I recently sent off for one of those DNA reports. It was on sale and I wanted to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t some magical foundling or infant switched at birth my parents had taken home and claimed as their own.[1] The results were, I’m sorry to say, unsurprising, and more or less lined up precisely with what we already knew. To wit:  I am a white person, descended from white people, the vast majority of whom came from the British Isles (the rest were French and German). Of that number, approximately 20% were Irish. I’d figured as much. I knew the surnames. In Ireland, I’d received some unsolicited commentary about how I “had the look of Cork about ye,” which didn’t sound entirely like a compliment. I felt (and still feel) fiercely ambivalent about Ireland, like it tapped into some combination of This place is lovely and magical and I need to get right the fuck out of here before I end up trying the lotus.  If I were the sort of person who believed in that whole “places speaking to you/historical memory/ancestral resonances” bullshit, I might give the pot another couple of stirs, but I’m not and I don’t, so leave it.

I mention this, of course, because today is St Patrick’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day is an abomination. I need you to know that I don’t say this because I hate Ireland or Irish People or the color green (in fact, my favorite color) or quasi-mythological, beatified snake charmers or whatever portion of myself[2] may be distantly rooted in the auld sod. I hate St Paddy’s because it is a drinking holiday in the US and while all drinking holidays in the US are uniquely awful (see also: the Fourth of July, Cinco De Mayo, New Year’s Eve), St Paddy’s is the one that tends to produce the most toxic combination of drunk bros with tribal tattoos, tin whistles, and old men reeking of green beer and cabbage farts that take “I’m going to pinch you if you’re not wearing green” to mean “I can put my finger pretty much anywhere I want because Erin Go Bragh.”

This year, St. Paddy’s falls on a Saturday, which means it will be a waking nightmare out there. The only way around it is to stay out of it. So pour yourself a stout, put on your favorite “traditional” Irish record (My Bloody Valentine is perennial favorite round these parts, but Thin Lizzy also works pretty well), pull a book from the shelf  and let Ireland dazzle you with her unsurpassed skill at just turning a damn phrase.

These lists are always overstuffed with the classics. And that’s fine. Today would be a great day to finally maybe give Ulysses a go (thought, strictly speaking, that novel has its own holiday, and it’s generally lovely). It’s a lot funnier than you’ve been led to believe and is less intimidating if you take it one chapter at a time, maybe with friends, maybe with beer, ideally with both.

Wilde is always a charmer. And his effortlessly elegant wit certainly helps nullify the horrors of whatever thick-necked, cargo shorted rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward your local bar to order Irish Car Bombs accompanied by House of Pain (apologies to W. B. Yeats).

But in the event you want to step off the beaten track (or maybe visit a bookstore. Book stores are a fantastic place to spend St. Paddy’s Day. If you happen to be in Ireland, try out Charlie Byrne’s in Galway, which is maybe my favorite book store, like, in the world), here are a few of my recommendations for making the holiday a reading holiday:

The Third Policeman—Flann O’Brien. It’s always a toss-up between this one and At Swim, Two Birds. And the truth is, you can hardly go wrong with O’Brien. They’re all brilliant and weird and hilarious. The Third Policemen, though, is a clever philosophical argument bound up in a surrealist, dystopian farce that’s kind of about bicycle theft. And if that doesn’t entice you, I can report that I truly laughed out loud regularly throughout this book, even, especially at moments when it edged toward melancholy.

Skippy Dies—Paul Murray. As a one-time student of boarding school, I find most boarding school novels to be awful. This one was a rare, surprising gift. Murray is a great writer (and he does a really deft job with teenagers). Funny, sad, and probably the most compulsively readable novel I’ve ever read whose title gives the plot away on the front cover.

Days Without End—Sebastian Barry. I wrote about this book on my Best of 2017 list. I still haven’t stopped talking about it or recommending it. Perhaps even more appropriately for St. Paddy’s, this is a book about an Irish immigrant and his singular experience throughout the US during the middle of the 19^th century. It’s also on my short list of Favorite Westerns.

A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing—Eimear McBride. Full warning: this is a difficult book that deals with a very tough coming of age and Eimear McBride writes in a dreamy, stream-of-consciousness style that might turn off those wary of unconventional sentence structure. It’s worth it if you stick with it, though. McBride does a thing all her own. Hers is a voice I’m always eager to hear more of.

Troubles—JG Farrell. Technically, JG Farrell was an Englishman of Irish extraction, but this extremely funny, brutal satire concerns itself with the failing fortunes of an English family in Ireland on the eve of Irish Independence. It’s also maybe my all-time favorite extended metaphor for colonialism. If I’ve ever talked to you about books, I’ve probably tried to get you to read it.  You should read it.

City of Bohane—Kevin Barry. If you’re after a dystopia (and still not convinced we’re not already in one), Barry’s post-apocalyptic urban Ireland is a good one to get under your skin and freak you out with its imagery (eerie as hell) and its language (gorgeous). I liked it better than his follow-up (also pretty good), which fictionalizes John Lennon and sends him exploring the West Coast of Ireland.

The Untouchable—John Banville. In general, you’re either on board with Banville’s morally compromised, dirty old men and their classical allusions or not. The Untouchable is a bit different, though, in that it’s a spy novel, specifically focused on young men at Cambridge University who ended up spying for Russian, during and after WWII. Banville’s protagonist is a fascinating character, who’s playing a part, within a part, within a part. And I’ll wholly admit to loving this book. Reads pretty fast too.

Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923—RF Foster. I’d be remiss without a piece of non-fiction. This is a big book that covers the decades leading up to the Easter Rising and afterwards to Independence and the formation of Irish Republic’s government. It’s a fascinating take on the collision of art and politics and the things that tend to get sold out (women’s rights, for one) when your creation of a revolutionary national identity requires the cooperation of a population steeped in traditional religion.

Oh and if you’re absolutely determined to venture out into the crowds, consider going to bed with this recent gem from the New Yorker. I’ve been haunted by it for months because what lord, a beautiful bit of writing.

