The End...at last

Summertime, and the living

Hi there, I wanted to write a carefully-shaped piece for you about summer in England: the heat wave that unleashes something in the national character, unaccustomed as they are to exposing so much of their flesh.

I wanted to tell you that we saw an incredible concert by Pulp, how Jarvis Cocker is one of the greatest performers I’ve ever seen and I can’t get their new song Spike Island out of my head.

Waiting for Pulp in Birmingham

Maybe I was going to describe to you the delights of our English garden, how I can spend hours out there without being attacked by mosquitoes, wasps, hornets, deer ticks or poison ivy. This, this is why the English have such beautiful gardens! They’re not fighting nature all the time, the UK really is a garden spot, not a swamp or desert or a combination of the two like back in the US.

Imagine sitting outside at dusk without mosquitoes! I do miss the fireflies though…

I could go into detail about my quest to dress - it’s not even the heat, which is nothing too much really, it’s just being in a new season (summer) in a new land (England) in a new part of my life which is just being a little bit (a lot?) heavier than I’ve always been, sick of wearing black all the time, not onstage much this summer so not sure who I am, and being surrounded here in the UK by ubiquitous brands and stores that make a clear divide between older lady (Boden, Sea Salt, Joules) and younger (Fat Face, White Stuff, Next) and rich lady (Toast, Barbour, Liberty) and the rest of us (Mountain Warehouse, Cotton Traders, T.K.Maxx, charity shops Cancer Research, Sue Ryder, British Heart Foundation). I know my next goal is to sew some clothes of my own BUT

Everything has been on hold. As I had to finish my book. One last (dear god please let it be the last, it has to be the last as I’m getting this thing out in the fall) revision. I was all set to breeze through it in a week.

Then I made the mistake of reading Keith McNally’s book, I Regret Almost Everything. Now why did I even choose this memoir/autobiography? I have never eaten in one of his restaurants (Odeon, Balthazar, Pastis) though I probably stood with my nose pressed up against the glass of Odeon a few times when I lived in NYC and could never afford to eat there. For some reason I started seeing his posts in my Instagram feed and started following him and being delighted. Who was this character? He’s been touting his book and I’d just finished Molly Jong-Fast’s and needed another read, fast- I’d spent Molly’s book whipsawing between terror (I AM Erica, I am a selfish monster selling out my family and friends in my writing) and anger at Molly (you ungrateful TWAT, plus I TOTALLY UNDERSTAND) - see that’s another thing I could tell you , how my thoughts have started running with British phrases, I would never be so pretentious as to USE them out loud but started calling people wankers and worse in my head, saying “lovely” a lot and even told Eric “the boy done good” when he’d executed an excellent bit of parking. See how it all creeps in?

Anyway, Keith’s book - well, the whole way through I kept thinking and even saying out loud “this is one of the best books I’ve ever read” - it was just so honest and delightful and sad and funny. But one thing that hit me, or dawned on me, crept up on me as I was reading and while finishing my own book everything I read relates back to that -

I HAD to rewrite my entire book in past tense. Why had a put it in present tense a year or two ago? I’d started in past, “I walked…we met…I fucked up” etc but parts I was having trouble getting through I’d hit on the idea of writing as if it was all happening right then. That approach had allowed me to finish a draft, and I’d revised a draft that way BUT reading Keith McNally’s excellent, devastating memoir, where he never lets himself off the hook for anything, I realized past is the only way to not throttle yourself for your behavior. Past is the only way to have some kindness for yourself and choices you made.

So I went back and rewrote the entire 98,000 words and I like to think it was the right thing. Healing even. The character I found myself disliking quite a lot (myself) came off at least a little better through the filter of retrospect.

We’ll see. I just typed The End. Again. At last.

Coming out this fall