Today I made his early morning breakfast and packed his school lunch for the last time.

He and my husband made their way down the stairs to the car, as I called after them: drive carefully!  Have a great day!  See you later! My husband and I exchanged a glance.  In that marital glance, there was all of it.  The awareness this moment is one of tremendous change.  That we are transitioning from one time in life to another.  Just as the years of baby seats and plastic apparatus and bedtime stories gave way to tennis lessons and homework and class art projects, which in turn gave way to standardized tests and middle school dramas and team victories and defeats and boarding school applications, now we are entering a new phase, one which will reveal itself to us as we enter it.  Our boy, our only boy, is going away to school next year.  There is no road map.

After they left, in the quiet of my kitchen, I glanced down at the book of Buddhist wisdom that I keep on our table, open to today's offering.  The wisdom of the day was from Pema Chodron:  "Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly."

And then I noticed the date.  And realized that today is my mother's yahrzeit,  the Hebrew anniversary of her death.  She has been gone for ten years.  I went into our dining room, where in the sideboard I keep a supply of yahrzeit candles.  It is a measure of being at this stage of life -- of having lost both of my parents -- that I am always sure to have them around.  (Our first year in rural Connecticut, I went out on the day before Yom Kippur to pick up a yahrzeit candle at the market, only to discover that I wasn't on the Upper West Side any more.)

Alone in the kitchen, having just sent my middle schooler off to his last day of eighth grade, full to the brim with the awareness that he will be going to high school four hours from home come September, I lit the candle for my mother and recited the Mourner's Kaddish.  I thought of her with sorrow, with fondness, with confusion, with love.  Anyone who has read my work knows that she and I had a complicated relationship.  I wiped away my tears, and climbed the stairs to my office.

As I write these words, I am lying on my chaise longue surrounded by books.  A former student's galley I intend to blurb, last week's New Yorker, a book for which I'm writing a literary appreciation, piles of galleys of Still Writing.  My cappuccino has grown cold by my side.  The dogs are curled up in their beds.  The house is silent.  Crows peck at the meadow outside my window.  My boy is spending his last day at the only school he has ever known.  My husband is at his office, digging in to work of his own.  Downstairs, in the kitchen, a candle flickers.

This is it -- all of it -- a rich, deep, contemplative, paradoxical life -- each hour full of the bitter and the sweet, the push and pull.  Pleasure and pain in the same breath.  The love is to risk.  To love is to let go.

What kind of writer are you?

Over the the course of the last two decades, I have written novels, memoirs,  stories, essays, book reviews.  I have written a play for a drug company (don't ask), ghost written a novel for a hair stylist, and collaborated on a few bestsellers.  For years, I wrote the back page of Travel+Leisure, for which I interviewed all sorts of fascinating people on the subject of their favorite places.  I have written more blurbs, more letters of recommendations than I can count.  I have written blog posts.  I have taught all over the world: Alaska, Provincetown, Big Sur, Lenox, New York, Positano, and written comments on the backs of students' manuscripts.  I have given dozens upon dozens of speeches, in auditoriums, hotels, back yards, churches, synagogues, yoga studios.

What kind of writer am I?

We are, each one of us, singular, but our selves are made up of multiple identities.  We live in a culture that would prefer for us to define ourselves in sound bytes, but it is dangerous, soul-deadening, to succumb to that way of thinking.  I am a mother, wife, daughter, and friend.  I am a writer and a teacher.  A Jew.  A former city dweller.  A country girl.  A yogi.  A dog owner.  A Democrat.  I like to dress up in beautiful clothes and go out to elegant dinners, and my preferred state of being is solitary, in ratty yoga gear, with my hair pulled into a clip and warm socks on my feet, as I am right now.  I am most at home when I am following a line of words on the page.  I am a social creature, but I also--in the words of my friend Sylvia --startle easily.  So what does this make me?

