Theodora Goss

I think life is a process of collecting scars.

Mine are inconsequential, all things considered. The oldest ones are the marks from immunizations: smallpox on one arm, tuberculosis on the other. If you were born in the United States, you won’t have these. But when I was a child, in socialist Hungary, we were still being immunized against Victorian-era diseases. So I have a round scar on one arm the size of a five-forint piece, a smaller round scar on the other. There is the small round scar near one eye from having chicken pox, and the small straight scar near the other eye from a rowdy-boys-during-gym accident in high school. After I got that one, I was wheeled through the school in a wheelchair with blood flowing down my face. I felt quite injured and fancy! When my mother looked at it, she said, “Oh, that’s nothing. Wounds like that always bleed a lot.” Then she put a few butterfly steri-strips over it, and that was that.

Then there are my two appendectomy scars from graduate school. I suppose they mark where the video camera and surgical tools went in. I can barely see them now. And then there is the scar from the thyroid lobectomy in May. That’s the largest and most prominent, of course. I still don’t know how I feel about it. Perhaps I will feel differently when the internal scar tissue is not so palpable. Right now, four months after the surgery, it still feels like I have a rubber eraser in my neck. I’m still using scar gel and SPF 50, still doing scar massage, the way they demonstrate in the YouTube videos. I feel very lucky that there have only been two serious problems with my health so far — appendicitis and recurring nodules on my thyroid — and that they are very common problems to have. All in all, I’ve spent very little time in hospitals.

Nevertheless, I think life is a process of collecting scars. They don’t go away, not fully — they are like marks on the map of your body, showing where you’ve been, what you’ve experienced. Time writes your history on your skin, just as you might write it in a journal. Except, of course, that time’s journal is public. You can see the scar on my neck, although it’s slowly fading. And when you see it, you might ask yourself (if you’re too polite to ask me), What happened there?

But I was thinking too of the scars that are not written on our skin, the scars that are inside, that affect our hearts and minds. Life is a process of being wounded, healing, but then feeling the scar left behind — because I think there is always a scar left behind. From each hurt, each loss, each failure. And then it’s a process of waiting as we heal, of trying to help the healing process. The first medicine for my surgical scar was oxycodone. For heartbreak, the first medicine might be hours of watching Netflix, which would have a similarly numbing effect. Instead of applying scar gel, you might apply ice cream where it hurts. Or music. Or long walks. Or, of course, therapy.

I suppose it depends on the depth of the wound, the extent of the scar. For some wounds, the process of healing is long, and the resulting scar can limit your mobility, your flexibility — this is as true for mental and emotional scars as physical ones. I don’t know what the process of scar massage might feel like for these internal scars. I’m not a therapist. But there must be one — there must be a way of dealing with them so they hurt more in the short term, but less in the long term. Hopefully, if I’m diligent about the massage part of my therapy, the rubber eraser in my neck will eventually go away, and I won’t feel it each time I swallow.

So I guess I don’t really have any wisdom here, because scars aren’t exactly beautiful, and saying that everyone becomes scarred is not an optimistic statement. The scars fade, but never completely. But I’m not trying to say something wise or optimistic. Rather, I’m trying to say something about how I’m experiencing life right now, which is as a relentless march of time that marks you as it passes. And yet, and yet, we also write on paper, and that is as valid as what time writes on our bodies.

Perhaps it is the way we respond to how time scars us. Perhaps the marks we make on paper are the way we take time’s power into our own hands, make our marks against time. We say, “You may scar my body, but look — these words will outlast me.” Whether on clay or papyrus or parchment, we have been doing this since writing began. And now here I am, doing it on a computer screen, writing, “I think life is a process of collecting scars.” And perhaps, just perhaps, if these words are shared and copied and remembered, they may outlast my physical body. Or other words of mine may be the ones that last, who knows? And so, I continue to collect scars and make my marks on the computer screen, as I am doing now.

(The image is Head of a Woman by Pablo Picasso.)

I was sent home from the hospital with three bottles of pills: oxycodone, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen. They were white pills in orange plastic bottles, very much hospitals pills: uncoated, difficult to swallow. I only took a few of them. I quickly realized that the oxycodone was much too strong for me. I only used it in the first few days, when I couldn’t sleep. The ibuprofen was also too strong and gave me nausea. After the first week, I went back to my ordinary Tylenol and Advil.

That first week, I mostly slept and ate and slept. By the second week, I could get back to work, and I had to — I needed to finish grading for the semester. Just after my grades were in, I received the final biopsy result. This was the real biopsy, not the fine needle biopsy that had told us the thyroid nodule was “suspicious for malignancy.” Now, post-surgery, they would actually be able to diagnose what had been happening in my neck. The result was: benign. There was no malignancy. I had what they called an “oncocytic follicular adenoma,” which used to be called a Hürthle cell adenoma.

Of course I did some research. One of the funniest parts of this experience has been that I always try to do my research, so when my endocrinologist or surgeon said to me, “According to the most recent studies,” I could say, “Yes, I read those studies,” and I had — in JAMA or on the website of the National Institutes of Heath or wherever. This is what happens when you’re treating a rhetoric professor who teaches research techniques for a living (and whose parents are doctors).

(Medical procedures are highly comical, in a dark comedy sort of way. My surgery only took a few hours, so I went in on a Thursday morning and went home that same afternoon. When I got home and looked in a mirror, I realized that I had purple lines on my neck. There was a thin purple line going down my neck, and then one thin purple line across the middle, and a thick purple line below. There was also an arrow drawn on the left side of my neck. The thin purple lines must have been some sort of surgical marker — I looked those up too, and apparently they’re called SkinMarker. You can buy them on Amazon. They look like the white board markers I use in my classrooms. The surgeon must have used them to plan the incision, sort of the way an artist starts by drawing a series of lines showing relative proportions. The arrow must have been drawn on to indicate which side of my thyroid to remove. The thick purple line was surgical glue covering the incision itself. It was not a dark purple, more like a violet that eventually faded to lilac — a happy color that reminded me of a muppet. It made me laugh to see the little arrow on my neck, while it lasted.) So, as I said, I did my research.

The best and clearest description of what I had comes, unsurprisingly, from Wikipedia, which says that “Hürthle cell neoplasm is a rare tumor of the thyroid” that occurs mostly in women. “When benign, it is called a Hürthle cell adenoma, and when malignant it is called a Hürthle cell carcinoma. Hürthle cell adenoma is characterized by a mass of benign Hürthle cells.” Of course I wanted to know who Hürthle was, even though the medical profession is moving away from naming conditions after people. Wikipedia says that Karl Hürthle (1860-1945) “was a German physiologist and histologist” who received his degree from the University of Tübingen and became famous for his contributions in the field of haemodynamics. While I understand why we might not want to keep the old names of diseases, it sounds much more impressive to say that I had a Hürthle cell adenoma than an oncocytic follicular adenoma, perhaps because of the German name, especially with an umlaut. An umlaut makes everything seem much more serious.

The process of healing is really a process, and it’s psychological as much as it is physical. I had been expecting this diagnosis, simply because I had gone into the surgery knowing the possibility of cancer was about 15-30%, which meant the possibility of no cancer was 70-85%. That’s a pretty large possibility. And I had talked to the surgeon about how I would feel if that were the case. Would I feel as though the surgery had been unnecessary? As though a part of my body had been removed for no reason? The problem is that, according to an article from Oncologist called “Follicular Adenoma and Carcinoma of the Thyroid Gland” (which is the sort of article I would expect my students to cite — no Wikipedia for them!), “A major limitation of fine needle aspiration biopsy . . . is the inability to distinguish a follicular adenoma from a follicular carcinoma.” And, as Wikipedia puts it, “Typically [an adenoma] is removed because it is not easy to predict whether it will transform into the malignant counterpart of Hürthle cell carcinoma, which is a subtype of follicular thyroid cancer.” Basically, without surgery, there is no way to tell whether you’re looking at an adenoma or a carcinoma, and you can’t tell for sure what will happen to an adenoma in the future. They are very unlikely to turn cancerous. But unlikely is not the same as “never happens.”

That did not keep me from bursting into angry tears when I saw the diagnosis, nor having to spend a week working though the psychological confusion of it. Would it have been better if we had found a malignancy? Of course not. Would it have been better if there had been no need for surgery — if we could have known it was a benign adenoma in the first place? Yeah, sure. Should I have taken the other option I was given by the endocrinologist and waited until the fall, then done another ultrasound and fine needle biopsy? I asked the surgeon if it would have made any difference, if we would have gotten any different information then. “No,” he told me. “The FNB would have come back either ‘suspicious’ or possibly ‘indeterminate.’ It would never have come back ‘normal.'” If it would have come back “suspicious” again, I would definitely have chosen surgery, so we would have ended up in the same place. If it would have come back “indeterminate,” we would all have worried that the second fine needle biopsy had missed something.

Here is the takeaway, the hashtag quotation: Life is a series of decisions you make with insufficient information. You can put that on Goodreads.

(Another humorous part of this, for me, is that these categories were created by a team at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in order to standardize diagnosis, so they are called Bethesda I through VI. My diagnosis, “suspicious,” was Bethesda V. The funny part of it is, when I was a little girl, my mother used to work at the NIH, and I used to go there after school whenever for some reason we did not have a babysitter. So I would play in the halls, and sometimes, since this was the olden days before the current strict protocols, I could even visit the rabbits and mice. My elementary school artwork hung in a laboratory in NIH Building 10.)

(Another humorous part was when I took back all the pills I had not taken to the hospital pharmacy for disposal. “You really don’t want these?” the pharmacist said, as though he could not understand why I would give back free medicine. “I really don’t,” I said, handing over the orange plastic bottles. They were basically still full. Hospital medicine is foul stuff.)

The final part of this process, for now, was a blood test. It came back normal — the right side of my thyroid seems to be humming along, merrily pumping out all the thyroid hormones I need. It doesn’t seem to miss the left side at all.

Of course, I’m still healing. The purple surgical glue has mostly come off, but a strip of it is still sticking to me, as though it does not want to leave my neck. The incision site is a bit hard and swollen. There’s work going on in there — my cells repairing things. It’s a reconstruction site. The scar looks very good — it’s thin, and unless you’re standing close to me, you might not even notice it. It will fade even more over time. Someday, I will have wrinkles there and it will be invisible. For now, I need to treat it with silicone gel and keep it out of direct sunlight, so I’ll be wearing a bandage over it for a while.

The psychological part is harder. I’ve been incredibly lucky with my health. So far I’ve had an appendix and half my thyroid out. Those are the only serious medical problems I’ve had. But this experience has reminded me how fragile and miraculous bodies are. They’ve reminded me that I have a limited time on this earth, and that I’d better make the most of it. Some days that’s a depressing thought, some days an invigorating one.

It is, at any rate, a reminder that I need to do my work, the work that is in me to do, while I can.

(The image is Catherine La Rose by Richard Emil Miller.)

My thyroid and I got along very well for a long time. We had a good relationship — I lived my life, and it provided me with the hormones I needed. There was that incident about twenty years ago, when suddenly I noticed a bump on my thyroid. It was about the size of a quarter, and filled with something — it felt like half of a water balloon. I went to an endocrinologist, who gave me a long talk about thyroid cancer that was, I think, more for the resident who was helping him than for me. He put a needle into the water balloon to get some fluid to test, and the water balloon deflated. The test came back negative. It had been nothing — a harmless cyst.

So when I felt a bump on my thyroid again, shortly after Christmas, I had some context for it. I knew approximately what it could be. I managed to get an appointment at the clinic where my primary care provider works — it took waiting for two weeks, and I would only be seeing a nurse practitioner. Apparently all the actual doctors were busy. The receptionist was also busy talking to her friend while I tried to make an appointment. That was the start of my journey in making appointments, and every appointment system was as bad as that first one. I have a theory that the most difficult part of healthcare in American is making an appointment with anyone anywhere. The second most difficult part is, of course, the billing system. I have tried to explain to European friends about “co-pays.” They stare at me blankly.

The nurse practitioner ordered a bunch of tests, all of which came back normal. She also requested an ultrasound, for which I had to go to Boston Medical Center. The ultrasound results came back. I had some nodes on my thyroid. They looked normal. No follow-up recommended. But I still had a bump on my throat. My mother, who happens to be a doctor, said, “You need to have it biopsied.” So I wrote to the nurse practitioner, I need to have it biopsied. She gave me a referral to an endocrinologist. I called to make an appointment.

It took a month and repeated phone calls to get an appointment. There was the phone call during which I was given an appointment in six months; the phone call during which I was told that no, that was just for patients coming back for checkups, and someone would call me back; the phone call during which I was told I needed to talk to Ashley; the one where Ashley was not available; the one in which I was told there had been a cancellation and I could come in tomorrow, and I had to explain that I was a professor and would be in the middle of teaching class; the phone call with Ashley; the follow-up phone call with Ashley. And then I had an appointment, a month from the day I talked to Ashley. (You can’t call Ashley or anyone else to make an appointment. You have to call the central number, click all the right buttons through the recorded message, wait to music you have not heard since the 1990s, and then talk to someone who tells you that someone else will call you back.)

Between the time that I got the appointment and the appointment itself, the bump on my throat disappeared. That happens sometimes. It doesn’t mean there wasn’t an underlying problem. Anyway, I already had an appointment with an endocrinologist, so I went — just to make sure the bump had, indeed, been nothing to worry about.

The endocrinologist did another ultrasound herself. Apparently, the radiologist who read the first ultrasound had miscounted the number of nodules. There were in fact more than four, and most of them looked harmless, except two on the left side. “There’s a lot of vascularization there,” she said, holding a cold wand to my throat. I’m very lucky that I know what vascularization is. I mean, I have a PhD in English literature. It’s not a medical doctorate, but it is a doctorate in words — in what they mean, how they’re put together. It’s a doctorate in, when I don’t understand something, looking it up. At every point, dealing with the American medical system, I wondered how someone without an advanced degree in understanding language, someone who might not even be fluent in English, would deal with it. “We really should biopsy those specific nodules,” she said. So she did, with a long, thin needle.

The biopsy for the larger nodule came back “suspicious for malignancy.” Suspicious, not definite. Even if it’s definite, the problem with this kind of biopsy (an FNB, or fine needle biopsy) is that it’s never really definite. An FNB can only give you a percentage certainty. The official percentage for “suspicious” is a 15-30% chance of malignancy. That’s a very big chance that it’s not, in fact, malignant. But there’s only one way to be sure. “I recommend surgery,” said the endocrinologist. “I’ll have someone call you for an appointment with the surgeon.” So there I was in the appointment system again, but this time within Endocrinology. The Ashley of this system was called Blaise. Once you can speak to the Ashleys and Blaises of the world, everything goes smoothly. The trick is identifying who they are and then getting to them.

