Two Years of Blogalicious Blogness

Hey gentle readers, did you see that I had two pieces on the cover of Open Salon this month? One was a reworking of last year’s Mother’s Day post (which the editors chose to run under the heading “This Mother’s Day…treat yourself to some porn?”). The other was a book review of Emily Gould’s And the Heart Says Whatever. Which reminds me . . .

I don't remember the exact date of my blogiversary, but I think we're coming up on two years pretty soon. When I started, I hadn’t written anything in years (thanks to all those lucrative-but-mind-numbing jobs and all that not-so-lucrative-but-soul-consuming parenting of newborn babies). But I’d been reading a lot of memoirish stuff by writers my age or younger, including Gould’s infamous NYT Magazine piece. It was the sort of writing that people are always wringing their hands over: “Oh no, young women are writing about themselves! How dare they!”

I suppose there’s some inevitable and perfectly justifiable jealousy when someone gets a book deal for the same sort of stuff you couldn’t get away with in all those writing workshops. But instead of finding it discouraging, I was inspired. Not deluded into illusions of fame, you understand. Just really, truly inspired. I had all these hilarious coming-of-age “nothing happens” kind of stories floating around in my old journals, not good enough to spin into fiction. But maybe I could just . . . write them the way they were. And maybe people would actually read and enjoy them, just as I was reading and enjoying other women’s stories.

So, here we are. It’s hardly the stuff that 1980’s montages are made of, but I’ll take it. After all those years of struggling with it, I’ve found a medium that works for me and I’m simply writing again. I’ve loved having this little virtual open mic to try out my voice and share my thoughts. Thank you so much for reading. And stay tuned . . .