So here I am, blessed receiver of lollipop sticks, popsicle wrappers, watermelon rinds, regurgitated sandwich bites, you name it. It’s midway through August and when it comes to my parenting, the wheels are falling off. Just yesterday, my six-year-old punched his four-year-old sister in the face, after which he was promptly escorted to Time Out and told he’d lost the privilege of dessert that evening. Later, after leaving the beach, I mentioned stopping for ice cream. It was past 5:30 but my husband only shrugged, steered the car towards town. “Why not?” he said. “We’re on vacation!” In the backseat, the kids cheered. And just like that, the aforementioned lost dessert privilege has flown out the window, even as my husband and I remind each other daily to be firmer in sticking to the boundaries we set for our kids. My son got a big cone of rainbow sherbet—apparently not for dessert, but for dinner. Dr. Becky, don’t come for me.

“Vacation” is a loose term when you’re traveling with very young children, without childcare, with unstructured days. Three kids is B-A-N-A-N-A-S, in the very best, most grateful, most exhausting way possible (multiple things can be true at once!!). Yesterday at the beach, my 8 month-old ate sand and cried (rinse and repeat), my daughter screamed at me to come swim with her in the ocean while I read half a page of a novel, and my son went boogie boarding on a piece of driftwood because our real boogie boards were swept out to sea. We lasted an hour.

It’s my default, lately, to complain about parenting and then feel badly about complaining. All I want is to read my book in peace, and then I open up Instagram for the algorithm to inform me that I only get eighteen summers with my kids, that 75% of the time I spend with my children in my lifetime will have happened by the time they turn twelve. I’m tempted to tell the creators of these upsetting reels to quit panic-mongering. Who is this content HELPING, anyway? Do moms really need another reason to feel guilty?

For the past eight months, I’ve taken a hiatus from working full-time (and working with a full attention span). My youngest was born last December; he was a somewhat colicky infant, plagued with a milk protein allergy and then reflux, and I never got to a point where I felt comfortable asking our nanny to watch all three children at once. I struggle to watch all three by myself; how could I ask her to do it? I have friends who’ve questioned this logic, and they probably aren’t wrong to do so, but nonetheless—Clark and I have spent the better part of eight months together. I spent countless hours bouncing him in his Baby Bjorn while tackling late-stage edits for my forthcoming novel last winter and spring, and while sporadically working on a new project this summer. This time with him has been a gift (I’m lucky to have the flexibility to be home with him), and it’s also been difficult. I miss my uninterrupted writing days. I often find myself looking towards September, when my oldest will start Kindergarten and our nanny will officially watch Clark full-time. I can’t wait to have my work days back, and I also know my heart will break to no longer be with the baby round the clock. So much of mothering young kids feels this way. The constant paradox of frustration and gratitude, of hurrying through time while wanting to freeze it, of struggling through moments you know you’ll wish you could relive later.

A good friend of mine has been in the hospital on bedrest for the last few months of her pregnancy. She’s away from home, without her two older children. It’s torture, she tells me, to be missing these precious summer weeks with her kids while they’re still little. I’m crushed for her. I remind her that she’s strong, that she’s exactly where she needs to be, that it’s a shitty stretch but will be a blip in time one day soon. All the while I think of my own kids, good old guilt creeping in again. I make an internal pledge to be less reactive, more present. To soak up the remainder of the summer with them without wishing a single moment—challenging or not—away. Parenting young kids doesn’t always feel magical, but of course it is. The daily practice of this reckoning—the acceptance of this irreconcilable dichotomy—feels like one of the hardest parts of the job.

Sometimes, I do read whole books. I’ll leave you with two standout recs, both 2027 releases to keep on your radar:

We Go Way Back by Niamh Connolly. Connolly is an Irish writer and this is her debut, which publishes in the US next spring. This novel blew me away; I could not put it down except for all the moments when I had to. It’s Normal People meets My Best Friend’s Wedding in the most entrancing way.

The Things You’ll Never Know by Ashley Audrain. Out in January, this is a psychological suspense about a mother who watches her family from the afterlife in the days following her sudden death. I’m an Ashley Audrain stan—The Push is in my top five—and I devoured this one, which is giving The Lovely Bones. Ashley is also the kindest, most gracious human—you would never believe that such a lovely person could be capable of writing such fictional darkness.

Treat your future self and preorder either/both of these gems.

Speaking of preorders, they’re open for Whiteout, my own 2027 release coming March 9. You can read more about the novel on my website, which just got a much needed glow-up (credit to the talented Ilsa Brink). March is far away, I know. But if you preorder Whiteout, I will love you forever. And if you preorder a copy from Barrett Bookstore, I’ll sign and personalize it. Thanks in advance for supporting my work, and for bearing with me through the self-promo.

Have a happy and relaxing rest of the summer. (We’ve got till September 22—no hurrying allowed.)

It was Saturday, mid-morning. I watched light flurries of snow dance down from the chalky white sky and told my mom that I would be there to say goodbye, that we would head back to Connecticut early. I ended the call, my stomach in knots. To my left, my five-year-old son James asked a question I couldn’t register, something about the numbers on the chairlift. My mother and father-in law were with us, and mercifully, they answered him. The line shifted forward; the knots in my stomach tightened as I thought of Boulder in my parents’ garage, on his bed, bleeding unstoppably from his nose. They’d given him a sedative and he was comfortable, my mom had promised on the phone. She wouldn’t leave his side, I knew, and this brought me some solace.

It was my first ski run of the winter, and the group had made a big push to get me out on the slopes. My husband had gone back to the condo to watch our nine-week-old baby and our three-year-old daughter; I’d made sure a bottle of pumped breastmilk was ready before cramming my postpartum body into ski clothes. It was a big effort, and half of me wondered why I was bothering at all. It seemed to matter more to my husband than to me that I ski—a generosity on his part, yes, but perhaps there was a part of him that wished to preserve (or revive?) the version of me from before I became a mother, the twenty-something girl he fell for who skied boldly and often, who was always game to hike for powder and could chase him down the mountain till the lifts closed.

James, my in-laws and I reached the front of the line, where the next chairlift whisked us off the ground and up into the sky. Beside me James was cool as a cucumber, and I studied his profile, awed. When had he become so grown up? So self-sufficient? He could ski now—he could get down almost any trail—how and when had that happened? When had my first baby turned into an actual kid?

All of a sudden, the lift halted—signaling a problem on one end or the other—and the four of us were suspended in the air, our chair swaying in the icy wind. I tried to wiggle my toes, which were already well on their way to frozen. I turned to my in-laws and explained that we’d need to leave Vermont early, and that I probably only had time for a couple of runs. It was Boulder, I told them, as discreetly as I could manage in James’ presence. I needed to get back in time to say goodbye.