Slainte and happy reading.

So, I like Ireland. I generally like Irish people. Green is, in fact, my favorite color. And though I’m not terribly keen on traditional Celtic music, I do like it a bit better than bluegrass, (faint-praise-be-damned as that may be). There were plenty of Irish people in my family tree, a fact now confirmed by a DNA report, a sense of fierce, As many of you may know, St. Patrick’s Day is an abomination. St Patricks’ Day is the worst holiday. The. Worst. Holiday. Please understand: I don’t say that because I hate Ireland or Irish People or the color green (in fact, my favorite color) or quasi-mythological, beatified snake charmers.  It’s just that people in the US cannot handle a drinking holiday just don’t care for most drinking holidays, or to be precise, I don’t care for drinking holidays in the US. It’s not entirely the fault of the Irish that St. Paddy’s Day has become synonymous with hordes of wildly shit-faced

[1] To be clear, I am absolutely, incontrovertibly my parents’ child, as anyone who has met my parents for even a fraction of a second will confirm. I have known this ever since I was able to look at my face and their faces side by side in a mirror, but while they may have endowed me with my good looks and a truly epic catalog of seemingly congenital eccentricities, they did not endow me with a  great fortune or any supernatural powers. And look: a girl’s got to dream.

[2] I devote all of my historical shame, horror and self-loathing to the fact that I’m a Southerner.

i.

When I was five years old, my mother and my grandmother used to ply me with treats because I was all eyes and skinny legs, chronically underweight. They supposed I drank too much (juice and water, charges of hitting the gin too hard were a few decades yet to come). They supposed I ate too little. They doctor supposed I would stay small into adulthood, despite coming from (mostly) tall people. I doubt she’ll hit 5’4. My little sister (who came roaring out into the world like a queen and was thus (partly) named after The Queen) was projected to be a giant. The pediatrician poked at her chubby knees and said, She could be six feet tall. Six feet wasn’t all that rare for women in my family. My mother (herself barely an inch shy of) just nodded and said something to me about the charms of being petite, a fairy princess.  

 I had the youthful confidence of being a pretty child. People told me so all the time. My mother was an artist. She painted portraits of other people, other children. She used to study my face and tell me it was uncannily symmetrical, very beautiful. I would stare at myself in the mirror and summon an imaginary friend from my reflection. I called her Zaka. She was pretty, even if her hair didn’t curl the way I wanted and truly, if it were as short as my mother regularly threatened to cut it, she might look exactly like a boy. Zaka would clearly, obviously, stay pretty, in much the same way she was, because pretty was most important. I felt relieved to have her. I knew, no matter what, that she would stay loyal and constant, that she would never betray me, that she would always have my best interests at heart.

I still have a symmetrical-ish face, I suppose, marred as it may be by moles and wrinkles and the ever-lengthening list of age-related imperfections. I lost half an eyebrow about six years ago, thanks to an over-enthusiastic waxing job at a cheapo mini-mall nail salon. I still have one pointy ear and the same inconstant shade of green eyes I’ve long suspected to be my most reliably good feature.  I can still the barest traces of Zaka if I squint through time and disappointment and, mostly, fat. But what I mostly see is Fat. Because I am Fat and Fat is me and it was always thus since Zaka slipped away without rhyme or reason one day around fourth grade and never returned. I never even got to say goodbye. I never got to ask why. I just turned on the light one day, one morning before school and instead of Zaka’s knowing, confident grace, I saw Fat. Slunking, slumping, skulking, sloppy Fat, who eschewed eye contact and changed her clothes in the dark. I despised her. I felt sorry for her. I hated everything she was. I wished she would go away and find some other poor soul to attach herself to, because couldn’t she see that I was better than that. That I wasn’t like her. That I was pretty, uncannily symmetrical, very beautiful. And she would only ever drag me down. The more I ignored her, the harder she chased after me. She seemed quite gratified by my scorn, like, she was some kind of masochist. And after all was said and done, she hung around. She hung around longer than anyone else. Absolutely loyal. Firmly steadfast. After thirty-odd years, it would seem I couldn’t lose her if I tried.

ii.

The thing about Fat is she’s easy to blame. And depending on my mood, I blame a lot—A Lot—on Fat. My lack of confidence, my solitude, my professional failures, my personal failures, my personality failures, my failure failures. She takes it because she’s round and cushiony and hard to break. She lands soft and giggles out some self-deprecating commentary and waddles along her way, inured to the stares and the that’s what happens when you don’t take care of yourself.

Is it possible there are other reasons why I am not an endlessly beloved, swaggering bastion of poise and perfect achievement? I am—this junk drawer of words perhaps notwithstanding—a rational, reasonable human being. Plenty of people who have been side-eyed out of a boutique that doesn’t carry their size or reminded they are technically obese by a medical professional have found fulfillment and fame and happiness and copious amounts of passionate lovemaking with a partner that simply adores them despite their stretchmarks. Am I also socially awkward and kind of elitist and inclined toward existential despair? Do I procrastinate?  Do I talk to much?  Yes. Am I lazy? Do I lack will-power? Is Fat the manifestation of all the ways in which I am flawed or are my flaws the reason for Fat? How much of my life is determined by the expanse of hips—comically oversized like the boned and fluffed architecture under a Rococo court dress? How much am I letting this or that chin (or all in concert) steer my course through life?

Fat has a weakness for conspiracy theory. She feels bad for buying into it (because she feels bad about everything) but she still keeps me up with second guesses. Here’s one:  do I have friends in spite of Fat or because of her? In high school, in college, I’d find myself surrounded by whisper thin, pretty girls and think I might shine in a bit in their collective shimmer. But Fat would whisper, you make them look good—even better, even thinner–by contrast. They like you because you’re not a threat. Because compared to you, they always win. She wasn’t alone. My grandmother once told me, point blank, that I’d be far better off making friends with bigger girls, so when we were all out together I wouldn’t look so . . . so . . . disproportionate.

