The relationship is over. The wine is winning. The pills aren’t for back pain anymore. He’s never coming back. That book won’t write itself. The move is the only way. Quitting this job will save my life. It is abuse. You never grieved him. It’s been six months since we made love. Spending a lifetime hating her is no life at all.
We keep ourselves shaken up because there are dragons in our center.
One night, back when my children were babies, I was reading a book of poetry in the bathtub. I came across a poem called “A Secret Life” about deep secrets and how we all have them. I thought: Well, I haven’t had one since I got sober. I don’t keep secrets anymore. That felt good. But then I read:
It becomes what you’d most protect
if the government said you can protect
one thing, all else is ours….
it’s what
radiates and what can hurt
if you get too close to it.
I stopped reading and thought: Oh, wait.
There’s one thing.
One thing I haven’t even told my sister.
My secret that radiates is that I find women infinitely more compelling and attractive than men. My secret is my suspicion that I was made to make love to a woman and cuddle with a woman and rely on a woman and live and die with a woman.
Then I thought: So odd. That cannot be real. You’ve got a husband and three children. Your life is more than good enough.
As I climbed out of the tub and shook my hair dry, I told myself: Maybe in a different life.
Isn’t that interesting?
As if I had more than one.
I sit in a cold plastic seat near the airport gate, stare at my suitcase, sip airport coffee. It’s bitter and weak. I look at the plane through the gate window. How many of those will I board in the coming year? A hundred? I’m bitter and weak, too.
If I board, this plane will take me to Chicago O’Hare, where I’ll search for a driver holding a sign with my (husband’s) last name on it. I’ll raise my hand and watch the driver’s face register surprise that I am a small woman in sweatpants instead of a large man in a suit. The driver will deliver me to the Palmer Hotel—where a national book conference is being held. There I’ll stand on a stage in a grand ballroom and speak to a few hundred librarians about my soon-to-be-released memoir, Love Warrior.
Love Warrior—the story of the dramatic destruction and painstaking reconstruction of my family—is expected to be one of the biggest books of the year. I will be promoting it on stages and in the media for, well, forever.
I am trying to find my feelings about this. Fear? Excitement? Shame? I can’t isolate anything specific. I stare at the plane, wondering how to explain my life’s most intimate, complicated experience to a sea of strangers within my seven allotted minutes. I have written a book, and now I must become a commercial for the book I have written. What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?
I’d been at this airport gate starting line before. Three years before, I’d released my first book and traveled the country telling the story of how I’d finally found happily-ever-after by trading my lifelong food and booze addictions for a son, a husband, and writing. I’d stood on stages all over the country and repeated the book’s message to hopeful women: Carry on. Life is hard, but you are a warrior. One day it will all come together for you, too.
Right after that first book’s ink dried, I sat in a therapist’s office and listened to my husband say that he’d been sleeping around since our wedding.
I held my breath as he said, “There have been other women,” and when I inhaled again, the air was made of smelling salts. He kept apologizing while looking down at his hands, and the impotent stammering made me laugh out loud. My laughter made both men—my husband and his therapist—visibly uncomfortable. Their discomfort made me feel powerful. I looked at the door and willed adrenaline to carry me out of that building, across the parking lot, and into my minivan.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a while and realized that the revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.
I was furious with him and disgusted with myself. I’d let down my guard and trusted that the other characters in my story would act as they should and that my plot would unfold as I’d mapped it. I’d rendered my own future and my children vulnerable by ceding creative control to another character. What an idiot. Never again. I would take back full control, starting now. This was my story and my family, and I would decide how it ended. I’d take this shit I’d been handed, and I’d spin it into gold.
I took control back with words, sentences, chapters, and scripts. I started with the story’s resolution in mind—a healed, whole family—and worked backward from there. There would be rage, pain, therapy, self-discovery, forgiveness, reluctant trust, then eventually: fresh intimacy and redemption. I do not know if I lived the next few years and then wrote about what happened or if I wrote the next few years and then made it all happen. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that at the end of that blur of time I had myself a dark love story—a drama of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and redemption, brokenness and healing. In book form and family form. Checkmate, Life.
In Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty, a reader approaches Lucy at her book-signing table and asks of her memoir, “How do you remember all of that?”
“I don’t remember it,” she says. “I write it.”
When Love Warrior was complete, I handed the manuscript to Craig and said, “Here. Here is what it all meant. I made it all mean something. We won the war. Our family made it. We are a love story after all. You are welcome.”
Now the war has ended, and I want to go home. But home is still a foxhole with me and Craig left staring at each other, wondering: What now? What did we win?
I call my sister and ask if I can cancel the book launch event in Chicago. I want her to tell me that this will be fine, no big deal. She says, “We can cancel, but it will be a big deal. You committed to this.”
So I do this thing I do. From the outside I imagine it looks like a straightening, a stiffening. From the inside it feels like turning my liquid self to a solid. Water to ice. Glennon has left the building. I’ve got this. I board the plane to go tell a story I’m not sure I believe.
It will be okay. I’ll just tell it like a story instead of a life. As if I am past the end instead of stuck in the middle. I’ll tell the truth, but I’ll tell it with a slant: I’ll blame myself just enough; present him in the most sympathetic light; attach my bulimia to my frigidity and my frigidity to his infidelity. I’ll tell how the cheating led to my self-reflection, how self-reflection led to forgiveness and pain led to redemption. I’ll tell it so that people will decide: Of course. It was leading to this ending all along. I see. It all had to happen exactly that way. That is what I will decide, too.