Love Warrior—the story of the dramatic destruction and painstaking reconstruction of my family—is expected to be one of the biggest books of the year. I will be promoting it on stages and in the media for, well, forever.
I am trying to find my feelings about this. Fear? Excitement? Shame? I can’t isolate anything specific. I stare at the plane, wondering how to explain my life’s most intimate, complicated experience to a sea of strangers within my seven allotted minutes. I have written a book, and now I must become a commercial for the book I have written. What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?
I’d been at this airport gate starting line before. Three years before, I’d released my first book and traveled the country telling the story of how I’d finally found happily-ever-after by trading my lifelong food and booze addictions for a son, a husband, and writing. I’d stood on stages all over the country and repeated the book’s message to hopeful women: Carry on. Life is hard, but you are a warrior. One day it will all come together for you, too.
Right after that first book’s ink dried, I sat in a therapist’s office and listened to my husband say that he’d been sleeping around since our wedding.
I held my breath as he said, “There have been other women,” and when I inhaled again, the air was made of smelling salts. He kept apologizing while looking down at his hands, and the impotent stammering made me laugh out loud. My laughter made both men—my husband and his therapist—visibly uncomfortable. Their discomfort made me feel powerful. I looked at the door and willed adrenaline to carry me out of that building, across the parking lot, and into my minivan.
I sat in the driver’s seat for a while and realized that the revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.
I was furious with him and disgusted with myself. I’d let down my guard and trusted that the other characters in my story would act as they should and that my plot would unfold as I’d mapped it. I’d rendered my own future and my children vulnerable by ceding creative control to another character. What an idiot. Never again. I would take back full control, starting now. This was my story and my family, and I would decide how it ended. I’d take this shit I’d been handed, and I’d spin it into gold.
I took control back with words, sentences, chapters, and scripts. I started with the story’s resolution in mind—a healed, whole family—and worked backward from there. There would be rage, pain, therapy, self-discovery, forgiveness, reluctant trust, then eventually: fresh intimacy and redemption. I do not know if I lived the next few years and then wrote about what happened or if I wrote the next few years and then made it all happen. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that at the end of that blur of time I had myself a dark love story—a drama of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and redemption, brokenness and healing. In book form and family form. Checkmate, Life.
In Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty, a reader approaches Lucy at her book-signing table and asks of her memoir, “How do you remember all of that?”
“I don’t remember it,” she says. “I write it.”
When Love Warrior was complete, I handed the manuscript to Craig and said, “Here. Here is what it all meant. I made it all mean something. We won the war. Our family made it. We are a love story after all. You are welcome.”
Now the war has ended, and I want to go home. But home is still a foxhole with me and Craig left staring at each other, wondering: What now? What did we win?
I call my sister and ask if I can cancel the book launch event in Chicago. I want her to tell me that this will be fine, no big deal. She says, “We can cancel, but it will be a big deal. You committed to this.”
So I do this thing I do. From the outside I imagine it looks like a straightening, a stiffening. From the inside it feels like turning my liquid self to a solid. Water to ice. Glennon has left the building. I’ve got this. I board the plane to go tell a story I’m not sure I believe.
It will be okay. I’ll just tell it like a story instead of a life. As if I am past the end instead of stuck in the middle. I’ll tell the truth, but I’ll tell it with a slant: I’ll blame myself just enough; present him in the most sympathetic light; attach my bulimia to my frigidity and my frigidity to his infidelity. I’ll tell how the cheating led to my self-reflection, how self-reflection led to forgiveness and pain led to redemption. I’ll tell it so that people will decide: Of course. It was leading to this ending all along. I see. It all had to happen exactly that way. That is what I will decide, too.
The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.
I arrive in Chicago and meet my book publicist at the Palmer House hotel, where the event is being held. This weekend is the literary Super Bowl, and she’s buzzing. We are on our way to a dinner where ten authors will get to know one another before we head into the ballroom and pitch our upcoming books from the stage. This dinner, which I have just learned about a few hours before, has heightened my introvert terror alert level from yellow to red.
The room where the authors are to have dinner is small, with two long conference tables pushed together to form a square. Instead of sitting, people are milling. Milling with people I do not know is my idea of hell on Earth. I do not mill. I walk over to the drink table and pour an ice water. A famous writer walks over and introduces herself. She asks, “Are you Glennon? I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You’re the Christian one, right?”
Yes, I’m the one.
“My new book is about a woman who has a religious experience and becomes a Christian. Do you believe it? A Christian! It feels so real to her! I don’t know how my readers will react: Will people be able to take her seriously? What do you think? Do you feel like people take you seriously?”
I say the most serious thing I can think of and then excuse myself.
I look at the table. No assigned seats, damnit. George Saunders sits quietly at the end of the table. He seems gentle and kind and I’d like to sit next to him, but he is a man and I don’t know how to talk to men. At the end of the table is a young woman with calm energy. I sit down next to her. She is a twentysomething releasing her first children’s book. I ask her question after question while considering how wonderful it would be if the organizers would just place our books on the table, so we could get to know each other by reading silently. We butter our rolls. Salads are served. As I’m reaching for dressing, the children’s book lady looks over at the door. I look over, too.
Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe. She has short hair, platinum on top, shaved on the sides. She is wearing a long trench coat, a red scarf, a warm half smile, cool steel confidence. She stands still there for a moment, taking inventory of the room. I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life.
My whole being says:
There She Is.
Then, I lose control of my body. I stand up and open my arms wide.
She looks over, cocks her head to the side, raises her eyebrows, smiles at me.
Fuck Fuck Fuck Why am I standing? Why are my arms open? Oh my God, What Am I Doing?