Nana wasn’t wrong. Fat did look disproportionate. When I saw her in pictures with my friends, she appeared to be a different scale of thing, maybe a different species altogether. Every piece of me was bigger—from features to fingers to feet. I growth-spurted into tall-ish late, sometimes during sophomore year of high school, as if to underline just how wrong my childhood pediatrician had been. But Fat didn’t stretch out into lean angles and elbows, just reconfigured, and settled into new, uncomfortable curves that didn’t make me look like a glamorous woman so much as a prematurely middle-aged frump.

iii.

You’re asking yourself, Has she lost her mind? (Maybe) You’re wondering, Why doesn’t she just do something about it? Like eat less and exercise. (I’ve tried and failed and failed again and failed better and failed so well that I’m in pretty good shape, no matter what Fat would have you believe). You might even be thinking, You’re not Fat. And hey, there’s always someone around telling Fat she isn’t. That person is usually not fat. That person is usually normal-sized, often the variety of normal size that spends two weeks in the gym trying to work off a burrito lunch because they live in fear that three extra pounds is a slippery slope. Other fat people generally refrain from such commentary because they know the fuck better. Specifically, they know that while fat is the kind of elastic-waisted, billowy pejorative that can be applied to just about any person with an extra ounce of body fat, Fat has its own zip code and it’s never going to be the right side of town. And though Fat comprises considerable diversity in size and shape, she tends to recognize herself even as she obsessively compares. Am I the fattest person in the room? Is she as fat as I am? Is she fatter? It’s terrible, embarrassing, wrong that she does it, but I doubt she’s alone. And at least it’s not as bad as the moments when Fat is the only fat person in the room, or in on the block, or like, in the actual zipcode.

I know, by the way. The grass is always greener. Thin people are nodding. And let me crystal clear about this: I don’t think I know a woman, no matter her size or shape, without a body image issue. It’s the only metoo bigger than #metoo.  You came blame fashion designers and fast food and the diet-industrial complex and the patriarchy (it’s probably the patriarchy).[1]

Pretty, thin girls worry they’re valued only for their looks. Fat worries she’s judged for her lack thereof. It’s not enough to be simply unattractive. Beauty has a moral component. Fat is unhealthy, irresponsible, lazy, self-indulgent, hedonistic, needy, a visible sinner, deceitful, leeching off society. Most other transgressive self-destructive behaviors can look a little romantic in the right light. Consider the sordid glamor of movies about, say, heroin addicts. But gluttony is the least sexy of the Seven Deadly. No one writes great swaggering rock songs about going on a pasta bender. There’s no famously edgy poetry about being too fat for an armchair. I’ve yet to see a fashion magazine advertise a new look as being “carb chic.”

Fat assumes people won’t smile back. Fat is surprised when people don’t recoil. You figure out what makes you interesting. You work on your shtick. You do funny—people tolerate Fat when she’s funny. You do easy to please. You don’t freak out. You don’t get too serious—people can’t take Fat seriously. I mean, please. You try not to judge people the way you think you’re being judged.  You know first-hand, that people are so, so much more than how they look. You find that you know little things, like, how it’s always safer to compliment a pair of earrings of a shirt or a haircut or a tattoo than it is to tell someone they look thin or they have beautiful skin, because that tattoo is a choice about how a person wants you to see them as opposed to whatever perfect storm of genetics and lifestyle and health and a whole College of Social Sciences worth of circumstances well out of their control gave them the underlying hardware.

Some of my friends are freaking out about their age these days. They’re worried about incipient middle age making them invisible and undesirable. Fat finds this hilarious. She doesn’t know what it is to be visible, to be desirable, to walk into a room and have people gaze in admiration. She wants to tell them, you know there’s more to you, right? She wants to say, it’s not so bad, really, when you can’t fall back on looks. You get used to it. After all, you can be left alone. After all, it could be worse.

 I get the fear, though. We’re taught not to judge books by covers from earliest fairy tales on. We strive not to. But we still live in a world defined by racism and sexism. We still fear things that are different from us.  We find them unsettling, useless, disgusting. And we still have to live in that world. Society requires we interact with those things, even when we don’t believe those things, even when they say we are those things.

You may be angry at the fact that I’m not preaching radical self-acceptance and reclaiming Fat as something strong and powerful and beautiful. Something to be loved, not hated. I wish I could do that. I’ve been trying to learn how. It’s maybe harder than anything else that I’ve ever tried to do, including, say, eating less and exercise. As noted above, Fat makes a great scapegoat. She literally eats the job right up, sometimes with an extra serving of whatever current dietary wisdom says is bad for us. By blaming Fat, I can avoid having to burrow in too deep with the other deficiencies. They’re all there. A real rogues’ gallery, another story down, drinking whisky and playing a hand or two with my future and my financials, waiting for their 4am curtain call on a sleepless night, after Fat has finally punched out and gone for some shut-eye.

iv.

 It may surprise you to know that I forget about Fat. I can go hours, even days, without giving her so much as a thought. I spend a lot of my life inside my own head, unreflected by mirrors or unflattering Facebook photos, and in there I’m anything. A shapeshifter, a chimaera, an endlessly glorious, slightly androgynous being suffused with the power of infinite transformation. Or at the very least: a dead ringer for Cate Blanchett.

I can strip myself bare (not always literally) and interact with the world on a purely sensual level. All body and no body at once. I am the first spring sun glancing across my face when I wander up the street for coffee. I am the smell of rain and salt from the bow of a boat on one of those summer afternoons that make you feel like you could fly over the tempest and across the bay. I am the sound of the wind rattling the oak limbs and the autumn roses and the breeze curling its fingers round to brush the short hairs on the nape of my neck. Or Orion over the backyard on a cold, clear, winter night winking at me like I’m the only girl left in the room.  I am wine that tastes like a dry sunset over a lazy sea. Cheese that tastes like a nap at Versailles. Berries that taste like skinny dipping in the dead of summer with the friends your mother didn’t entirely approve of. Shellfish like briny abandon. Warm, crusty bread, fresh from the bakery, that tastes like a kitchen full of wisdom.  I could go on with the food. Obviously, you think.  And at risk of sounding cliché, I don’t thing Fat has hung around this long because I ‘m a bad cook. She feels guilt–so much guilt–about it. But we really are both hedonists.