If there are advantages to no longer being very young (or young at all) chief among them is this: I am beginning to become comfortable with all of my selves, and all of those selves' inherent contradictions.  It is possible to be a yogi and like to drink a few glasses of wine.  It is possible to be a solitary writer living in the country, and also obsess about a pair of Jimmy Choo pumps.  It is a fact that I am a literary novelist, and also get up in front of audiences and talk about meditation, and building a spiritual life.  And that spiritual life is not at odds with the murky, doubting, complicated place inside of me that challenges me with its darkness.

What kind of writer am I?

On a good day, I am a writer who writes.  Who gets out of my own way.  Who feels less of a need to define myself with each passing year.  When we create characters on the page, we try to bring them to life in all of their complexity.  Should we really ask anything less of ourselves?

"You will do well to cultivate the resources in yourself that bring you happiness outside of success or failure. The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. At that time, we turn around and say, yes, this is obviously where I was going all along."

My husband has spent a good portion of this holiday weekend down in our very messy basement starting to sort through ten years and several lifetimes' worth of things that were once important (copies of old contracts and tax returns),  indispensable (high chairs, strollers), or of sentimental value (kindergarten art work, stacks of holiday cards).  He also came across a stash of memorabilia and photographs from my childhood,  which included this photo:

At Thirteen

As soon as I saw it, a particular summer afternoon came flooding back to me.  The backyard of my childhood home.  The "fashion show" that my mother put on for the neighborhood ladies, to introduce them to her new line of tennis towels and tennis jewelry, modeled by her daughter Dani.  The way I felt, circling the swimming pool in a little white tennis dress, wearing a necklace with a gold tennis ball affixed with a sapphire eye (the motto being keep your eye on the ball).  The strange mixture of self-consciousness, embarrassment, and the awareness, lurking somewhere, that something was very wrong with this picture.  That I was being put on display -- I was well used to being put on display -- and that the whole episode was mortifying.  Did I also feel pride?  Was I enjoying, on some level, being paraded in front of the ladies?  It's possible.  I don't remember.  I am only able to touch a vague feeling of unease and numbness.  I didn't know the first thing about myself.

I am writing this from the chaise lounge in my home office.  My son and his friend are outside, shooting hoops.  My dog is crashed on the rug by my feet.  My husband is  downstairs, still sorting.  It's a chilly, New England weekend.  I am in mid-life.  A wife.  Mother.  Writer.  Teacher.  Friend.  I have lately been very aware that this journey of mine could not have been mapped out.  That the thirteen year old girl smiling bashfully in that photograph couldn't in her wildest dreams have imagined the life that would unfold for her.  She didn't even know to dream it.  Nor could she have imagined it at twenty.  Or even at thirty.

How we spend our days, Annie Dillard once wrote, is, of course, how we spend our lives.  Our lives are a chain of these days.  We grow, or we stagnate.  We form good habits, disciplines, or destructive ones.  Or sometimes both.  We learn from our mistakes, or we keep repeating them until we're in enough pain to make changes.  I can supply a narrative to my life, shape and carve the story so that it seems to make sense.  But there is no straight arrow pointing from that girl with the tennis racket to the woman on the chaise lounge.  No game of connect-the-dots.  There is only the blessed, hard work of living, and allowing life to shape us, as water shapes rock.

If I could reach back through time and whisper something to that girl, it would simply be this: be patient.  Be kind to yourself.  And wake up.

It's now noon and I'm here to say that I have not practiced what I'm pretty good at preaching.  Here is an incomplete list of what I have, in fact, done so far this morning: checked email; answered email; dug up a link to a piece about me and sent it to my U.K. agent who is about to submit Still Writing; Googled myself; searched for an elusive pair of black high-heeled sandals that seem to be sold out all over the United States; ate half a yogurt; deleted emails; checked Twitter; tweeted; tweeted again; went on Facebook and shared a link to my husband's new movie poster; talked to the housekeeper; planned tonight's dinner; took a bath; read old notes from a phone session with a psychic.

