us a chance for fresh insight, which is something you experienced with Signal Fires. If not for the bardo of the pandemic, Signal Fires would not exist. I had put it in the drawer about ten years earlier because it wasn’t working—I was trying to tell the story backward in time, which was a terrible idea. The possibility of rediscovering the book had never occurred to me. I thought it was going to be the one that got away, and I mourned it. But I literally found the novel again: I was cleaning out my office closet, and there was this neat little pile of pages. My mind was quiet enough that I heard my inner voice say, reread this. I’m not in the habit of rereading my work, especially not rereading it and liking it, because the self that wrote that work is hopefully doing better work now. But I sat down and reread those pages, and I loved them. The characters were still really alive for me. They’d just been sound asleep for years, like in a coma. During those years, I was moving through time and experiences: my discovery about my dad, my husband’s cancer. Through those bardo moments I was becoming seasoned and softened and open and capable, deserving the characters I’d created such a long time before. I was ready. It was a spectacular creative experience, an exercise in patience and humility and witnessing, in being awake and aware enough in the moment to rediscover those pages. 

Legend says The Tibetan Book of the Dead was written in the 8th century and buried in the earth and the sky, in dreams and the mindstream, so its wisdom could be unearthed when the time was right. Do you feel like your rediscovery of Signal Fires was an unearthing like this? Yes, and finding out about my biological father was too. If I’d found out about him when I was a teenager, or in my 20s, or shortly after my dad died, when I was lost and grieving, I don’t know that I would have survived it. I was already teetering on the edge, like, “Do I stay or go in this life?” But I made the discovery at a point when I was at my most stable and grounded, in a happy and supportive marriage, with a child who was well on the road to becoming a self-sufficient adult; at a time where, as a writer, I’d written book after book exploring identity and family secrets. One of the things I’ve learned over the last four years of doing my Family Secrets podcast is that when we find out what we find out is perhaps even more important than finding it out at all. If it meets us in the mindstream when we can tolerate it, metabolize it, and make meaning of it, it’s such a blessing.

When I wrote the first one hundred pages of Signal Fires in 2011, I created the character of the doctor, Benjamin Wilf, fully formed. It’s the character who appears in the finished book. It wasn’t until 2016 that I discovered the man who was my biological father. And it wasn’t until 2020 that I returned to the pages of the novel and finished a draft. I gave it to my son for a read—he’s been an early reader of mine for a while. He came into my office holding the manuscript and said, “Mom, he’s just like him.” Chills went through me. Benjamin Wilf is a physician, as is my biological father. He’s a pulmonary specialist, as is my biological father. There are qualities to him that are just like my biological father: a gentleness, a reticence, a moral compass. Anyone who reads Inheritance and then reads Signal Fires would think I created the character of Benjamin Wilf after I knew everything that I knew about my biological father. But that’s not what happened. So if we go back to the mindstream, to what exists in the bardo of life that we can’t explain or understand, my biological father was quite literally already inside me and I found out about him when the time was right.

Do you feel like, with all that’s happened, you have a heightened awareness of impermanence and the importance of doing what matters to you now rather than later? Virginia Woolf has these beautiful descriptions of the “cotton wool” of daily existence, as opposed to what she calls “moments of being.” We can’t live in moments of being all the time—we’d burn to a crisp if we had that awareness without end. But I’m more able to kiss the joy as it flies, to engage with the moment and understand that this moment is the only moment. My husband’s illness was the greatest catalyst for, “If not now, when?”

A good day is a day in which I’ve meditated, and I’ve unrolled my yoga mat, and I’ve spent time with people I care about or I’ve been of service in some way. I live in fear of wasting time. By wasting time, I don’t mean, “I didn’t do anything today.” I mean, “I got in my own way today.” I’m completely capable of getting caught in the external. This thing happened, or this thing didn’t happen, or I really wanted some shiny thing, an award or whatever. It’s not that I don’t have those feelings, but I’m moving through them with greater ease. Dwelling in them feels soul-deadening. It’s not, in Buddhist terms, skillful. 

In Signal Fires, there’s a point where the neighbor’s son, Waldo Shenkman, feels that he is “as aligned with the trajectory of his life as he has ever been.” Do you feel aligned with the trajectory of your life? I love that question. At this very moment, yes, more so than ever. I feel deep in all the different aspects of my life as a partner, a mother, a friend, a woman getting older, a writer, a teacher. I’m more capable than I’ve ever been in my life, more equipped. It’s the way I imagine a conductor would feel, having, for a split second, control of the music. I feel aligned because I know that we’re all hanging on the vine.

My husband got sick at the same moment as Inheritance became a best seller. There were crowds everywhere I went, and I was being invited to do amazing things with writers I admired, and places I’d longed to go. At the same time, my husband, my beloved, was facing grueling treatment, radical surgery. But we both wanted me to continue doing what I was doing, because it’s what I do. I’m a writer, and this is my livelihood, my career. I can’t just not do it. So I would go onstage and do these events and be fully present. Sylvia Boorstein has this beautiful mantra: “May I meet this moment fully. May I meet it as a friend.” That’s what I was attempting to do. 

Then I would come home and be 100 percent there for my husband as his advocate and his partner. There was no option to not do both, and it taught me a lot about how more than one thing can be true. It was true that my husband was fighting for his life. And it was also true that I was having this extraordinary moment out in the world. Those things didn’t coexist comfortably, but they did exist together.

You could have struggled against the reality of the situation. But instead, you met it. Not meeting it never felt like an option. As Joan Didion says so beautifully in The Year of Magical Thinking, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” The ordinary instant is not a given for any of us at any moment. It’s the work of my life, both as a human being and as an artist, to not let that knowledge paralyze me, to navigate how to live with that knowledge and let it enhance my living.

The post This Moment Is the Only Moment appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

 “I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing,” says Edwidge Danticat in The Art of Death (2017), an account of losing her mother to cancer and a meditation on how other writers explore death. Danticat is the author of seventeen books, including novels, short story and essay collections, and memoirs. Through the lens of the Haitian diaspora in the United States, she writes about family and legacy, violence and poverty, migration and the meaning of home; her themes are rooted in an enduring engagement with the inevitable loss we experience in life.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969, Danticat moved to the US at age 12 to join her parents, who emigrated when she was a small girl. She attended Barnard College and planned to become a nurse but decided instead to follow her passion for writing, which had been sparked and nurtured by the Haitian storytelling tradition. When she was honored with a MacArthur Fellowship in 2009, she said, “Growing up in Haiti, I was told lots of stories, and I wanted in my own way to become a storyteller. Migration…certainly heightened the desire to tell not only stories of what it was like to have lived in Haiti but also what it is like to live in the United States.” 