My parents got Boulder almost fourteen years ago. It was May when they brought him home, high spring. I remember how bright the grass was, the way his pale Labrador coat popped against it. His nose was shiny and black, his tongue bubblegum pink. The cutest puppy I’d ever laid eyes on.

I was twenty-three then, a year out of college. I’d just started my first “real” job in New York and had moved into an apartment with one of my close friends and her cousin. It was a time in life when the future was wild terrain, open and uncharted, and even though it’s easy to romanticize that moment, I’m not sure I loved it. Below the surface I was anxious, eager to be tethered to something loving and pure, and worried that I’d never find it. That I wasn’t worthy of the life I desired. Whenever I took the train out to Westchester to visit my parents—which was often—Boulder was there, rambunctious and increasingly handsome, a shade of yellow so pale he could’ve passed for white. A polar bear, my siblings and I called him. A prince. Star of our Snapchats and camera rolls. The leading man of our young adult lives.

There were stretches of time in my twenties when I felt I’d be single forever. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t. Suddenly—finally—I was in love. Then married. In a blink, my husband and I fell firmly into a life in the suburbs. We had a baby, then another. Our wedding album gathered dust on a shelf in the living room as little shoes accumulated by the front door, as toys slowly overtook the house. I measured the months by the preschool calendar taped to the fridge.

Our third baby was born in December, four months ago now. The early postpartum days are already too distant, memories congealed in the past. The hospital ID bracelet secured to my son Clark’s tiny ankle; his freshly clamped umbilical cord. His left eye, bloodshot from the trauma of birth. Friends showing up on our doorstep with homecooked dinners. Crumbs of sleep. Mornings that arrived too quickly. Snow coming down in thick sheets outside our windows, a heavy blanket draping the earth. The way time stopped, fell down around us.

I remember how I’d grown teary leaving the hospital, Clark snug in my arms, averting my eyes so as not to worry the nurse who escorted us out to the parking lot. In the car with my husband and our brand-new boy, I broke down in sobs as reality hit: I’d never be back in this hospital as a birthing mother. That chapter of my life was over, and so quickly. How?

Boulder became weaker during the chaotic years of my life when I started and grew my family. His diminished robustness was something I’d been too distracted to track closely, until his age was a fact I couldn’t ignore. His eyesight—which had begun to diminish a couple of years earlier—gave out completely in 2023. Boulder, once an expert retriever who could spot the right stick in a forest of trees, succumbed to full blindness.

I read The Giving Tree to my children and thought of Boulder when we reached the part about the boy growing up and becoming too busy to visit the tree. The guilt was there, hovering around me, but it didn’t sink in, at least not entirely. Life was moving too fast.

In Vermont, the chairlift finally started again, velocity propelling us forward. On instinct my body softened with relief, an irony given the fact that I would’ve done anything to freeze time. To stave off the inevitable—the pain of losing Boulder that awaited, a kind of anticipated grief that was already infiltrating each passing second.

My parents, who live close to us, had an appointment with the vet at 7 pm, and my husband dropped me there on our way home from Vermont. I was still in my ski clothes, the car packed haphazardly in our swift exit. The kids had a thousand questions about what was happening. Boulder is sick, I explained. I need to help Nini and Papa take care of him. The explanation would have to suffice, for the time being.

My brother was there; he’d taken the train out from the city, and my sister called in from California. Boulder was quiet as he took his last breaths, peaceful. We held him in our arms, wept into his sweet fur, kissed him, told him how much we loved him. Almost fourteen years—a transformative period in my life, and all of his.

The rest of the winter was long; there were moments when it felt like it would never end. But it did, of course, chased away by a fickle warmth. Now the air is soft; spring flowers push up through the earth. Last week, I went into New York for work drinks. I got off the subway at Astor Place and was immediately hurled back in time, to nineteen or twenty, when I used to visit my best friend from high school at NYU. I thought of Trader Joe’s Two Buck Chuck, of photoshoots with digital cameras in her dorm room. As I walked west towards Washington Square Park in the pale sunshine, I left my friend a voice note to relay the memory. I feel so old! I exclaimed into the phone. I mean, not old…you know what I mean. I feel older in a grateful way! But God, when did we stop being young?

Time, the ache of it.

My daughter likes to watch the movies I did when I was little. The Wizard of Oz. The Sound of Music. Annie. We watch these films together, we dance in the kitchen to the soundtracks and it rewinds the clock, takes me back to an earlier life and an earlier self. Pieces of my brain that reawaken, jostle back to existence. A time capsule, like climbing up out of the subway on a spring evening and walking straight into a memory.

Boulder’s ashes sit on my parents’ mantle now, beside Red’s, the dog we had before him. Reminders of loves had and lost. Lives lived and changed.

The other day, I caught up with a close friend I hadn’t talked to in ages, since before I had the baby. Our friendship is the kind that picks up where it left off, one that plows through pleasantries and gets right to the real stuff. We don’t need each other to remember every little thing. During the pandemic, when James was an infant, this friend came to visit and stayed in a tent in my backyard because of the Covid worry. We hung out on my patio, and she drove to Starbucks to use the bathroom. We reminisced about that on the phone, laughing at the preposterous nature of a time not that long ago.

How old is James now? she asked. Is he three? Four?

He’s five, I told her. Six this summer!

No! Her voice filled with legitimate shock. How is that possible?

I don’t know, I answered. Bittersweetness leapt in my chest. I truly don’t know.

My mom is my number one fan. She goes to bookstores and asks if there are any Carola Lovering novels in stock; if there are, she slyly moves them to the front of the shelf. She texts me throughout the day, lately screenshots of different Tell Me Lies reels and publicity items, with comments like “SO COOL!!!” or “none of this would exist without you!” She shares in my frustrations, in my highs and lows. She is light personified.

Throughout my life, I’d always held the subconscious notion that I would name my daughter Lucy, after my mom, if I ever had a baby girl. When I started writing Tell Me Lies I was twenty-four, and having kids was far from my mind. So I named my character Lucy instead. I don’t remember thinking about it or ever deliberating that choice—she was always Lucy. Lucy Albright, from Long Island.

When my daughter was born in July 2022, the first season of Tell Me Lies was six weeks away from premiering on Hulu, and the trailer was about to drop. Buzz was building, the Hollywood kind. My husband and I chose the name Lila instead of Lucy—our other favorite—because to name our child after my character on the brink of such a stellar moment in my career felt self-serving in a way that didn’t sit right. I wanted my daughter to have her own identity, her own thing. But the irony is that as the series went on, as the show gained momentum and fandom through three increasingly popular seasons, I felt more and more detached from it. Yes, they’re my characters on the screen (many of them, at least), but the show’s plot became vastly different from the book’s plot. In the middle of season one, TV Lucy takes a sharp turn away from book Lucy. Today, it would no longer feel self-serving to name a daughter after my protagonist—only special, the way it did before, like I was really naming her after my mother. My third baby was born this past December—a boy, but we didn’t know the sex in advance. If he’d been a girl, he would have been Lucy.

