A Good Week for Writing Things

Writing to share some writing about some things I wrote.

Hello! This feels weird, but I want to point you to a couple of things I wrote that came out this week. Do I promote myself? Very well then, I promote myself! (Oh sorry, did you think you were going to get a post without a dad-joke-meets-Whitman reference today? Think again!)

First, I wrote a story for The New York Times about women simultaneously navigating a breast cancer diagnosis and its impact on their future fertility. This is a piece that I pitched last August, and which has been in the works since then, though with the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling about embryos, it suddenly became very timely a few days before it was set to publish.

I put a lot of work into this piece, and a lot of care. Not that I don’t always put a lot of work and care into all of the stories I write, of course, but this one hit a little different because it was so near and dear to my heart. I was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was 37, and while I was lucky enough to have already had two kids — like literally just had one of them; she was five months old — I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t already built my family before I was diagnosed. There are so many hard decisions to make in such a small amount of time, and you’re basically just trying to make them, one after the other, while also not falling down an elevator shaft of fear (this is what I told my husband it felt like in the days after I was diagnosed; like if I thought about it for just a second too long, I felt like I was falling down an elevator shaft in the dark, just forever and ever and ever, with no landing.)

It was so important to me that the women who agreed to speak to me for this piece felt that they could trust me with the very vulnerable stories they were telling me, and that I would be someone who would get it. It was also, truth be told, a little triggering to be immersed in that cancer world again while I worked on the piece. Every time I interviewed someone — and I interviewed at least thirteen or fourteen people for this — it plunged me back into that time in my life, which is a time that I’m mostly happier to leave in the past. So it was a bit depleting, I guess is what I’m saying; the stakes felt so impossibly high for me to do a good job.

All that to say, though, I am really, really proud of how this story came out, and of all the women and experts who so graciously agreed to speak with me for it. If even one newly-diagnosed cancer patient reads it and feels less alone in the elevator shaft of fear, that’ll make the endless hours of rewrites I worked on the night before it was published — during which I had no idea where my kids were, what they ate for dinner, what time they went to bed, or what their names even were* — one hundred percent worth it.)

* They were not living like feral children; I am extremely lucky to have a partner who understands what it means to be on deadline for a national newspaper in a stressful news cycle and was like “close your door, don’t even think about it, do what you gotta do, I know where we keep the pasta,” and just took complete control of the afternoon and evening the minute they got home from school. Pretty good for a boy I met while he was playing hackysack on a beach in the ‘90s with Sun-Inned hair.)

Anyway, you can read the piece here; it now includes some audio I recorded with a producer last week, including some brief commentary I gave on why and how I wrote the piece, in which I can literally hear the restrained panic in my voice as I try to remember how my brain works while speaking into a microphone.

And now let’s switch gears and talk about fiction!

Today, my first ever piece of fiction was published in Fractured Lit, a wonderful literary journal that specializes in flash fiction (usually defined as pieces a thousand words or under — a kind of short short story.)

This piece — which I started working on in 2020 — won the Grand Prize in the 2023 Fractured Lit Open Flash Fiction Contest, a fact I found out last November and which absolutely, totally floored me. Like, I’m not being modest, I actually thought they had maybe emailed the wrong person. I do not care for the concept of imposter syndrome as a whole, because it just seems like another made-up way for women to feel bad about themselves, but I definitely have some serious feelings of “I’m doing it wrong and everyone’s going to find out!” about fiction writing, which is a thing I am a) very new at, and b) not formally educated in, besides just, like….reading a lot.

Anyway, if you are interested, you can read “For a Short Time Only” here. It is exactly 1,000 words — tell me you like following the rules without telling me you like….etc etc — which means it won’t take very long to read. It was inspired, as most fiction is, by lots of different random pieces of my own personal history, the most prominent being: a) a real-life woman whose kids I used to babysit when I was a teenager, and b) this weird thing my own kids started doing when we first got a trampoline in Peak Pandemic Time, where they’d fall onto their backs suddenly, spring up again, and ….. well, just read the story.

I guess I’ll end by saying that March 1st, last Friday, was my 6-year anniversary of finishing chemo, which I only mention because going through that whole crisis — being diagnosed with something really awful and scary when you have an infant and a 4-year-old — is inextricably linked with the big career change I made two years later: leaving my job in tech to become a freelance journalist and writer. I recognize, of course, the huge privilege in being able to do that — to just leave a steady job and take a wild leap into something else — but still: sometimes I can hardly believe that I have made the thing I wanted to happen actually happen for myself.