before the epilogue
This Week in Reading:
A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg
I read Molly Wizenberg’s food blog, Orangette, many years ago, back in the early days of the internet. I lost track of the blog, and her, for the better part of a decade, until I rediscovered her on Instagram a few years back. I had never followed her particularly closely; I don’t remember what I thought her life looked like when I was first reading Orangette, besides the fact that she lived in Seattle, and when I was 15 it was very exciting to read about anyone who could potentially be within 20 miles of me at any given moment. Regardless, the Molly Wizenberg I found on Instagram in 2017 had a radically different life than the woman who was posting yogurt cake recipes in 2009.
This Molly Wizenberg had a small daughter and was freshly divorced from her husband of ten years, with whom she co-owned two restaurants. Her marriage had ended, because after ten years of loving, tender partnership, she had woken up one day and realized her sexuality had changed. She hadn’t been gay for the entirety of their marriage, but now, suddenly, she was, and she could not stay married to her husband. Since then, Molly met and got engaged to her new partner, Ash, who is genderqueer, and she, Ash and Brandon all amicably co-parent their daughter, June, together. I’m sure there must have been a great deal of heartache and tension as those roles and relationships transitioned, but for all intents and purposes, the divorce appears to have been incredibly gentle and loving. She and Brandon continue to co-own their restaurants, see each other regularly.
But I’ve gotten ahead of myself (though for me, the end of this story was also the beginning, so forgive me for telling you the epilogue first). I recently picked up a copy of A Homemade Life, Wizenberg’s first book, which was published in 2009. It’s a food memoir, and is as fun and light and unfussy as a food memoir should be. The book covers Molly’s (lets just call her Molly, I feel like we are friends) childhood in Oklahoma, her brief stint in France (no food memoir is complete without a stint in Paris, after all), the death of her father, meeting Brandon, their bicoastal relationship, and ends with their wedding. That is where the story ended in 2009, so that is where A Homemade Life ends—but of course, that is not where the story ends. It is fascinating to read it in 2019, a decade after it was written, with all of the context that Molly herself didn’t have when she wrote it.
What struck me reading this book was how clearly she loved Brandon. It is the kind of writing that leaves no doubt-- she is so precise and tender and true in the way that she loves him:
“I used to think I had a good dowry. I can make a nice meatball and bake a fine chocolate cake. I can find my way without a map around Paris, Seattle, and Oklahoma City. I stand to someday inherit that stunningly ugly ceramic boar that sat on my father’s bathroom counter. But Brandon brought with him more than I could have ever thought to want. He brought an eye for vintage champagne glasses, that Caetano Veloso song he always sings in the shower, the crease on the top of his nose, and the stunning mess he makes on the kitchen counter. He brought his chana masala, his love for cabbage and chocolate, and his gentle questions about my father, whom he will never meet. He brought that mischievous look that flashes when he asks if I want a chocolate malt, the radishes and the butter and the salt, and the way he asks me to marry him, grinning, over and over, almost every day. Sometimes when I see him across the room, I can hardly believe that I get to be his wife.”
She loves him wholly, purely and truly. She writes about loving him in a way she obviously believes to be forever. But she didn’t.
In many divorces the love dwindles and fades until it is impossible to remember a happy time, or the feelings that brought the couple together in the first place. But because Molly and Brandon’s marriage ended for reasons that feel very separate from their relationship, because this book exists, capturing the earnestness and truth of their feelings at that specific moment in time, we will not forget the way they loved each other.
In her coming out blog post (a fascinating read that I have returned numerous times) Molly writes:
“Sometimes I see pictures of married couples, especially married couples with children, and I feel heavy. I don’t have particularly eloquent words for it – just loss, grief. It feels like a death. I never imagined June as a child of divorced parents. Sometimes it feels like we failed, like there’s something everyone else knows that we don’t, something everyone else is doing right. But then, other times, it doesn’t feel that way at all. We never stopped loving each other. Our marriage never failed. We never broke it. In some ways, it feels like we’ve actually had a huge success, like we’re actually succeeding right now – just in a way I didn’t predict, and a way that’s hard to explain.”
I know that this seems frightening, but I’m not recounting this as a cautionary tale that even a relationship that feels like the most sure thing in your life may, one day, be completely derailed by someone else’s sexual awakening. (Though it could! No one knows what the future holds.) I’m writing about this because there was something paradoxically comforting about reading this book. It was comforting to realize that things changing in the present doesn’t change the past. Molly loved Brandon and planned on being married to him for the rest of her life, and now she isn’t, but that doesn’t negate their ten plus years together, it doesn’t make that love untrue. A Homemade Life was true with Molly Wizenberg wrote it, and it is true now, regardless of whatever happened after the last page.
I’m a big believer that we shouldn’t hate our exes, for the sole reason that if we hate our exes completely, we are unable to respect the version of ourselves that once loved them. In order to maintain some level of empathy for our younger selves, we can’t believe the people we once loved to be demons. We may not love them anymore, but that doesn’t mean we never did, it doesn’t erase the time and feelings with had with them. Truth can shift over time but it doesn’t undo or rewrite past truths.
Last Stop Before the Frontier, gauche and silkscreen on paper, concrete, 2019
Studio-ing
I finished a project I’ve been working on for a very, very, very long time. They are aerial view photographs of National Park parking lots that I did one-tone silkscreen prints of and colored with gauche. Each print is mounted in a poured concrete frame that I cast myself. It was a very difficult, very frustrating, very expensive process, but I’m happy with the way they ended up.
My statement, from my website:
National Parks are some of the last expanses of untouched nature we have. A border is carefully drawn around a plot of wilderness-- protecting and preserving the land within its boundaries. We visit these parks in an attempt to enter the wild: to witness the world unsullied by human civilization. And yet, when we go to experience this untouched land we find the same kind of rules that govern our cities and towns. Leave no trace, stay on the trail, do not pick flowers, do not collect the rocks.
In our attempt to enter the wilderness we can't help but follow a prescribed route. We drive into nature and park at the trailhead parking lot, positioning our car neatly between the two white lines. The parking lots-- smooth cement ovals carved into the rugged landscape-- are a final moment of order and regulation before we can finally go to a place that is supposedly free of both of those things.
You can see the full series here.
Further Reading:
I haven’t been writing much lately, but I have been reading many good books. A few that did not get their own newsletter but that are absolutely worth reading: The Dinosaur Artist by Paige Williams and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. Also the Glennon Doyle episode of the Going Through It podcast covers her very similar, fascinating, experience of divorcing her husband to date world famous soccer player Abby Wambach, while on book tour for a memoir about working through her marriage.