Pardon this tangent about a hypothetical reality that doesn’t exist; bear with me while I try and stick the landing. My brain is mushy from sleep deprivation and I haven’t written since my son was born, but I think what I’m trying to say is that I put my whole heart into Tell Me Lies, and this moment—the closure of this chapter—is nothing if not bittersweet.

On Monday, Hulu announced that the series will end with season three, a decision that’s caught many of us off guard. I respect this choice, even if I don’t understand it, even as it’s frustrating to think about what could have been, and with a bigger and more engaged audience than ever before. Of course, there’s something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead. But still, it’s hard to say goodbye.

The truth is that any frustration I feel is quick to burn off; it’s always been that way with the show. There’ve been aspects to the process that haven’t felt ideal, ways I’ve felt separated—dare I say boxed out—from something that wouldn’t exist without me. The psychology of this dynamic is complicated; the logistics even more so. And yet, I can’t manage to feel anything other than gratitude for the series, and for the immensely talented people behind its success. The adaptation will always be one of the greatest gifts of my life. Lucy Albright will always be my first and favorite literary child.

With that, a final thank you to the TML fans is in order. Thank you for reading, for watching, for allowing me to speak about this story for the past eight years. Writing the book helped me process a terribly difficult time in my life; witnessing the story’s resonance has filled my heart with peace. It’s rare for a novel to experience this kind of longevity; I don’t take it for granted and I won’t expect it in the future. Twenty-four year old me is speechless. Her jaw will be on the floor for all eternity, remembering the run of a lifetime.

Mentally I feel a surprising calm, probably due to the fact that a month and a half ago I finally, officially turned in Book 5 and have since been on a hiatus from work. I’m finished with big picture edits, and copyedits won’t come back until the end of January. For now, I’m done.

These past six weeks have been the first substantial chunk of time I’ve taken off from working in several years—longer than I can remember, because I didn’t take a real maternity leave after I had my daughter in 2022—and the break has been much needed. Initially, I told myself I was going to use the time off in intentional, productive ways. For one, I would pay more attention to this Substack. I’d been keeping a running list of content ideas taped to a note on my desk, and I finally had the bandwidth to post more often. I would write and post once a week! I’d also reengage in a light exercise routine—a daily, thirty-minute prenatal yoga class on the Peloton app seemed perfectly feasible, and like just the thing my mind and body needed.

But on the first morning of my new, clear schedule—book turned in, kids off at school, house to myself—I found that I couldn’t do anything. Instead, I felt almost physically immobilized, hit with the reality that the year’s combination of writing, parenting and pregnancy had left me flattened. The next morning was the same. And the next. Each day I felt more wiped out than the last. Each day I ignored my aforementioned list of intentions.

I know, objectively, that this is fine. The physicality of parenting two young children while pregnant is exercise enough, at least for me (sometimes my Oura ring thinks I’m hiking when I’m unpacking groceries or getting the kids ready for school, and I’ll take it), and none of my 338 Substack subscribers are banging down my door for more content (phew). But I suppose as a writer and as a person whose sense of accomplishment/self-worth is largely tied to productivity, especially during hours when I’m already paying for childcare, I’ve felt a certain pressure to keep the ball rolling towards something. To make use of this fleeting time before I give birth to my third child and lose the rest of my brain cells.

But over the past six weeks, this pressure began to leak, then disappeared altogether. Or maybe I just got tired enough to ignore it. I haven’t felt much like writing, like tapping into a cerebral place. I haven’t felt like moving my pregnant body any more than running a home and corralling two active kids already requires. And so, I…haven’t.

Instead: I napped before noon. I cleaned out closets and junk drawers. I took my daughter to ballet, and my son to his woodworking class (our part-time nanny usually does it). I sifted through hundreds (thousands?) of pictures on my phone and got the best ones printed. I updated my children’s baby books with a backlog of said photos (a chore, but I know I’ll be grateful to have these books in the future, when the nest is empty and clean and far too quiet). I finally learned how to use the slow cooker we got as a wedding present in 2019, and experimented with recipes. Why, for all these years, have I been daunted by the slow cooker? It couldn’t be easier.

I went to Michael’s the week before Halloween and bought posterboard and paint and got crafty DIY-ing an avocado costume that featured my belly as the pit. I spent an inordinate amount of time on Auction Ninja, where I bought an outdoor table and a set of botanical prints. I spent the better part of three days scouring rug websites; I ordered a runner for the kitchen that we don’t really need, that I’m debating returning after all that.

I dug baby clothes out of storage. I considered sterilizing bottles, but watched the five-hour Billy Joel documentary instead. I watched All Her Fault and The Beast in Me and savored every twisty minute. I’ve been reading at a snail’s pace, which is the way it seems to go for me at the end of pregnancy, but I recently finished Heart the Lover (it’s magic) then went to see Lily King speak about the novel at my local library. In my new book, there’s a somewhat pivotal scene where the protagonist goes to a Lily King event at a bookstore, so attending one of her events myself was a meta experience. I waited in the signing line after the talk so I could share this tidbit with Lily; she was, no surprise, entirely gracious.

We’re still finalizing the title and publication details for Book 5; I have lots to say about the story, and will as soon as I can. For now, know that it’s about marriage and motherhood and mental health, that it’s suspenseful and thematically dark. The novel is set in Aspen, Colorado, where I lived for a period in my twenties, a place that will always be close to my heart. Work is exciting at the moment, in spite of the extended pause, and I’ve spent the past weeks reflecting on my own gratitude for all that’s to come next year and beyond. I can’t wait to share more.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to hunker down as much as I can in these last days before life explodes with a change that feels impossible to anticipate. When waiting for a baby, I’ve learned, you can predict and plan until the cows come home, but you can’t know the true shape of what’s coming until the waiting gives way to an open door, until the change is there before you, unfolding in real time. The end of the third trimester means living in a liminal state, as my friend Avery described of her own pregnancy. Liminal is the operative word.

A friend recommended I read Wintering by Katherine May, and I recently started it. This passage from the opening chapter resonates:

There are gaps in the mesh of the everyday world, and sometimes they open up and you fall through them into somewhere else. Somewhere Else runs at a different pace to the here and now, where everyone else carries on. Somewhere Else is where ghosts live, concealed from view and only glimpsed by people in the real world. Somewhere Else exists at a delay, so that you can’t quite keep pace. Perhaps I was already teetering on the brink of Somewhere Else anyway; but now I fell through, as simply and discreetly as dust sifting between the floorboards. I was surprised to find that I felt at home there. Winter had begun.

Everybody winters at one time or another; some winter over and over again. Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider. Perhaps it results from an illness or a life event such as a bereavement or the birth of a child; perhaps it comes from a humiliation or failure. Perhaps you’re in a period of transition and have temporarily fallen between two worlds.