In addition to the MacArthur, Danticat has received many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Everything Inside (2019), a collection of stories, and Brother, I’m Dying (2007), a memoir. She holds honorary degrees from Yale University and Smith College, and contributes to the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s, among many others.

From her home in Miami, Danticat spoke with me about why death is central to her storytelling and how she finds meaning in the face of impermanence.

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The bardo teachings are about the art of living in a world where nothing lasts forever. In your writing, you explore how we grapple with the end of the things and the people we love, as well as our own end. Why is death a preoccupation for you? When I was writing The Art of Death, I thought about that a lot. The earliest I could trace it to was the circumstances of the house in Haiti where I grew up. My uncle was a minister, which meant going to all the rituals. A lot of weekends for us were a Friday night prayer service, then a Saturday morning funeral and a Saturday night wedding, and then a Sunday service. I remember the shock at the funerals of seeing someone motionless in a coffin whom I’d just spoken with the week before. And then, of course, I was growing up during the Duvalier dictatorship, and you’d see bodies lying in the street that the families couldn’t claim because of the political situation. So in one way or another, death was always present with me.

Did it become something you took for granted? Yes, until I realized that I could die! When I was 10 or so, a teenager I knew got tuberculosis and died. I thought, “That could happen to me!” I imagined what people would do, what people would say. My parents had gone to live in the US, and I thought, “Wow, they would be so sad, they would feel so guilty.” 

Did the realization that you could die make you afraid of death? If you listen to enough sermons, where someone is saying you know neither the hour nor the day, or to everything there is a season, you realize, “Oh, the calendar is not up to me.” Often at the funerals my uncle presided over, there would be a whole section dedicated to getting your life together, because you don’t know when your turn will come. Some people die at 7 days, he’d say, or 7 months, or 7 years or 77 years—very biblical. Since I had the chance to come to terms with the fact that it was not up to me where I would fall in that framework, I didn’t worry about it. But I did still wonder: How sad would people really be? And would they miss me?

What your uncle said is very much in line with the bardo concept that we don’t know how long we have, so we should do what’s important to us now. For my uncle, getting it together meant “Come to Jesus.” You decide where you’ll spend your eternity. But yes, there was also an element of carpe diem, the idea that at some point it will be too late to do certain things. I remember that my mother felt this when she was dying. She wanted to get certain things off her chest and made a lot of phone calls—sometimes they were angry calls! 

I learned a lesson about carpe diem from both my parents when they were dying. I saw that being on the threshold between life and death allowed for a wisdom or vision that I hope to have at the end, a surrender that allows you—even though your body is still in this world—a glimpse of what’s to come. The dying are already looking past this sphere of things. When my parents got sick, they would say, “When I’m gone…” and I would say, “No, no! You’re going to get better!” Once we got past that, I was like, “OK, when you are gone, what do you want?” When I am gone… Let them finish that sentence. If we’re not too afraid, some beautiful, honest conversations can emerge.

“If we’re not too afraid, some beautiful, honest conversations can emerge.”

In the Tibetan belief, we often fall into denial when confronted with endings. It’s said that after we die, we hover about, unwilling to accept what has happened. We see our relatives and friends weeping and call to them: “Hey, why are you crying? I’m right over here!” That’s so powerful. It relates to this novel I just finished writing. The book starts with an experience I had at a mall here in Florida, where I heard gunfire and I thought I was in a mass shooting. This was a couple of days before Christmas, so you can imagine how full that mall was. Everyone started running, but it turned out it was just some kids who’d used an app to tap into the mall’s sound system and make gun sounds. I didn’t realize it was a hoax until I had run and hidden behind a bush.

This character in my novel is in a mall shooting and she escapes. When I was writing the aftermath of the shooting, I thought, “Maybe she’s actually dead, but she doesn’t know it.” I started writing the next part of the story as though she were dead and was hovering and haunting. I saw that the desire to hold on, especially if you feel like you have unresolved business, is very strong. 

In The Art of Death you say that Annie Dillard asks in The Writing Life, “What would you begin writing if you knew that you would die soon?” Is there something you’d begin writing if you knew you were near the end?Exactly what I’m writing now. As I creep closer to 60, I’m aware of the limit on my time and I feel a sense of urgency with the things I write. The other part of that Annie Dillard quote that’s memorable is that she says, “Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.” We all—both reader and writer—have this terminal condition called life, so there’s no time to waste.

You write fiction, memoir, and essays. Do you feel any difference in terms of which you’re more drawn to as you realize your time is limited? They have equal weight for me. I just want to feel awakened and excited by what I’m doing. That’s what I love about creating: you’re putting something new into the world. You’re birthing or rebirthing ideas with your particular stamp on them, and that’s what will stay behind after you’re gone. 

Also, through my writing there’s a part of my mother, of my father, that I manifest and share with my children and other people in my family. After my parents died, I felt joy when someone shared something about them that I’d never heard before; it was like being given a piece of them back. That’s what I try to do in my writing, especially the part that’s just for lineage, for family, because my children will extract things from my writing that other people won’t. They’ll probably read some parts and be like, “Oh, that’s what she was working on when we were supposed to be on vacation!” When I’m writing, I think, “I’m putting these little nuggets in there for them.” That’s also the part that will live on without me. 

Does this make you more accepting of your mortality? Absolutely. The generations that follow in my family will know me so much better than I know my grandmother and great-grandmother. I feel blessed about the way that the work I do allows a bridge, a thread, to continue in my family. Because we’re immigrants, we’re not going to be on censuses for generations, extending beyond the time when we came to the US. And the next generations here won’t be able to just go back to Haiti and say, “Give me my mother’s archives.” But at least they’ll have what I know, when I’m no longer here.

Some years ago, I interviewed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. He was living in exile in Manhattan, and he told me that sometimes he wasn’t sure if he was in New York City or Havana. Sometimes he felt like he was in both places at once, or in limbo between the two places. Do you feel like you’re between Haiti and the US? When I turned 24, I realized, “After this year, my time in Haiti will stay frozen at twelve years, and my time in the US will just keep growing.” I remember being aware of the imbalance of that. But given the situation now, it’s hard for me to go back as often as I used to. Because of WhatsApp, we’re in constant touch with family members in Haiti, and often we wake up to them saying, “I’m hiding under the bed because they’re shooting outside.” And then I’ll hear the sound of gunfire. My parents couldn’t live my experiences when I was a girl in Haiti because we had to go to a phone booth once a week to tell them, or we’d send cassettes, whereas now you’re living your loved ones’ difficulties together with them. I talk about it with my friends here in Miami, and we’re like, “I can’t sleep, because this is happening in the neighborhood where my family is. I haven’t heard from my loved one in a couple of days, and I’m afraid, because the last time it was something terrible.” All of this makes me feel emotionally in between in a way that’s much more about fear than homesickness or nostalgia.

