Forthcoming Books

I was taken out of the oven too soon, like a partially-baked soufflé that falls flat in the middle. And what I’m going to tell you isn’t perfectly accurate, but as real as I can make it. No one’s at fault and no blame to be placed anywhere, just the failures of people muddling through life. I’ve tried to see things from others’ points of view along with mine, avoiding temptation to blame, but also not being too hard on myself. It’s a delicate balance facing the circumstances that have channeled my life and taking responsibility for pain caused others. 

The more specifically we talk about our lives, the more universal our story becomes, and some of this may resonate with you, because we all fall down, get up, and harbor misconceptions. What I’ve come to understand tumbling around planet Earth, is that all of us made mistakes and wish we’d done better. To protect privacy, I’ve used pseudonyms for some people, left others alone, but it’s all true, or at least my version told through the filter of personal experience. 

Not for the fainthearted, memoir requires total honesty, no holds barred or punches pulled, hitting less hard than one could. And revealing yourself in this way can be humiliating but worth the embarrassment. You’re in a war zone with yourself, and if you’re not going to tell the truth, don’t bother. Mine has been a struggle with many dead ends and cul-de-sacs, trying to evolve into someone of value and then embracing her. Some episodes will amuse you, others make you sad, or you’ll just shake your head and wonder, how could she have done that? 

It all started with my mother’s letters, found among her sister’s correspondence. I hadn’t intended to write a memoir, but there they were, seven letters written from a nursing home during the last months of her life, a place to die, not recover. Sad, but not self-pitying, they held the few memories I had of her, and I wrote a reflection about them, later realizing I had more to say. 

My parents came from very different backgrounds, father from the Pale of Settlement, that geographic corridor stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, created to protect Russian merchants from Jewish competition. His was a Polish town with a population of four thousand, who made meager livings as butchers, bakers, tanners and peddlers of everything imaginable. 

With a Holocaust mentality and little confidence in the future, he had fled Eastern Europe as it was crumbling and expected the worst to happen. Nothing was forever; loss was now or coming. Things might alter in a second and little you did could change that. Jews from the shtetl understood this and tried to protect themselves by spitting three times on things they loved. There, they said, that should keep the devil way. People were out to get you, and if you didn’t keep your head down, ultimately would. It was one shoe waiting for another to drop, a Jewish mistrust of the world. To stay safe, you needed to remain vigilant at all times. Had Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics been around, “Sweet Dreams” might have been his anthem; it certainly became mine. “Sweet dreams are made of this; who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas, everybody’s looking for something. Some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you, some of them want to abuse you; some of them want to be abused.”

My mother was American-born and soft where he was hard, smart, capable but powerless. Her parents had come to America during the 1890’s from Austria and owned a two-story house in Brooklyn. High school educated, she worked as a stenographer, loved tennis and had a season-ticket for the opera. 

What she found appealing about this recently arrived immigrant is hard to fathom. In her mid-twenties, maybe she thought she was running out of time, perhaps she already had been disappointed in love; something charmed her. Uneducated, he had no profession or means to earn a living, but as my older brother says, love is blind. It wasn’t enough to save a disastrous marriage. In short order, bill collectors started banging on the door, electricity got turned off and the family fled one apartment after another, a step ahead of landlords. 

The decision to define myself differently began when my mother attempted to leave, grabbing my hand and heading for where buses drove into New York City. She probably was heading for her sister’s apartment on West 92nd Street, but when the tan and white bus stopped, didn’t have enough money to climb aboard. That day she didn’t escape, but soon developed symptoms of Cancer that would kill her two years later, a departure, as it were, through death. That was it; I never was going to be dependent on anyone for survival. If this loss was possible what other tragedies lurked? 

On the afternoon she died, my father told me to grow up. “You’ll have to take care of yourself now. I won’t be around to look out for you.” At thirteen, I became an emotional orphan. Yes, I still had a father and brother, but both were away for various reasons, and while there were aunts and uncles, my father had alienated most by borrowing money. 

My memories of this time are of isolation in makeshift apartments with no heat and little food, when something shifted in me and never shifted back. Childhood was over and I entered a spiritual wasteland. To compensate, or so I thought, I grew fiercely independent and developed the solitary nature that defines me still. Time came and went, as people entered and exited my general malaise, interrupted occasionally by brief passages of contentment. It was melancholia camouflaged by a forced cheerfulness masking pain, desperate to become what I was not, happy.

Now, nobody’s life is perfect and bad childhoods common, but mine left an indelibly bad impression. Along with developing a tough exterior so as not to incur harm, there always needed to be an exit strategy, a personal bank account, deed with my name on it, or weekly paycheck, anything would do. The idea was not to be caught blindsided. Too frightened to jump in, I walked on life’s periphery, not participating but surviving in lower case. Disaster lurked everywhere: a worrisome medical diagnosis, poor investment, job loss or bad luck.  

Something always held back, mine was a groping and tentative nature never exposed.  I existed at such a level of mistrust, I didn’t know how to fully connect, What I’d been deprived of in youth made me vulnerable to emotional disruptions in adulthood. I thought happiness would be bestowed on me by someone who miraculously would appear, continually seeking validation and a better deal around the corner. 

After my mother’s death, feelings of unworthiness lodged in my mind, and I expressed them through a lifetime of sabotage by obstructing happiness, easy to do when you get the hang of it. The word saboter originally meant to kick something with an old wooden shoe, and that’s what I gave myself, a lifelong kick in the butt.  I figured who we are is where we come from, and since I came from nothing, thought I deserved little. Everything about me was “not really.” I was Jewish but not really, from an affluent New Jersey town, but not really, going to college but not really, and promoting myself as capable when I was half baked. It was a long list of detriments: poor social skills, an undisciplined mind, a dead mother and unreliable father and no extended family or connection to anything. I simply was not up to the task, feeling like damaged goods on a seconds rack alongside cracked mugs and miss-sized socks, convinced I didn’t deserve anything really good.  

The ultimate giveaway was that I could never use any of the exquisite things I bought or was given: my grandmother’s diamonds, red lizard shoes so beautiful I couldn’t wear them, a cashmere sweater from Mongolia with little chance of coming out of its box, and gorgeous Italian agenda books that never got written in, saved for later times that never came. 

On the positive side, I had a degree of optimism that countered fear, the notion I might “make something of myself,” and what can only be described as Hapless Pluck, a willingness to do anything to win, Jewish chutzpah, but more. It was a resourcefulness fused with perseverance and ambition, traits that helped me succeed and simultaneously did me in. I never took no for an answer, thought rules good since they kept order, but didn’t think they applied to me. My response to “no” was “why not?” and I considered tenacity as important as talent, sometimes more so. Goals were attainable if you stuck with them, and what one lacked in talent could be overridden through determination. 

Only mine was a flawed ego; two divergent selves with little overlap, a competent me versus beleaguered one, the adult alongside a child with no sense of the future, just a need for instant gratification. I reacted to whatever came along, never seeing life in its entirety. I seemed confident, but never felt mature enough to do adult things, nor viewed myself as one, more like a teenager hoping people would like and accept me. 

Life centered on discovering how the world worked, why people acted as they did and outcomes emerged. It was a mystery to me, as it had been to my father, and a pursuit I took seriously. More than anything, I wanted to stop feeling like driftwood on the open sea, tossed from one crest to another. Rather than life controlling me, I yearned to harness it, and the path towards this was education, not just the book learning kind, only that too, but to become savvy about the world. I wanted desperately to become someone who knew something; didn’t have to be much, just something. 

This took time, and along the way I became a skilled impostor. From youth I realized I was someone of scant substance, so masquerading became a necessity. I saw the world as accepting me tentatively, continually expecting someone to find me out and say, “What’s she doing here? She’s a fraud, she doesn’t belong.” I was a ready to be anything people wanted, with no strong convictions about anything except my sexuality, which I fiercely guarded and bestowed on the highest bidder. About other things, I remained indifferent and did whatever seemed expedient. You want a blue suit? I’ll give you a blue light. 

I had no money as a teenager, but wanting to impress a boy, once bought a tie at a fancy men’s store, then cut off its label and sewed it into the back of a shirt I’d gotten at some cheap place. Only it didn’t fit, and when he returned it to the expensive shop, they indignantly said it wasn’t theirs. When he came to me confused, was I embarrassed? Hardly; if you fabricated as much as I did, sometimes you got caught. It was the cost of doing business, one more system to game, and I liked putting things over on people. With no real integrity, I had a casual relationship with truth and lied regularly. 

My limitations were grossly evident to teachers. Only fortune intervened, and through some administrative error, I was put in the advanced English class of the school’s best instructor, Horatio Wirtz.  If you were in his section, you were with the cool kids who knew their way around and heading for good colleges. Brilliant and inspiring, he sparked my interest in literature and idea of becoming an author. But it was a child’s romanticized notion of one. Writing seemed like a fine thing to do, and fit the model of the woman I wanted to become. 

I had always kept diaries, first those with shiny locks and little keys, moving along to Moleskine journals with rounded corners and a sewn spines, modeled after those handmade notebooks made by French bookbinders in the 19thcentury. They came with ribbon bookmarks and wide elastic banding, and I wrote in them daily, trying to stay authentic and understand what was happening around me. Years later on a book tour, the person driving me between media events, known as an “author escort,” pulled out a journal and asked me to contribute my philosophy of life. “I ask all my authors to do it,” she explained, showing me sage comments by Garrison Keillor and Amy Tan. Dutifully, I added my thoughts which concerned the nature of writing; “Just do the work, not for money or acclaim but privilege of doing it,” something I believed passionately, knowing it had saved my life. 

Part of the “hinge generation,” I had one foot in the fifties, when marriage meant motherhood and being a homemaker, and the other in the sixties, when women felt they could become protagonists in their own lives. The ambient energy of feminism was upon us, and we assumed we had plenty of time for invention. After all we had agency, believing we could create a world of our own invention.  

It was a leap of faith to become Kendall Taylor, a fabricated name defining a woman who knew what she wanted and how to achieve it. She seemed the answer to everything I hoped to achieve, a person to be reckoned with, well educated, savvy and out of the ordinary. Majoring in English at college, what women from my generation often did, I became fluid with expression, and by my mid-twenties had written everything from essays to features, short stories, poetry, travel pieces and television scripts. I found my niche writing about people, first with profile pieces and later biographical articles and books. Their stories fascinate me and I’m equally interested hearing them from a driver at a truck stop, or Ambassador at a state dinner. So now, if someone asks, “what kind of writer are you,” it feels comfortable to say, I’m a biographer. 

Only, if you carry around unworthiness, no amount of degrees or achievements overrides that. So, even when I became who I wanted to be, I could not fully integrate that person into my psyche. You can change your name and add an endless list of titles, but unless you embrace your journey with all its magical illuminations, satisfaction remains elusive. 

As for relationships, I was never meant to be anyone’s full time wife. I didn’t want to be a helpmate to a husband’s career, but yearned for my own. Nor did I want children, at least not in my twenties, afraid that if I chose domesticity, I would relinquish being protagonist of my life and wind up like my mother. I also didn’t think I’d be a particularly good mother, and when I got the opportunity, wasn’t. My childhood had produced a woman afraid of being dependent on a man and fiercely reliable on herself, but it was independence tinged with desperation, and though married twice, I would spend much of my life alone.

None of this did I understand straight out of college, when I married my West Point boyfriend and began a life together, quickly interrupted by Vietnam and a separation that became a blueprint for disaster. It would take the love of a second husband and him saying, “you’re fine the way you are” to set things right. He anchored me like a drafting compass, two parts connected by a hinge, one with a fixed foot, the other adjustable and roaming, inextricably connected despite the distance between them. With him as my grounding I could accomplish anything, and our marriage thrived despite geographic separations until his heartbreaking death. 

People like thinking things happen for a reason, but sometimes they don’t, even after spitting three times. We all experience losses and setbacks, but how we deal with them is critical and predictive of future success or failure. At its base is acknowledging that all of us deserve a life of contentment, choosing that over self-denial and deprivation, telling ourselves unequivocally, in a way that leaves no doubt---yes, yes.