Mary Novaria

As if gray, post-holiday, winter days aren’t dreary enough, the sad news came of author Elizabeth Wurtzel’s death from breast cancer . She was only 52. Her seminal work, Prozac Nation , had a profound impact on me when I first read it as the mother of two young children back in the mid 1990s. I can still see myself turning the pages, propped up on my bed in the new Kansas house. My eldest was probably in First Grade and my youngest napping. It was before we’d decorated the bedroom or renovated the master bath. The walls were still that grayish  builder’s white and the comforter on the bed, from early in our marriage, was worn and faded, which was how I felt sometimes, too. My memories of reading Prozac Nation are linked to place and time like no other book I can recall. Sure, I might remember reading this book on an airplane, or that one at the beach, but I am so rooted to that snapshot of my thirtysomething self with my nose in Wurtzel’s book. Not...

“My friends all tell me I should write a book,” she said, “because I’ve had so many experiences. But I’m really not interested in doing that.” “What I've found,” I told the person I’d just met, “is you kind of have to feel compelled to write. If you’re a writer, you can’t not write.”  Please pardon the double negative. “I don’t understand why people put their personal lives out there. Why do you feel like you want to do that?” “Because I want people to know they’re not alone,” I said. “So if they’re going through something, they’ll know they’re not the only one. “Hmmm. Really? I don’t read things like that.” Sigh. Thankfully, not everyone feels that way, as judged by the likes of popular self-disclosers like David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, Dani Shapiro and, very recently, Tara Westover, whose memoir Educated was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, to name a few. These au...

I’ve met a lot of people in the 2½ years I’ve lived in LA, and one of the best of the lot was Karen. We met at a writer’s workshop put on by our mutual friend Vicki Abelson a couple of years ago. Each month, Karen and I were part of a group of women gathered around Vicki’s dining table to read aloud and gently critique each other’s work. Karen had presence. Her readings were performances that drew you in. She was engaging. She always had a smile and a twinkle in her eye. I secretly coveted her thick, lustrous, long hair, because mine is fine and is scraggly if I try to grow it out.   Karen and I had a bit of a mutual admiration. We genuinely loved what the other was writing. I couldn’t wait each month to hear the next chapter in Karen’s story of the years she lived in France as a child. Because we both were writing about our families, we felt a little bit like we knew each other’s kin. “How are Anna and Paul?” I’d ask, when I wanted to know how Karen’s memoir was prog...