First thing’s first: the fall session of my accountability group, Fuck You, Write Your Pages, is now open for enrollment.

The session begins Monday, September 14, 2026 and goes for twelve weeks (skipping Thanksgiving). The final email goes out December 14, 2026.

Here is how it works:

Every Monday, accountability group members will receive a Substack newsletter (different and separate from this one) accessible only to group members.

Each email includes a contribution from a working writer I admire: a helpful tip, a writing prompt, a stirring pep talk, and so on. Past contributors include Rachel Khong, Matthew Zapruder, Stephanie Danler, Attica Locke, and Dan Chaon…among other luminaries and mensches.

From there, I pose two questions: What are your writing goals this week? and how did last week’s goals go?

I always include my own answers in the week’s email because I too want to be held accountable!

Some Fuckeroos aim to write a certain number of pages or words a week, while some set a time-at-the-desk goal. Some are outlining; some are drafting; others are revising; others are writing journal entries. It’s up to each person to decide what they need to do. Hearing how it’s going for other people is inspiring and comforting. Some Fuckeroos even find a buddy for extra accountability.

If someone fails to post, they hear from me.

Throughout the week, I comment on everyone’s posts, and there’s some communication between Fuckeroos as well. It’s a supportive, energizing place to gather.

In addition to the weekly emails, I hold three optional Study Halls via Zoom throughout the session; typically, two are on Sunday mornings (9 am PST), and one is held on a weekday morning. In these sessions, we briefly share what we’ll be writing, and then we mute ourselves and turn off our cameras to write alone-yet-together for ninety minutes. It’s amazing how much people get done in these Study Halls.

This group is open to writers of all experience and skill levels; there are very new writers participating as well as authors with multiple books published or projects developed. You can be working on a book, or a script, or a play, or a story, or a poem, or a newsletter post, or a journal practice—anything goes as long as you want to write and be held accountable.

The cost is $125, except for paying subscribers of this newsletter, who can enroll for $100. Right now there’s a BIG SALE: 35% off!

What a deal!

If you’re interested in joining the group, please email me at edan.lepucki@gmail.com to sign up.

SPACES ARE LIMITED! ACT NOW! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO BE PART OF THIS SEXY GANG OF WRITERS!

Okay, phew, information dispensed.

I’ve just returned from a ten-day writing retreat. I finished my novel for the time being, so what did I do for ten days away from my family—aside from melting in 100+ degree heat?

Read on to find out:

1. What one writes on a 10-day retreat when one has recently finished a big writing project.

2. What bestselling novel appeared in my cottage unbidden, demanding to be read in 30 hours. I am here to issue my decree.

3. What excellent new dinner recipe will be forever rolled into our retreat life.

4. How I honored Dolly Parton’s legacy.

5. A few internet rabbit holes I went down.

Read more

This piece is free for all subscribers, but if you’d like to become a paying subscriber, check out the sale! I’m offering 35% off, baby!

Every woman has an underwear biography, a story of what she wore beneath her clothes at different points in her life. The clothing changes and so must the underwear. The body changes, too. Then it changes again, and again. (And again.) The underwear follows. Perhaps someone will be looking at us in our underwear. We want them to look. Other times, we don’t.

Most of all, we want to be comforted by the first article of clothing we step into every morning. We need something reliable and, hopefully, flattering. Many of us have also set aside a few pairs for a highly specific purpose, to be worn approximately once a month. Period Underwear is rattier than its siblings, possibly stained, likely capacious, wide of gusset: the word itself—gusset—comically ugly. Yet when our bodies change again, we know it will and it does, a fondness may remain for those hardworking pairs, no longer necessary.

To think, every time I go to the bathroom, I reflexively check in with my underwear, to read whatever corporeal data might be there. It’s a site of communication between me and my body.

Underwear has earned its name: it’s intimate.

Lately, I’ve struggled to find a pair of underwear that works for me.

For years, I wore a thong.

This was for practical reasons. I have a narrower waist and wider hips, and my butt is big—fat and muscular—and it eats underwear like Cookie Monster gobbles up Oreos. A big butt rises on either side of a wedgie like dough. It’s neither cute nor comfortable. To paraphrase a line from Elisa Albert’s novel After Birth, my panty lines have panty lines.

A thong fixed this issue. At night, I wore—and still wear—cotton bikini briefs. (Scandal! Woman Wears Underwear To Sleep! If this bothers you, get this: I go commando to exercise…)

The thong was my solution until my third pregnancy left me with a hemorrhoid. (My doctor once called it “cute” so we’re going with that. It’s a cute hemorrhoid!) You know what a cute hemorrhoid doesn’t like? Thongs!

What now? I have no desire to wear full-coverage granny panties, even the hipster rebrands. I don’t want that much fabric on me, and, sorry, I can’t abide the dowdy factor. On the other hand, hipster cuts and boy shorts have never fit me right.