You write powerfully about the history and politics of Haiti, and about the importance of bearing witness. Do you feel like you’ll also live on in what you’ve written about Haiti? I hope that whatever I’ve written about Haiti will be a singular time capsule of it in my lifetime, because I’ve had the privilege to have lived through different historical periods there, as well as to know what it’s like to live here, to migrate and try to make a life. There’s a Haitian-Canadian writer, Dany Laferrière, who calls all his books his “American autobiography,” like when Maya Angelou wrote seven autobiographies. A parallel project for me has been tracing my personal lineage through Haiti’s history and our story of migration. My hope is that people on that journey with me now and after I’m gone will find echoes of their experiences in the pages I write.

In The Art of Death, you quote something Margaret Atwood says in her essay “Negotiating with the Dead”: “Perhaps all writing [is] motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.” Is this true of your writing? I always go back to something similar to what Atwood is saying. It’s a Haitian proverb: “When you see some bones on the side of the road, remember they once had flesh on them.” Thinking about all the people in my life that I’ve written about who have passed on, especially the people I love, I feel that my job as a writer is putting the flesh back on their bones. 

The post Storytelling, Death, and Putting Flesh Back on Bones appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his new collection of autobiographical essays, Happy-Go-Lucky, best-selling author and humorist David Sedaris writes about topics ranging from guns to teeth to siblings to the pandemic. At the heart of the book is his difficult, unresolved relationship with his father, who died in 2021, and the inevitable change and loss we encounter in life.

Born on December 26, 1956 in Johnson City, New York, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Sedaris dropped out of college and did odd jobs to support himself, including working as an apple picker, an apartment cleaner, and a Christmas elf at Macy’s. In the mid-eighties, he entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began giving readings from his diaries. His life changed in 1992 when he read “SantaLand Diaries,” a comic essay about his elf gig, on NPR’s Morning Edition. Soon he was writing for the New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and other magazines and had landed a contract for his first book, Barrel Fever (1994), a collection of essays and short stories.

Sedaris has written thirteen books and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001; other honors include Grammy Award nominations for Best Spoken Word Album and Best Comedy Album. Based in West Sussex, England, and New York City, Sedaris tours for the better part of each year and attracts large audiences, sometimes in the thousands. “Eventually,” he says, “people are bound to get tired of me, and I’ll play smaller and smaller theaters, and then they’ll say, ‘There’s nothing smaller than a five-seat theater, Mr. Sedaris.’ Then I’ll just have to retire.”

Late on a Manhattan evening, Sedaris talked with me about letting go, why shopping soothes his soul, and dying without regrets.

  –Ann Tashi Slater

In Happy-Go-Lucky, you reflect on growing older and experiencing endings. Do you hold on when something comes to an end?  When I decided to quit drinking and quit smoking, those things were just over. I accepted the idea immediately—you know, that’s finished, and I can’t do it anymore. I never had another cigarette and I never had another drink. My boyfriend Hugh and I used to live in Normandy before we bought a house in the south of England. Hugh goes back to Normandy all the time, but even though I loved it there, that’s over. I’ve never gone back. The second I left, I thought, “I’ll just look forward now and start this new life.”

With people, though, it can be harder. When I broke up with the boyfriend I had before Hugh, it took me a long time to let go. I felt like I’d failed. It didn’t matter if we weren’t right together, which was clear.

You also write about seeing your father in a nursing home and thinking, “In the blink of an eye, couldn’t it be me?” How do you feel about aging? There’s nothing good about it except you can ride the bus and the subway for free. In England, anyway. But the worst would be to be old and broke. It would be such an indignity to have to get old with no money. If you have money, then when your youth is gone, your looks are gone, you think, “Well, at least I have that second home.”

I’m at a point now where every other week I’m having to write a sympathy letter because somebody’s parent has died, and I’m about to move into that period where your friends start dying. I already go through my addresses and: dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. As you get older, this person dies, and your sister dies, and then maybe your brother dies, and your best friend dies. It’s a burden of sorrow that you think you can’t carry. But since not everybody dies at once, you find you can carry it. Or you develop dementia or Alzheimer’s, and the burden is taken away from you. You don’t have to remember the people. You don’t even remember having a mother. That’s the bright side.

As you’ve started losing people, do you feel a different quality to your interaction with people you care about, knowing you won’t be together forever?  Yes, but I don’t know what to do about it. For example, I can’t think of anybody I say “I love you” to. I’m crazy about my sister, Amy, and we see each other all the time, and we talk on the phone all the time, and we’re inseparable. But I’ve never told her I loved her. If she died, I wouldn’t say “Oh, she didn’t know I loved her. I wish I’d said, ‘I love you.’” It would’ve been a weird moment, pointless.

I went on a trip with my best friend recently, and I did think she could get sick and die. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to get on your nerves. It’s no help when you’re like, “Will you hurry the fuck up? We’re going to miss this plane!”

It helps, too, that I keep a diary. I don’t care anything about photos, but it’s nice to read about my friends and family in my diary. Every now and then I’ll send people something from the diary to let them know how I feel about them. Some things you can’t send because you’re just bitching about them. But I’ll send sunny reflections on something we did together that they may have forgotten.

You’ve talked about looking at people around you and thinking, “Who’s going to die first? And of what?”  I usually think about that when I get news that somebody has died, and they just died. They had an aneurysm or a heart attack in their sleep. And I think, “Well, good for them. Nice.” A clean death; they didn’t have to linger and be in the hospital. They didn’t have to suffer. And I think about my death, when and how it will happen, and I hope I don’t know that I’m going to die that day. I’m often asked what I would have for my last meal. I’ve always thought I’d have the manicotti my mother used to make. And then I saw a cartoon this guy had done on Instagram. He said that for his last meal, he’d have all-you-can-eat breadsticks, so he’d never have to die. You could just keep eating those breadsticks.

“There’s nothing good about old age except you can ride the bus and the subway for free.”

You’ve written movingly about your father’s decline and death, and how the way he changed at the end of his life was surprising to you.  My father got dementia and forgot that he was an asshole. For the first time, he was fun to be with. I’m glad I got to see him like that, when he had turned into this little creature who was cheerful and said things you didn’t expect. Part of the change was that he’d always just watched Fox News and conservative talk shows, bathing in that day and night. But the television was complicated in his assisted living facility so he was without it, and, for the first time, he wasn’t filled with rage. The question was: did he change? Or is that who he really was, and it was smothered in layers of rage and frustration that peeled away at the end?

