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After the Sicilian proposed, I ordered a glass of wine. I waited for the AA police to slap the glass from my hand, to make a citizen’s arrest. I waited for lightning and thunder and my higher power to speak, but nothing happened. I looked at the waiter. Help me, I thought. The glass was set in front of me. “I thought you didn’t drink.” “I won’t marry you unless you let me drink.” And so, I drank. It seemed inevitable. It tasted insignificant. I did not get drunk. But the next time, I drank more, and my brain remembered how much better it felt to shut down. I drank with some degree of control because getting married was on the menu, and if the Sicilian knew the sad heart of his future bride, he might panic. I drank and flashed my diamond at work. I took a brief trip to Dublin and announced I was no longer an alcoholic. I got very, very drunk with Gabrielle, and she asked me if I loved my future husband.
“No. But it doesn’t matter. I have a diamond ring. I want to get married.” “And then?” Her forehead was lined with worry. “Then I’ll kill myself.” “Molly! You mustn’t.” No, I must because then my mother will finally believe how terrible I felt.

During my phone company days close to Christmas, I was sent to check on a new installer trying to connect a residence line. He had called in to say he was afraid, and the people who lived there were trying to burn the house down. When I pulled up, the installer stood outside the house, a shabby ranch, dark amid the other houses decorated with lights and Santa, looking stunned. "Listen, these people are in some kind of cult."

Retrieving my clog, I picked up my bag and left. There was a bus to New York City that stopped across the street. I would be home in a few hours. My friend Palmer had invited me to her parents’ house in the Adirondacks. This would be better than sitting in my tiny house wondering why I had refused to go to Tortola. Palmer had a friend, an actress friend, who also came. She sat in the back seat and talked about auditioning. When she stopped, I talked about Catherine.

I told Palmer about the couple who came to Beckman's house expecting dinner and instead were told my sister was dead. Laughter came from the back seat. I turned around. The actress was giggling. “I'm sorry, but you're so intense. Seriously, I can't handle how intense you are.”

Meanwhile, there were shrinks. I visited several psychiatrists who listened while I described the previous months and then recommended several treatments. Three wanted me to voluntarily commit myself to a locked ward, while two gave me generous Valium prescriptions and said I had the saddest story they had ever heard. One doctor actually cried. I didn't return to see any of them. I decided to wrap myself in cotton wool woven by the linen man’s workers, drivers, restaurant meals, the Hamptons, my birthday with a tumble of expensive gifts, chocolates from the most expensive store in New York City, a new pair of running shoes and a state-of-the-art electric typewriter.

Was this paralysis foreshadowing the future frenzy, the insane grief, the understanding that love was dangerous, heartbreaking, and doomed? So many stories told me the same truth over and over again: life was a series of disappointments, dashed hopes, letting go, and tear-stained memories of happiness lost. When I see Catherine, I see her joyous, dancing down Atlantic Avenue, pregnant, happy, and greedy for everything. I see her with Henry at my play, smiling, laughing, encouraging, wise, my sister, my friend, and my heart. She would save my life after her death, but her death sent me to the brink of madness and suicide. Schooled as I was in denying pain, nicknamed “the bison” for my endurance and constantly reminded that it was crucial to conceal weakness, my spiral downwards was halted periodically by guilt. But down I fell; deep, dark, and seamless was the descent, and once I reached the level of despair, it was beyond anything I could anticipate.

I hated AA. At twenty-five, I was the youngest person in the meetings near Drew. I arrived as they started and dashed out the door after the Serenity Prayer. I didn't ask anyone to be my sponsor, crucial to a happy sobriety, as most alcoholics are liars, loners, and deniers. My self-esteem was still very low, which kept me from asking any woman in the room to sponsor me. Instead, I gave several newly sober men my attention and my phone number, providing them with rides back to their rehabs and listening to their prison stories. Despite all the information to the contrary, I felt responsible for how much I drank, the effect alcohol had on me, and for not stopping when my mother shouted, “Stop!” Although I wasn't drinking, I refused to allow AA to make my life easier, and without the drinking and the drugs, I felt overwhelmed, angry, and lost.

The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival was in residence at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Some New York actors in Equity would spend their summer there performing plays in repertory. Then, there were lowly apprentices like myself who could audition for roles but otherwise spent their time running errands and building sets. One set required a massive grid to fly above the stage, and each square in the grid (hundreds) had to be covered in this shiny stuff called Mylar. It was the perfect task for stoned, bored, resentful, and rebellious apprentices who banded together to form a secret society called FOST (Federation of Set Technicians). We had a secret handshake and signal, a set of ever-morphing regulations, and we spent hours, days, and weekends Mylar-ing the grid.

I taught an adult creative writing workshop this weekend in conjunction with an art exhibit that asked artists to take an abstract and express that word in a piece of art. Since I often speak to students about using concrete details instead of abstractions (envy, courage, regret, grief), I came up with an idea for a workshop on the subject, which the gallery accepted. It went well. The class was small, only four women, but the writing was mighty, and it felt good to be teaching again. My ex-brother-in-law once asked me why I continued to trust and appreciate men since my relationship history included some terrible things. This is an interesting question, except I remain hopeful and aware that the men who hurt me were a tiny section of the population. However, I have had the same question about teaching. I wonder why I love it so much when I've had horrible teachers.

