Dear Ira: Tiny True Stories #1
Welcome!
Hello and welcome to the first edition of Tiny True Stories! I’m so glad you’re here. If you’re here from my Harry Potter tour days, hello! I’m so happy to see you! I’ve just moved over to Substack with a new title; everything else is the same.
A quick intro to what to expect! (In future newsletters I promise to keep it tight.) Each month, I'll be sending you monthly original tiny true stories (about 700 words or, often, much less), along with little letters of recommendation—books, quotes I’ve loved, news I love to hate, art, music, you get it.
Why?
I started this newsletter because I’m tired. Living in the world feels exhausting, with disaster at every corner. I’ve always been drawn to writing short pieces, and right now, they feel exactly right. So much of nonfiction is the big story. We spend our lives waiting for the big story. But much of our lives are not lived in these big stories. Most of us live our lives between and within to-do lists. We grade papers, we attend meetings, we take our children to school, we scroll on our phones while watching Netflix on the couch, we wish we were spending our one precious life a little more loudly.
I love looking at those forgotten, small parts of our lives that seem unworthy of stories and finding stories anyway. The lists, phone calls, emails, various piles of laundry, unwashed dishes, rumpled blanket, errant Legos, stack of unread books, stack of unread mail, the steaming cup of coffee, the cold cup of coffee: each of these is a still life. Yes, we hope for our lives to be big, exciting. But this routine is where we live. Of course it contains stories. Everything comes back to this. The everydayness of your life is worth contemplation. It is ordinary, extraordinary, just as it is. The world is brutal; we are tired; I hope I can share some small beauties in spite of it.
Today’s Tiny True Story
Sometimes my writing comes easier as letters. I’ve always been an introvert, and don’t love talking to strangers. But on the page, it almost feels easier to be truthful to a kind stranger than to be truthful with yourself.
So here’s your first tiny true story! An unsent letter to my friend Ira Sukrungruang, who I don’t think subscribes to this, but who taught a brilliant seminar where I wrote this.
Dear Ira,
I didn’t sleep well last night even though I should have. The baby is sick (not THAT kind of sick, though of course that fear is a river running through me at all times, forever), and my body kept me up and ready, even though she didn’t need me. I used to count, like you, when I couldn’t sleep, backward from 1,000. It sometimes worked, but sometimes I would get down into 700s or 500s and it was too depressing to think of how deep the numbers could go.
Instead, I now think of drawing an outline around my body. It’s a white, luminous line, and the cultural significance of a body outline is there, I’m sure, but I try not to think too hard about that. It helps me to follow the line around the curve of my elbows, the space under my armpit, around my ribs, my knee bent at 90 degrees like a flamingo, and my daughter sleeping the same exact way the next room over. It helps me to think of the space we take up, to make my brain go forward, forward, treating my body with love, even if I am only ending up in a circle. There is comfort in knowing where you will end up.
Ira, how do we sustain this kind of love forever? Some days I’m not sure if I can. Some nights I get distracted from the outline and instead can only think of my daughter—not horrible things (though sometimes those, too), but magic things, her body like a lighthouse when she points to a rose and asks to smell it, when she loves the shape of a bedraggled orange cone on the side of the road, when I cannot find parking but she calls from the backseat, “P!” when she sees the blue parking sign, so happy to know what’s ahead.
Dear Ira, what outlines will our lives take? What outlines will our children’s lives take? How can we keep going, how can we sleep, when we can’t see what the shape will become, only what’s right here in front and the line behind, where we have been? The question is so big, Ira, and now the rice is boiling over because I forgot I was cooking while I wrote this and for once it feels a little good to forget, to let the mind rest somewhere gentle, and right now what’s ahead is rice for dinner, cooked fine despite boiling over, and I will go and turn the heat down, five, four, three, two, one.
Today’s Letters of Recommendation
Hiding an entire bag of Pirate’s Booty from your toddler and eating it all yourself.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s memoir about family, memory, the porousness of reality, and storytelling, The Man Who Could Move Clouds. She writes about her amnesia after a car accident:
Forgetting everything, entirely, was freedom. Amnesia was abundance. The hours lengthened into a certain timelessness, during which a ray of sunlight, never experienced before, was crowned in gold. I forgot myself. On my knees, I followed the ray of light as it cut across my apartment. I stared at the spot where the light met the dark, and in a second I’d rename it: border, grace. Everything was new. My daily labor was the act of naming. I raged with a happiness I have not since and will never again feel.
As my memory returned, piece by piece, I grieved. If amnesia was weightlessness, then the opposite was true: every path taken, every word said, every knowledge discovered, every emotion lived—all of it—came back to me with a manifest weight. The narrowing of a life is gravity. Memory is burden. I mourned every ounce of memory returned.