In Finishing My Book, I Rewrote the Story of My Own Life

I’d never met a metaphor I didn’t like. 

I’d recently started going to the beach each night to do something I called “death practice,” an exercise that involved watching the sun disappear behind the ocean while I envisioned myself taking my final breaths. It was late summer in 2020, and it seemed perfectly appropriate to be imagining my own death every day. The world was in the midst of a pandemic. I’d just turned 40. And, though I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, my marriage was bleeding out.

That wasn’t the only thing going on. There was also the matter of the novel I’d just finished. What had started as a meditation on gender dynamics in heteronormative marriages had turned into a steamy and sweary lesbian love story. The book had taken me by surprise, which was sort of hard to explain considering I was the one who’d written it. It’s fiction, I kept telling myself, and the handful of friends who read early drafts. A metaphor, I’d explain, when pressed. But a metaphor for what? The stereotypical modern marriage? Or my own, very particular life?

My agent was more direct. “Did this stuff really happen?” she asked when she finished the manuscript, which I’d kept a secret until it was done. I’d promised myself I didn’t have to publish it unless I wanted to, which itself was a sort of admission that there was something personal at stake. But the answer to her question was, at least in the factual sense, no.

“True, but not literally true?” I offered, haltingly. I think I added something about the story’s “emotional core,” fumbling for language to answer my own questions about the novel’s realism. How had I written something so visceral and specific, and so quickly? I was struggling to understand it myself.

I knew how the story had come to me. On a girls’ trip to Mexico, ripe and delicious like the fruit floating in my tequila that weekend. Two women, 20 years between them, an unexpected spark. I sucked on a lime and wondered if I was up for it, a book about female desire and sapphic sex. I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, but it was a delight to have an idea to play with—any idea!—after months of creative drought. It felt, at the time, like it had come from outside of myself, one of those alchemic moments when the divine giver of ideas says, “Here, this one’s for you.” I couldn’t yet see that the call was coming from inside the house.