I have been teaching writing for over thirty years. Name a writing class and I have probably taught it. Fiction, nonfiction, AP Literature, many freshman composition classes, a plethora of variations on the theme of writing better, writing to get accepted, writing to heal, writing to critique or record one's life. I don't claim to be a brilliant short story writer or a poet, but I have taught both subjects.

Sometimes, we go somewhere for a reason that becomes an entirely different reason once the journey is complete. I recently spent six days in Manhattan, which was booked in, honestly, a snit, as I found my patience exhausted by my husband's adjustment to retirement in Northern Michigan. Also I longed for diversity of people, places, and, yes, noise. Here on the Leelanau Peninsula, there is paradise and a gilded cage that somehow makes the beauty, trees, lakes, rolling hills, squirrels, wild turkeys, and deer less appealing. You miss seeing people who don't look like you, speak a different language, or have a different accent; the sounds of a city with its crowds of people, sirens, and car horns bring peace rather than pain.

I  grew up in a world with standards that were nearly impossibly high. My parents, both Harvard graduates, and my father, a PhD, were brilliant, funny, and wildly critical. As a child, I barely touched books meant for children, almost immediately reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Austen, Woolf, Dickens, and Hardy. I was exposed to Fellini and Truffaut, adult conversations that were inappropriate and enthralling, and adults living life at a speed difficult for their children to match. I was a teenage alcoholic, sober by my mid-twenties and sober still. I want to own this history without the judgment that seems to accompany every choice I have ever made as a writer. Writing, like teaching, is everything good in my life, which also means it needs to be protected and allowed to falter without my rushing forward, declaring I am done. Yes, it is very hard and sometimes awful, but it is also the thing that saved my life. Over the years, the question has been posed, "Are you still writing?" I silently think as I affirm that I am, "Yes, I am breathing, I am alive, I am a writer."

My first exposure to Buddhism was during a weekend in a monastery in upstate New York, a gorgeous place with gleaming wood and a literary pedigree, albeit one that had been tarnished by some shady behavior (no, it's not just the Catholics). The weekend was offered as a sober retreat, and I was willing to go mainly because I had a major crush on an angry Jewish guy who had signed up. We had been flirting, and the four-hour drive sealed the deal enough that we snuck into what later proved to be a private sanctuary for the students and monks and made love in the hot tub on arrival. Then there were noises in the adjacent room, and the only way to access the exit was through a space that was clearly filled with better-behaved retreatants and Buddhists attending a meditation class. My companion decided to depart fast while people lay out their mats, but I was horrified by the idea of a walk of shame through a meditation class. But there was no alternative, so I opened the door and was greeted by a dozen prone bodies and a monk who sat in zazen but made eye contact and winked. He knew. Soon, he would know everything.

I never did heroin. My older sister did, but I was too little to understand, and by the time I felt ready to join her, she had stopped, found her footing, went to therapy to understand the crimes our parents committed, and was full of her own brilliance and future. “Mouse,” she said; she called me Mouse, “Don’t.” So, I didn’t.

I was a terrible waitress. Starting the evening with a bank to use to provide change to customers I often ended up losing money because of my total lack of ability to count. Luckily, the bartenders found my ineptitude endearing and usually remedied the situation by tipping me from their earnings. As long as I stayed numbed by drugs and alcohol, I remained immune to the human sadness found...

It started early. I thought the painting of George Washington that hung in my elementary school classroom, clouds all around his big head, was God. Then I thought it was the lady with the torch at the end of the movie, but when I asked my oldest sister how they got God to agree to hold that torch, she looked at me like, who are you? I asked my parents, and they said that God doesn’t exist. This was, at least, an answer, but I wondered what the hell my Catholic grandmother was going on about when she told me that since I was the youngest and free of mortal sin, I was six, I should pray every night because the rest of my family was going straight to hell. So, I piled all my stuffed animals into my bed and in the unheated attic where we slept, I got on my knees and said, over and over, “God, don’t send my family to hell,” because I didn’t know any prayers. When I demonstrated this to my grandmother, she said nothing counted unless my bare knees were on the floor, I had knelt on my nightie. She had been raised in a Catholic convent. I quit the nightly pleas.

My mother was chopping garlic. Catherine was in the PhD program at Rutgers. She had always been brilliant, her mind capable of analyzing the complexities of literature while still able to appreciate celebrity gossip in People Magazine. I wasn’t like her. As a child, I loved to write and found it easy to spin poetry or short stories. In college, my creative writing instructor told me I should send out my work to literary magazines, but that was my father’s territory. He was, like my oldest sister, a literary genius. I was merely clever. My stuff was whiny and self-centered. I couldn’t imagine calling myself a writer any more than I could imagine happiness.

Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been in recovery my entire life. In this moment, it was major surgery, but as I passed through the stages of feeling totally fucked and then beginning to believe I’d be all right, it occurred to me how many times I’ve had to remind myself, “don’t give up.” There were recurring experiences with my parents’ behavior around alcohol when it felt as if the world, my world, the world of a child, was on a path to destruction marked by terrible fights, broken things, witnessing violence and mayhem, betrayal by the two people I loved the most. And then, after the chaos, the tears, the terror, the light would gently enter the beautiful rooms my architect mother had designed, and my charming, brilliant father would be present, reading The New York Times, drinking coffee, and calling me “Swipsie.”  Only then could I breathe again.