As May emphasizes, there’s a wide range of circumstances that might induce wintering. But perhaps you don’t always need a rightful reason or excuse to hide a little. If nothing else, let my rambling here be your permission to take a break when the opportunity arises. To move through each passing moment with more intuition and less intention. To usher in mental and physical rest in a culture that likes to hijack our time and attention, that aims to jam the calendar at every turn, that can unwittingly spoil our own peace. Have many of us been subconsciously trained (tricked?) to believe that ultimate productivity generates ultimate content? It can’t just be me.

Bears and chipmunks slip into instinct by hibernating when winter tightens its grip, when early, peach-colored sunsets blaze through skeletal trees. To hibernate is to preserve life. To relinquish our own human inclination to do something, and to succumb to the natural instinct to do nothing, is something after all.

I’m now at the point in my pregnancy where I want to cry if I drop something, and where the sensation of consuming one too many tequila-sodas is a distant memory (I’m dying for a cocktail). But I’m also counting my blessings, and it was worth the frenzied effort of corralling the family together for a photoshoot to capture this special, transient moment in time.

I wore a Doen dress for the pictures, and my daughter wore a dress with Doen vibes that my cousin, who is now in her forties, donned as a flower girl in my parents’ wedding in 1986. With the rocky beach backdrop and our pale, drapey clothes, I was reminded of my friend ’s wise and all too relatable Substack post that strikes a chord in its title alone: “Life is Not a Doen Ad”. No, life most certainly is not.

After the shoot, the photographer let me peek at some of the pictures on the small screen of her camera, and though it will be a couple of weeks before I see them edited and enlarged, the thumbnails looked great—not Doen ad flawless, but as close as my family will get to that particular marker. This got me thinking about Emily’s post again, about the facade of the Doen ad—or, perhaps more generally, the facade of what we portray externally (online and otherwise). How it’s only the tiniest corner of the story. How it could even be deemed inaccurate. A lie.

Probing this line of thought, I recalled our day leading up to the evening photoshoot. I’d had a 9 a.m. doctor’s appointment, so my husband Rob planned to take the kids to school on his way to the office. Moments before walking out the door, he cut his finger changing the head of his electric toothbrush. I was checking in at the doctor’s when I got a call from him asking if we had any superglue for the wound; I could hear the kids in the background, animated over the morning’s action, exclaiming that there was a lot of blood. I directed Rob to the superglue in my office closet; he hung up abruptly.

Are you okay? I texted him from the waiting room at my OB’s, keeping an eye on Find My Friends. Relief ran through me when the small icon that showed Rob’s location began moving down the driveway and out onto the road, towards school. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed with a new text—Rob’s laptop had fallen off the roof of the car. He explained that he’d placed the computer up top to load the kids in, and that the car then wouldn’t open because the key fob turned out to be dead, and the extra key was in my car. Changing the key fob battery was a whole ordeal; by the time Rob finally got his car unlocked and loaded the kids into their seats, he’d forgotten about the laptop on the roof. Miraculously, the computer landed intact and directly in the middle of the lane so that cars whooshed over it without their wheels crushing the machine to a pulp.

Thank God, I thought, floored by this stroke of luck as an ultrasound technician led me into a dark room and squirted cold jelly onto my cantaloupe stomach. I’d done something similar driving the kids to school a few weeks prior, but that had only been a cup of coffee. I’d made it two whole miles with the mug on the roof of the car before it rolled down the front, splattering the windshield with camel-colored liquid that shocked me to the point of alarm until I realized what had happened.

The technician rolled the probe over my belly and our baby appeared on the screen, a grainy black and white video of the little being now just eleven weeks away from joining our family. I glanced down at Rob’s texts again; I could feel the stress of the morning through our messages, a product of the chaos of our life. Perhaps I’ve been especially sensitive given the complicated origins of this pregnancy, but it seemed like the wrong moment to FaceTime my husband and show him the screen in front of me.

That evening, we arrived to the photoshoot on time, clean and coordinated, the children cherubic in the adorable little outfits I’d bribed them (with candy) to wear. The photographer was a pro with the kids; they laughed at the stuffed animal perched on her head while she clicked away, capturing their sunny faces, preserving the four of us as something we could only be for a split second: still, smiling, hair and clothes and expressions immaculate—a perfect image I will certainly frame or post or use on a holiday card. It’s part of the way I want to remember us.

But only part of. Because I want to reminder the other parts, too—the mess, laptops and coffee cups flying off the roof of the car when the morning has spun out of control. I want to remember the way my kids refuse to go to bed at night, and the way it makes me feel like I’m losing my mind. I want to remember how nobody eats the dinner I make and how my five-year-old erupts into violent tears in public when I say he can’t have another juice box. I want to remember the compression socks I use to aid the varicose veins on my swollen calves, and the fifteen minutes I spent putting on concealer pre-photoshoot in an effort to hide the melasma that inevitably flares up when I’m pregnant. I want to remember how tired I am, how sometimes I bring my computer into bed in the afternoon and fall asleep trying to write.

I want to remember it all because it’s the true story, the story behind the perfect picture we’ll see in a frame for years to come. Deep down, it’s these hardest parts for which I’m most grateful. They are the counterpart to the sweetness, to the moments I wish I could freeze and relive, again and again: my daughter crawling into bed with us at 6 a.m. to snuggle; my kids walking into school hand-in-hand, their too-large backpacks bouncing against their shoulders. My son telling me I look beautiful; my daughter clomping around in my heels, laughing at herself in the mirror, all spirit and spunk and innocence, pure joie de vivre. My kids kissing my belly and talking to the baby. My kids asking me to lie with them while they fall asleep.

The family photo is the fantasy, at least in a sense. At minimum, it’s a false projection of perfectionism that doesn’t feel particularly helpful or honest to portray. But the photo is also proof of something real—proof of our family’s love, our togetherness. A fleeting moment comprised of joy and impatience and tenderness and the day’s earlier chaos, the four of us on the precipice of changing our collective shape. And how lucky are we that that is not a fantasy.

As we head into fall, I’ll leave you with a hodgepodge of recs, just for fun.

• TV: The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox on Hulu. I’m probably biased because I’ll forever watch Grace Van Patten in any and every role she takes on until the end of time, but I think this show is so well done. I was a college freshman when Amanda Knox was arrested for the murder of her roommate during a study abroad program in Italy, and though I didn’t closely follow the case, I remember seeing the headlines everywhere and being totally brainwashed by the media into believing Amanda was someone she wasn’t. Her story is devastating and moving and remarkable and Grace’s performance as Amanda is next-level—most of the episodes had me in tears. I also listened to Amanda’s interview with Gwyneth on the Goop podcast and found it wise and inspiring.