The surgeon and his colleague, a specialist in thyroid issues, did another ultrasound. Everything looked fine, they told me, other than those two nodules. My lymph nodes looked fine. The other side of my thyroid looked fine–the nodules there were harmless. But the side of my thyroid with the suspicious nodule, that side should go. They recommended a thyroid lobectomy, which means that the surgeon takes out half the thyroid. It’s serious surgery, but one with an excellent success rate. Even if the patient has thyroid cancer, the long-term survival rate is 99%. The one thing I remember from that first episode, twenty years ago, is the endocrinologist telling me, telling the resident, if you’re going to have cancer, thyroid cancer is the best kind to have.

The difficulty was, I didn’t know what I had. There was a 15-30% chance of malignancy, and a 70-85% chance that it wasn’t. That was the information I had, and I would have to make a decision based just on that. The FNB doesn’t give you certainty — it’s just a small number of cells pulled up through a needle. The only certainty comes after the surgery, when they do a full, real, official biopsy on the whole nodule. Then you know for sure. But by then, the decision has already been made.

I talked to the endocrinologist again. She said I could choose surgery, or I could put off the decision until the fall. We could do another FNB, although it would not necessarily give us more information. “What would you do if it were you?” I asked her. Surgery, she replied. I talked to the surgeon again. During my first conversation with him, I had almost laughed several times. It had been almost like being in class at medical school. Perhaps because he knew that my mother was a doctor, and that I was a university professor, he had explained everything very thoroughly, in all its complex uncertainty. I had wondered, again, what my experience with the American medical system would be like if I did not understand Latinate terminology. But knowing big words doesn’t help you make a decision in a situation like this. “What would you do if it were you?” I asked him over the phone. Surgery, he replied.

In the end, I decided based on two things. The first was something the surgeon said. “If everything on that side of your thyroid was clear and easy to observe,” he said, “I would be fine with waiting and doing another ultrasound. We could see if the nodule changed over time. But that side of your thyroid looks weird.” It was the word “weird” that struck me. You don’t really want an endocrine surgeon saying your thyroid looks weird. The other thing was that I have lived in this body a long time. I trust it. I know when it’s trying to tell me something. First, it sent me a bump. The bump did not go away until I had already made an appointment with an endocrinologist. I think my body was trying to get my attention. Since then, I’ve been able to feel, not always but sometimes, that there’s something wrong on that side of my throat. I can feel a sort of pressure in a particular spot. It makes me just a little breathless and gives me a slight cough. When I told the surgeon about this, he looked at me skeptically. “Maybe you can feel the nodule inside your throat,” he said. “You have a thin throat, so you might be able to feel it.” In my experience, doctors never believe that you understand your own body. They’re pretty sure they know better than you — after all, that’s what they were taught in medical school. They’re the experts on bodies. But I’ve lived in my body a long time, and I know when something’s not right.

So that’s it. On Thursday I’ll have surgery. Theoretically, the side of my thyroid that is left should take over the function of the whole thyroid. Hopefully I won’t need medication, but we’ll see. I’ll have a scar on my throat. I plan to tell everyone that it comes from the time when I was a pirate queen. Or that I got it dueling in France, but you should see what I did to the Countess. Or that I usually wear a velvet ribbon, and watch out because my head might fall off.

More prosaically, I’ll do my best to get through end-of-semester grading. Then Budapest, then London, then the rest of my life. Half a thyroid is better than none, and I hope we will go on many more adventures together.

(The image is Woman Reading in Bed by Gabriel Ferrier. This is what I plan to look like for about a week after the surgery.)

I’m trying to make a space for writing again.

I’m writing this in my official writing room, or at least what is supposed to be my official writing room. During Christmas it was my daughter’s bedroom, but now the daybed is back to being a place to sit and work rather than sleep, and all the things she brought with her are back in her dormitory, and it’s just me and the desk and the books and notebooks and notes and laptop. And I’m trying to feel as though this is a writing room again.

I suppose I’m also trying to feel as though I’m a writer again.

It’s only the beginning of March, but this semester has already been so eventful. I feel as though I’m living in the middle of a windstorm. Among other things, there have been medical problems to deal with, and in the midst of it all I’ve felt as though my writer self has gotten a little lost. She is wandering at the top of high cliffs, in this wind that is whipping her hair back and forth, pulling at her coat, sending her scarf streaming out first one way then another. She is clutching her hat and trying very hard not to fall over the edge. She is a brave soul, but she has been buffeted by just too much.

And here I am in the meantime, the practical part of myself that works and pays bills and tries to save for the future, that grades student essays and makes lesson plans, and schedules medical appointments, looking at her wandering at the top of that cliff. And I feel responsible, as though I need to catch her hand, pull her back. Poor Writer Girl. What shall I do with her?