Okay, this is embarrassing enough.  I think I'll stop.  But I imagine you get the point.  Sometimes people ask me whether I find it easier, living in the country, than I did back when we lived in New York.  My response is, to quote Jon Kabat-Zinn, wherever you go, there you are.  This is our lot in life -- even the most disciplined among us.  Wet get in our own way.  Today -- and today isn't over -- I have so far frittered away precious hours.  I have rituals to recalibrate, adjust.  I often tell my son that we can always start our day over again -- and after I finish this little post, I intend to attempt to do just that.  I will unroll my yoga mat.  Light a fire in the fireplace.  Do the things that I know will set me up for an afternoon that will be free of the "fleas of life" -- Styron's wonderful phrase -- and allow for spaciousness in my mind.  That kind of spaciousness comes from turning away from the chattering world.  From journeying inward.  From having the simple but oh-so-hard to come by practice of patience, contemplation, quiet.

That practice that can be shattered with the click of a mouse -- just checking one more thing.  The internet is the writer's crack cocaine.  It just is.  At times, I find myself in its thrall.  I long for the movement of a pen across the page, a notebook on my lap.  I long for the capaciousness  and focus that comes from hours of undivided attention.  It is not when I'm at my busiest that I click away the hours.  No.  It's when the hours seem endless that I squander them.  And we all should know better than that.

Which do you think I was interested in?

Right.  I clicked on the one star review for Slow Motion, the memoir I first published in 1998.  When a writer is in an evil, self-Googling mood, she is not on the hunt for glowing reviews, positive feedback, happy and generous people.  No.  A writer in the midst of self-Googling is stuck in the muck of her own mind.  She is flailing, tumbling head over heels down a slope that can only end in pain and insult.  Pretentious cry baby, one reader offered.  She had read Slow Motion in a women's lit class.  But it was a review right beneath it that caught my eye: Why did she omit her 1981 marriage?

Someone had done her research.  She had dug up details about my very brief marriage at the age of eighteen--she even knew what the poor, hapless fellow who had the bad sense to marry me had done for a living (he owned an art gallery/clothing store).  She was infuriated that I hadn't written about that baby marriage in the pages of Slow Motion.  That I had somehow duped the reader by not revealing everything about my  life.

What is the job of the memoirist?  Is it to tell all?  Or is it to carve a story out of memory?

I always begin classes on memoir by discussing with my students  the difference between autobiography and memoir.  Autobiography presumes that the person writing the book is important, and the reader is drawn to the book out of a desire to know more about that person.  It would be unreasonable for Hillary Clinton, say, to omit an early marriage from her autobiography.  But memoir is story-telling.  No one reads Slow Motion or Devotion because they want to know more about Dani Shapiro.  They don't read This Boy's Life because they want to know more about Tobias Wolff.  Or Lit because they're determined to get to the bottom of the question: who is Mary Karr?  No--these memoirs are stories, hewing as closely to the truth of the writer's memory as possible--but not letting it all hang out.  Part of the art of memoir is seeing, and recognizing the story itself.  Life is messy.  Art takes gathers up the chaos and gives it form.

If I had written about that early, baby-marriage in Slow Motion, the reader would have misunderstood me.  The reader would have imposed certain societal ideas (divorce equals maturity, for instance) onto me, thereby not understanding the extreme childishness, the amoeba-like lack of sense of self, and yes, the innocence, that propelled me into the circumstances I wrote about in my memoir, of a long and garish affair with an older married man.  If I had portrayed myself as a teenaged divorcee, it would have confused the reader.  It would have, in fact, misled the reader, even though it was a fact of my life.  And so I left it out -- and wrote about it later, in a piece in The New Yorker, a piece where that information was useful to the narrative.