In those moments when I forget what I am and become only what I feel, I have a sense of anything being possible. I am free from the girl in the mirror. Any of the girls in the mirror. I can just be purely myself. Honestly, I don’t even know what that looks like. Only that it doesn’t matter because it feels right. To me. To anybody else. But mostly to me.

v.

Sometimes I wish I could see Zaka again.  I have words for her. Not all pleasant. Also, I would like to introduce you to her. I want you to know that I was not always this.  And I know you can’t see her, but she still lurks in the peripheral, in the flattering selfie, a silhouette of missed opportunity, a flittering shadow of what may have been, now reduced to a footnote to what is certainly a hefty (natch), annotated biography of Fat—my partner, my nemesis, myself.

As a child, I read myth the way other kids read fairy tales and Bible stories. I was fascinated by transformation, even when it became grotesque. I thought it possible I might become a tree, a spider, a swan or a God. For a time, I believed perhaps my own unwelcome transformation was a result of this, that the universe had misread my interest as latent desire and fashioned for me a monster suit that I could not remove so I could better understand how those stories ended. How did Niobe fare once she became a waterfall?

I’m just American enough to still believe in spontaneous, fantastic transformation, but in a measured, sidelong kind of way. Knowing what I am and being okay with it is more rational, more preferable to endless expectation of Salvation via Powerball, the eclipsing success gleaned off a single TED talk, a Rom Com of a love affair, the dreamy reflection of myself as Beauty, Realized.

I suspect the solution to Fat is to no try and force her away or into something she cannot be, but to try and make her more comfortable. I can maybe stop trying to stuff her into pants that don’t fit and let her exist in a corner of the world where she’s not just a thing to be pitied and jeered at and loathed in my bathroom mirror but something that could be, just maybe, if not beautiful, never beautiful, at least worthy of my eye-contact, of basic respect, of the simple, affectionate regard of a sustained second glance.

[1] To be clear: there are plenty of men and non-binary people with body image issues and eating disorders too. That’s also probably because of the patriarchy.

February 28, 1995

 Venue: 30 Griffing Circle, Asheville (and various)

The BA Society formed during Short Term at the Women’s College I attended Freshman Year. Short term, for those ignorant of the rightfully antiquated 4-1-4 semester system, was a month long “mini-term” in which students were (in theory) encouraged to devote their time to one intensive course, research project or internship. In practice, short term allowed the roughly 75 % of campus rich enough to do a fashion internship in Paris or study the efficacy of Hawaiian Tropic Sunscreen firsthand from Emily’s dad’s yacht in the Caymans or Mary Ellis’ Mom’s condo in Vail, while the rest of us took the sort of dozy, no-stakes classes common in day camps for summer nerds—Medieval Italics, Improv Theatre: Past Present and You, Feminism in “Star Trek.”  I took, “The Counterculture and Those Counter to It,” which was taught by a woman with Bernadette Peters’ hair, a serious Eileen Fisher habit and tendency to relate the upheavals of the late 1960s to her ex-husband’s myriad deficiencies as both husband and lover. We read Abbe Hoffman and Tom Wolfe and wrote journal entries about how the Woodstock documentary made us feel. One whole class was devoted to discussion of how much we admired Angela Davis’ earrings.

Suffice to say, I had plenty of time on my hands. And so did my other friends stuck on campus. These included C, who’d been the first friend I made on campus, L, who I’d met doing theatre, sort of, and M, who lived in the single at the end of the hall. We were an odd mix (even odder than my thirteenth birthday party) that in any other circumstance (and almost certainly in a larger college), would have maybe never hung out together. What we shared mostly consisted of the Womens College itself (about which we didn’t even agree internally), smoking and our ability to have a surprisingly good time at the Waffle House.  C & I had already been hanging out a lot off-campus downtown with the bunch of the music fans, local bands and artfully disaffected townies that more or less constituted “The Scene” as it existed in Roanoke, Virginia circa 1995. Our friend, Killer, a skateboarder (ironically dubbed for his baby face and small stature) somehow came into keys for an old Elks Lodge, where we wiled away the winter hours playing pool, posturing, and trying not to behave like nice young ladies from that nice women’s college. We weren’t supposed to be there, and we definitely weren’t supposed to be drinking the beer in the fridge with Killer and his friends. But what else were we going to do? We’d already exhausted the goodwill of our one friend with a Fake ID and we kept getting stymied by snowstorms in the Shenandoah whenever we tried to drive up to DC.

I don’t remember how or when we came up with the BA (stands for Bad Ass, with ample irony) Society, except that I’m pretty sure The Lodge was involved. Virginia has a long and storied history of collegiate secret societies. My father may have even tried to start one during his tenure at University of Virginia, back in the era Professor Eileen Fisher liked to compare to her ex-husband’s sexual prowess.  We appointed ourselves as member/officers, invented a completely ridiculous secret handshake and preceded to break the cardinal rule of any secret society worth its salt by telling everyone we knew about it  And it became yet another way to unite our otherwise disparate group, consisting of : opinionated Texan self-described “waver” with a weakness for poetry and Dr. Pepper, a theatrical Massachusetts hippie who professed to actually enjoying Phish concerts, a blonde Virginian who spoke German and dressed like Holly Golightly and an underachieving, over-literate, prep-school-educated wanna-be punk rocker, straight off the mean, leafy, scenic streets of Asheville, North Carolina. The BA Society was the banner we traveled under like a super group or a group of superheroes. And that would be a pretty good analogy if, say, the Avengers were four eighteen-year-old girls whose combined superpowers were impossible late-night caffeine intake and infinite snark. We may not have been able to save the world, but we could fill a Honda Civic with asphyxiation levels of cigarettes smoke in less than fifteen seconds while dancing in our seats up I-81 in a snowstorm.