I think the only solution is to write again. And that means I have to make a space for writing in my storm of a life. I need a rock and a lighthouse. I suppose this desk and the laptop on it will have to do. The desk is the rock, the laptop is the lighthouse. And my job is to keep the light going, because there might be lost ships out there somewhere.

I’m quite sure I’ve let this metaphor run away with me. Metaphors tend to do that — they steal away the thing you were trying to say, and they tell you, Just go with it. It’s poetry.

Anyway, where were we? In my writing room.

The thing is that my brain doesn’t work right if I’m not writing. Somehow I need the activity of putting words on a page to recalibrate my brain, which makes it sound as though my brain is a compass, but not the old-fashioned kind, which doesn’t need calibrating. It’s a modern electronic compass, and sometimes it doesn’t point north anymore. And then my ship gets lost, and there are the rocks . . .

Now I’ve done it again, let the metaphor run way with me (or sail away with me), but honestly there is such a pleasure in writing these words and sailing away with metaphors, because here I am writing again and it feels like standing on that cliff, on a perfectly sunny day, and seeing all the sailboats down below, with puffs of wind blowing them here and there. Somehow, writing is exercise for a part of my brain that doesn’t get exercised otherwise. There is a part of my brain that simply loves putting down words and feeling the flow of them, like a river flowing to the sea or a scarf flowing through my hands.

Of course, making space for writing is not just about the physical space of my office. It’s about time as well, and I really have no idea when I’ll be able to make the time. But if I can make the space, I can make the time somehow. Anyway, that’s what I’m determined to do. And in the meantime, I’m going to make some changes to this room. I’m going to add a bookshelf, because I have piles of books everywhere. And I’m going to add a stand for my printer, for paper and the other supplies a writer needs. Because sometimes the best way to start a new habit, or restart an old one, is to redecorate.

There is something I realized once that has stuck with me, and maybe it will stick with you as well. Here it is:

In order to write a book, you have to become the writer who can write that book.

That goes for short stories, poems, essays — anything, really. In order to write something, you need to become the writer who can write it. Setting aside a space for writing won’t make you into that writer, but it will give you a place where you can transform. Where you can sit and work and grow into the person you need to be, in order to write the next thing. A writing room is a place of transformation. Who knows what you will become . . .

And now I have sat in my writing room, playing with metaphors and putting words down on paper (or rather, a laptop screen), and it feels as though a part of my brain has breathed out again — as though it had been holding its breath, and now it can exhale in relief. It feels as though I can see farther than when I started to type, and as though when I go to sleep, I will dream of lighthouses.

(The image is The Veiled Cloud by Charles Courney Curran.)

“The orchard was very silent and dreamy in the thick, deeply tinted sunshine of the September afternoon, a sunshine which seemed to possess the power of extracting the very essence of all the odours which summer has stored up in wood and field. There were few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so bravely along the central path a few days before, were withered. The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt. But in the corners the torches of the goldenrod were kindling and a few misty purple asters nodded here and there. The orchard kept its own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate, indestructible charm.”
–L.M. Montgomery, Kilmeny of the Orchard

It feels a bit strange to write that I had not read Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables until just recently. I had read a number of her other books, including other Anne books and some Emily books (about the adventures of Emily of New Moon), and several collections of her short stories. I loved her as a writer, but in some obscure way I was afraid to read Anne of Green Gables, her most famous book. I was afraid it would not live up to my expectations. I had watched the Canadian movie version, in which Anne was played by Megan Follows, and I loved it so much that I was worried the book itself might let me down.

I should not have worried. Anne of Green Gables is a wonderful book, both touching and very very funny.

Just before reading Anne of Green Gables, I read Kilmeny of the Orchard, and it’s . . . not. As in, neither funny nor particularly touching. It’s the story of a young man, a privileged young man, who goes to teach on Prince Edward Island and meets a beautiful, really stunningly beautiful, really incredibly impossible beautiful, young woman with one mysterious defect (his words, not mine) . . . she can’t speak. They fall in love, because he is basically the first young man she has ever seen, and she is just so beautiful that it doesn’t matter that she has no money, no knowledge of the world outside the farm she has grown up on, basically nothing to bring to a relationship except her beauty and untouched purity, and oh yes, she plays the violin. Plus she can’t talk back, although she and the young man seem to get along well enough because she can write on a slate.

This is a typically icky Victorian plot. You could find buckets of such books in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and as I’m sure you expected, in the end Kilmeny’s muteness turns out to be psychological. It’s cured by her love for Eric, the young man, which is a good thing because she feels as though she could not possibly marry him with such a defect (her words, not mine). As the novel progresses, all obstacles to their union fall away rather easily, like the fall of a silk robe from the shoulders of Gibson girl. Eric’s rich father could object, but he doesn’t because Kilmeny is just so stunningly beautiful that she would make an appropriate wife for anyone, plus she reminds him of his beloved dead wife, Eric’s mother. Yes, I know, icky.

