Dear friends,
One of the most vexing things about divorce is the inability to cohere it into The Story. Tell people you’re getting divorced, and most of the time the first thing they ask, out of shock, fear, or pity, is WHAT HAPPENED?!
I have written approximately 500 drafts of an attempt to describe What Happened in a letter-sized way. All of them were true and incomplete, and so too will this be. Previous drafts proceeded from a ground-level-mistaken assumption that I owed anyone The Whole Story, that I somehow had to clear it from the pipes before I could flow through anything else. And what I have now are fragments of a new story I’m still living my way into. Spoiler: it fucking slaps.
What happened? We grew up together. And what happened after that is we started growing up apart. My memory tends to datemark in processing complex narrative action. On December 31, 2022 I told my partner of 17 years that I was too gay to be married to a straight man and I wanted a divorce. On March 3, 2023 I moved out of my marital home and into an apartment with room for my children, bookshelves, and the best Bay view I’ve ever seen. On August 15, 2024 my divorce was finalized by the state of California.
What Happened to precipitate all that was a sensation within myself that I have come to know as The Enormous, Cosmic Not This. I believe every one of us senses it at some point; it lives in the intuition, in the body; its discomfort is unruly and obstinate; it decimates sleep with no more than a persistent whisper. The Enormous, Cosmic Not This is a powerful, propelling force. But TECNT does not know, and cannot see, what comes next. And this is the most difficult and revelatory property of TECNT: it requisitions a leap away from without offering perceptive clarity of toward. TECNT is never cheap, convenient, or comfortable, but ultimately, the blind courage of obeying it costs less than the soul death of sublimating it. And in this mystic calculus, even more than upon courage, the capacity to heed TECNT relies upon faith.
The toward emerged, and emerges, in luminous seeds. In summer 2023 my friend Audrey texted me “you really need to get obsessed with Chappell Roan”, because both Audrey and Chappell are queer icons. And I don’t remember falling this hard for a new, unmelanated artist since Amy Winehouse or Lady Gaga. Someone who feels not just like a new voice, but like a songsmith contributing new verses both to the Great American Songbook and to the soundtrack of my heart.
When Chappell sang, you can kiss a hundred boys in bars, shoot another shot to try to stop the feeling—goddamn, I felt that. You’d have to stop the world to stop the feeling.
I heard that song and I was like, I did that. I stopped my whole goddamn world. Because I couldn’t stop the feeling. Couldn’t stop the feeling that my real life, my best life, was queerer than this, freer than this, kinder than this, happier than this. Couldn’t stop feeling like strangers treated me with more respect than I received inside the home I’d paid for. Couldn’t stop sobbing every time Nina Simone sang I wish I knew how it would feel to be free even though I knew how fucking offensive it was for a white woman to self-translate into that sensation. Couldn’t stop wondering if I’d feel happier if I’d gone through with leaving a year ago like I’d planned. Couldn’t stop feeling like my kids deserved a happy mother. Couldn’t stop suspecting that I didn’t want or need a man, like, at all: not for money, not for sex, not for social legibility, not worth the trouble. Couldn’t stop dreaming of the sexual, personal, logistical, and professional possibilities of being a free and queer agent. Couldn’t stop the feeling that I would sleep better, feel better, write better, love better, be better if I could liberate myself from the heteronormative nuclear construct and into a more self-determined space.
Preferably one with a fucking beat.
Stopping the world meant locating my courage and deploying it to build. It meant signing a lease in only my name and setting up Wi-Fi by myself for the first time in my adult life. It meant handing over the keys of the home I bought with my grandmother’s money, where my children took their first steps, to the man I couldn’t live with anymore. It meant taking only my books, clothes, and art with me because I’d already haggled far too much for life’s basics inside that house and I just wanted to start fresh. It meant spring-loading a whole new life at Amazon and Target and Goodwill in scraps of time I barely had; seeing a gap on my calendar between 12 and 2:30 and thinking, I can acquire a mattress and kitchen utensils in that time. It meant writing the bravest emails I’ve ever sent: to my parents, informing them what I’d decided and firmly instructing them not to contact me for a full week. To every single living member of my extended family, saying “I’m gay,” because they were about the only people who might not know at this point. It meant accepting that I was going to cause a scene, and that it and I wouldn’t make my mama proud.
It meant making myself proud instead.