It’s sad that maybe the father you got to see at the end was there all along and you could have had a better relationship.  There was never a time when you would just sit around and talk about stuff that interested you both. You could never trust him. He was like a cat: you stroke it and then it turns around and sinks its teeth into you and hisses and claws. When my mother died, I was gutted. I’d never known grief like that. Every day I wondered, “How am I going to get through this day?” When my father died, I didn’t care. I know that sounds harsh, but I’m grateful because it would be awful to have to go through what I experienced with my mother twice.

Is the difference that you had such a difficult relationship with your father compared to with your mother?  My mother was a lot of fun. I would call her all the time and she was easy to hang out with. She was nice. She was funny. I got a big kick out of her and she got a big kick out of me. I think about her all the time, and I long for her. If in heaven you were reunited with your loved ones, I’d drop myself out the window right now, thinking, “I can have breakfast with my mother!” We have a terrace and we’re on the twentieth floor. There’s no way I’d survive the fall. But if there’s an afterlife and my father was going to be there, I’d be like, fuck.

In Happy-Go-Lucky, you say you’re finally throwing down the lance you’ve been carrying in battle with your father for the past sixty years because “I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.” Have you really thrown it down?  No. I picked it right back up again when my father cut me out of his will. It’s in my hand right now!

“It sounds so false and clichéd, but nothing makes you happier than doing something for somebody else.”

According to bardo wisdom, nonattachment can help us achieve happiness. But as you’ve found in your relationship with your father, it can be hard to let go of grievances. How happy are you?  I’m a pretty happy person. I’m not going to bring you down, moaning about stuff or complaining about my health. I don’t have anything to complain about on that level. I go to at least a hundred cities a year on tour, and I read out loud onstage and sign books. That’s me at my best because my happiness is based on doing things for other people. It sounds so false and clichéd, but nothing makes you happier than doing something for somebody else.

Still, I have a hole in myself that I try to fill with material things like houses and paintings and objects and clothes. This doesn’t in the long run make me happy. It’s a deep hole and it’s always been there. I don’t know what it is. When I was young, I would try to fill it by shopping at thrift stores. And now there’s just no stopping me. People think, “Shopping?” But I’m not going to be ashamed of it. I’ve just always loved it.

Why does shopping make you feel you’re filling the hole?  Just looking at things and touching things, and the encounters. Today, at Saks, I bought a T-shirt made by this Swiss company. The salesman was busy—the woman in front of me in line wanted something wrapped and there was a customer looking at these expensive wallets, and it was hard for the salesman to turn away from that person and wrap this woman’s present. So I told the salesman, “I can wait.” When he came back, I said, “Are you Danish?” And he said, “No, I’m German.” And then we spoke in German, my pathetic little German, and it was a really nice encounter. The woman who wanted her gift wrapped had just turned to her phone and not engaged him at all. I look at that as such a wasted opportunity. I want the person and me to prove to each other that we’re humans. I want to know that person has a soul and a life, and sometimes I want them to know that about me. I felt a connection with a stranger, and that makes me happy.

The Dalai Lama says, “Not only must you die in the end, but you do not know when the end will come.” You should live in such a way that “even if you did die tonight, you would have no regrets.” Do you have regrets, or do you think you’ll have any?  I don’t regret that much. There are people whose feelings I’ve hurt, and I regret that. I apologize, but that doesn’t mean your apology is accepted. And when I was young, I thought, “I’ll just die if I have to spend my life in Raleigh, North Carolina.” I always wanted to live in another country. So I moved to France and then I moved to England, and I’d be happy to move again. I would have a lot of regrets if I’d never done that. I always wanted to see the world. I’ve only been to about forty-seven countries, but it’s a start.

Career-wise, I don’t have regrets. I’ve been offered the opportunity to write TV shows and movies, but I’ve never cared about that, so I wouldn’t regret not doing it. I often tell myself that if my career were taken away, I really enjoyed it while I had it. I’ve never gotten onstage and thought, “The tickets didn’t cost that much. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t give it my all.” I always give it my all. And I always get a thrill out of it.That would be the pity—if you didn’t realize until afterwards that you loved it. And then you’d think, “Damn it, why didn’t I embrace it while I had it?”

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“Existence is traumatic and female existence is traumatic in its own ways,” says author Melissa Febos. “To acknowledge rather than dismiss the gravity of experience that also happens to be ordinary and shared by many people has been transformative, a doorway to authentic living.” In memoirs and essay collections, Febos looks at what it means to break free from the scripts of family and society, to live a life that is true to who we are rather than try to please others.

Born and raised in Falmouth, Massachusetts, Febos has written two memoirs, Whip Smart (2010), the story of her work as a professional dominatrix to support her heroin habit, and Abandon Me (2017), an investigation of family legacy, erotic obsession, and identity. Girlhood (2021), Febos’s first essay collection, explores growing up female in America and her quest to let go of the false selves she began constructing as a girl, when she became adept at “performing the mental acrobatics necessary to discredit her own instincts.” Her latest book, Body Work (2022), is a collection of essays on the power of personal narrative.

Febos’s awards include the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for Girlhood, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Granta, Tin House, and Vogue, among many others. An associate professor of English at the University of Iowa, Febos spoke with me early one evening from her home in Iowa City about her search for authenticity. 

*

You’re on sabbatical from your teaching position at the University of Iowa, so you’re experiencing a suspension of your ordinary reality, a kind of bardo. In bardo, we encounter obstacles but also have the opportunity for insights. How has your sabbatical been so far? Obstacles and insights is an accurate description. I’m a fantasizer and I also identify as an addict. I’ve been in recovery for almost twenty years but I have a strong inclination toward fantasy and expectation, and I tend to be resistant to past experience. When I anticipated my sabbatical, I thought, “This is going to be an ecstatic disappearance from the stresses of my daily life that will allow me to focus on writing.” But instead, it has created a space to encounter things I don’t make time for when the frenetic, absorbing everyday is swirling around. 

Part of what I’m reckoning with is that being in thrall to the linear progression of my existence—goal-oriented creative ambition, the life of a tenure-track academic—has been a way of avoiding suffering and processing. As I’ve stepped out of my usual routine, I’ve felt emotionally untethered. Or maybe it’s the opposite. Emotions are coming up and they’re like, “Yoo-hoo, still here! It looks like you’ve got some time.” This period is making space for grief over the pandemic, when I had intense health problems, and I’m also processing stuff in my marriage and with my family. I had this moment recently where I was lying awake and feeling self-pity and anger, like, “This is not what I had hoped for my sabbatical.” But I also feel a sense of satisfaction because I know all this has been waiting for me and now I’m dealing with it. 