• CLOTHING: I promise I won’t regularly use this Substack to shill links, but I’ve gotten a number of compliments on this $40 Amazon dress, and as a seven-months pregnant lady I will TAKE them. The dress is not maternity, but I now own it in three prints (red, navy blue, and blue floral) because it’s basically the only garment that fits over my body while making me feel cute and put together in this transitional weather. The cut is forgiving and flattering and I’m sure I’ll wear these dresses not pregnant, too (unless I burn them with the rest of my maternity garb; I’ll keep you posted).

• RANDOM PRODUCT: I genuinely don’t know what I was doing before I owned this sleep mask. It was a rec from my brother-in-law and is perhaps the best $8 I’ve ever spent. I’m sensitive to light when I sleep and this mask has been a lifesaver—if Rob has a lamp turned on or is reading on his phone I am none the wiser (pure gold during a season of life when every minute of shut-eye must be protected).

• SKIN: Westman Atelier bronzing drops. I feel a bit like Cassie Barnwell Adler with this rec, but here we are—these bronzing drops have given me life lately. I do my best to hide my face from the sun even in January, which leaves me a bit pasty and missing my 2008 perma-tan (RIP to my monthly membership at Tejon Tan in Colorado Springs), but these drops give an instant, dewy bronze without the harmful rays. They were sold out for a while so I tried the Drunk Elephant drops in the interim—those are great too but I think I prefer Westman Atelier’s. I use the medium tan shade.

• BOOKS: Admittedly, I have not been on top of my reading game these past few months. I recently turned in another revision of Book 5, and writing has taken up most of my time and energy (I hope to have book news to share soon!). I’ve read a few bound manuscripts and early drafts of novels for writer friends, some of which have been excellent, but they are titles I can’t recommend (yet!). My book club just discussed The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, which I might not have picked up on my own, especially in the middle of the summer, but I ended up loving it. If I can recommend one novel to you, let it be Finding Grace by Loretta Rothschild, which published in July. I’ve already gifted this book to numerous friends and family members—it’s insanely readable and touches a few different genres. The end of chapter one is utterly shocking; it’s impossible not to be hooked after that.

• SUBSTACK: A quick moment to shout out a few of my favorite Substacks, which you should subscribe to! I’ve already mentioned ; her Substack The Mom News is a must for anyone raising young kids in this cultural and political moment. ’s Iced Tea delivers juicy gulps of gossip from the archives (think Tina Brown, Carolyn Bessette, Graydon Carter’s feud with Donald Trump); her writing is smart and witty and always a treat in my inbox. Lastly, The Lacey List uncovers the best of wellness, beauty and beyond in a way that feels accessible and refreshing. is a gem of a human and her posts are enlightening—they’ve helped me make healthy changes in a variety of areas in my life.

• EAT: I’m having a renewed love affair with Alison Roman’s Lemony Tahini Dressing from Dining In, which I used to make all the time and recently rediscovered. It’s delicious on a kale salad, or honestly on anything. Recipe below.

• LISTEN: TLOAS tomorrow, in case you forgot!! (You definitely didn’t)

If you’re still with me, thanks for reading and subscribing to Tell Me Truths. I know this is not the most structured or consistent space, but for now I’m okay with that and hope you are, too. If there are specific topics on writing or motherhood that you’d like to hear more about, feel free to let me know—I’m most interested in writing about those two subjects here on Substack, as honestly and vulnerably as I can.

But he couldn’t. Where I’m emotionally-driven, my husband Rob is pragmatic and rational. So much of the stress in our lives was directly rooted in the difficulties of parenting two young children. We were constantly exhausted, sapped by the demands of our day-to-day lives. Why on earth did I want to add a third kid to the mix?

The want was hard to articulate. Was I being greedy? Impractical? But desiring another child didn’t feel like splurging on a fancy bag or buying a pair of jeans I didn’t really need. I simply felt, in my soul, that I wasn’t finished having children. For every complaint about pregnancy and the challenges and sleep-deprivation that come with having a newborn, I couldn’t fathom not doing it all again.

But my husband was not on the same page, and in spite of my awareness that his feelings were valid, it was an agonizing pill to swallow. I understood where he was coming from, of course—it’s true that having little kids is stressful and demanding, regardless of the precious moments. Rob and I agree that life often feels like constant whiplash on a rollercoaster, that there’s hardly ever a break from the turbulent ride. We both work full-time; we’re both hands-on parents. I wouldn’t trade this dynamic, but it’s led to countless instances when I feel like I’m half-assing my two roles, where I’m legitimately lost in the balance of being a writer and a mother—creeping to the end of a draft with scary-low brainpower, air-frying Dino nuggets for the fifth night in a row while my children beg for candy.

“The kids need to eat vegetables!” Rob vents aloud.

“I know. I know! It’s so bad.” I nod in agreement. What is wrong with us? What is it we can’t get right?

On such nights, I lie in bed and envision a world where I’m not on deadline for another book, where I have the time and energy to chop zucchini and carrots and bake them into homemade muffins, sneak the kids veggies that way.

Back before I started seeing my new therapist, I had days where I’d tell myself I was delusional, crazy for even thinking of another baby. And yet, I wanted one. Irrationally and wholly. I pictured five of us at the dinner table, some years down the road, and my heart soared at the rightness of it. A dream I didn’t know how to throw away.

My first few sessions of therapy were painful yet clarifying. Near the end of March, I arrived at the revelation that we needed to table the third kid conversation, at least for a while. Rob was relieved. We pledged to focus on being present, on tackling what lay in front of us. My fifth novel was contractually overdue; I’d just received tough feedback on the book and was at the beginning stages of a massive revision I hadn’t anticipated.

There was also the issue of our home, which was too small for the four of us—a high-class problem, as my grandfather would have called it, but still one we’d been eager to address. We’d begun to look into the legitimate possibility of adding onto our existing house—a fourth bedroom, a mudroom, and a true playroom (our existing playroom had previously been our dining room until the space was swallowed up by toys—the dining table and chairs currently live in a storage unit). Expanding our square footage would be a dream, but a renovation would require moving out of our house and living elsewhere for six months, maybe a year.

All signs pointed to the glaring reality that it wasn’t the right time to be thinking about a third child, the issue of my husband’s reluctance aside. And yet, my innermost struggle remained: the not knowing when—or if—Rob’s mind would change. But we had two healthy kids—I had loads to be grateful for—and through therapy I committed to standing in this place of uncertainty, to seeking peace where I was and with what I did not yet know.

Multiple things can be true at once, my therapist explained. You want another baby, and it isn’t the right time in your life or marriage to move forward with that conversation, and you’re accepting of this, and you’re sad. All of these truths coexist.

