A Note to My Readers

Where I've been.

Sara took this picture of a Brown Pelican today. Such beauty in this world!

For the past month or so — longer, really — I have been struggling with a severe bout of depression. This has temporarily impeded my flow of missives to you in this space — to my great regret, as my relationship to you, my dear readers, has been a great joy to me. A revelation, really, as before I began this blog — in January of last year — I wasn’t sure I could generate a weekly written dispatch: I’d become convinced, through the grinding experience of decades, that I could only “write” stories by improvising them to live audiences. That’s still how I craft my solo shows (in collaboration with some amazing theater artists) — but I’d always dreamed of being a, you know, writer-writer, one of those who communicate purely through the printed word. When Covid made it look as though my live-theater career might be kaput, I decided to experiment with this Substack thing. And to my surprise, it took! Folks subscribed, and my readers (readers!) became, to me, a beautiful community, leaving kind and thoughtful comments, sending me emails, and just being there — here! — week after week.

I have written to you while caring for my mother, Bernice “Bunny” Selden, during the last year of her life, as she dealt with Alzheimer’s and congestive heart failure. I have told you lots about my father, Paul Kornbluth. And so much more about me — as well as how there came to be so much less of me, over the course of my 30-week liquid(-ish) diet. I’ve learned that different aspects of myself come out when I write to you, as opposed to when I perform. There’s something quieter in this process (duh?). Here — improvising on the computer keyboard — I don’t (can’t) rely on immediate feedback from others, so I must “listen” to myself. I see the words spool out on the screen, evaluate them, delete sometimes, forge on sometimes. I catch a wave for a while. I stare for a while. I delete a chunk and save it in a Word doc. I retrieve part of that chunk — thank god I saved it! — but then decide to delete it again. It’s all by feel. And then, at a point (usually arrived at unexpectedly) when I sense that I’ve gotten to some sense of wholeness, I hit “Publish.”

It’s magical, and it’s scary — and I’ve missed it, over these past weeks. I’ve missed you.

But I’ve been deep inside myself, in a place that has felt sealed off from … well, pretty much everyone and everything. For a time, as I felt the creep of encroaching depression, I kept up my regular exercising schedule — and even started doing yoga at a place around the corner from us — but then my range of activity became more and more circumscribed, until I ended up mostly staying at home, generally shuttling from bed to living-room armchair and then back to bed. My thoughts became darker, or maybe I mean dimmer: I had un-thoughts, un-feelings. I felt like a nullity, almost as if I didn’t exist. And yet at the same time I knew that the world — with all its beauty, and pain — was still out there. Could it again be in here?

As I sit here, typing, I flicker between those feelings of nullity and a sense of hopefulness. Flickering — it’s a start!

What has sustained me is the love of my family and friends. I’ve also found that, once I wrestled my body and soul out of bed and made it to the armchair, I could sometimes read. Read lots! One book that has meant a great deal to me is the short story collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, by Alice Munro; the title story is one of the most amazing, beautiful things I have ever read. A day or two ago, Sara started to tell me something, then caught herself. I asked her what had happened. She told me that Alice Munro had just died. She knew how much those stories had meant to me, how they had helped to keep me sort of afloat lately, and hadn’t wanted to sadden me with the news, given my current state.

Some other books I’ve read in this recent period (most of them borrowed as e-books from the Berkeley Public Library, via the Libby app):

• Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips

• Foster, by Claire Keegan (beautiful! exquisite! heartbreaking!)

• Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

• Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State, by Kerry Howley (great, but start with her earlier Thrown, which is awesome)

• The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (intimidatingly brilliant)

• A House for Mr. Biswas, by V.S. Naipaul (I cannot begin to tell you how much this novel meant to me)

• The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam (almost unbearably sad, but such gorgeous writing)

• Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, by Naomi Klein (terrific)

I’ve also been on a Jonathan Lethem kick, since seeing him at Pegasus Books in Berkeley — one of my last jaunts before my recent hunkering-down. He was reading from a delightful, slender collection of fiction and essays, The Collapsing Frontier. A reminiscence in The Guardian by Lethem of his writer friend Paul Auster, who died recently, referred to (and was written in the manner of) a memoir called I Remember, by Joe Brainard (which Auster had loved). That book consists entirely of sentences and short paragraphs that begin “I remember …” I found an excerpt online and loved it and so I ordered a used copy from abebooks.com, and it just arrived yesterday. (I’d finally summoned the impulse to go to the mailbox.)

Right now, I’m reading Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. It’s a real corker, and I think the author will go far.

I began many other books, but they didn’t take — didn’t pull me away from where I was stuck. Finding traction in what I’m reading is as mysterious to me as finding it in my writing.

But I am committed to continuing this writing, here, and to continuing to find myself in this writing. When I started doing monologues, I learned early on that theater audiences had an infinite capacity for receiving meaning and feeling. No place I could go would be too deep for them, so long as I went there with honesty; the only limitations were within myself. I feel that way about writing in this space as well. I have grappled with the question of whether to tell you about my depression. It may shock you to hear that I do worry about oversharing! But now that I’ve gotten myself out of bed and in front of the computer, and now that I’ve actually been typing out this dispatch to you for a while, it strikes me that maybe I’ll go ahead and, well, share.

It’s a hopeful thing, albeit a somewhat terrifying thing, to be open about this. There’s a danger I’ll go back inside myself for a while. (I hope not.) There have been times (many) when I’ve worried that this depression will never leave me. But I think I’m feeling right now, thanks to you — thanks to knowing you’re out there — that in some profound way, we’re in this together. That buoys me.