Have you been able to focus on your writing? Yes, I’m working on a book about a year I spent intentionally celibate and spiritually seeking. It’s a memoir but with the spirit of an essay in that it’s driven by the desire to think through an experience and a set of questions.

Is the creative process with this book different because you’re in a different space? In relationship to writing, I’m in a real in-between place. I’ve gotten most of the things I was hungry for: I’ve published books and I have a job I might stay in for the rest of my life. What does this mean for my writing practice, which is for milling what’s hard and has been motored by my ambition?

I was talking at breakfast this morning with my wife about how different it is to be writing a book where the conflicts and tensions are more subtle. My earlier books were about heroin addiction and an abusive relationship, experiences that were both exciting and excruciating. What I’m writing about now isn’t acute suffering and the stakes aren’t life or death. This book is about what was the best year of my life up to that point, and peace and joy are hard to make interesting to a stranger. Giving urgency, or momentum, to a very interior process requires different craft methods than I’ve used in the past, so I have to teach myself how to write in a new way. I’m used to measuring my writing progress by daily word count and that isn’t working. Although sometimes I go into spasm because I’m just staring out the window, it feels right. When I was younger I would have doubted this instinct, but experience tells me it’s a reliable compass.

I love that instead of struggling to make your usual writing practice work, you’re seeing where your current process leads. There’s so much uncertainty but I get to listen to a part of myself that I otherwise don’t. There’s something miraculous about following instincts that are operating at a much deeper level than the level where I’m worrying about things like word count, and the process always turns out to know where it’s going. 

It’s like having a block of marble in front of you and knowing that somewhere in there is a beautiful sculpture, even if you don’t know how long it will take to find it and what it will look like. Exactly. There’s a quote attributed to Michelangelo that’s stuck with me for decades: “I saw the angel in the stone, and I carved to set him free.” For me, writing is more about finding than conjuring. 

That can be said for the journey through the bardo not only of writing but also of life, where our authentic selves are there for the finding. You’ve written about how you lost sight of your true self by trying to please people and ignoring your instincts. Pleasing others requires overriding parts of myself—feelings, responses, curiosities, interests—and forcibly manipulating and exiling the shape of my body. When I do that for an extended period, those parts revolt and express themselves in addiction, in depression, in all sorts of compulsive behaviors. The consequences can be harmful and even life-threatening. If I don’t make space for an authentic way of living, I’ll go sideways so quickly that I will self-destruct.

I want to escape. I want everyone to like me. I want to succeed. I want to be a good employee. I want to be a good capitalist. I have these inclinations, so I’ve had to develop a holistic way of living where I go to 12-step meetings, I have a meditation practice, I do movement that puts me back inside my body, I go to therapy, I have meaningful connection with trusted people. It requires constant maintenance for me to stay authentic. That’s why I’m a nonfiction writer: nonfiction writing is the place that will least suffer falsity or performance. It’s a space where I have to be present and honest. I try not to give myself a lot of credit, because I’ve had to do it to survive. People are like, “Oh, you’re so rigorous, and you’re healing, and you’re self-examining, and you must really like therapy.” And I’m like, “No, I hate therapy.” When I think about feeling my feelings, I’m like, “Eeeww, no!” I’ve had to organize my whole life around therapy because otherwise, I won’t do it.

In Girlhood, you write that you were happy until around age 10, when you experienced a “violent turn.” What happened? I enjoyed an enormous amount of privilege growing up. We were solidly middle class. I was well-loved, raised by parents who tried to shield me from the damaging prescriptions of American culture for girls. I had a cheerful, vigorous, excited response to life. But with the transformation of my body at puberty, I reached a crucible where the freedoms of childhood came to an end. It was impossible to avoid what it meant to be a girl and a woman in our society. The revelation was especially devastating because in the early nineties when I was growing up, there was no internet where I could find connection outside my small town. For me, adolescence was a reckoning with external forces in the culture and my first reckoning with the internal consequences of suppressing true parts of myself. I was a good student and a good daughter, and then I exploded. 

You exploded but you were still trapped between your true self and the self you presented to society. You say in Girlhood that you “burned with self-hatred, as if I’d ingested a poison that was slowly blackening my insides.” When were you able to break free? That initial combustion lasted for a few years. I suffered from an eating disorder while I was an adolescent, segued straight into substance abuse and was a high-functioning addict, and then became a non-high-functioning addict. I began to break free when I got sober in my early to mid-twenties. I was still smoking cigarettes and eating a lot of gummy candy, but I was becoming more honest with myself. It was at that point that I pivoted toward the person I am now. People-pleasing and eating disorders and drugs had felt like a shortcut, but they had created work on the back end. I started doing that work—spiritual work, community work, self-work—and things got easier. 

“There’s so much unlearning that needs to be done before we can live authentically.” 

It seems like it should be the simplest thing in the world to just be ourselves, yet it’s often so hard. It’s tricky because children are powerless. We don’t come into our agency until we’re older and by then we’ve already figured out a way of living that’s contingent on powers greater than ourselves, on other people. There’s so much unlearning that needs to be done before we can live authentically. 

You found it was possible to train your mind and undo the indoctrination you underwent as a girl. How did you accomplish this? My mother is a Buddhist and, although I didn’t pay much attention growing up, Buddhism was ambiently around and I started meditating when I was about 14. That early introduction to Buddhist concepts and meditation was the beginning of my mind training.

Also, getting sober gave me a profound understanding of how possible it is to change the way you see things, because addiction is a disease of the mind. When I got sober, I started to do the micro-work of looking at how I interacted with people and with myself. I examined how I understood the boundaries of my body and who had a right to cross them. When someone tried to hug me, I hugged them back, whether I wanted to or not. And there were lots of other things like that—from casual touch to sex acts. When I started to look at how I navigated physical interactions, I realized that a micro-overriding of my own desires was happening all the time that I wasn’t even aware of. If I continued to let that happen, I’d end up in a life that was inauthentic and empty, that had shame all around in weird places. A life that was a weird Frankenstein of what people wanted from me. 

Because I’d grown up as a girl in the United States of America, I felt for a long time that it was important not to make other people uncomfortable by asserting my physical boundaries. When I finally stopped to interrogate this, I realized I had to slow down my reactions until the moment where I could make a choice became visible. When someone said, “Let’s hug.” I had to step back and wait a few beats—very awkward—for the moment when I could discern whether I wanted to. Oftentimes, the answer was no. I had to let the awkward moment stand and, as it turned out, time kept moving, people kept talking, nobody died. The important part is that moment of pause where, instead of looking outward to assess what the other person wants, I listen inward to what I want. But it’s a challenge because it can be very comfortable to be estranged from yourself.