I am aware that this is incendiary stuff.  That perhaps some people feel that omission is on a par with invention -- which is an idea I find infuriating myself.  I wanted to write back to that Amazon reader and say: I don't owe you my life served up on a platter.  We writers who mine our personal veins, who find the stories in our own lives and dive deep, searching for the ways to make order out of chaos, are not doing so because we want to be reality TV stars, or because we're exhibitionists, or narcissists.  We are not publishing our journals, or imagining ourselves to be so important that people are actually interested in the details of our lives.  No.  We are taking those details and lining them up, amazed, astonished, rapt the way a child might be, building blocks to form a tower.  We are attempting to make sense out of what we can -- to reach out a hand to the reader across a rough sea of isolation and separateness and offer up something that has shape, integrity, even beauty and symmetry.

Just like life?  Hardly.  But that isn't our job.

Morning at Le Sirenuse

It is the end of a week of teaching.  Of spending time with some of my favorite people in the world.  Of making new friends, delving deeply into the work of people who began the week as strangers and ended the week with hugs and tears.  It's always this way at Sirenland, but somehow this year feels even more poignant to me.  We have been coming here for seven years now.  My son has grown up in this hotel.  The lovely people who work here feel like family when we arrive.  And nowhere in my life do I feel, more acutely, the passage of time.

This morning, when the last of the cars left the hotel's driveway to make the long, windy trip from Positano to Naples, and the last of our friends waved goodbye -- departing for London, Paris, Rome, and eventually for the States, I realized that I have somehow become a person who worries less.  I'm not quite sure how this has happened.  Anxiety has defined my inner landscape for so much of my life.  You might say that it has driven me -- as a writer, as a wife and mother.  Certainly it has been central to my subject matter.  But now--in midlife--it has vanished.

Positano

Travel safe, I say to my friends.  See you next week in New York.  Or next month, in the Berkshires.  Or over the summer, in Provincetown.  Or next time my husband and I are in Los Angeles.  Or next year, back here in Positano.

Poo, poo, poo, my grandparents and parents used to say.  Or Kain Ayin Hora --a Yiddish expression meant to ward off the evil eye.  The idea was: don't ask for too much.  Don't make assumptions about the future -- especially not happy assumptions.  A peasant version of God willing, or please God, or any of those other familiar expressions.

But as I said goodbye to my friends this morning, and as I prepare to make the trip home with Michael and Jacob--airports, multiple flights, the kind of thing that used to fill me with paralyzing dread--I search myself for signs of the old terror...and find none.

This is not in any way because I am less aware of life's fragility.  It may even be because of a heightened awareness that this--this morning, this blue, blue morning, these clanging church bells, my husband standing on the balcony overlooking the sea, my son who I swear has grown an inch on this trip, the friends and their children who have also grown up at Sirenland, the call from my 96 year old uncle about an upcoming birthday celebration for him (his wife called it "wow plus one!")--this is it.  The whole megillah.  In the human catastrophe, this very moment is one of peace and tranquility and hope.

Will it always be so?

Of course not.

But it is precisely what we have today, at this moment.

Because the way I know myself is through the written word.  The ways in which I am able to access any understanding of what makes me tick, how I see the world around me, what I feel, what I know, is through the daily practice of grappling with the page.  The grappling itself is the point.  Ideally something comes of that grappling, eventually.  Every story, novel, essay, memoir begins with that dive, that free fall, that willingness to not know.  We begin with the barest of ideas, a flickering image, a phrase, just outside our grasp, and we begin to try to capture it by sitting with the page and seeing what emerges.

When I'm not engaged in this process a depression settles in.  This time, I think, this time it's different.  I become convinced that my imagination has taken leave of me.  That I will never become obsessed with a character or a story again.  My mind starts spinning all sorts of stories--and not the good kind of stories.  I feel as if I have split in two, and part of me is on a small boat without oars, drifting slowly out to sea, carried by the tide, watching the other part of me standing on the shore, watching.  Writing brings these two aspects of my nature together.  It weaves the observer, the story teller, the thinker, the dreamer, together into one woman.  It silences my demons by putting them to good use.

