We Do What We Want

Dear Amelia,

I don't even want to do the math for how long it took me to respond to your bio of me because I never want to do math and also because, as you so cleverly said to me when I expressed anxiety about it: We do what we want!

Amen, amen, amen.

In your previous post about Jonathan Franzen, author and PR-accidentalist extraordinaire, I loved your spiraling way of getting at parenting and writing and bad advice. I especially, as always, loved your "npr talk," which is not even what I think of your particular habit of recounting radio interviews and internet tidbits as, but it seems like the thing to call it here, so I hope that's okay. I also secretly hope everyone in your life now has a phrase for their fleeting thought, "Here Amelia goes with her npr talk again!"

As you know, we recently had the chance to see each other on the occasion of your reading in Wisconsin. About six minutes into our reunion you were discussing Sherman Alexie, Episcopal churches, and literary submissions. As my baby toddled beside us, examining rocks, we meandered in the deliciously brisk night air and something like gratitude, but wilder, zapped my veins. You hopped along your ideas, lighting a chain of hyperlinks in my brain and I thought: Yes. This. More more more.

This seems a good time to bring in your bio, because in it I try to sum up your combo of intellectual hearth-tending and all-around heart-tending. Let's see how I do, okay?

Amelia is the author of Bon Appétempt: A Coming of Age Memoir (with Recipes!), which I almost just called A Coming of Age Recipe!, and I think that makes sense, too. She is the founder of the award-winning blog Bon Appétempt where you can find, among other things, her husband Matt's gorgeous photographs and stylish videos, Amelia's thoughts on recipes she's trying or modes of being she's trying to outgrow, disappointments she's embracing, successes she's being impressively modest about, her thoughts on parenting, her thoughts on LA, glimpses of her light-flooded home, beloved (especially by me) glimpses of her east-coast family, pictures of her ridiculously cute son, Teddy, and her esteemed, floppy-haired, first child, Mavis (who is actually a dog, not a child), all shot through with the kind of off-handed humor that you never see coming, humor that takes your breath away with its casual, pointed, self-deprecating turns.

Among the many things I admire about Amelia, like her discipline and persistent appetite for creative expression, her ability to metabolize intellectual ideas at light speed is one of my favorites. What tops that, though, is her honesty and willingness to explore the still-forming things in her life. Some days, this willingness to see out all her attempts, and to own up to the awkwardness or the tension and plain emotional duress that trying anything worthwhile entails, shocks my heart to life. I want to posit that it's this willingness to try, and effort's inherent vulnerability and innocence, that is the source of all her dead-pan humor, and that this person with an electric mind and abundant, life-saving jokes (who also sends me stickers in the mail) has one of the most open and caring hearts I've ever seen.

By the way, in your description of me, you imagined I don't torture myself about my decisions. Just to let you - and everyone - behind the curtain, I torture myself every single day. When I give advice to friends, I'm pretty passionate about the "right" thing to do. Hearing it in my own life is, of course, a lot harder. It's probably why I like giving advice to friends so much :)

Without going into a lot of boring personal data, it takes much still, alone time for me to hear the quiet voices of wisdom inside me. This is why writing is like oxygen for me and my life. Becoming a mother has compressed my time to such intense pockets of freedom that sometimes those voices of wisdom and gentleness get squashed out entirely. While I'm happy that my reputation still stands as a sane person, you are lucky that you see the end product of my to-and-fro decision process that includes plenty of hand-wringing, reading of tea leaves, and pitifully desperate offerings to the gods.

In case anyone mistakes the above photo for my total endorsement of J. Fran, I was sort of enjoying Purity this fall until I got near page 100 and encountered what appeared to be the unironic use of a phrase so vulgar my response was to automatically shut the book and return it to the library. If I do finish the novel someday, I can then listen to what you described as Roxane Gay's unimpressed appraisal of it. I look forward to one of those things!

In other news, I am excited for this fresh(ish) phase of Grizzly & Golden with some updated pictures (maybe) and two long, winding bios. I still secretly want to do a mock up of intellectual bio photos, but since you tackled that stunt so fantastically on Bon Appétempt, I'll just settle for putting up any new bio photos at all.  Deadline: December, 2016.

Love to you and your radiant ways, sister!
XOXO

P.S. Samantha ate a million Craisins while I wrote this post.