And meditation helped you come to this realization? Meditation is an important part of my practice, the place where I learn to be present, to let go of narrative and see what is. But a lot of the work with my mind happens in interaction. The work is a combination of meditation, writing—where I do my best thinking—and being in relationship, where I practice. Marriage is the perfect laboratory. The work is theoretical if I can’t do it in relationship, if it’s not affecting the way I’m treating other people—including as a teacher. I often think about how I’m modeling what it means to be an artist and a human being to my students, and that’s a great motivator for me.

You used to keep a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet pinned over your desk: “The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.” Are you still doing this heart-work? Yes, it’s all that we’ve been talking about: turning towards a more authentic self, a more authentic life. Maintaining the courage to always be engaged in that, to not hide in what’s familiar and comfortable. 

At the time, I understood the quote as related to writing my second book, Abandon Me. That was a long time ago, and today I understand how the quote applies to every part of my life. My life isn’t divided cellularly; it’s one thing that’s expressed in different ways. Now I have a more capacious understanding of what the heart-work is and hopefully I’ll say that again in ten years.

The post Turning Toward a More Authentic Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Writing chose me,” says author Gish Jen. “It’s not like I sat down with four alternatives and thought, ‘Okay, which one of these things am I going to do?’ Writing chose me, and I do not see myself as having had any other option.” Born in Long Island, New York, to Chinese immigrant parents, Jen has written five novels, two nonfiction books, and two short story collections, including her latest, Thank You, Mr. Nixon. Named a best book of 2022 by the New Yorker, NPR, and Oprah, Thank You, Mr. Nixon looks at the fifty years since Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China, unfolding with Jen’s signature wit, empathy, and poignancy.  

In her writing, Jen explores family and cultural ancestry, existing between worlds, and how we figure out—or don’t—who we are. She’s not sure she would have become a writer if she hadn’t grown up the child of immigrants. “From an early age,” she says, “I was engaged in the activity of making a coherent narrative out of my life.” Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, among many others, and her stories have been chosen five times for The Best American Short Stories. Honors include a National Book Critics Circle Award nomination and a Guggenheim fellowship; she’s a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of the MacArthur Foundation. 

From her home in Boston, Jen spoke with me about being between cultures and how she became the author of her own life.

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I loved Thank You, Mr. Nixon! How did you come to write this book? I was sitting by a lake during COVID, and it was very quiet, and I had a bunch of stories I’d written over the years. All of a sudden, the stories started to coalesce in a way I hadn’t anticipated. 

Bardos include times when the reality we know ends and we’re in a state of suspension, like during a pandemic. How did COVID influence the writing of your book? It heightened my awareness of contingency in general and sparked an interest in historical contingency in particular, especially the way that one man, Richard Nixon, could go to China and unleash forces beyond anything we imagined. 

American culture tends to be less accepting of contingency, in contrast to many Asian cultures. Is your view of impermanence influenced more by Chinese culture than American culture? That’s an interesting question. I’m from a background where dynasties fall, governments come and go. There’s an assumption of flux. My friends in America are surprised when a company goes out of business, but I assume things are unstable. 

You grew up in ethnic isolation in Queens, Yonkers, and Scarsdale. Did you feel like you were “in between”—kind of American but kind of Chinese? It’s only now that I understand I was in limbo, in transit from one culture to another. I was aware my parents knew nothing. It was news that people used dishwashing detergent, that they drank things iced instead of at room temperature, that they had a different idea of personal space. We had a Volkswagen Beetle and we’d all crowd into it, my parents in front, the three bigger kids in the middle, and my two little brothers in back. We loved it, but being squished together like that would be unacceptable to most of the people I live with today.

Was there a point when you started to feel different from your family? I was ambivalent about my home life because it was so isolating and people thought everything we did was funny. The way we ate was funny. The way we dressed was funny. The way we thought was funny. My feeling of disjuncture became more acute in high school. I remember driving in Chinatown with my boyfriend and my family, when my father got pulled over. He started speaking in Chinese, pretending he didn’t speak English. The cop said, “You stay right here,” and went for help, whereupon my father took off! Everyone in the car was laughing, but I was aware we weren’t all laughing the same laugh. My siblings were laughing because we’d gotten away with something. My boyfriend was laughing because he just couldn’t believe it. He was like, did that really happen? And I was laughing because I felt uncomfortable—I was aware my boyfriend was laughing in a different way, and also that it wasn’t OK to do what my father had just done. Not only was my family life a bardo, but I was in a personal bardo within the bardo. A meta bardo, if you will. You could see the writer coming: I was becoming an intimate outsider, part of my family but not. 

How do you feel about that? Today, I can feel the loss of it, but I mostly feel the liberation. I’m happy to have become a person who could leave. And I don’t feel like I’m still in bardo. Or maybe bardo has become a home for me?

The bardo teachings encourage us to face reality so we can live in a way that’s authentic to who we are. After you graduated from Harvard, you went to business school but dropped out. Did you wake up one day and realize, this isn’t for me? When I finished college, I thought, “I really need to do something,” so I applied to business school. I can’t believe they took me, because I was the least business-oriented person to ever set foot in Stanford Business School. As soon as I got there, I knew I was in the wrong place. Everyone was concerned about things I didn’t care about. By the second trimester, I’d stopped going to class. I was taking writing classes instead and read one hundred novels that year. 

During my time at Stanford, I went to a funeral for the first time and realized, “Oh, my god! We’re all going to die!” I was going to die, and if I didn’t try to become a writer, I would lie on my deathbed asking myself, “Why did I not try to become a writer?” You can’t lie on your deathbed with regret of that order. At the same time, I was the daughter of immigrants, and nice Chinese girls did not just drop out of graduate school. It was a hard break to make.

I dreaded telling my parents. You yourself know what these Asian immigrant families can be like. My parents had experienced a lot of trauma in China and had worked really hard to raise five children and send them all to college. So to have a daughter say, after all that, “I’m going back into the pool of the hopelessly insecure” was upsetting.

How did they take it? They stopped speaking to me for over a year. Eventually they accepted that I had become a writer, but to the end, they would have loved to see me in real estate or medical school.

Being aware of death helps us remember that not only are we finite but also that we don’t know how long we have, so there’s no time to waste. Do you still feel the consciousness of impermanence that struck you at the funeral? Absolutely. For every book, I ask myself, “If it’s only given to me to write one more book, would this be it?” And, “Would I rise up from my deathbed to finish this book?” People are always saying, “Why don’t you write for TV?” and I see great work being done on TV. But on my deathbed, I wouldn’t say, “Grim Reaper, wait one more minute. I have to finish this episode,” while with a book, I would say, “You know what? I’m on page 275. Give me a little more time, I’m almost done.” 