I eventually settled on Auden—Target’s house brand—Invisible Edge bikinis. These are affordable and flattering, and a wonder of technology: so slippery and soft, with nary a panty line.

Alas, there’s one problem. A big one. This underwear is made of nylon, a synthetic material that should not be allowed anywhere near a vulva. Never mind that I’m probably giving myself cancer, the issue is that this fabric makes me sweat. I will not be fooled by a measly cotton lining: I may be a woman but I am no lady, and the cotton lining on these is mere security theatre. The thermoplastics breach the barrier!

I live in fear of someone sniffing the air and asking, “What’s that ungodly odor?” Then I’ll have to explain that it’s the argument my vagina is mounting against a fabric devised in the last century by a group of chemists—male chemists, I presume.

I know I am not entirely beastly because my cotton underwear (my night look, thank you very much), causes no such problem. And yet. To wear them during the day brings me back to the wedgie/panty line issue.

So. What now?

Earlier this year, I sent out a survey about underwear. Forty-one women aged thirty-ish to seventy-ish, sized XS to 3X, shared their favorites and their struggles. Their answers were illuminating, not only because they offered so many appealing options, but also because they proved how complex the search for the right undergarments can be.

We want our intimates to serve many different purposes, often contradictory ones. Underwear should be comfortable yet flattering, practical but not so practical as to look unappealing. One responder wrote that she wants underwear that makes her feel “more like a sexy seal and less like a sausage in casing.”

We want cotton or breathable fabric. We want soft. We want invisible or at least not-too-visible panty lines. We want pairs available in neutral colors and black but fun shades and patterns too. We want them to last.

We don’t want a too-narrow gusset that—oh dear god no—rides up the front, what one responder called “the horrible vagina wedgie.” We don’t want underwear that digs into our flesh, or snags on our pubic hair, or bugs our C-section scars. We want it to be elegant. We want it to be absorbent. As one responder wrote, “Nothing more repellent than vaginal discharge on nylon in my opinion.”

And yet: we are not a monolith.

Some of us want to feel strapped in and secure. Meanwhile, someone else wrote, “I abhor being held in,” which is the exact thought I had earlier this year when I tried a thicker, more structured cotton underwear. No thank you!

Some of us want underwear to reach our navels, and some of us want a little triangle covering only our nether parts.

Some of us want underwear that doesn’t stain when we free bleed into them.

Some of us are hoping for lace or a bow.

Some of us have given up sexy underwear altogether: “to my husband’s chagrin, but this is his problem, not mine!”

Some of us swear by thongs that don’t chafe or bunch up. Others refuse thongs, resolutely; one responder called them “male gazey.”

Some of us pay big money for our underwear—“I am willing to spend extra money on underwear because it is a thing I wear every damn day!”—while others prefer a more affordable multi-pack.

Some of us are devoted to one brand or style, and some of us switch it up based on mood, season, outfit. One of us even owns some Victorian underwear “to have at the ready should I need them” —what that occasion might be, it’s fun to imagine.

A few of us want underwear that stays up. This confused me: I have never, in my life, worn underwear that did not stay up. This, I realized, was a body type issue, another revelation from the survey: we are talking about our bodies in such interesting ways.

In the surveys, all kinds of non-body imagery proliferated. Someone out there is a bowling pin. There are a couple of apples, and more than a few pears. One woman self-reported as a Dachshund, with a long torso and short legs. Another is a “hot penguin” due to outdoor distance swimming and eating what she likes. One woman is a reformed ruler, straight and narrow, only she’s too curvy for that description nowadays.

I myself am not literally a pear, nor is my butt an actual bubble, nor even oatmeal over a slab of muscle (as it looks to me in the mirror sometimes!) Yet the metaphors are useful: their playfulness allows the body to slip from the noose of language, as it must.

There was also a lot of approximate language in the surveys : “Tall-ish” and “Athletic ish curvy ish average ish” and “short and stout-ish.”

For others, question marks reveal a body’s state of flux, descriptions like, “Works out but also likes to eat. Curvy athletic?” and “Long but increasingly lumpy?” One responder even put her body type in quotes, followed by a few question marks: “Curvy”??

(This responder added that she’s been into the word “chubby” lately, and I agree: it’s great.)

I also appreciated the women with a more declarative sense of their bodies. One exclaimed: “Curvy! Rubenesque! Big Butt! A bit of a jiggly lady of a certain age belly pooch!” Another wrote, “Tall and thin with massive boobs.” Another: “Flat ha ha.”

Underwear, being so close to the bodies, our particular, exceptional bodies, is the first barrier between us and the world. How could we not want it to be as particular and exceptional as we are?

What follows are the various types of underwear recommended by my generous survey respondents. I am grateful to them for their time and wisdom!