So there we have it. What kept me reading Kilmeny of the Orchard, other than its very short length (134 pages)? Well, there is my love for turn-of-the-century literature. But there is also no denying that the book is beautifully written. Lucy Maude Montgomery is a cracking good writer, whether she’s writing great books or bad ones. As you can see in the passage I excerpted above. Her descriptions of the orchard, and of Prince Edward Island in general, make up for the weaknesses in characterization and plot. Their loveliness comes not just from the imagery she describes so well that I can see the orchard on that September afternoon, but from the sentences themselves. It’s in the way she puts them together.

“There were few flowers now; most of the lilies, which had queened it so bravely along the central path a few days before, where withered. The grass had become ragged and sere and unkempt.”

What beautiful rhythm. It would not be at all the same if she wrote, as a modern editor might suggest, “The grass had become ragged, sere, and unkempt.” That would not capture the lilting, unhurried pace of a sunny September afternoon. The lilies queened it, as they do. The torches of the goldenrod — yes, I can see that, because goldenrod does exactly that, it stands up and blazes. Purple asters are misty because there are so many little flowers on a stem that from any distance they look like a purple mist. So her images are both evocative and precise.

And this: “The orchard kept its own strange attractiveness, as some women with youth long passed still preserve an atmosphere of remembered beauty and innate, indestructible charm.”

Ok, yes, it’s thoroughly of its era, when old age for a woman was approximately thirty . . . But it’s beautifully written and I love the image it evokes, of the orchard aging in this way. You can see that the spring glory of its flowers has passed, it has borne its fruit, which may have already fallen, but there is something innate and indestructible — imagine the trunks of fruit trees that will stand like strong brown limbs through the winter snows, and blossom again in spring. In a sense, the novel is a love story between an author and the orchard she created.

Honestly, if I were Kilmeny, I would write on my slate, “Thanks, Eric, but this is a really nice orchard, I mean I really like this orchard, so have fun in the big city but I think I’ll be fine here. I have a violin, after all.”

The thing is, Kilmeny of the Orchard was published the year after Anne of Green Gables, and Anne of Green Gables is a really good, I mean really really good, book. It’s got all the beautiful language, but it also has perceptive characterization, excellent pacing and plot (will Anne be allowed to go to the church picnic with Diana and the other girls? I had to know. I could not put it down and stayed up until 2 a.m. to find out), and the one thing Kilmeny of the Orchard does not have at all, not even a little — it’s very very funny.

I had to find out how the author of Anne of Green Gables could have written Kilmeny of the Orchard, and the answer is that Kilmeny’s story was written earlier, as a magazine serial. After the success of the red-haired orphan who breaks slates over people’s heads, Montgomery’s publisher said “I want another novel and I want to publish it a year later,” and this was the only thing Montgomery could give him — a patched-up serial, while she wrote her next Anne book. I suspect that publishers have been responsible for bad books in exactly this way since they invented themselves . . .

While trying to figure out how Kilmeny of the Orchard came into being, I came across a review on Goodreads that I found particularly illuminating. The reviewer said something like, “Kilmeny is the romantic heroine Anne imagines herself to be, but can never become.” And I thought, yes! That makes perfect sense! Kilmeny has long black hair and is impossibly beautiful. Anne has red hair, as she often laments, and the most endearing thing about her is that she simply never shuts up. Anne of Green Gables is filled with long paragraphs that are simply Anne going on and on while Marilla says, “The muffins in the oven are burning.” And the muffins burn, and then we listen to Anne lamenting the burned muffins and her red hair, and spinning a new romantic adventure for herself, for another couple of pages.

I don’t have any great wisdom to offer here. Just a few observations: First, good writers are going to write bad books, sometimes. That’s just how it is. Both readers and writers should expect it. Second, if I really love a writer’s style, I will read a bad book by that writer, regardless. I will read L.M. Montgomery’s bad books with pleasure, ignoring Eric and even Kilmeny, pretending that it’s really a book about an orchard, and the happy ending is that those annoying protagonists finally leave the wonderful, magical orchard alone to dream in the September sunshine.

(The image is the first edition of Kilmeny of the Orchard, published in 1910.)

The strangest thing about turning fifty-five is that it doesn’t feel any different from turning forty-five, or even thirty-five. I suppose thirty-five was different because I was pregnant with my daughter, but I don’t remember feeling any particular age. And I don’t feel any particular age now. Twenty-five was different because I was working as a lawyer and trying not to be completely miserable in the world of corporate law. It was actually more different than fifteen, when I was still in high school and still myself, more or less. Still the self I am now, rather than trying to be someone else. I was writing poetry and reading literature, which is more or less what I’m doing now.

It feels as though the years between fifteen and fifty-five have been a return to who I am — a long, hard road that has taken me back to myself.