That’s such a great image. I can imagine the Grim Reaper standing there. While I’m typing away…

In bardo, we’re the artists of our lives. We create our trajectory with the choices we make, like you did when you dropped out of business school and became a writer. You often talk about the importance of self-narration. Does self-narration mean being the author of your own story? Being the artist of your own life is quite a Western idea. The Eastern idea has more to do with adjusting to whatever life brings. It’s about navigation rather than authoring. I credit Western culture for the degree to which I do feel like the author of my own life. Today, I’m very much a hybrid figure, oriented toward accommodation but uncomfortable simply accepting everything that’s given to me, especially because what I was expected to accept as a girl was so ridiculous.

What kinds of expectations did you encounter? My parents were informed by a 19th-century, premodern China, so I grew up with the ludicrous idea that I should try to make myself into someone marriageable. My grandmother “kept in the background,” as my mother described it, so much so that she never laughed aloud. The whole idea that that’s the ideal, that it’s not okay for you to exercise your voice in any shape, way or form, is so extreme that I reacted against it. You begin to say, “Well, no, I don’t accept that. I cannot go along with that.” And if that means I’m the author of my own life, I guess I am! But it doesn’t start so much with this idea that my life is mine and I should be able to do what I want with it as, “I don’t know what my narrative is, but I can tell you one thing: I reject yours.”      

When I left business school and entered writing, I could never have said that I was self-narrating. I was just doing what was given to me to do. Grace Paley once said to me, “It’s your fate.” That made perfect sense. In “it’s your fate to self-narrate,” you can hear the marriage of the old world and the new, both East and West. It’s not that it’s your right to self-narrate, or that you should do it because you feel like it. You do it because it’s your fate. 

When I say “East and West,” I don’t mean these things are monoliths. However, it’s true that many people from non-Western backgrounds are uncomfortable using the first person. Distinguished writers with this discomfort include Yiyun Li, who has said, “As soon as I use the word ‘I,’ my confidence crumbles.” And Salman Rushdie started writing his memoir about life under the fatwa, Joseph Anton, in the first person and had to switch to the third person. A lot of reviewers and readers thought that was weird, but if you understand anything about non-Western cultures, it’s much less surprising. 

Even if you shy away from the first person, though, you’re still the author of your life. Right. Someone like Salman Rushdie is obviously the author of his own life, so it’s not like the opposite of a first-person orientation is passivity. Many people from non-Western backgrounds see themselves as part of a larger chain. They are born from something, and when they die, something continues. So the idea that you would tell a story that only begins with you and only ends with you seems strange and wrong. That’s why you’ll see this discomfort with the autobiographical impulse as it’s practiced in the West.

For me, it isn’t so much that I’ve needed to tell my story, but that writing has been a way of making sense of all the dissonance I experienced as a child. It’s been a way of grappling with the forces that made my parents who they were, the forces that make America what it is, and where I fit in all that. It’s been a way of grappling with the very different ways there are of being human. I’m grateful that I have a facility with words, and a way of addressing it all as opposed to simply marinating in it. It’s nice to be the marinator instead of the marinated.

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In his new collection of autobiographical essays, Happy-Go-Lucky, best-selling author and humorist David Sedaris writes about topics ranging from guns to teeth to siblings to the pandemic. At the heart of the book is his difficult, unresolved relationship with his father, who died in 2021, and the inevitable change and loss we encounter in life.

Born on December 26, 1956 in Johnson City, New York, and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina, Sedaris dropped out of college and did odd jobs to support himself, including working as an apple picker, an apartment cleaner, and a Christmas elf at Macy’s. In the mid-eighties, he entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and began giving readings from his diaries. His life changed in 1992 when he read “SantaLand Diaries,” a comic essay about his elf gig, on NPR’s Morning Edition. Soon he was writing for the New Yorker, Harper’s, GQ, and other magazines and had landed a contract for his first book, Barrel Fever (1994), a collection of essays and short stories.

Sedaris has written thirteen books and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001; other honors include Grammy Award nominations for Best Spoken Word Album and Best Comedy Album. Based in West Sussex, England, and New York City, Sedaris tours for the better part of each year and attracts large audiences, sometimes in the thousands. “Eventually,” he says, “people are bound to get tired of me, and I’ll play smaller and smaller theaters, and then they’ll say, ‘There’s nothing smaller than a five-seat theater, Mr. Sedaris.’ Then I’ll just have to retire.”

Late on a Manhattan evening, Sedaris talked with me about letting go, why shopping soothes his soul, and dying without regrets. 

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In Happy-Go-Lucky, you reflect on growing older and experiencing endings. The Tibetan bardo teachings say that when we die, we hover around instead of going on to rebirth because we don’t want to let go of the life we had. In the bardo between birth and death, we hold on to things like habits that no longer serve us, or people we’ve lost, and this keeps us from moving forward. Do you cling when something comes to an end? When I decided to quit drinking and quit smoking, those things were just over. I accepted the idea immediately—you know, that’s finished, and I can’t do it anymore. I never had another cigarette and I never had another drink. Then, my boyfriend Hugh and I used to live in Normandy before we bought a house in the south of England. Hugh goes back to Normandy all the time, but even though I loved it there, that’s over. I’ve never gone back. The second I left, I thought, “I’ll just look forward now and start this new life.” With people, though, it can be harder. When I broke up with the boyfriend I had before Hugh, it took me a long time to let go. I felt like I’d failed. It didn’t matter if we weren’t right together, which was clear. 

When the pandemic hit, did you long for your previous life? I did, though because I write, I had something most people didn’t. The pandemic was something to write about. It started and my phone started ringing—people were looking for a funny take on what was happening. So it wasn’t like I had something for sale before the pandemic and all of a sudden nobody wanted it anymore.

Bardo is about facing change and impermanence. In Happy-Go-Lucky, you write about seeing your father in a nursing home and thinking, In the blink of an eye, wouldn’t it be me? How do you feel about aging? There’s nothing good about it except you can ride the bus and the subway for free. In England, anyway. But the worst would be to be old and broke. It would be such an indignity to have to get old with no money. If you have money, then when your youth is gone, your looks are gone, you think, “Well, at least I have that second home.” 

I’m at a point now where every other week I’m having to write a sympathy letter because somebody’s parent has died, and I’m about to move into that period where your friends start dying. I already go through my addresses and: dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. As you get older, this person dies, and your sister dies, and then maybe your brother dies, and your best friend dies. It’s a burden of sorrow that you think you can’t carry. But since not everybody dies at once, you find you can carry it. Or you develop dementia or Alzheimer’s, and the burden is taken away from you. You don’t have to remember the people. You don’t even remember having a mother. That’s the bright side. 