I’ve organized their recommendations, with occasional notes. I also painted some (extremely amateur) visual aids for your amusement…

If you want full-coverage, up to the belly button—or close to it:

Amazon, Women’s Breathable Cotton High Waisted Full Coverage Underwear, $15.30 for 6

Arq, High Rise Undies, $34 (two votes)

Chantelle Lingerie, briefs, $15.99

Duluth Trading Company, Women’s Free Range Organic Cotton Briefs, $10.97

Hanes,Women’s Super Stretch Microfiber Modern Brief Underwear, Comfort Flex Fit, $18.99 for 6

Harper Wilde, Bliss Lace Highwaist Brief $18

Subset, Organic Cotton High Rise Brief, $20 (these got three votes; these were way too thick and confining for me!)

Uniqlo, High Rise Briefs, $7.90

If you like a hipster cut:

Icebreaker, Women’s Merino 150 Siren Hipkini 2 Pack, $80.00 for 2 (these are made of WOOL! I am intrigued!)

Gap, Breathe Hipster, $24.99 for 3

Gap, Organic Stretch Cotton Hipster, $6

Me Undies, UltraModal Feel Free Hipster, $22 (or 3 for $44.88)

Target, Auden Women’s Seamless Hipster Underwear, $8

If you like a boy short:

Athleta, Sleek Form No Show Boyshort, $15

Gap, Organic Stretch Cotton Lace-Trim Shorty, $11 (or 5 for $35)

Soma, Boyshort Panty (various), $14

Tomboy X, Boy Shorts, $26

If you like a bikini cut:

Amazon, Women’s Cotton Spandex Bikini Brief Underwear, $10.40 for 6

Arq, Lou Undies, $32

Aubade, any of the bikini cuts, $75-$115

Calvin Klein, Carousel 3-Pack Bikini Panty Set, $17.97

Gap, Breathe Bikini, $7

Gap, Organic Cotton Bikini, $7.99

Jungmaven, Bikini Brief, $40

Natori, Bliss Briefs, $22

Negative, Whipped French Cut Brief, $115 for 3

On Gossamer, Gossamer Mesh Hip Bikini Underwear, $22

Soma, Cotton Bikini Panty, $17.99

Woolly, Bikini Brief 3-Pack, $97

If you like a thong:

Cosabella, Seamless Thong (discontinued, but here’s something similar), $26

Hanky Panky, Original Rise Thong, $24 (I used to wear these!)

Hanky Panky, Signature Lace Original Thong, $24

Hanky Panky, Signature Lace Low-Rise Thong, $24

Huha, High Rise Thong, $26

Intimissimi, Microfiber Lace Brazilian Thong, $18

Negative, Cloud Cotton Thong, $62 for 3

Target, Auden thongs (various) , $6-15

Other brands specified, without a cut mentioned:

Chantelle Lingerie

Gap

Hanes

Jockey

John Lewis

Pact (twice recommended)

Panache

Subset (twice recommended, but one person said these need to be replaced annually, which feels too often.)

Uniqlo Seamless

There you have it. Enjoy clicking through and making some decisions!

Do you have an underwear recommendation? Do you have an underwear-related rant to share? Sound off in the comments!

***

If you enjoyed reading this piece, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work. As I mentioned: There’s a 35% off SALE going on right now until October 1st! That’s $3.25 a month or $32.50 for the year. Wow!

Paid subscribers receive an email every Friday. These short newsletters cover all sorts of topics, from books to parenting to fashion to food to the writing life. My goal is to delight and engage, and maybe make you laugh. Occasionally, I get very personal…

Paid subscribers also receive $25 off enrollment in my private accountability group, Fuck You, Write Your Pages. The new session begins mid-September.

Don’t want to commit? You can also leave me a tip—because mama needs some cash to get some new underwear…

My kids are back in school, which means that, no matter how glittery the seashore, how high the temperature, my summer is over.

I read eleven novels in my eight weeks off. What follows are mini-reviews of a few of them.

Read on to find out what big summer book I hated (it’s not Yesteryear, which I haven’t read yet!), which literary novel I loved, which modern classic drove me batty, and which bestseller made me cry…

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I was traveling all week so here’s a quick quintet of recommendations…

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On Monday, the kids and I went to the beach, which was perfect, even with the sunburn souvenirs we brought home…

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If you’ve wondered what bedtime looks like for three children aged 15, 10, and almost 7, read on. As babies, these kids were exclusively breastfed, they never co-slept, they took long, juicy naps and slept for ten to twelve hours nightly, and they transitioned from crib to toddler bed before the age of two.

What follows, unfortunately, isn’t advice. (Ha ha ha ha NOPE). Consider it a highly idiosyncratic saga, as all parenting chronicles should be.

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What are you eating this summer?

Here are two meals I enjoyed this week:

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Summer is a season for the senses and I love it. This week, I had a hard time writing fiction until I leaned into sensual, sensory descriptions, every scene charged with the bodies in them, alive with living.

So what should I write here, for this week’s issue?

Here’s some of my living—

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That first summer was pretty wonderful: not-writing is the easiest thing in the world, and I allowed myself to sink into a low stakes summer schedule with my kids. I felt lucky to get that time with them.