As I write I am in a quiet hotel room.  Room service coffee is cooling at my side.  My laptop is balanced on a pillow.  Light streams in from the floor-to-ceiling windows facing east over New York City.  But even this––this small act of thinking about the in between––brings me back inside myself.  I am not aimlessly drifting.  The room sharpens, comes into focus.  My interior life becomes heightened, once again making itself known to me

Do you know those lists of how much time we spend, over the course of a lifetime, brushing our teeth, or taking out the garbage, or talking on the phone, or grocery shopping?  I want to diminish the time I spend in the in-between.  Like Virginia Woolf's cotton wool, the in-between is a muffled, deadening place.  It is soul-eroding.  You would think it might be a time of gestation -- roots beginning to form beneath that frozen ground -- but you would be wrong.  The real gestation happens on the page, just so.  A writer's fingers moving along a keyboard, a pen scratching words.  The next word appears, then the next.  And the next.  And suddenly the sky brightens.  The day beckons.  The simple, elusive act of beginning.  The practice itself, the very point of the thing, and suddenly the in between is revealed for what it really is.

It is all we  have.

But when it comes to the writing life, risk is what it's all about.  Lately, I've been reading a lot of books that play it safe.  Conventional narratives, characters whose edges are smoothed out to a palatable degree.  Can I just say it?  These books bore me.  I'm bored.  It's like eating muesli when I want a charred, juicy steak.  I want to read about messiness.  I don't need the pieces to fit together in fiction -- I mean, when do the pieces ever fit together in life?  I want to encounter characters who feel, who do the unexpected.  Who think human thoughts -- no matter how dark and flawed and uncomfortable.  I want to be reminded of my own inner landscape, my own complex humanity.  I want to connect -- with the book, with myself.  In a recent re-reading of Mrs. Dalloway, I was amazed, as I always am, by the way that Woolf renders Clarissa Dalloway almost see-through, as if we were watching an MRI of her internal life, all the while that she is going about her daily business ––the inner and outer equally accessible.  I felt this thrill of discovery too, when reading Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, a novel in which the author took risk after creative risk but somehow never lost control of his taut narrative, his story.  Walter writes like no one has ever said no to him.  No.  He writes like he has learned not to say no to himself.

If we are to write work that is alive, we have to be willing to head out there on that high wire.  Every day, we have to place one foot, then another, on that thin, quivering line and let go of our ruminations and questions about what might happen.  Maybe it won't work.  Yeah.  Maybe it will suck.  Maybe I'll waste my time and precious energy on a piece of prose that will be dead on arrival.  And indeed, yes you may.  But how else are we supposed to discover what's in there -- in the teeming, writhing darkness?  In the frozen tundra?  If we're sitting alone in our rooms, engaged in this solitary life -- a life filled with uncertainty, with constant self-doubt, oh, yes, and with risks of a very practical sort -- no one gives us a pension and a retirement plan, after all -- then we damned well better be sure that we're spending it all, shooting it all, holding back nothing.  We need to give it up to the page, not just when it feels good, not when we feel in control of it, but every single time.

It was a Sunday morning.  My husband was in his office, getting ready for a month-long process of editing his film.  My son was lolling in bed with his ipad.  The dogs were crashed on the floor.  And I was making the shift from my private self to my public self.  And it wasn't easy.  As I dressed, the feeling I had was one of arming myself -- not because I wasn't looking forward to the event (I was) but because, for writers, going out into the world requires some doing.  We spend our lives in a solitary way.  I write this, I am sitting on my chaise lounge in the clothes I slept in and a pair of socks from one of those in-flight kits.  I will probably not speak to a soul all day, unless you count the dogs (here, the dialogue consists of, bujabujabu, and i love you do you know that? and who wants a treat?)  My own face will surprise me in the mirror, should I pass a mirror, because the act of writing is, for me, a kind of self-forgetting.  Take someone who lives in this realm of self-forgetting and put her in front of an audience, and there you have it.  The dilemma.  The modern writer's conundrum.