I could think of no better way for the BA Society to solidify itself than with a group road-trip, and no occasion more wanting of such a voyage than my nineteenth birthday. I had a new (old) car—the afore-mentioned, smoke-drenched Honda Civic—a Mom willing to host three desperate characters and a notion that I might recreate the magic of my eighteenth birthday. [1] Specifically, we would all stay at the house, drink wine like grown-ups, talk all night and go up for the epic, Vegas-casino-with-ice-an-butter-sculptures brunch[2] at the giant resort hotel up the block from Mom’s house the next morning.

We took off on a Thursday afternoon and drove to a roots-music themed nightclub, roughly halfway home, in not-so-metropolitan Winston-Salem to watch a mysteriously popular ska band ride one of the mid-90s most regrettable trends into mass popularity. None of us were huge fans of the band, in fact, we probably disliked it equally, each for our own separate reasons. The club was gross, crowded with the kind of baggy cargo-shorted, tribal-tattooed baseball capped disaster that traditionally presaged bar fights, casual racism and someone named Jeremy spilling beer all over your shoe while trying to touch your boob. M wore a silk blouse and pearls and complained at the lack of espresso machine. L and I stood in the corner on the far side of the stage watching a huge amp teeter ominously over us from its implausible perch atop the stack. We emerged, sweaty, uncrushed by amp and vaguely euphoric in that particular galloping eighteen-year-old way. We drove west on I-40 and took a room at a motel on the western edge of the Piedmont. Next door was a truck stop, where we ordered breakfast at 3am and, for maybe two hours, pretended we were a touring rock band called Condiment Chaos (the A was an anarchy sign) that constantly struggled with inter-band personal dramas, exacerbated by our track-suited d-bag manager, who was always trying to get one of us to go solo as a pop sensation. We did our best to sound blasé and worldly which was totally belied by the fact that we were literally playing pretend. Eighteen feels well down the road to adulthood when you’re eighteen, but you can still catch childhood in the rearview, so close you don’t even have to turn your head.

The next day we drove into the mountains. I took my friends on a tour of my hometown, complete with high school roundabout and downtown walkaround. We met up with a few of my friends who had been at my eighteen birthday the year before (some of them were still in high school). My best hometown friend joined us that night, adding a Y-chromosome to the undertaking. We took him to the basement, inducted him into the BA Society and then agreed to forget we ever had, when we retroactively decided the BA should be a tits-only kind of deal.

My mother made the most decadent pasta dish (it involved so much cheese) she could envision for a mostly vegetarian table. We ate. We had cake. We woke the next morning and everyone agreed to look the other way as I lapsed out of vegetarianism and into pure hedonism with heaping plates of oysters.

Surprise: The BA Society lived on, long after my birthday, long after half of us transferred away from Women’s College at the end of Freshman Year. We had a BA Society reunion in winter of 1998, at which we got wildly drunk on airplane bottles of booze at L’s apartment. Two BAs ended up in Austin. One ended up moving in with me, almost eight years after we met. She would eventually move to Asheville, about exactly a decade after visiting for the first time on my 19^th birthday.  At time of writing, it’s about twenty-three years later and I keep up, with varying degrees of regularity, with every single member of the BA Society. Three of us met up for coffee over the holidays, two of us shared a 40^th birthday jaunt to the Riviera and a lazy long weekend of cocktails and chocolate just last week.  It’s tempting to credit this to social media and the vast nostalgia-industrial complex that binds us electronically to our pasts with humiliating Throwback Thursdays and Google-stalking high school crushes, but the BA had done a pretty solid job for more than a decade before Facebook. Which is pretty remarkable given that the BA Society only ever spent about four months with all of us in the same place. That four months seems more epic in memory, a product of the magical temporal distortion of youth,[3] but it really wasn’t such a long time to carve out the foundation of friendships spanning decades.

Best Gift: The Y-Chromosome-d member of the weekend’s festivities gifted me a mix tape, which like all of his mixtapes, was a good one. Though an obsessive mixtape maker, I rarely received them from others. Whether that was a function of most mixtape makers not liking me enough to make me a tape or a function of musically-minded people being afraid I’d hold their cloyingly juvenile and hopelessly pedestrian tastes against them, I cannot rightly say. I always admired the friends that went for it, because they were the ones who trusted me to listen, even to things I didn’t think I liked, and try to hear them the way they did.

Also, my mother bought me a black leather motorcycle jacket, which briefly made me feel like the coolest person in the world.

[1] My eighteenth birthday was really good, quite poignant and, when I considered writing about it, way more complicated to recount in retrospect. Maybe I’ll tell you about it one of these days.

[2] To my 18-year-old mind having a raw bar AND a fruit bar AND a Belgian Waffle Bar AND a guy in a lampshade toque doing custom omelets AND a waiter that would totally turn a blind eye if your Mom ordered you a mimosa was the very pinnacle of luxury.

[3] If I had one superpower, it would be time manipulation, so I could slow down, hasten, rewind or pause time as needed.  If I had two superpowers, they would be time manipulation and the ability to change the song to whatever I think of whenever I enter a room.

February 28, 1989

Venue(s): The Asheville Mall, Chickadees & Rye, 109 Westwood Rd, Asheville

Twelve was probably not the worst year of my life.  But I drifted into it on creeping dread, bolstered by two eloquent letters[1] I received from each of my parents the morning of my birthday. Each suggested, in subtle, spiraling, marvelous language that being twelve sucked for everyone, and I’d need to steel my resolve if I wanted to survive it without becoming a permanently sucky person. Oh, and by the way, adolescence would be exponentially better for me if I’d smile more, brush my hair, snack less, iron my clothes, get some exercise, improve my math scores and try, just try, not being a fat person.