I mean to write this post last year, around my birthday, but I was in Budapest and so busy that there was no time. I suppose this post is really about time, about what a strange thing it is. I didn’t think much about time until I became a lawyer. Of course as I was growing up, there was time to wake up, time to get to school, the schedule of the school day signaled by a bell I hated the way a cat might hate the bell around its neck. In the regional dialect I grew up with, in Virginia, it could be “high time” for something, meaning it should happen now, and maybe should have happened some time ago. In college there were syllabi telling me when to turn in assignments, when exams where scheduled. There was a rhythm to the semester. The first time I remember really being conscious of the passage of time was in my early twenties, when it became “high time” for the girls I graduated with to get married. I remember feeling as though, if I was not married in my early twenties, I would have somehow missed a crucial step in the dance my girlfriends and I we were all dancing — as though life were one of those balls in a Jane Austen novel.

Later, I realized this was once again regional. The female law school students I met in Massachusetts were definitely not getting married in their early twenties — there was a ten-year difference between what was considered normal in Virginia and normal in Massachusetts. Instead, they were thinking about how long it would take to make partner in their law firms, and planning their lives around that particular track. In the law firm, I had my first experience of time and mortality. All of my work had to be accounted for in fifteen-minute increments so the law firm could bill by the hour. We lived under the tyranny of the billable hour, just as I had once lived under the tyranny of the school bell. One day, I remember trying to calculate how many billable hours there would be until I died. That was the beginning of the end of my legal career.

The next time I remember feeling the pressure of time was in my early thirties, when I thought, if I don’t have a child now, I may not be able to. I was in graduate school, my then-husband was in graduate school, and it was not an easy time to have a child, but then everyone said there was no easy time, really. And I was thrilled when my daughter was born. That was the beginning of a different relationship with time, because when you have a child, you live with a small being whom you fervently hope will outlive you, will have a long and happy life after you are gone. You are presented every day with the fact that life is a cycle, and you are part of that cycle. You live with physical evidence of your own mortality. Of course, most of the time you’re too tired to actually think about this, but it’s there, like existentialism for John Paul Sartre.

And what is time now? My daughter will be turning twenty this year and as she had gotten older, I’ve lost that sense of time as so physical, so urgent. I feel, once again, somewhat immortal. I have to remind myself that my time on this earth is limited, and that I have things to do. Sometimes I wonder how much time I have left. But it’s more as motivation than existential crisis, because the other thing I’ve learned over the years is that there are two kinds of time. The first is the time of the bell and the billable hour, which passes and passes and passes, inexorably. But at the same time, there is yes, another kind of time — the time of subjective experience, in which a moment can last forever or a day can pass all too quickly. We can lose time, as when we scroll on our phones and realize, hours later, that time has passed and we have barely experienced the world. And we can have moments of exquisite being when we are fully alive, and it seems as though the experience will never end, that it’s etched in eternity. I have so many of those potential moments left that I’m pretty sure I’m going to live forever. More practically, my grandmother died at ninety-six, and all the women in my family live a long time. So there is that.

Mostly what happens as you get older, I think, is that you return to the essential self you had when you were young. Somehow society covers it up, like layers of varnish on an old painting, and then time cleans it again until you are back to the original layer, like a Vermeer after a museum restoration. At least, that’s my theory today, and it could be wrong, or only apply to me. But I feel closer to my fifteen-year-old self than my twenty-five-year-old or thirty-five-year-old selves. And when I think about all the things I still want to do in my life, I think, there’s plenty of time — but I’d better get started.

(A photo I took of myself on my birthday, already thinking I would write this post. No makeup, no filters, but excellent lighting by the city of Budapest.)

One of the nice thing about working for a university is that there are always speakers and events, which are often free or not very expensive for students and faculty members. Last week, I was able to attend a reading and Q&A session with the Nigerian writer Ben Okri, and I wrote down a few thoughts that I wanted to share here.

First, it’s always fascinating to hear good writers talk about their process. I’ve only read a little of Okri’s work so far, but what I read was an essay on writing that was very smart, so I wanted to hear what he had to say. And I found that his perspective on being a writer from Nigeria was similar to what I’ve heard from at least some Central European writers. His view on writing felt right for Hungary as well — at least for the way I write about Hungary.

Okri lived through the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960, which resulted in mass casualties from both the war itself and the resulting poverty and starvation. The war followed a long period of British colonial rule, so the people of Nigeria suffered the double trauma of colonization and civil strife. It was a very different environment than the one we were experiencing at that reading, sitting in conference room chairs arranged in neat rows, in a large room with floor-to-ceiling windows that showed the Charles River at night, with the lights of Cambridge across the river and Boston to the right of us, as the river bends. If you looked carefully, you could have seen the gold dome of the Statehouse. It was the serenely privileged light of a city that had not been in a war for two hundred years, and as I sat there, I remembered the spring of 2022, when I was in Budapest and the war started just one country over, in Ukraine.

First there was an introduction by the novelist Ha Jin, then a conversation, then a reading, then a Q&A. Here is what Okri said that struck me enough that I wrote it down, and I scribbled for some of the conversation and most of the Q&A. The Q&A always ends up being the most interesting part of these sorts of presentations, and it is always left for last, so it’s usually done in a rush — which is unfortunate.