Last year, I repeated the experiment to mixed results. For one, I was crabby about putting aside the first draft of my new novel, and the tension between wanting to write and not being able to write made me resentful. Also, the kids’ one week of summer camp came right before our big trip abroad—our first substantial family travel since 2021! By the time we returned to the States, I felt disconnected from my novel. It took real effort to get back into my regular writing practice once school began.

This year, I decided I needed to change up the summer plans. Read on to find out how I’m tinkering with the Mommy Experiment…

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This is the last full week of school for my kids, with the semester officially ending next Wednesday. A week from now I’ll share this summer’s Childcare Plans, which may or may not be at odds with this summer’s Writing Plans. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, here are some recent delights, be they literary, visual, edible, sartorial, or interpersonal—

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For today’s Friday edition for paying subscribers, I thought I’d share some of the books that my teenage son has enjoyed these past few years…

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Then, as now, I exclaimed over the collage-style illustrations, Peter’s cap a pop of red in a world of white snow. I marveled at Peter’s pink bathtub as I read, “And he thought and thought and thought about them,” the repetition a song, a pleasure.

My child could not see beyond a few inches in front of him, let alone follow a picture book. His face was still swollen from a tough birth, and I was still bleeding as my uterus contracted back to its original size. Had my milk even come in yet?

No matter. A story was a story and I was reading my child the first of many.

Looking back on it now, I think, Of course I did that. I was sleep deprived and wrecked after a 42-hour labor that ended in a C-section, a birth outcome I’d refused to mentally prepare for. And now I had this human to keep alive? Excuse me?

Reading was how I’d always relaxed and self-regulated. Reading, I felt like myself. That I could share this experience with my baby was the first clue that I’d be able to mother him.

I had two more children, and I read to them as soon as I could. Reading to and with my kids transformed time: ten or twenty or thirty minutes of parenthood became an immeasurable unit of peace and togetherness. The soothing prose rhythm of Margaret Wise Brown’s Big Red Barn is only made more profound with a child’s weight against one’s chest.

In the beginning, it seemed I’d transferred my love of reading to them, that this was a passion my children and I shared. We bonded over favorite books. We laughed over them, we appreciated illustrations, we quoted lines, we asked questions we couldn’t answer. With reading, we punctuated the day.

They got it.

I was eager to teach my kids to read by themselves. How could I not want to pass on this magical power? Also: If they read, they would be more independent. They might leave me alone to dive into a novel. Bliss!

So, one by one, I taught each of them their letters. Then we practiced reading with BOB books. I cheered when they read aloud their first picture books.

Now my kids are fourteen, ten, and six. We visit the library and our local bookstores on a regular basis, and our house is covered in books. As far as children’s literature goes, we have all the classics and modern greats, plus the hipster titles, the award winners. We also own every shitty Pinkalicious paperback and handfuls upon handfuls of TV tie-ins. All the popular graphic novels too. If you want to read it, I’ll find a way to get it in your hands. Just read!

The truth is, there are very (very) few things about parenting that make me think, Yep, nailed it.

For a time, reading was one them.

Until it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the line our house of voracious readers shifted to a house where the parents read…and (most of) the children do because…their parents require it.

Maybe that’s not totally accurate. My kids do read, and not always because we make them.

Mickey has re-read the Dog Man and Dory Fantasmagory series at least 600 times, and he’s currently smitten with Bird and Squirrel, a graphic novel/comic book series that his older brother also loved in first grade. We recently went through a pile of Berenstain Bears picture books together. Now he’s onto a graphic novel series called Mayor Good Boy, which is like Dogman without the copaganda.

Ginger will read any Babysitters Club-related content, especially if it’s a graphic novel. She had a three-month, on-and-off again relationship with a middle grade novel called Gracefully Grayson that she finally finished, declaring it, “My new favorite book.” Last year, she went through a serious Judy Blume phase. We’re slowly reading Anne of Green Gables aloud together.

And, back when freshman year began, Bean read Salem’s Lot obsessively. From time to time, he’ll say, randomly, “I love that book. How did he do it?”

I realize these descriptions paint a rosy picture of my family’s literacy habits. The reality, however, is less than ideal.

My kids, if they’re reading, don’t typically do it of their own volition. It’s not fun to them. It seems like they’d rather do something—anything—else.

We make Ginger and Mickey read at least thirty minutes before bed. It’s a rule, not to mention Ginger’s homework, but it’s also a ritual, a way to be a person.

If they didn’t read then, and if we didn’t make them, would they do it at all? I’m skeptical.

Ginger rarely finishes a book; she only got to the end of Gracefully Grayson because I forced her to. I usually let her abandon books as she sees fit—it’s her reading life, after all!—but there were only thirty pages left and she’d been quite taken by the novel at different points. (I felt vindicated by her final verdict!)

When we read Anne of Green Gables together, she is fidgety.

“Why is this so boring?” she’ll ask. (Meanwhile, I’m filled with the golden light of L.M. Montgomery’s descriptions.)

Mickey, though happy to get in bed to read, resists almost all new books. And if I suggest he read on a random afternoon, he’ll wrinkle his nose.

“I’m not you, Mommy,” he might say, and a hairline crack edges along my heart.

He’s correct. He isn’t me. Neither is Ginger or Bean. That’s fine—I’m not trying to make carbon copies of myself. (Or am I?!) But my kids rarely seem genuinely excited to read, and it bums me out.

It’s worse with Bean, my teenager, to whom I read The Snowy Day so many years ago.

I can’t force him to read at bedtime anymore. So he doesn’t. After Salem’s Lot, he couldn’t get into another book. He abandoned one Stephen King novel after another until giving up on the author altogether. The book of De Gaulle’s war memoirs, which he begged me to get him on a random trip to Vroman’s, also went unread.

The kid doesn’t have a smartphone, but he has other ways to degrade his attention span. There’s the endless buffet of streaming TV, there’s YouTube, there’s Nintendo.

People tell me he’ll get back to the reading habit. That he’s a teenager. And I get that. But when people say that they also didn’t read when they were his age, I’m less comforted. The world our kids are growing up in is different than the one we grew up in. There’s now a mind-boggling array of on-demand entertainment. There is less friction, less boredom, and unlike other pastimes, reading requires an ability to move through those feelings until the mind fully immerses into the text and lights up.

Patience, attention, tenacity—in 2026, you can get through most days without them. Yet those same skills made me a lifelong reader.

What I want is to raise lifelong readers.

But why —and how? Maybe it’s a folly to try.

I’ve written before about family rules v. family values. In a household where reading is a value, what do you do when that value isn’t shared?

When reading is enforced, a site of connection becomes a site of conflict. Believe me, there are more than enough of those in my house.

In the middle of the night, my rational brain floating somewhere in the dark, I worry that my children’s halfhearted reading reflects a widespread, societal deterioration. That their lack of passion for books signals how they’ll live going forward, adapting to an AI-slopped, fragmented world where sustained attention inside another human’s consciousness is considered out of touch, inessential. That reading will only be good-for-you, and reserved for a select few. That it won’t be valued. It won’t even be entertained as entertainment.

Sometimes, way past midnight, I think about all the bored kids who scroll or play mindless games on phones instead of reading—or making art or music or some dumb doodle as their mind wanders. How many artists and thinkers will be unmade before they’re made?

Reading can’t prevent the world’s ills. I know that.

And yet, it’s saved me over and over again.

Reading—and the way my kids do or don’t do it—has become an avatar for everything I’m afraid of. The world they’re inheriting. What they’ll reach for when life gets challenging. The options they will or won’t have. The space they’ll be given: to reflect, imagine, mature, dream.

It’s control I want. I want a failsafe method to keep them safe. And there isn’t one.

Reading to my kids was how I meshed my identities: the person I was before I had children, and the person I became after. They weren’t so different after all.

But raising bigger kids also means accepting them for who they are. Figuring out that dance of identities. Learning to let go, without neglect. Allowing them to differentiate from you. Watching them find their own way, in their world.

It tracks that the children of readers might reject the practice—or at least come to it on their own terms.

The most I can do with my teenager, in particular, is to continue to offer different stuff to read, and to accept his methods. As with everything else, if I push, he resists.

I have to encourage, never demand.

And so—

I check out from the library that dry history book on slavery he asked for, and say nothing as it remains unread on his nightstand.

I buy him a cool-looking graphic novel from a local comic shop, and display zero enthusiasm when he takes it into the bath one evening.

I remain placid when he brings back a sci-fi book from a little free library, and a month later, and I keep my face neutral when he mentions finishing it at school.

I pay attention to his interests so that when he starts talking about being “a simple country lawyer” in an egregious Southern accent (don’t ask), and mentions creating a Civil War-themed amusement park, I can say, “I have just the thing for you.”

All I can do is create opportunities for my kids to read, and model a life that includes books.

To try not to control the outcome—because I can’t, I have no control, I never did.

(Here we are again, learning yet another Motherhood Lesson.)

This is their life to cultivate as they see fit.

The other day, on a Sunday, Mickey wanted to re-read Bird and Squirrel. The sun was hours from setting. It felt like a minor miracle. He wanted to read!

Play it cool.

I asked if I could read my book next to him. He was delighted by the prospect.

It took us a while to get comfortable, and we chatted about how settling in to read can be hard, but once we got going, we were reading for a good forty-five minutes.

He finished his book, for the eleventh time.

Two days later, Bean said offhandedly, “I’m reading that story. The CivilWarLand one.”

I held back from screaming with glee.

“Is it making you laugh?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Yeah,” he said.

He offered nothing more. I didn’t press.

The other morning, I read about the fund and then, a few minutes later, discovered Ginger barefoot in her room, drawing with a highlighter in her journal like it wasn’t 7:41 am and time to leave for school. I lost my mind. There is only so much bullshit I can handle!

Since I’m riding a wave of anger, here are three other parenting annoyances I want to stew about…

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Attention! I have an announcement!

For the past couple of years, I’ve taken the summer off from writing to become a full time parent. This summer, although I’ll have only three weeks of childcare for the nine weeks that schools are closed, I’d like to stay connected to my work.

I won’t be able to do that without my Fuckeroos. I need accountability!

Introducing the Fuck You, Write Your Pages: Quick ‘n Dirty Summer Session.

The session will go from June 22, 2026 to August 3, 2026 (7 weeks).

It will be a compressed version of the fall and spring accountability groups. Members will post their weekly writing goals to a private newsletter, which, unlike the regular sessions, will not include guest contributors. However, there will be three optional Study Halls to write together on Zoom, scheduled for Saturday June 27, Wednesday, July 8th, and Sunday, August 2nd, from 9 am to 11 am, Pacific time.

Cost: $55; $50 for paid subscribers of Italics Mine (this newsletter!)

I have 3 spots left. Please email me at edan.lepucki@gmail.com if you’d like to sign up.

***

I’m in the midst of revising a new novel, which feels unlike any other book I’ve written. This one is a sleek (yet smelly) horse that wants to gallop wild and free. Imagine me on its back, no saddle, hanging onto its matted mane for dear life. It’s exhilarating. And exhausting.

Maybe this metaphor doesn’t make sense to anyone but me. What I’m trying to say is, all my writing energy is going toward the novel. Until the horse and I finish our ride, I can’t come up with any essays, or even “essays”—as this medium encourages.

What I have, instead, is a list of delights. Who doesn’t want to be delighted?

Here they are, in no particular order, starting with the best postcard ever invented…!

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One of these shirts is only $10.00! The other costs more, but it’s made in the USA and when I wear it I feel like a sultry and powerful Ed Harris—except with breasts and not bald.

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Hey there! I’m Edan Lepucki, bestselling novelist and mother of three living in my hometown of Los Angeles. I send an email every Friday to paying subscribers; these missives cover everything from parenting to writing to reading to eating to dressing to…oh you get the picture. Subscribe for a weekly delight. Thanks so much for supporting my work.

Before I get to a report on my writing retreat, I wanted to share two pieces that were published while I was away:

For Alta, I interviewed Rachel Khong about her marvelous new story collection, My Dear You. We discuss her roots as a short story writer, her newsletter devoted to reading the form, her work’s goofy yet sincere tone, and magic:

“I find a lot of things magical. The fact that you can grow a tree from a seed: That’s magical. There’s the magic of our everyday lives. We take it for granted.”

Go here for more!

Although I was out of town for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, I did contribute to the paper’s special section on book clubs, recommending Sula, Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, and Middlemarch. About George Eliot’s novel, I wrote:

In these outraged, internet-addled times, there’s perhaps nothing more noble and community affirming than discussing a thick 19th century novel about rural England with a group of fellow readers. Originally published serially as eight volumes over the course of one year, “Middlemarch” would be the perfect pick for a slow-reading book club. For one, it’s long (my Penguin Classic clocks in at 800 pages), and you’ll want to take your time dissecting its fascinating cast of characters: the sincere and the bitter, the blowhards and the tenderhearted. By the sage grace of her omniscient narrator, Eliot depicts the full complexity of these lives — and, by the magic of fiction, our own. Trust me: There’s a wisdom bomb on nearly every page.

There are many other excellent books recommended—check it out!

I returned from my two-week writing residency on Monday and my re-entry has been…rough. The kids, resentful over my absence and uncertain what to do with their big feelings, have been the opposite of easy. Beyond that, the noise of everyday life, compared to the hours I had of solitude and birdsong, feels like being inside a truck motor.

That I ever wrote any of my novel during my regular life is a goddamn miracle.

Here’s a photo of me three days into my retreat. Has anyone ever looked more relaxed and happy?

I go away twice—sometimes thrice!—a year, but I don’t usually leave for two entire weeks. That asked a lot of Patrick, who handled everything while also working his demanding full time job. During my absence, he not only did all the normal stuff, like school drop-off and pick up, homework help, meals, and bedtime, he also dealt with a sick dog, a thousand meltdowns, overseeing the last part of a big fourth grade language arts project, getting a teenager to pack his PE sweats and log onto Spanish tutoring, taking said teen to the orthodontist (an appointment he made, by the way, because, no, not all moms make all the appointments, stop saying that), and putting out a million small domestic fires. I came home to a clean house, a stocked fridge, and news that the plumber had fixed our leak. Patrick was drained of his very life force, but at least he’d kept the household together. I have never been more grateful to have married someone so capable and loving.

To go away to write, as a parent, requires a mammoth level of support.

It also requires nerves of steel. I received many weepy phone calls from Ginger, and one where Mickey asked in a little voice, “Can you drive home right now to see me?” I missed them in that elemental way when distance has lathed away the frustration and fatigue and all you want is the sacred duty that is caretaking. I longed to see them, hold them, smell them. Everything was happening to them, and I wasn’t there to see it.

While I was gone, Mickey lost two teeth, and the photo Patrick took me of his new smile made me tear up:

My youngest was stepping into the next stage of childhood, and I wasn’t there to see it, wasn’t there to slide that cash under his pillow in exchange for a little piece of him, wasn’t there to hear the air whistling through that hole in his mouth, hear his new and temporary lisp, because—because why? Because I was writing a novel?

To go away to work is to prioritize your writing over everything and everyone else, including your children.

Nothing to do but hold the guilt and grief alongside the delight and pleasure of being away. I wrote a lot so that the sacrifice wouldn’t be for nothing.

Here’s a further peek into my experience there:

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In January, during our third week of winter break—a break that included endless rain, various flus, major holidays, zero travel, and days of boredom and fighting—Patrick said, “We have to go somewhere over spring break.”

If you have three (or more!) kids, then you know the financial pain of travel: five (or more!) is a troubling number of people to fit into a hotel room or a rental car. Airbnbs are better for a larger party…but I’m down on vacation rentals. The ones in our price range are always a little depressing. I don’t want to pay over a thousand dollars to swim desultorily in an okay pool in an okay house with serial killer vibes!

When Patrick was a kid, his family (two adults and four kids) would take road trips down to his grandparents’ house, and, on the way, stuff into a single motel room. He said he slept on the floor. I’m sorry, but I would rather stay home. I know it’s deeply uncool to admit this: but I don’t love to travel! I get anxious away from home, without my bed and my routines. I’d rather travel less so that I can spend more to have a comfortable (even luxurious) experience.

(Remember: frugality is not one of my core principles.)

A few years ago, we went to Santa Barbara with the idea that we’d do some stuff for the kids (swimming, ostrich feeding), and some stuff for the adults (winery visits, nice meals). In the end, this tactic meant someone was always unhappy: the parents swimming on what turned out to be a not-warm day, without even poolside service to soften the blow because we didn’t have the money for a nice hotel; the children who had to suffer through an (amazing!) lunch at Bell’s. We returned home resentful—and with a big credit card bill.

I didn’t want to repeat that sort of spring break. Why not just let the kids have all the fun, and we’d lap up the delights where we could?

“Let’s go to Disneyland,” I told Patrick. There was a 3-day park hopper ticket for Southern Californian residents, which meant we could do both Disneyland and California Adventure over multiple days.

We’d gone as a family to Disneyland in 2021; Bean had just turned ten, Ginger was five. Mickey, who wasn’t two years old yet, loved it…and yet he has no memory of the experience.

Time for another go!

That’s how we ended up staying at a Homewood Suites in Anaheim, California from Monday to Thursday of last week.

Let me first say, this was a great hotel for the price. (Specifics: The first night was something like $145, the second night was $200, and last, and most expensive, was about $320.)

For that cost, we got a large one-bedroom suite with a kitchen, plus free breakfast. This set-up, with Bean on the pull-out couch in the living room and the rest of us in two queen-sized beds in the bedroom, is still bone chilling for someone with travel-induced sleep anxiety (i.e., me), but it was our best option in our price range. We could walk to the free park shuttle, swim in the pool, and Mommy could take her emergency Xanax on night two when it was midnight and she was having a panic attack about being trapped in a room with three sleeping people and nowhere to go.

Here were all the bad things about our trip:

1. That stupid panic attack. Don’t recommend.

2. Two days in a row of amusement park madness. If we’d had more money, I would have rather put a day of rest between these Disney visits—we could have slept in, watched television, swam at the hotel or gone to the movies. Instead, on day two, we marched back to the happiest place on Earth without enough sleep. I was likely dehydrated and so tired I felt nauseated and dizzy. Everyone was crabby. The first day had been overcast, but the second day was hot and sunny. I felt like I was being fried on Main Street. Then I rolled my (still healing!) ankle and, I hate to tell you this, but I cried. I believe I said to my family, “Don’t touch me! I want to be alone!” Not my finest hour. However, the tears must have released some adrenalin or endorphins or whatever because things turned around after that. We went on Big Thunder Mountain for the second time, and then ate some Dole Whip while watching the animatronic birds sing at the Enchanted Tiki Room, and I felt my heart open once more.

3. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: Ginger’s anxiety is really bad when we travel, and on this trip her OCD spiked too. Lots of compulsive behaviors, rigid thinking, worries about anything and everything, many meltdowns. She subjected us all to an absolute obsession with Minnie Mouse ears, a ubiquitous trend among girls and women at Disneyland ages five to a hundred. She finally decided on the pair she wanted…and still every conversation returned to the various Minnie Mouse ears available. Just kill me. Please. Take me behind the Dumbo ride and shoot me!

4. The arguing. My god. You think, The kids will be so happy at Disneyland! But you forget that you have to do a lot waiting-in-lines together, a lot of dining together, a lot of hustling from one ride to the next together: in short, there are many opportunities to argue and pester one another about every god damn thing. I can’t count the number of times I said, “Just stop.”
   

   

5. Two years ago, I made the mistake of showing the kids this video about a guy who got naked on It’s a Small World because he was on drugs. To this day, I field questions about this newsworthy event. No surprise, these questions reached a crescendo when we were at Disneyland, and, in particular, in line for It’s a Small World, and on the ride itself. Why did he do that? What drugs was he on? How did he get off the boat? At what point in the ride did he take off his clothes? What happened next? Why did people film it? Did they give him new clothes when they caught him? What kind of blanket would they put on him? Is he is in jail for that? What’s the difference between jail and prison? How long would you go to prison for that? What is the crime he was charged with? What is psilocybin like? How is LSD different from mushrooms? What was he hallucinating? What part of the ride set him off? Is being on mushrooms like being in a dream? What did his family think? Were people scared? Why can he never come back to Disneyland? Why is Disneyland so strict? What if I see a naked man on this ride? Mom? Mommy? Mom?

6. On day two, we had time to kill before another ride reservation (we got the lightning lane pass) so we jumped into the 50-minute line for Goofy’s Sky School roller coaster at California Adventure. Well, folks, that shit took ninety minutes, in the blazing sun, and the kids were being insane. The ride itself was not special and we all felt cheated. At least we bonded over our hatred of this ride. We absolutely roasted Goofy for the rest of our trip.

7. The pain of walking twenty miles in two days, especially so soon after a sprained ankle. Everything hurt by the end!

Wow, that felt cathartic! Thanks for letting me rant!

I am happy to say that the good was so good. Here are some highlights:

1. We got to the hotel the day before our Disney adventures began, which let us settle in and hang out. For dinner that evening, we drove to Pho 101 for some excellent Vietnamese food. When Baudrillard wrote about the unreality of the region surrounding Disneyland, I don’t think he’d been to the city of Westminster! (Also, Bean kept cracking me up all week by saying, “Welcome to the desert of the real.”)

2. The new(ish) Star Wars ride, Rise of the Resistance, is a triumph. It’s a story-as-a-ride, with a goddamn narrative arc, and it’s thrillingly immersive—even for world weary adults. Mickey almost lost his mind with pleasure, and so did I. And I don’t care about Star Wars at all! (EXCEPT NOW I DO?!)

   

3. Mickey got absolutely soaked on Tiana’s Bayou Adventure née Splash Mountain: it looked like he’d fallen into a swimming pool…at 9 am on a chilly morning. He was so wet, I had to buy him some shorts to wear instead. The thing is, it was really, really funny and he was so good natured about his drenched circumstances. We all kept laughing about it for the rest of our trip.

4. We left the parks every night for dinner in downtown Disney. After walking so many miles among the masses, my bougie-ass wants a leather booth, a cocktail, and an overpriced entree on a porcelain plate. No regrets.

5. Space Mountain is still the best roller coaster in any galaxy. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride remains wonderfully odd, and Pirates of the Caribbean never fails to make me grin and gasp—that pirate’s dirty foot! Disneyland really is the happiest place on Earth.

6. And Ginger did look fabulous in her Minnie Mouse ears.

   

7. We went on Grizzly River Run, California Adventure’s water ride, at the end of day 2, when it was dark and cold and no one else in the park was interested. We got ponchos out of the trash (oh yes we did) and still got wet in uncomfortable places. Some of us went on this ride twice in a row. Some of us went on it three times. This episode of laughter and screaming and sustained non-arguing and non-anxiety and non-pain made the whole trip worth it. Also, Patrick’s poncho was a crop-top and looked like some high-end Fashion Jacket picked up in Tokyo.

   

8. Patrick and I are not the best planners, and I admire that about us. We did make those fancy dinner reservations and, obviously, had the park tickets and the hotel, but that’s about it: we didn’t have a game plan, we didn’t pack snacks, the first day we didn’t even have water! (I know some of you are aghast! Fuck off there are drinking fountains everywhere!) We didn’t know what the week would hold and that was part of the fun. As a group, we bicker, we are inefficient, one of us (Mommy) is probably crying, someone else is wandering off, someone needs a churro yesterday. But we also are there, fully, open to spontaneous moments of joy. We are analyzing the manufacturing of fantasy that Disney does best. We are laughing. In the end, we went on all the rides we wanted to go on, some of them a few times. Most importantly, we were in it together.

   

8. Last gift of the trip: Bean’s smile when I told him we could get McDonald’s on the ride home.

…and if you were reading carefully, you’ll recall that we bought a 3-day pass to Disneyland. So we will back for one more day in May! Lord help us!