Neither one of my parents were assholes. They knew from experience that actual Hell was likely inspired by a middle school lunchroom and Satan was a bored looking thirteen-year-old psychopath with good hair.  They tried to arm me with the tools I’d need to survive adolescence (encouragement, spiral perms, “Sassy” magazine, the Esprit book back everyone had until it was a Benetton backpack until it was a LL Bean backpack, diet soda) because they hoped, maybe, just maybe, things would be better for me

There solidly non-miserable moments in my twelfth year.  I went to England with my grandmother, for example. That was as close to magical as you could get without a talking dragon and actual evidence of wizardry. But the reprieves made the rest more unbearable. I’d feel a breath of something more and then have to slum  back into my day to day, absolutely sure that I’d not only been born into the wrong city, in the wrong state, in the wrong region of the US, but perhaps onto the wrong continent entirely. I lit off for eedy heart of Daydream City, where I doodled in the margins and designed my own curriculum and imagined my way out of the halls of Hill Street Middle School for as much of the academic day as I could muster. My grades fell. My teachers were dismissive. The popular mantle passed from the mean party girls with purple shimmer lipsticks and tale of libertinism  to triple threats:  the rich, smart, athletic people. They were nerds too, but hot nerds with that looked good in bikinis by the country club pool in between tennis camp and summer programs in Physics at Duke. I was the wrong kind of nerd. I didn’t have a scene or a clique or a crowd that I even enjoyed hanging out with. hadn’t yet pulled up anchor away from the scrap-edge of the lunchroom and just fucked off to become a pirate

I had three friends I called best friends, though I’m not sure any of them every thought of me that way. Only two were in my school. Of those, one was in my grade. None were in any of my classes. Irish name was my oldest friend. I’d known her since before memory. We’d done everything together despite having almost nothing in common. She’d been tracked differently than I in middle school and spent a lot of extracurricular time at youth group. She shared a best friends heart necklace with another girl (in fact, the girl who locked my out of her house during a slumber party), but we were like siblings in closeness (I still know her home phone number by heart, despite not having called it for something like twenty-five years). Ivy League was my smartest friend. She was talented and weird, a year younger than I was, but most likely among my friends to dance around the front yard, reciting Elizabethan poetry to the moon’s reflection in the lake, which was exactly the sort of thing I was into. I figured Sunshine  the most beautiful girl I knew in real life. She was a warm breezy afternoon of a person, gentle and funny and, to my mind, impossibly humble despite looking like she rode in on a seashell on the crest of a frothy green wave.  I’d known her since pre-school. She went to the private Saint school across town, but as with the other girls, we’d stayed friends, mysteriously, marvelously, especially then, in a year where I felt so suddenly abandoned by everyone else.

So when Mom  asked if I wanted a party for my thirteenth party,  I think I probably rolled my eyes. What are we celebrating? With what friends? What I wanted was to spend twenty-four hours with the only three people that didn’t seem to hate me, who didn’t even all know each other, who didn’t even all like each other, who had scarcely more than me and a zip code in a common. I wouldn’t have to pick a clique; I could just wallow in being all of myself in the space between them.

Best Gift: This is real dumb. I went to the mall on my thirteenth birthday with three twenty-dollar bills. It felt like tycoon-level money. I let my friends talk me out of blowing it all at the book store and bought myself an entire outfit at the then-new-to-me Gap. It was nothing special—a pair of stretchy orange pants and a long sleeved black t-shirt, both on clearance (and an enormous pair of orange and back teardrop earrings to match)—but it was the first time I’d ever picked out my own clothes and bought them without even a whisper of parental opinion or approval. I also bought “The Joshua Tree” on cassette.  I thought it was overrated.

Surprise(s): Irish Name and Sunshine sat quietly, without the giggles and scorn entirely deserved, when Ivy League and I capped off our fancy pasta dinner reciting stanzas of Eliot back and forth to each other over the bread basket. Irish name didn’t bring up youth group at all and let fly a “motherfucker” when she got her hair stuck in a zipper at The Limited. It turns that even the endless kindness, coolness and celestial charisma of Sunshine could not encourage me to learn to love the Grateful Dead.

Everyone got along, though no new friendships emerged. They all went home the next morning and we returned to our normal, gross, stupid teenaged lives. Sunshine and I would spend a week at Irish Name’s family at the beach a year and half later. It was a fun trip, but felt nostalgic in advance because we were already drifting apart. Ivy League, Sunshine and I would all end up as day students at the same boarding high school. Ivy League and I would graduate and stay reasonably close well into our twenties, even as she slid into a more accomplished, more secure sort of an adulthood and I confounded (and maybe disappointed) expectation by loitering indefinitely at the frayed and frantic edges of maybe one day having my shit together. [2] I went to her wedding about ten years ago. It was lovely. I haven’t seen or spoken to her since.

When I turned thirteen, I believed nothing could ever be as bad as twelve. The nasty kids, the terrible unmooring of adolescence, my failure to live up to my once-touted potential and the unshakeable sense that I was like Jeff Goldblum in “The Fly,”[3] slowly sloughing off my humanity with each extra pound, every new oozing zit, each stuttered word (and where and how did I get a stutter?), every failure to present like a normal person and would one day just become a grotesque monster, unlovable to everyone. And the only humane thing for them to do would be to just let me go, so I wouldn’t ruin their lives as well.

At twelve, I was well-fed, well-housed, well-loved (despite my misgivings) by still married (if unhappily so) parents. I was only naïve enough to believe that middle school was the worst thing that could happen to a person because none of the big foundation-cracking, paradigm-shifting stuff that could happen to a person had happened to me yet. Thirteen would mark the start of my unsolicited educated in some of those darker mysteries. I made it through, though, armed with (and sometimes only with) the idea that somewhere I had three friends in the world and somehow, against all odds, I’d fucking survived twelve.

After that, anything was goddamn possible.

[1] Both of my parents are marvelous writers.

[2] Still there.

[3] Which I was told explicitly not to watch, but as with every movie in that category, I did anyway.