It meant literally feeling my spine straighten within days of the first breakup conversation. It meant feeling a rinsing, palpable physical relief, alleviating tension in my hips that years of yoga never managed to unravel. It meant respecting myself more than I ever have. Ever. It meant sleeping soundly and sumptuously, spread-eagle in a gorgeous king-sized bed. It meant learning the freedom of truly, finally, deeply decentering men. It meant hearing my dentist and hairstylist marvel that my skin, teeth, and hair look so much healthier. It meant hearing my oracular therapist say, unprecedentedly, “I have nothing to add, that’s exactly what I would have told you to do.” It meant learning how to conduct the tight logistics of getting laid on nights he has the kids, and how it feels to be elaborately tied up by someone I love. It meant believing the feminist things I say to my students enough to live them. It meant living Audre Lorde’s “it felt right to me” every day, with urgency and devotion.
It meant learning how to tell the fucking truth. It meant having the closest and sweetest relationship I’ve ever had with my kids. It meant reaching a plane of authenticity and candor with my parents and extended family where we’ve never previously ventured. It meant learning to exist within the duality of missing certain aspects of him and still shuddering at the daily reality of how it felt to live with him. It meant traveling beyond the horizon of everything I’d ever pictured for my life. H-O-T-T-O-T-O-G-O.
It meant understanding what Hedwig, my Jesus, learned when his mother told him, “To be free, one must give up a little part of oneself.”
It meant understanding what Toni Morrison meant when she said, “Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt.”
It meant that the part of me who survived finished four long-languishing book projects in one summer. Got signed by a new team of agents on sample chapters alone. Sold a manuscript to a commercial publisher for the first time in 16 years, and to a Big Five publisher for the first time ever. It meant that the part of me who survived has a new book coming out in September 2025. (More on that soon.)
As a combination birthday/I Survived Divorce celebration, I took myself on an aggressively fabulous weeklong vacation to Buenos Aires over Thanksgiving break. It was the greatest trip I’ve ever taken. I danced in found parties with strangers I’d never see again. I attended an academic talk in Spanish and actually followed its substance. I scarcely made it to bed before 3am. I was wined and dined by a condom heiress. Some wonderful and brilliant Stanford friends, who just happened to be visiting BA for the same week, took me to a lavish birthday lunch and a feminist textile exhibit (below). The whole experience felt like the honeymoon of my homecoming to myself.
A lot of people asked me, why Buenos Aires, and I didn’t and don’t really have a better answer than I wanted to speak Spanish and enjoy summer south of the equator, I’d heard it was a sexy, queer-friendly city, and also I passionately loved Madonna as Evita when I was 12.
My 12-year-old self was so intuitively correct about Buenos Aires that I find myself trusting her gangly, bespectacled north star ever more. 12 feels, for me, like the last moment before sexual initiation, the year I placed at both a spelling bee and a beauty pageant, an era of raw, tender, unmitigated desire. 12-year-old Laura loved the nerve of Madonna and Evita. She read and wrote voraciously. She played music all the time. She was obsessed with her girlfriends. She talked back to loud boys. She dreamed of going to college and of being a writer and a professor in a big city. In sum, 12-year-old Laura was a bad bitch, everything golden and sumptuous in my adult life originates from her aspiration, and I mourn every minute I ever spent trying to hide and kill her. She is now the mermaid at the prow of my ship, arms extended, salt in her hair.
I didn’t know exactly why I had to go to Buenos Aires until I re-listened to the Evita soundtrack. And there was the answer, right there in its most famous song:
I had to let it happen
I had to change
Couldn’t stay all my life down at heel
Looking out of the window, staying out of the sun
So I chose freedom
I could go on, and I will, in this new forum. I have some stories in the chamber I’ve been saving for a special occasion like surviving into my 40s and thriving as no man’s wife. I keep trying to have a plan for this newsletter and keep returning to the inimitable fact that my life now is simply much more vibes than plans. So that’s my invitation: Less plans. More vibes.
LEG.
COVER OF A COVER CORNER
(In the previous TinyLetter editions of this newsletter, I really enjoyed tracking my own media diet by saving links I loved for its footer. Largely because the longform journalism I used to love reading on the hellscape formerly known as Twitter has exploded into a defunded, Substackified supernova, my recent links are audio.)
Kelly Clarkson covering Chappell. Kelly and Miranda Lambert covering Chappell. Melissa Etheridge remixing Chappell in the gayest possible way. Mariachi Chappell. Patti Smith covering Lana del Rey. Alice Smith covering Jeff Buckley. Two revelatory covers of the same Radiohead song: 1) Danielle Ponder and 2) Avie Sheck and his mom. Julia Louis-Dreyfus interviewing old women. Do you ever need to revisit the way Luke Combs looks at Tracy Chapman, just as a little treat? Never underestimate the will of an Italian Catholic girl from the Midwest.