The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.
I arrive in Chicago and meet my book publicist at the Palmer House hotel, where the event is being held. This weekend is the literary Super Bowl, and she’s buzzing. We are on our way to a dinner where ten authors will get to know one another before we head into the ballroom and pitch our upcoming books from the stage. This dinner, which I have just learned about a few hours before, has heightened my introvert terror alert level from yellow to red.
The room where the authors are to have dinner is small, with two long conference tables pushed together to form a square. Instead of sitting, people are milling. Milling with people I do not know is my idea of hell on Earth. I do not mill. I walk over to the drink table and pour an ice water. A famous writer walks over and introduces herself. She asks, “Are you Glennon? I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You’re the Christian one, right?”
Yes, I’m the one.
“My new book is about a woman who has a religious experience and becomes a Christian. Do you believe it? A Christian! It feels so real to her! I don’t know how my readers will react: Will people be able to take her seriously? What do you think? Do you feel like people take you seriously?”
I say the most serious thing I can think of and then excuse myself.
I look at the table. No assigned seats, damnit. George Saunders sits quietly at the end of the table. He seems gentle and kind and I’d like to sit next to him, but he is a man and I don’t know how to talk to men. At the end of the table is a young woman with calm energy. I sit down next to her. She is a twentysomething releasing her first children’s book. I ask her question after question while considering how wonderful it would be if the organizers would just place our books on the table, so we could get to know each other by reading silently. We butter our rolls. Salads are served. As I’m reaching for dressing, the children’s book lady looks over at the door. I look over, too.
Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe. She has short hair, platinum on top, shaved on the sides. She is wearing a long trench coat, a red scarf, a warm half smile, cool steel confidence. She stands still there for a moment, taking inventory of the room. I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life.
My whole being says:
There She Is.
Then, I lose control of my body. I stand up and open my arms wide.
She looks over, cocks her head to the side, raises her eyebrows, smiles at me.
Fuck Fuck Fuck Why am I standing? Why are my arms open? Oh my God, What Am I Doing?
I sit back down.
She walks around the table and shakes hands with everyone. When she gets to me, I stand up again, turn around, face her. “I’m Abby,” she says.
I ask if I can hug her, because what if this is my only chance? She smiles and opens her arms. Then—the smell that will become home to me—skin like powder and fabric softener blended with the wool of her coat and her cologne and something that smelled like air, like outdoors, like crisp sky, like a baby and a woman and a man and the whole world.
The only seat left is at the far end of the table, so she walks away from me and sits down. She’ll later tell me that she didn’t eat or speak because all of her energy was spent trying not to stare. Mine, too.
Dinner ends, and there is more milling. Oh my God, more milling and now with a revolution in the room. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and kill two milling minutes. When I walk out, she is standing in the hallway, watching the bathroom door, waiting. She motions to me to come over. I look behind me to make sure it’s me she’s talking to. She laughs. She laughs.
Then it’s time to walk to the ballroom. We separate ourselves from the pack somehow. There are people three feet in front of us and behind us, but here we are, walking alone, together. I want so badly to be interesting. But she is so cool, and I don’t know how to be cool. I’ve not been cool a day in my life. I am warm—burning up—sweating through my shirt already.
She starts talking, thank God. She tells me about the book she’s about to release. She says, “But things are hard right now. You’ve probably heard.”
“Heard what? I have not heard. What would I have heard, and where would I have heard it?”
She says, “The news, maybe? ESPN?”
“Um, no, I have not heard the news on ESPN,” I say.
She speaks, slowly at first, then all at once.
“I’m a soccer player. Was a soccer player. I just retired, and I’m not sure what I am now. I got a DUI last month. It was all over the news. I watched my mug shot scroll across the ticker for days. I can’t believe I did it. I’ve been really lost and depressed the last couple of years, and I just…I screwed up. I’ve always been about honor, and I ruined my whole legacy. I let everybody down. I hurt the whole team, maybe. And now they want me to write my book as some kind of hero athlete puff piece, but I keep thinking: What if I’m just honest? What if I write the truth about my life?”
I am sad for her, but I am thrilled for me. In our four minutes together she has asked me about the three subjects I know best: drinking, writing, and shame. This is my jam. I’ve got this. Hot damn.
I put my hand on her arm. Electrical currents. I pull back and recover enough to say, “Listen, I have a rap sheet as long as your arm. I’d write it all. I’d be honest. I don’t know much about the sports world, but I do know that out here in the real world, we like real people.”
She stops walking, so I do, too. She turns and looks directly at me. It appears that she’s about to say something. I hold my breath. Then she turns and keeps walking. I start breathing and walking, too. We enter the ballroom and follow the other authors through a sea of round tables, white tablecloths, thirty-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers. We end up at the dais, climb the stairs, and see that we’ve been seated next to each other. We walk toward our places, and when we arrive, she puts her hand on the back of my chair. She cannot decide whether to pull it out for me. She does. “Thank you,” I say.
We sit down, and the writer seated next to Abby asks where she’s from.
“We live in Portland,” Abby answers.
The writer says, “Oh, I love Portland.”
Abby says, “Yeah.”
Something about the way she says “Yeah” makes me listen very, very hard.
“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there. We moved there because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”
I can tell, just by the way she says this, that there is no we left. I want to save her from follow-up questions, so I say, “Oh, people like us can’t live in Portland. We’re Portland on the inside. We need sunshine on the outside.”