February 28, 1986

 Venue: 109 Westwood, Asheville

I wanted a slumber party. Slumber parties were peak popular girl, peak 80s movie, peak teenager, all things I aspired to be. For several years, winter weather froze out my birthday parties—a regular occurrence when you’re born in the temperate part of the northern hemisphere during the month most associated with Freak Blizzard. Mom did her best to alleviate the fog of gloom. All I ever really wanted was a pool party, because I loved the water, so one year (my eighth), she rented out the pool at the downtown YMCA. We splashed around and endured the glowering impatience of elderly lap swimmers counting down the minutes until we were forced out of the pool.  It was only an hour, but a great weird hour. At the end, we were sopping and reeked of chlorine as we were ushered out to converge outside the locker room. I blew out the candles and unwrapped presents, while adults with workout bags breezed through, chased by snowflakes and arctic outside winds, on their way to the pickup basketball game in the gym. Immediately afterward, six of us came down with bronchitis. My mother blamed it on all of us having wet hair in the middle of winter.

Mom thought I wasn’t old enough for a slumber party. I reminded her that most of my friends were already having slumber parties. I’d been to a few including: 1) the one out in the middle of the country where the host’s father got into a screaming match with his wife upstairs hours after we went to sleep, and drunkenly staggered into a living room to pass out of the sofa mumbling about whores 2) the one where my nominal best friend’s best friend locked me out of the house in the dark, in the cold on the side of the mountain for about an hour during a game of truth or dare 3) the one where my bad influence friend’s bad-influence-with-therefore-limited-custody mom had us all over to her Adults Only apartment complex, made us hide when the landlord came by and then promptly went on an all-night date, leaving us to our Prince-themed dance contests, underwear drawer explorations and gas-stove related fire experiments. Mom reminded me that I’d not yet managed to stay the whole night at a slumber party (I basically faked a stomach virus every time, by locking myself in the bathroom, groaning and pouring Dixie cups of water down the toilet to sound-effect vomit until someone called my mother) and the girls having them were not my close friends. Both of those things were absolutely, true. But I made enough noise about Mom being boring and over-valuing the limp-bowed rich girls who, generally never set things on fire or called their biological father a “useless sleazebag jerk” or claimed to know what oral sex was[1] that she finally agreed. I went to Hallmark, bought a bunch of black and hot pink invitations and conspicuously passed them out among the girls in my class, carefully avoiding anyone I thought might be “boring,” which was to say nice, smart, reasonable and having anything in common with me. I was just shy of ten years old and it was my first (and really only) attempt at playing mean girl. I believed I would suddenly become popular and effortlessly adult, that I might just elide the awkwardness of adolescence and turn out Molly Ringwald overnight. I micromanaged the cake, the movies, the snacks and prepared for my apotheosis into ten-year-old cool girl.

Surprise: To say that it backfired spectacularly would be a massive understatement. For one thing, the few of my actual close friends I invited didn’t come because they were all on an entirely wholesome (if problematic in retrospect) YMCA Indian Princesses weekend with their definitely not-sleazebag dads. Also, they didn’t like the other girls I invited because the other girls I invited were mean.

 Said mean girls arrive at the house en masse—they were all best friends with each other—and immediately started sassing my mother, which I found disconcerting, because my mother was generally nice, fun and accommodating. They picked at the food. The quibbled at the movie. Half of them made fun of me for being comparatively rich. The other half made fun of me for being comparatively poor. They eviscerated my haircut (which was, admittedly, disastrous), my weight (chubby, and noted by every single person in my life at the time), my clothes (nerdy), my interests (super-nerdy) and my parents lack of available objects to be set on fire. All of those girls were wearing bras already. Two had started their periods. I remember feeling hopelessly, helplessly, impossibly behind. They sat around talking about underwear like old pros, as they shared bottles of brilliant purple glitter nail polish (traces of which still remain, to this day, on furniture in my mother’s house). I remember one of the girls, notably beautiful and the kind of early bloomer that looked like a tiny seventeen at eleven, was absolutely sure that girls who didn’t get their period by sixth grade would never grow boobs and would, thus, stay weird, ugly babies for the rest of their tragic lives. This didn’t sound entirely credible to me—my parents were comparatively forthright and scientific when it came to discussion of sex and human development—but it haunted me, because I was a late bloomer[2].

I think I finally fell asleep around 4am with my fingers stuffed in my ears so I wouldn’t hear my party guests talking about me. I remember waking up the next morning in cold white February light, completely relieved that it was over and sure I would never tell anyone how bad it was, lest an I told you so.

Best Gift: My dad bought me a bicycle. It was pink and minty green with streamers and a basket and the words Sea Princess printed on the side. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. My parents eagerly insisted I take it out for a test drive. I demurred. I’d literally, embarrassingly only learned to ride a bicycle without training wheels the week before. I was still wobbly, had never ridden anything as big as the Sea Princess. I was terrified those girls would see, would laugh, would report back to everyone else in school. They insisted though, joining the parental chorus. I was weak to peer pressure. I agreed and promptly fell twice. My father offered to hold on to the back, so I could get my balance and I could hear the cool girls snickering by the station wagon as I swayed in place, but when I finally a-righted, I felt like I took flight. I forgot they were there. I found my own peace. I thought up a thousand adventures I could (and did) take on my own, free of judgement, as I unknowingly embarked on the front edge of an adolescence I would mostly ride through alone.

Note: There were no pictures taken at birthday party 1986. The visual is from Christmas, a few months before, but should serve as a reasonably clear view of the protagonist at the time.

[1] They didn’t.

[2] Fifteen, to be precise.