In April, I went into New York for my brother’s birthday dinner and was hit with the strange, borderline absurd sense that I might be pregnant. I didn’t feel sick or symptomatic, and I hadn’t even missed a period, but it was a bone-deep feeling I couldn’t shake, even though Rob and I had absolutely, decidedly not been trying. I ordered a margarita at the restaurant and wondered—ridiculously—if it would be my last drink for a while.

The next morning, I woke up at six and drove to Walgreens in the rain, my family still slumbering at home. I bought a pregnancy test and took it in our bathroom while Rob made breakfast for the kids downstairs. Two pink lines appeared. One of them very faint, but a line nonetheless.

My heart pounded wildly; the irony of the moment was disorienting. I felt a flutter of joy at same time I stood on the verge of true panic. This was not the plan; this was not supposed to have happened, not now. I thought of my sister, who, a week prior, had called me on FaceTime to share the news of her own pregnancy—her first baby, very much planned. I thought of my therapist, of the hard-earned productivity of our sessions, the way she was helping my marriage navigate an eventual decision that my body had—apparently—usurped. I thought of my fifth book, the poor mess of it, the uphill battle of revisions ahead. And, of course, I thought of Rob.

Marriage is not easy; life is unpredictable. Excitement and fear are there in the same room. When my therapist asks me what I love about Rob, it’s easy to answer. His loyalty. His capability. His lack of a temper (in our relationship, I am the hothead). He is a wonderful father and a steady hand. He tethers me to something solid but not restrictive, the way I always hoped love and partnership could feel.

When I told him about the positive pregnancy test, he was shocked, but calm.

“Okay,” he said, processing. “Wow. Okay.”

“I didn’t trick you or anything,” I emphasized, half-kidding. “If that’s what you’re thinking.” Because it’s true. Because this baby wasn’t meant to exist, at the same time this baby was—is—meant to be ours. Irony of ironies.

I believe in fate as much as I believe in science. Conception is an enigma, an ultimate injustice. I don’t deserve the luck I’ve had in that department, and I dislike sharing that this pregnancy was an accident—it feels like an insensitive fact to offer up, especially after witnessing what so many people in my life have gone through to get their babies.

And yet, I find myself gravitating towards honesty, propelled by the visceral need to share the complicated reality that this third pregnancy was wanted but unplanned, that it feels both destined and stressful, that there are times I feel lonely in my happiness, or undeserving. Rob’s experience, I know, is something equally nuanced, and it’s this delicate tumble of emotions that pulls me to write it down. To make sense of the fact that multiple things can be true at once. That they are.

“Where will the baby sleep?”

My mom asks this when she’s over, and I point to one corner of our bedroom, next to a chair piled with clothes waiting to be put away. “There?”

Rob and I have decided to push the renovation back so we can be living at home when the baby comes in December, a plan that fills me with relief.

My mom smiles, then reminds me that—as the youngest of six children—she slept in a space temporarily partitioned off by plywood in one of her sibling’s rooms for the first several months of her life.

“Your family is going to be okay,” she tells me, like she knows I need to hear it.

“I know.” The gratitude is too much; it swells in my chest. “We already are.”

When I’m underwater with a draft, I’m writing whenever I have a free moment and I don’t leave room for much else. I don’t work out or cook, I read at a snail’s pace, and—as I’ve now learned—I don’t make time for other projects, aka: this Substack. I’m not under the illusion that capital B Balance is something that can ever truly be achieved, but going forward, I’d like to do a better job of striving for it.

In the meantime, I have a little hiatus from my book in progress, and it’s late June, the best time of the year: long, light-filled days, the whole summer stretched out ahead like a glittering prize. Does it get any better than this? Probably not. And yet, like others, I’m finding this moment in time to be a fraught and difficult one.

With the bounty of soul-crushing shit going on in the world and the leadership in this country being as distressing as it is, I don’t quite know what to do with my own joy. I am happy, but how can I give myself over to that happiness when my parents’ beloved housekeeper of many years is living in a constant state of anxiety and fright, terrified to drive on the highways and visit certain towns for fear of being stopped by ICE? Since January, she’s stayed within a five-mile radius of her own home and my parents’. Her daughter—who she’s seen only once in the last fifteen years—cancelled her visit to the States because it felt too risky, too perilous. A few months ago, there was a night when news of nearby arrests had her too afraid to make the short drive home, so she spent the night on my parents’ couch.

This is merely my small personal connection to the horrors inflicted on so many hard-working and innocent people by the current administration, and I myself am insulated from any real danger. Anyone who lives the same stupidly privileged existence as I do—I trust we all know our safety and citizenship is a random of stroke of luck we don’t deserve.

Yes, the party has its problems, but I’m proud to call myself a lifelong Democrat. And while I’m not afraid to post my politics, it’s not my favorite way to use social media, mainly because I try and avoid fighting with strangers on the internet. But so many of today’s issues don’t feel political anymore, not inherently. Politics have become too enmeshed with morality. It’s not about the Dems verses the GOP. It’s about empathy and human decency. And it’s hard to stay quiet when I think about my parents’ housekeeper, and her daughter, and so many other families being ripped and kept apart, and our warming planet, and the setbacks and inevitable struggles for anyone who is not wealthy and cisgender and white. It’s hard to stay quiet when the stakes have become so incredibly high.

I don’t mean to state the obvious; I know we’re all aware that the news is bleak. If you’re looking for sources of inspiration and guidance, I’ve found the following to be particularly helpful and stimulating:

• This Jia Tolentino article from The New Yorker last month deftly communicates the despair and confusion surrounding this cultural moment. I have a tendency to vacillate between pretending certain headlines don’t exist and becoming completely engulfed by the doom of the realities they reveal, and after reading Tolentino’s essay, I feel less alone in this behavior, and more comprehending of the disassociation I’m experiencing.

• I wept watching Bruce Springsteen speak out against Trump during a concert in Manchester, England in May—ICYMI, it’s one hell of a speech.

• This clip from Rachel Maddow is motivational and spot on in terms of our collective responsibility at this juncture.

• As an actionable item, a friend reminded me that we should be calling our senators. You don’t have to have a script, per se, just call and tell the aid you have a message for your senator, then say something like: I’m highly concerned over the president overstepping his boundaries and, in particular, over the ICE raids happening across the country—or whatever your particular concern is. Every phone call helps.

• The below by the poet Elayne Griffin Baker is objectively dismal, but it reminded me of what our country used to be, of the soul that’s still in there, somewhere. It gives me hope that we’ll find our way out of this polarization and darkness and back to love, humanity, playfulness, and perhaps even unity.

A vacation also felt like a test, an experiment that would answer the following questions: what was our family, in its current status, capable of? How would we fare within our own limits, without school or grandparents or playdates or childcare for almost a week? My son and daughter will be five and three this summer, respectively; would embarking on a trip with children this young be vacationy in the slightest?

I am ready to travel with my kids. I am ready to drink a piña colada and read by the pool while my children entertain themselves in the water. But is this delusional? Am I getting five years ahead of myself? Ten? Parenthood is like this—a lot of feeling your way in the dark. Perspective that is only possible with hindsight. But I suspected a family vacation would be a way to gauge exactly where we stood, in real time.

We opted for a resort on the Gulf Coast of Florida, a kid-friendly spot on St. Pete Beach with a bajillion shallow pools and activities for little ones. In advance of the trip, we enrolled our 4.5-year-old in bi-weekly lessons with a swim instructor I’d been told could teach a rock to float, and potty trained our 2.5-year-old in an effort to free ourselves from the chains of round-the-clock, waterlogged diapers. On both fronts, enormous progress was made. We were ready. But were we?

The trip was last week, and now that we’re home, I do have a better sense of where we stand, of what level of travel our family can tackle. In an effort to be more casual with this Substack, I’ve opted for pros and cons, two each. Let’s start with the cons:

• 2.5 might be both the cutest and the hardest age. My daughter was probably easier on the trip than she would’ve been a year ago, but while she’s no longer a bull in a china shop, she’s now entered drunk escaped prisoner territory. She kept running away—from the pool, from the hotel room, towards the beach, away from the beach. She removed her bathing suit to pee on the sand in front of strangers, spilled entire strawberry daiquiris the minute they were handed to her. Smashed her brother’s sand castles. Screamed bloody murder when we intercepted her escape attempts. My back hurts from wrangling her.

• Evenings were not…ideal. Perhaps I’d been naive to envision the four of us blithely listening to reggae music on the beach at sunset, the sound of steel drums coaxing the children towards bedtime. In reality, both kids were wrecked by five o’clock, ready for a quick meal and pajamas after an active day in the sun. We’d planned to go out to dinner every evening of the trip, but only made it out twice. The first time, my daughter repeatedly slid underneath our table and tried to escape the restaurant; the second, she kept requesting one of us take her to the bathroom, only to have several false alarms. Eventually, she peed in her clothes right at the table. Needless to say, these dinners out were speedy. The resort didn’t offer any kind of babysitting service (which I should’ve looked into beforehand) and we forgot to bring a baby monitor. So when the kids went to sleep, my husband and I were in for the night, too.

Next, pros:

• Swim lessons for my son paid off. He’s always been a tentative kid when it comes to pursuing new activities, and it was incredible to see his comfort and confidence in the water. He had a blast. By and large, as a four-going-on-five-year-old he was pretty easy to travel with—he entertained himself on the plane (thank you, iPad), and was just generally more self-sufficient that he’s been on previous trips. I think I’m one step closer to drinking that piña colada with my book while the kids play in the pool.

• Maybe it sounds cheesy, but I keep thinking about what Carrie Coon’s character Laurie said in The White Lotus finale (which I think is safe to say we’ve all watched?). She said time gives her life meaning. It’s simple but it’s so profound, and I felt this often on vacation with my kids. To spend time with them—to be fully present with them for an uninterrupted chunk of days—was so meaningful. We don’t get this at home, when everyone’s schedules are packed and my husband and I are both working. I could tell that having our undivided attention made my children so happy, and it makes me feel a little guilty—and definitely sad—that it can’t be this way all the time. Our five days together were a gift, and I can’t wait to do it again.

Bonus pro: I read two incredible books that I must recommend—

Just Want You Here by Meredith Turits. I didn’t expect to finish a book on vacation with kids, but I simply could not put this novel down. I went to Meredith’s launch event in Brooklyn last month, where she was in conversation with my friend Colleen, so I thought I had a sense of the novel’s vibe. But for some reason, the book was not what I expected (in an exciting way). Just Want You Here follows Ari, a woman in her late twenties who has just broken up with her fiancé after a decade together. In need of a fresh start, she takes a job in Boston, where she ends up having an affair with her married boss (no spoilers, it’s in the jacket copy), while also becoming entangled with his wife. The writing was great and the plot was super unique—something about the reading experience reminded me of Emma Cline’s The Guest; I had no idea where the story was going but was thrilled to be along for the wild ride.

Long Bright River by Liz Moore. Technically I finished this one before vacation, but I have to shout my passion for it from the rooftops. This novel had been sitting on my nightstand for several years; I kept meaning to get to it, and when I heard the show was out on Peacock I finally cracked it open (I like to read the book before watching an adaptation, when I can). Long Bright River follows two sisters who are rocked by the opioid crisis in the same Philly neighborhood in very different ways—one’s a cop, one’s an addict—and the plot kicks off when the addict sister goes missing. The story is emotional and beautiful within the dark, devastating confines of its heavy subject; ultimately, it’s a literary thriller that had me fully gripped. I liked it even better than Liz Moore’s more recent bestseller, The God of the Woods. The novel’s final lines are chilling and resonant; I don’t think I’ll ever forget them.

Back then, Amelia had mailed me the print and included a note—I wish I’d saved it—which said something along the lines of: this is to remind you to be a strong, independent woman, like Carly!

The print has stayed with me over the years, tacked on the walls of the various apartments where I lived in New York and Colorado in my twenties. I finally put it in a frame when my husband and I moved into our house just before 2020. Looking at this picture of Carly never fails to shift my mood, to embolden me—a symbol of carefree confidence and something life-affirming. Perhaps most of all it reminds me of Amelia—a best friend who was there during a hard stretch, who believed in me when I couldn’t figure out how to believe in myself.

Five years later, Carly shines down on me from her corner perch in my office. The past five years of writing have been a whirlwind—lots of ups, a few downs. And even though it’s hard to feel anything but gratitude for a career that has given me so much—a career in which I’ve been on the receiving end of a stupid amount of luck—I want to talk about the way writing has been difficult lately, because that’s my current reality.

A couple of weeks ago, I received some tough feedback regarding Book 5, the novel I began drafting in May of 2023. It’s a book I’m writing because I want to, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that I’m contracted by my publisher for another novel. And while I’m overwhelming grateful to have a contract—because it means I have a job—it also adds pressure to the creative process.

The practice of cranking out Book 5 has been a slow drip, which I could’ve anticipated. When I began working on the draft, my son was two and a half and my daughter was nine months old. Nearly two years later and you can do the math, but writing a novel with a baby who’s grown into a toddler and a toddler who’s grown into a kid in preschool has felt, at times, like a kind of test. The transition from one to two children hasn’t been easy for my husband and me. It’s a transition that’s rocked our world, that some days feels like it’s only getting harder when I’m often told that it should be getting easier.

I love to write—the expansion and peace writing has brought to my life is immeasurable—but over the past year I can’t count the number of mornings I sat down at my computer and stared at the blinking cursor in front of me, thinking: I don’t want to do this. My brain doesn’t have space for this. There isn’t language for the way I love my children, but trying to write a novel and parent them in tandem—even with the privilege of childcare—has flipped my process on its head. I can’t figure out how to do it without stretching myself thin, on the verge of breaking. I always need more time. My mind is constantly robbed of stillness, of clarity, of intention.

For example: during the twenty-one-month period that it took to write the first draft of Book 5, I never once told my agent or my editor what the novel was actually about. Why on earth not? Motherhood is a theme, was all I said, vaguely. And it gets dark. I’d been adamant about keeping the plot to myself because I’d wanted them to be surprised. I’d wanted to test the effectiveness and placement of the twists. I never paused to think through the risks of this omission; I was too focused on plowing ahead, on moving forward.

Last December, when it was clear I wouldn’t make my end-of-year deadline, my husband offered to hold down the fort with the kids so I could stay at my parents’ house in Vermont for three extra days after New Year’s and have a stretch of uninterrupted time to work. That time was invaluable, and I made so much progress, but I still had a way to go when I got home. My deadline had come and gone; my publishing team was more than understanding but I told myself I’d get the draft in by the end of the month, if only for my sanity. I spent every night in January in my office after the kids went to bed. I didn’t watch TV or read or talk to my husband, and it wasn’t easy to give up that three-hour block between my kids’ bedtime and my own—the only free window a parent of young children has all day. I worked on the draft until my vision blurred. Until, on January 29^th, it was finally, mercifully done.

That same day, I emailed the manuscript to my agent and exhaled a sigh of relief as the file spun off into the cloud. Writing a book is hard, no way around that, but this one had taken a toll. On my mental health. On my kids. On my marriage—the tit-for-tat dynamic that had escalated because of the constant battle for more time to work.

My agent read Book 5 quickly, which I took as a good sign, but she had notes. I spent the next few weeks working on a revision, and then the manuscript was finally ready to go to my editor. I was full of nerves. My editor and I are close, and I’ve never submitted a book that she hasn’t felt was in relatively decent shape. But as I waited to hear back from her, I began to doubt myself. I thought more honestly about my agent’s feedback, which had contained a general degree of concern I hadn’t wanted to face. And it wasn’t just my agent—I knew Book 5 dealt with some polarizing material. Perhaps I’d simply been writing the book for so long that I’d become anesthetized to its potential triggers. For a week, I waited. I fought off the doubt and convinced myself that everything would be fine.

It was the middle of a Thursday afternoon when my phone lit up with a text. I was on the floor, using a butter knife to remove stubborn red putty from the fibers of our living room carpet (side note: don’t buy TheraPutty for your kids; it sneakily stains everything). I glanced at my phone to see a message from my agent. She’d written that my editor had finished reading Book 5, and asked if we could talk on the phone. I can’t explain how I knew in that moment, but I did. A pit of dread formed in my stomach.

Our phone call lasted for twenty minutes that are foggy, even in my recent memory. But the takeaway was clear: my team felt that Book 5 contained a fatal flaw, specifically pertaining to the degree of darkness of the plot. A portion of the novel—I didn’t yet know how much—would need to be scrapped and reworked.

For a disorienting moment, I felt like I was dreaming. Like it couldn’t be real. And then something broke open inside of me, some tight coil of hope I’d been spinning since May of 2023. The shame and anxiety were crushing; eventually, they crystallized into defeat. I felt numb and exhausted, rattled by the possibility that I’d wasted nearly two years’ worth of time and energy—time and energy I’d had to fight for. The tears came from a place of subconsciousness, and I felt like a child, unable to stop myself from sobbing uncontrollably into the phone.

I’m tempted to label my reaction as dramatic but that feels reductive and not quite fair to the me of that moment, even if my perceived sense of doom has lessened in hindsight. Regardless of the fact that I chose to keep this novel close to the vest, the extended solitary nature of writing it had me tightly wound; this kind of feedback was always going to knock me back on my heels.

Later that day, I texted my two closest writer friends to share what had happened.

Send us the draft, we’ll help you brainstorm, Avery and Colleen wrote back. This could be salvageable.

As any writer knows, when you’ve been alone with your manuscript for a long period of time, having other people read it is 1) terrifying and 2) the most helpful thing on earth. I sent Avery and Colleen the manuscript on Thursday evening, and they were both finished by Sunday, a fact that floored me because I’m a slow reader—especially during this season of life—and both of these women are in the thick of it with small children and busy careers. But they carved out time to do this for me. They shared what they loved about the book, and what they could see wasn’t working. Their feedback was unvarnished and exactly what I needed to hear, and the gratitude I felt was dizzying. It was like looking at the picture of Carly Simon in my office and remembering the way Amelia had cheered for me when I was on the ground. The way she’d held me. The way friendship, all my life, has held me.

When I was drafting Bye, Baby in 2021, I went to visit my sister in California and watched Working Girl on the plane. The theme song of that movie—Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run”—will always remind me of that trip, and it made its way into a chapter of Bye, Baby. It’s become a favorite song and now my four-year-old loves it, too—he asks me to play it regularly, and it’s a big step up from Blippi’s Excavator Song, let me tell you.

Let the river run. Letting the river run is trusting the process, and that’s my new plan, even if I don’t like the triteness of the way it sounds.

I’m tired; aren’t we all? The world is on fire and lately I just want to rest and read fiction and cuddle my children. Part of me is daunted by the scope of the work ahead, and yet, I know there is a river that runs below the surface, an invigorating current that will pull me under once I dip my toe in. In a matter of days or weeks, I’ll be absorbed back into the manuscript, committed to the revision. I’ll stay there.

Stay there.

The morning after my agent called, I dragged myself to a yoga class. The teacher cued us into an uncomfortable squat, where we bent our knees and lowered ourselves, slowly, towards the floor.

Stay there, the instructor said, a bright smile filling her face, which glistened with healthy sweat. We hovered above the ground and my thighs trembled, burning, the muscles begging for release.

Stay there, the teacher repeated, before reminding me of what I knew deep down, a truth I’d almost forgotten. The place where there’s discomfort, the place where it’s hard…that’s where things get interesting.

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I’m drawn to the concept of having a place where I can write in a more casual and intimate format, and hopefully engage with readers. Here on Substack, I plan to write about a range of topics—everything from writing process and ideation to motherhood and the enigmatic pursuit of balance. I’ll also use this space to share recommendations (books and otherwise).

This week, I'm brainstorming in advance of what is shaping up to be a heavy revision of my work in progress. So far, Book 5 has given me a run for my money and I’ve written an essay (a personal one) that touches more on this. I’ll share that here next week.

In the meantime, here’s a rec for you:

The Tell by Amy Griffin is a powerful and emotional memoir that truly reads like a thriller. I saw Amy speak at an event last week and she’s a real force—I left inspired by her vulnerability. I tore through her book in a couple of days and think it’s one that every woman should read. It would also make for a good book club pick—there’s a lot to discuss.

Thanks for being here. Have a glorious weekend, and happy SPRING!

x Carola