On Turning 39

Three mini-essays on life.

1. The Girl-Monk

As a girl, I wanted to be a monk. Being a nun held no appeal: it seemed to require all the bad things society demanded of women and no fun stuff at all. To be a monk? They sang beautifully and wore cool robes and could be intellectuals. This is the garden variety internalized misogyny of being a girl in a patriarchal culture. I didn’t learn about Hildegard of Bingen until I got to my Jesuit college. I grew up Catholic, if that is not abundantly clear.

Gender always felt tighter on me when I was younger. Just like it seemed more fun to be a monk, it seemed like being a drag queen was the ideal way to be feminine. While reading some recent issue of the London Review of Books, a review by Barbara Newman of a book called Byzantine Sexuality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages caught my eye. It began with a brief synopsis of the life story of the monk Marinos, canonized in Eastern Orthodox and Coptic traditions as Saint Marina: She concealed her sex to live as a monk, even suffering exile when accused of fathering a child. At her death, the truth was discovered and miracles occurred. I looked her up and her icons are the vision of who, as a girl, I imagined a female monk to be, and in seeing her, I realized somewhere along the line I’d freed myself from something I hadn’t even remembered once restrained me. 

2. Tempo

When I was presented with a new piece of sheet music as a young violinist, I would take note of the tempo—adagio, allegro, presto—and it would signal to me not something technical, but a mood to inhabit. Is that wrong, or is a tempo a mood? I would have to inhabit an upbeat or languorous essence, depending; my body would move differently, depending. I would perk up, stiffen my back, or I would become like a worm besotted by longing. I’d look at the time signature and if it were one of those weird ones—oh, I’d groan, but I’d get in line. As a teenager, I read guitar magazines not because I could play guitar or was a particularly talented musician but because I liked the technicalities they would explain. Regular music magazines talked about everything around the music; I wanted to get inside it. I haven’t played a violin in years but I still long to get inside the music, to inhabit a mood, to be challenged by a strange rhythm. To do this now, I blast it alone, and more occasionally, I dance.

The things I love most in life are about inhabiting a mood, locking into a choreography that’s simultaneously all mine and belongs to humanity: music, cooking, writing an essay, posting online.

3. Then Let’s Keep Dancing

As a kid, I hid my writing from everyone, in crushed velvet diaries under the mattress and on floppy disks stuffed behind stairwell carpeting, and I think that’s what saved it for me. No one read me unless they were a teacher (and I never got close to a teacher or a professor) or someone who knew about my online diaries, where I was free. 

Despite not wanting anyone in my real life to ever know what I was thinking, teaching my newsletter workshops has been an interesting reminder that I’ve been writing online since 1999. Diaryland. LiveJournal. I started my first magazine job ten years later, in 2009. I was probably destined to end up right here, in your inbox.

This reminds me about all the times I’ve casually thought about things and had them come true. Usually, it feels like nothing and nothing grand changes, but over time I’ve learned: it’s not manifesting; consistent work just adds up. I spent my childhood and adolescence poring over the contributor pages of magazines, thinking, I want to be like them. Writing, taking photos, teaching, popping up in print because my perspective was worth the freelance contract. It happened. I thought one day, why hasn’t anyone asked me to be an editor-at-large? and, I kid you not, an email about just that happened to land in my inbox a few weeks later. I wrote in my notebook at the end of 2022 that one of my desires was to “write for glossy fashion mags in print” and, at the end of 2023, my first cover story assignment came in out of the blue.

Again: These aren’t manifestations. I recognize something I want and I make moves toward it, but never aggressively. Head down. When I turned 30, I got the lyric “tiny victories and bursts of speed” tattooed on my left forearm and it’s been my guiding principle: the small things build but the work I’m always doing is bringing me to the next tiny victory. But have I ever really taken responsibility for what I want out of life? Have I ever charged toward something? Not really. I didn’t even have to query literary agents. It’s not a brag: I’ve lost out on a lot by drifting along, taking opportunities as they’re presented but never articulating in detail what it is I really want beyond continued survival.

I’m 39 now and I think it’s perhaps time to take myself seriously without being humorless, right? To shake off the fear once and for all. I’ve been so public but some part of me is still putting a red floppy disk behind the carpet on the stairs on the way up to my bedroom. Some part of me is still terrified of rejection.

My thirties have been about making myself a writer after spending my twenties copyediting, floundering, and finally baking. The last years of my twenties teed up my thirties perfectly, but I can only see that in retrospect. A gift of aging is knowing you’re only gonna know some things in retrospect; a gift of aging is throwing up your hands a bit, que será será is that all there is. What have I teed up for my future in my thirties? What tiny victories will add up to something new? Who will I be in 2029, 30 years since I started a process I wasn’t consciously aware of yet that landed me here?

I don’t know. 40 will bring with it a new book, and 39 will be a time of setting the stage for it. It also needs to be something all its own, right? I want to take responsibility for what that is, while also making room for tiny victories and bursts of speed.

Join me today for the Weekly Salon. I will open up a thread for a paid subscriber chat at 3 p.m. EST this afternoon to discuss what we’re reading, working on, watching, and more.

This Friday, paid subscribers will receive the Monthly Menu, a chronicle of eating, cooking, and a wine recommendation that includes recipes and cookbook recommendations.

On Friday, November 22, we will have the third part of the Desk Book Club discussion of Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction. For the final session, we’ll read through to the end. Our Zoom will be Sunday, November 24, at 1 p.m. I’ll include the details in the third part of the discussion. Pick it up from Archestratus, the 2024 Desk Book Club partner.

The author with her parents, at her first birthday.

News

My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is now out in paperback.

Reading

Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand