Just Show Up
My Trip to the San Francisco Bay Area
Just showing up I got to see my friend Sharon, host extraordinaire, celebrate Shabbat with her lovely family. Her homemade challah (actually two of them), hearing her daughter say the hamotzi (the blessing over the bread), her gorgeous kiddush cups. Watching Sharon make us a delicious dinner with aplomb. Walking around her bountiful kitchen lined with dozens of cookbooks. Waking up to European-style coffee made on her fancy coffee maker with a million levers and tools that brought me back to a cafe I visited in Spain last spring.
Just showing up I got to hear my friend Julie tell us about her incredible labor of love—creating the organization Waste Free Greenwich. How she studies best practices and then creates them for her community. No fear, no fanfare, just a desire to make the world a little better.
Just showing up I got to witness my friend Sujatha lead an immersive meditation at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where the room was quiet and still and pulsing with peace. I got to watch how Sujatha immediately put people at ease and welcomed them into the beautiful and vibrant space. I got to digest her words reminding us to have equanimity, to see the humanity in others and to have hope for a better world.
Just showing up I got to have a transformative experience at a Wild Writing Teacher Training. Our extraordinary teacher Laurie Wagner welcomed us into her sweet home. We were greeted with strong coffee and homemade muffins, given name tags and encouraged to settle in. We were all just where we were meant to be. Witnessing the exquisite writing of others; absorbing their truth. The room vibrated with warmth, grief, excitement, regret, ambition and love. My fingers were tingling just being in the presence of so much wisdom and vulnerability.
Where do you need to show up? Please do what you can to make it happen. It can be magical.
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Pep Talk: On Writing As the World Burns
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Pep Talk: On Writing as the World Burns
At my writing retreat, I heard dozens of poems. The power of poetry is new to me. This writing by Maggie Smith captures the importance of reading poetry in times like these.
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together—building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone nicknamed “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.
With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
Wreck by Catherine Newman
“Wreck is a delight. What an absolute joy to be reunited with Rocky and her family, the characters we all fell in love with in Sandwich. Newman’s prose is laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also profound. I couldn’t stop reading, even though I didn’t want it to end.”—J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Cliffs
“Wreck is the kind of book that pulls up a chair, pours the wine, and dives deep—equal parts hilarious, sharp, and achingly sincere. I didn’t just read it—I felt known by it. A luminous, laugh-out-loud triumph.”—Alison Espach, New York Times bestselling author of The Wedding People
The acclaimed bestselling author of Sandwich is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry—and relate.)
Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who’s back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in.
It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal . . . until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them—and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.
With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people—no matter how much you love them—are not always exactly who you want them to be.
A wonderful description of Amy’s visit that lets the reader feel as if they are in the room with her and her friends.