 February 28, 1981 (or thereabouts), 12-2pm

Venue: 109 Westwood, Asheville, NC,

As a child, I was into dresses. I was into dresses in the way that other children are into sports or bullying or video games or salting slugs in the rose garden or all of the above (you know who you are). My mother tells me she spent hours with my aunts and grandmothers changing infant me into dress after dress after dress just because people kept showing up for more baby dresses and they were so cute, and you were so cute. It was as if whatever conversations my parents had in utero about my presumed boy-ness somehow steeled my resolve to come out woman and roaring about, like, sequins, feathers and tulle. My dresses were vindication, another emphatic Yea to the ever-strengthening familial matriarchy. I slept most soundly in the stroller, parked amid perfumed dress racks in department stores and boutiques while Mom and Nana tried on clothes. I looped out ball gowns as soon as I could hold a pencil. At two-ish, I told my mother the sunrise over the lake in front of our house looked like the sky was wearing twelve fancy dresses, which sounds apocryphal, but also absolutely like something I said yesterday. When I was about three years old, Nana told me that when Elizabeth I was queen, she never wore the same dress twice and I was like #goals.

My relative level of taste was an issue. This was to be expected from women for whom “tacky” was the very apogee of insults, the absolute nadir that a human being could be.  I didn’t care much for the smocked pinafores, French sailor collars, white (and only white unless it was ballet) tights and tidy leather (never patent) Mary Janes the various taste mavens in my family tried to force me into. I wanted  glitter, a universe of glitter, ideally with ruffles. I wanted a skirt that swooshed like the tide when I walked in it and I wanted to wear it with my favorite tights which I referred to as “hole tight” because they had holes in the knees.

Sometimes my mother and I would go to a children’s store in a shopping center just up the lake from my house. There she would buy my tights and sundresses while I gazed in earnest, covetous wonder at racks of garment bagged pageant dresses in a special section in the back, those sparking concoctions of frothy chiffon and crinolines and so much sparkle.  I had, even then, no interest in being a beauty queen (that would require giving a fuck about hair and make-up and pretty and smiling, which I didn’t), but God, I wanted one of those dresses. I cried about it. I sulked. I think I once prayed for one. I begged to even be allowed to try one on. No dice. Sometimes I would watch in awe as big-haired little girls came in with their bigger haired mothers. They would assume the circular stage in surrounded by bagged tulle and rhinestone tiaras. I would near-drool with envy. My mother pretended to be oblivious, while she asked the sales clerk about where to find a blouse with navy blue piping to match the navy-blue monogram on my totally not sparkly sweater. Later in the car she would say, those dresses are tacky, Alison, you don’t want to be tacky do you? And I was like, yes, God, yes. Of course I do. From the depths of my soul! But instead I was left with a broken rattan trunk of dress-up clothes—my mother’s castoff cocktail dresses, slips and the minimalist tutus favored by my hippie ballet teacher, paper dolls and the bountiful delights of both Vogue and Modern Bride(for the bridesmaid dresses) in the supermarket checkout line.

I think the fancy dress party was a kind of olive branch. Mom dreamed it up, after I complained about having another party in the off-season 19^th Hole Bar and Grill at the local country club, where our membership dues allowed rental of a space with astro-turf colored carpet and sticky naugahyde chairs the color of oatmeal that permanently reeked of cigarette smoke and gin and white privilege. Mom agreed that five was a red letter year. She suggested we have my friends over to wear fancy dresses and eat at fancy tables like fancy ladies. Like a tea party, but with better cake. She stressed girl friends, which I found befuddling, and tried to explain again that boys didn’t like fancy dresses.

This was news to me. I  once begged my father to take in the bar next to the public library downtown because they had the most elaborate fancy dresses on mannequins in the windows. After a moment of hesitation, he kind of shrugged and obliged. That place was entirely full of men. Not another girl in sight. They were all very nice to me and delighted that I wanted to know more about the dresses. The bartender helped me climb up on a bar stool and made me a Shirley Temple and asked me if I’d ever seen “The Wizard of Oz.” I told him it was my favorite movie and he said it was his too and we sang a little of “Over the Rainbow” together. It was a marvelous afternoon, so marvelous that it took years for me to figure out why people were scandalized when I told them I’d been there. And of course, boys liked fancy dresses. How could anyone not like fancy dresses? It like mom was telling me there were a people in the world that didn’t like blueberries or cats or draping oneself in a feather boa and several of Nana’s  cast off chiffon scarves and dancing passionately along to the Soul Train opening credits. Impossible!

The boys didn’t come though. Instead, I had about eight girls I liked, another two my mother thought I should like. Among the former were my best friends at the time (including one I still drink with to this day). Among the latter were rich people with limp hair bows. I picked out paper cups and plates from a local gift shop printed with pink paper dolls. Mom covered the kid sized table with a linen table cloth and ordered a cake with a bustled lady in a portrait hat iced on top. My friends came. We posed for pictures. I remember it was the first party where I thought, the anticipation for this event absolutely exceeded the event itself.  I tried to get everyone to play Queen of England. No one  would even try to  follow protocol. I picked at my cake with white lace fingerless gloves. I turned five.

Surprise: None of my boy friends were disappointed that they weren’t invited.

Best Gift: Nana had a soft spot for me. She bought a cross-stitched pillow for my bed that said When Mother Says No, Ask Grandmother because she was a busy, professional woman and had no time for cross-stitching. I asked her for a pageant dress. Nana, with her Dior frames and wall of designer shoes, gave me a long, hard, sympathetic look before the honey, that’s tacky.  But as a child of the Depression, she understood the ache of wanting. She knew the intoxicating allure of the ridiculous and sublime. She hired her occasional seamstress, a woman called Marguerite [1]to make a dress-up dress to measure. It came, wrapped in brown paper, just days before my birthday. I unwrapped an organdy (polyester) gown with puffed sleeves and an ample neck ruff and billowy ruffled skirt. It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but still a completely badass present that took center stage through the next few years of my youth.

Also, my mother was four months (or so) pregnant) at the time of my fancy dress party. I didn’t ask for a little sister (and was, at that point, quite sure I didn’t want one), but that situation turned out to be more than okay.  My fancy dress party would be the last birthday I spent as an only child.

[1] If you ask my mother or Aunt, they will recount hair-raising tales of Marguerite’ sartorial villainy during their teenaged years.