As you’ve started losing people, do you feel a different quality to your interaction with people you care about, knowing you won’t be together forever? Yes, but I don’t know what to do about it. I can’t think of anybody who I say “I love you” to. I’m crazy about my sister, Amy, and we see each other all the time, and we talk on the phone all the time, and we’re inseparable. But I’ve never told her I loved her. If she died, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, she didn’t know I loved her. I wish I’d said, ‘I love you.’” It would’ve been a weird moment, pointless. 

I went on a trip with my best friend recently, and I did think she could get sick and die. But that doesn’t mean they’re not going to get on your nerves. It’s no help when you’re like, “Will you hurry the fuck up? We’re going to miss this plane!”

It helps, too, that I keep a diary. I don’t care anything about photos, but it’s nice to read about my friends and family in my diary. Every now and then I’ll send people something from the diary to let them know how I feel about them. Some things you can’t send because you’re just bitching about them. But I’ll send sunny reflections on something we did together that they may have forgotten.

You’ve talked about looking at people around you and thinking, “Who’s going to die first? And of what?” I usually think about that when I get news that somebody has died, and they just died. They had an aneurysm or a heart attack in their sleep. And I think, “Well, good for them. Nice.” A clean death, they didn’t have to linger and be in the hospital. They didn’t have to suffer. And I think about my death, when and how it will happen, and I hope I don’t know that I’m going to die that day. I’m often asked what I would have for my last meal. I’ve always thought I’d have the manicotti my mother used to make. And then I saw a cartoon this guy had done on Instagram. He said that for his last meal, he’d have all-you-can-eat breadsticks, so he’d never have to die. You could just keep eating those breadsticks.

In the bardo way of looking at things, endings can be the start of something positive that we didn’t anticipate. You’ve written movingly about your father’s decline and death, and how the way he changed at the end of his life was surprising to you. My father got dementia and forgot that he was an asshole. For the first time, he was fun to be with. I’m glad I got to see him like that, when he had turned into this little creature who was cheerful and said things you didn’t expect. Part of the change was that he’d always just watched Fox News and conservative talk shows, bathing in that day and night. But the television was complicated in his assisted living facility so he was without it, and, for the first time, he wasn’t filled with rage. The question was: did he change? Or is that who he really was, and it was smothered in layers of rage and frustration that peeled away at the end?

It’s sad that maybe the father you got to see at the end was there all along and you could have had a better relationship. There was never a time when you would just sit around and talk about stuff that interested you both. You could never trust him. He was like a cat: you stroke it and then it turns around and sinks its teeth into you and hisses and claws. When my mother died, I was gutted. I’d never known grief like that. Every day I wondered: how am I going to get through this day? When my father died, I didn’t care. I know that sounds harsh, but I’m grateful because it would be awful to have to go through what I experienced with my mother twice. 

Is the difference that you had such a difficult relationship with your father compared to with your mother? My mother was a lot of fun. I would call her all the time and she was easy to hang out with. She was nice. She was funny. I got a big kick out of her and she got a big kick out of me. I think about her all the time, and I long for her. If in heaven you were reunited with your loved ones, I’d drop myself out the window right now, thinking, “I can have breakfast with my mother!” We have a terrace and we’re on the twentieth floor. There’s no way I’d survive the fall. But if there’s an afterlife and my father was going to be there, I’d be like, fuck. 

In Happy-Go-Lucky, you say you’re finally throwing down the lance you’ve been carrying in battle with your father for the past sixty years because “I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.” Have you really thrown it down? No. I picked it right back up again when my father cut me out of his will. It’s in my hand right now!

According to bardo wisdom, non-attachment can help us achieve happiness. But as you’ve found in your relationship with your father, it can be hard to let go of grievances. How happy are you? I’m a pretty happy person. I’m not going to bring you down, moaning about stuff or complaining about my health. I don’t have anything to complain about on that level. I go to at least a hundred cities a year on tour, and I read out loud onstage and sign books. That’s me at my best because my happiness is based on doing things for other people. It sounds so false and clichéd, but nothing makes you happier than doing something for somebody else. 

Still, I have a hole in myself that I try to fill with material things like houses and paintings and objects and clothes. This doesn’t in the long run make me happy. It’s a deep hole and it’s always been there. I don’t know what it is. When I was young, I would try to fill it by shopping at thrift stores. And now there’s just no stopping me. People think, “Shopping?” But I’m not going to be ashamed of it. I’ve just always loved it.

Why does shopping make you feel you’re filling the hole? Just looking at things and touching things, and the encounters. Today, at Saks, I bought a T-shirt made by this Swiss company. The salesman was busy—the woman in front of me in line wanted something wrapped and there was a customer looking at these expensive wallets, and it was hard for the salesman to turn away from that person and wrap this woman’s present. So I told the salesman, “I can wait.” When he came back, I said, “Are you Danish?” And he said, “No, I’m German.” And then we spoke in German, my pathetic little German, and it was a really nice encounter. The woman who wanted her gift wrapped had just turned to her phone and not engaged him at all. I look at that as such a wasted opportunity. I want the person and me to prove to each other that we’re humans. I want to know that person has a soul and a life, and sometimes I want them to know that about me. I felt a connection with a stranger and that makes me happy.

The bardo teachings urge us to recognize we’re not immortal and live our lives as fully as possible. The Dalai Lama says, “Not only must you die in the end, but you do not know when the end will come.” You should live in such a way that “even if you did die tonight, you would have no regrets.” Do you have regrets, or do you think you’ll have any? I don’t regret that much. There are people whose feelings I’ve hurt, and I regret that. I apologize, but that doesn’t mean your apology is accepted. And when I was young, I thought, “I’ll just die if I have to spend my life in Raleigh, North Carolina.” I always wanted to live in another country. So I moved to France and then I moved to England, and I’d be happy to move again. I would have a lot of regrets if I’d never done that. I always wanted to see the world. I’ve only been to about 47 countries, but it’s a start.

Career-wise, I don’t have regrets. I’ve been offered the opportunity to write TV shows and movies, but I’ve never cared about that, so I wouldn’t regret not doing it. I often tell myself that if my career were taken away, I really enjoyed it while I had it. I’ve never gotten onstage and thought, “The tickets didn’t cost that much. It’s not the end of the world if I don’t give it my all.” I always give it my all. And I always get a thrill out of it. That would be the pity—if you didn’t realize until afterwards that you loved it. And then you’d think, “Damn it, why didn’t I embrace it while I had it?” 

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