I worry that I will be misunderstood.  That the lovely people who booked me for yesterday's engagement will think I didn't have a good time (I did!).  What I'm getting at here is the complexity of being a person at once deeply private and shockingly public.  A person who spends days--weeks--speaking as little as possible, a person for whom the word "hermitage" is appealing, and a person who sits in front of an audience, speaking into a microphone, telling stories (jokes, even!) and looking--in fact, being--comfortable.  It's a split-screen, this writer's life.  And what I have discovered, over these recent years when I've been doing a lot more public speaking, is that it requires a kind of armor.

This armor extends beyond the dark jeans, the silk blouse, the make-up.  The absolute vulnerability necessary to write something real, honest, and universal is at odds with the public self.  Yesterday, during my event, there was a woman in the back row (there's always one) who, every time I looked her way, rolled her eyes.  I mean, really rolled her eyes.  A full eye-roll, heavenward.  Her body language said: I'm not buying it.  It said, I'm bored to tears, when will this be over?  Now, the rest of the audience seemed very engaged, even rapt.  But because I'm a writer––because I am a sensitive creature with less armor than most––and, because in order to give a good talk, I in fact need to be vulnerable, I directed my talk to the eye-roller.  I couldn't stop thinking about her.  How was I failing?  Where was I going wrong?  Why, oh why, didn't she like me?  It's the next day, and I'm thinking about her still.  This is no different from writers who can quote you chapter and verse from their negative reviews, but not a word from the glowing ones.  Or writers who troll their Amazon pages, only stopping to take in the one star reviews.

So what is the armor, then, that allows us to take part in the world around us, a world that will sometimes feel like just too much, a world that might insult us, or hurt us?  For the writer, I think there's only one answer, and I'm doing it right now.  It's to return to the solitude.  To the chaise lounge, the dogs, the pajamas.  To return to the page, the blank and glorious page, and look up, hours later, realizing that the armor has slipped away.

How do we hold on to ourselves when life isn't routine--which is to say, most of the time?  I am a creature of habit, quite possibly neurotically so.  I eat the same thing for lunch every day, for instance.  I make my bed the minute I awake in the morning.  I have certain requirements: solitude, silence, enough hours, caffeine.  But for a while now, nothing has been routine.  I've finished a book, and am nowhere near starting a new one.  (I'm never near starting a new one until the day I do.)  I've been writing a little of this, a little of that.  My husband is away for months.  My kid is in eighth grade, and we're looking at high schools.  It's a particularly rich, completely nutty time.

In the midst of this, yesterday, someone (okay, a lady blow-drying my hair) asked me where I find inspiration.  The question stopped me, for a moment, because I realized that I was very far from inspiration because the practices that allow me access to myself behind myself (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson) had fallen by the wayside.  I hadn't packed my yoga mat on this trip.  I had only managed to practice once.  Meditation?  As if.  Reading?  I had brought Cloud Atlas with me on the flight down, but had read this instead.

"Everywhere," I answered the hair stylist.  "I find inspiration everywhere, as long as my eyes are open."

Ah, but this is it--what it's all about--this openness.  We writers (if I may generalize) are such sensitive creatures.  I've heard it said that we're born with one less layer of skin than most people.  Maintaining this openness -- when in the midst of the noise, the crowds, life's dailiness, can be incredibly challenging.  When I'm home and in my routine, I find it easier to be open because my routines support me.  But it's a luxury, and unrealistic, to think that I can live that way all the time.

So I look around me.  The boy, scribbling now in his math notebook.  The woman behind the counter who also works in the local theatre.  The smells and tastes.  This unfamiliar town.  I remind myself to breathe deeply, to fill my lungs, to stop protecting myself...from what?  This noise, this pace, this tumult, right now, today, this is my life.  If I am not present for it, if I'm simply getting through it until I'm finally back in my house on top of the hill with my bed made and my yoga mat unrolled, my favorite yogurt in the fridge, the silence and space and solitude I crave but can't always have––well, then.   All sorts of gifts may pass me by.