Nigeria, Okri said, according to my notes, is a palimpsest of realities — like Hungary, I would add. In that sort of situation, Western conventions of storytelling don’t work. When you have sedimented realities — that was the word I wrote down, and I think it came directly from him — you can’t tell a story in a linear way, so your choice of structure is already poetic and fantastical. Which means (I think, if I’m transcribing and explaining correctly), that sort of reality can only be represented, realistically represented, in a non-Western, non-linear fashion. He mentioned disliking the term magical realism, and I’ve noticed that everyone described as writing magical realism dislikes the word — it’s only people who themselves claim to write magical realism, usually from a solidly European tradition, who seem to like it. And he said that he started with his mother’s stories. That was his original experience of narrative.

I wrote down a series of statements about story. This is a sort of paraphrase:

Stories are the oldest human technology. They organize the chaos of existence. They create a clarity within that chaos, allowing us to see the world. They simplify, and in doing so, they give us a path forward. Stories are also a storage mechanism for cultural wisdom. They function as coded realities. They hold time — he paused, then said, “They hold the essence of time” (this is a direct quotation, I believe). I think I understand this in several ways. Stories hold the time of the story itself — they contain something that happens, a particular narrative, like a cup. They capture time, but they also take time. A story is not a painting: to experience it, you need to spend the time to read it. I feel as though this is somehow very important, but I’m not yet sure why. It has to do, I suppose, with the distinctive form of the story — it is not even a poem, which happens all at once. A story is the closest artistic event to a human life, which also takes time. Then he said, “I’m fascinated by stories that are impossible to tell,” and, “The deepest things are impossible to find a narrative for.”

When he was asked about what we face right now, the overwhelming problem of climate change, he said, and I’ve written this down on a card so I can remember it:

“We either transform or we perish.”

Write that down, because you’ll find that you need it in your own life, but we also need it as a civilization. Either we transform as a global society, or we perish, taking a lot of other species with us. We’ll find out which it is in the next few generations.

The most important idea for me, in terms of writing, came during the conversation, and then I asked about it in the Q&A. It was the idea of an aesthetic code. The aesthetic code of a story, said Okri, is the code by which the story can best be understood. For example, he wrote a story and later realized that it could best be understood as a series of gaps. This reminded me of what Henry James wrote about his novel The Golden Bowl: that when he started writing is, he envisioned it as a movement. Everything would revolve around Milly Theale without touching her. She would be the delicate center of the novel, but the action would move around and around her. When I first read this, I was fascinated by the idea of starting a novel with a movement. But I think many stories can be envisioned in this ways — they can be visualized. They have a particular shape, like sculpture or dance. In the Q&A, I asked him if he was aware of the story’s aesthetic code while he was writing it, and he said that sometimes, not always — that understanding it was like grace, but a grace that is earned through hard work. Which I think is a wonderful thought.

The other most important idea is something I’ve thought about before: it’s of the story as fractal. Okri did not actually call it that — he just said that the story should contain everything, just as reality contains everything. In reality, you look at one small thing (say, the way someone walks), and it contains so much — the whole history of that person, the things that have happened to them. Actors know this. When a really good actor develops a character, she thinks about how that character moves, and the way a character walks down a street can project the essence of the character. The small part contains the whole. Okri implied that stories functioned like this — although they show only a small part of reality, they somehow contain all of it, and the story itself is a fractal in that a small part of it also contains the entire story, so that a sentence can express the essence of that particular narrative (just as a character’s walk can express the character). I’m not sure I’m explaining this well, and I’m also not sure this is what Okri meant, because so much of my own thinking is wrapped up in it. But I remember reading, once, that a Jackson Pollock painting from his mature period had that fractal structure, whereas one from his earlier, less mature period did not, and it affected how I think about writing.

He also said, and here I’m paraphrasing again, that a novel walks in a constant dialog of oppositions. This reminded me of how I used to talk about writing when I was teaching in an MFA program. I used to say, what are you putting in tension in this scene? What things are pulling against each other? It doesn’t matter how much action you include, if nothing is in tension. Without that tension, your reader won’t feel anything, won’t be interested in anything. Things need to be in opposition to each other, whether it’s the galactic forces of good and evil or two friends having a disagreement.

Finally, he talked about dreams as a parallel reality, and described writing as making dreams real for people. I think this is important. Our minds can’t deal with the world all the time. We are created to shut down for part of every day, so that our minds can go do something else. They can go elsewhere. I have found that my dreams are often ways of processing my daytime anxieties, which is probably why I so often dream of being lost in either large cities or their equally large transit systems. Or more recently, in enormous airports. Stories can function in the same way. They are waking dreams that help us organize and deal with the anxieties of our existence. They create meaning for us.

And my final note from the reading had to do with The Odyssey. I didn’t write down the specific context for this statement, but toward the end of his talk, Okri said that it encapsulated a basic human narrative: “We’re all just trying to get home.”

I think that’s true, but I think we’re also all just trying to create home, to find our families, belong and find meaning for our lives. And that is what stories help us do.

The Famished Road is the book for which Okri received a Booker Prize.