Untamed

I sit in a cold plastic seat near the airport gate, stare at my suitcase, sip airport coffee. It’s bitter and weak. I look at the plane through the gate window. How many of those will I board in the coming year? A hundred? I’m bitter and weak, too.

If I board, this plane will take me to Chicago O’Hare, where I’ll search for a driver holding a sign with my (husband’s) last name on it. I’ll raise my hand and watch the driver’s face register surprise that I am a small woman in sweatpants instead of a large man in a suit. The driver will deliver me to the Palmer Hotel—where a national book conference is being held. There I’ll stand on a stage in a grand ballroom and speak to a few hundred librarians about my soon-to-be-released memoir, Love Warrior.

Love Warrior—the story of the dramatic destruction and painstaking reconstruction of my family—is expected to be one of the biggest books of the year. I will be promoting it on stages and in the media for, well, forever.

I am trying to find my feelings about this. Fear? Excitement? Shame? I can’t isolate anything specific. I stare at the plane, wondering how to explain my life’s most intimate, complicated experience to a sea of strangers within my seven allotted minutes. I have written a book, and now I must become a commercial for the book I have written. What is the point of being a writer if I have to say words about the words I’ve already written? Do painters have to draw about their paintings?

I’d been at this airport gate starting line before. Three years before, I’d released my first book and traveled the country telling the story of how I’d finally found happily-ever-after by trading my lifelong food and booze addictions for a son, a husband, and writing. I’d stood on stages all over the country and repeated the book’s message to hopeful women: Carry on. Life is hard, but you are a warrior. One day it will all come together for you, too.

Right after that first book’s ink dried, I sat in a therapist’s office and listened to my husband say that he’d been sleeping around since our wedding.

I held my breath as he said, “There have been other women,” and when I inhaled again, the air was made of smelling salts. He kept apologizing while looking down at his hands, and the impotent stammering made me laugh out loud. My laughter made both men—my husband and his therapist—visibly uncomfortable. Their discomfort made me feel powerful. I looked at the door and willed adrenaline to carry me out of that building, across the parking lot, and into my minivan.

I sat in the driver’s seat for a while and realized that the revelation of my husband’s betrayal did not leave me feeling the despair of a wife with a broken heart. I was feeling the rage of a writer with a broken plot. Hell hath no fury like a memoirist whose husband just fucked up her story.

I was furious with him and disgusted with myself. I’d let down my guard and trusted that the other characters in my story would act as they should and that my plot would unfold as I’d mapped it. I’d rendered my own future and my children vulnerable by ceding creative control to another character. What an idiot. Never again. I would take back full control, starting now. This was my story and my family, and I would decide how it ended. I’d take this shit I’d been handed, and I’d spin it into gold.

I took control back with words, sentences, chapters, and scripts. I started with the story’s resolution in mind—a healed, whole family—and worked backward from there. There would be rage, pain, therapy, self-discovery, forgiveness, reluctant trust, then eventually: fresh intimacy and redemption. I do not know if I lived the next few years and then wrote about what happened or if I wrote the next few years and then made it all happen. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that at the end of that blur of time I had myself a dark love story—a drama of betrayal and forgiveness, pain and redemption, brokenness and healing. In book form and family form. Checkmate, Life.

In Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty, a reader approaches Lucy at her book-signing table and asks of her memoir, “How do you remember all of that?”

“I don’t remember it,” she says. “I write it.”

When Love Warrior was complete, I handed the manuscript to Craig and said, “Here. Here is what it all meant. I made it all mean something. We won the war. Our family made it. We are a love story after all. You are welcome.”

Now the war has ended, and I want to go home. But home is still a foxhole with me and Craig left staring at each other, wondering: What now? What did we win?

I call my sister and ask if I can cancel the book launch event in Chicago. I want her to tell me that this will be fine, no big deal. She says, “We can cancel, but it will be a big deal. You committed to this.”

So I do this thing I do. From the outside I imagine it looks like a straightening, a stiffening. From the inside it feels like turning my liquid self to a solid. Water to ice. Glennon has left the building. I’ve got this. I board the plane to go tell a story I’m not sure I believe.

It will be okay. I’ll just tell it like a story instead of a life. As if I am past the end instead of stuck in the middle. I’ll tell the truth, but I’ll tell it with a slant: I’ll blame myself just enough; present him in the most sympathetic light; attach my bulimia to my frigidity and my frigidity to his infidelity. I’ll tell how the cheating led to my self-reflection, how self-reflection led to forgiveness and pain led to redemption. I’ll tell it so that people will decide: Of course. It was leading to this ending all along. I see. It all had to happen exactly that way. That is what I will decide, too.

The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.

I arrive in Chicago and meet my book publicist at the Palmer House hotel, where the event is being held. This weekend is the literary Super Bowl, and she’s buzzing. We are on our way to a dinner where ten authors will get to know one another before we head into the ballroom and pitch our upcoming books from the stage. This dinner, which I have just learned about a few hours before, has heightened my introvert terror alert level from yellow to red.

The room where the authors are to have dinner is small, with two long conference tables pushed together to form a square. Instead of sitting, people are milling. Milling with people I do not know is my idea of hell on Earth. I do not mill. I walk over to the drink table and pour an ice water. A famous writer walks over and introduces herself. She asks, “Are you Glennon? I’ve been wanting to talk to you. You’re the Christian one, right?”

Yes, I’m the one.

“My new book is about a woman who has a religious experience and becomes a Christian. Do you believe it? A Christian! It feels so real to her! I don’t know how my readers will react: Will people be able to take her seriously? What do you think? Do you feel like people take you seriously?”

I say the most serious thing I can think of and then excuse myself.

I look at the table. No assigned seats, damnit. George Saunders sits quietly at the end of the table. He seems gentle and kind and I’d like to sit next to him, but he is a man and I don’t know how to talk to men. At the end of the table is a young woman with calm energy. I sit down next to her. She is a twentysomething releasing her first children’s book. I ask her question after question while considering how wonderful it would be if the organizers would just place our books on the table, so we could get to know each other by reading silently. We butter our rolls. Salads are served. As I’m reaching for dressing, the children’s book lady looks over at the door. I look over, too.

Suddenly, a woman is standing where nothingness used to be. She takes up the entire doorway, the entire room, the entire universe. She has short hair, platinum on top, shaved on the sides. She is wearing a long trench coat, a red scarf, a warm half smile, cool steel confidence. She stands still there for a moment, taking inventory of the room. I stare at her and take inventory of my entire life.

My whole being says:

There She Is.

Then, I lose control of my body. I stand up and open my arms wide.

She looks over, cocks her head to the side, raises her eyebrows, smiles at me.

Fuck Fuck Fuck Why am I standing? Why are my arms open? Oh my God, What Am I Doing?

I sit back down.

She walks around the table and shakes hands with everyone. When she gets to me, I stand up again, turn around, face her. “I’m Abby,” she says.

I ask if I can hug her, because what if this is my only chance? She smiles and opens her arms. Then—the smell that will become home to me—skin like powder and fabric softener blended with the wool of her coat and her cologne and something that smelled like air, like outdoors, like crisp sky, like a baby and a woman and a man and the whole world.

The only seat left is at the far end of the table, so she walks away from me and sits down. She’ll later tell me that she didn’t eat or speak because all of her energy was spent trying not to stare. Mine, too.

Dinner ends, and there is more milling. Oh my God, more milling and now with a revolution in the room. I excuse myself to go to the bathroom and kill two milling minutes. When I walk out, she is standing in the hallway, watching the bathroom door, waiting. She motions to me to come over. I look behind me to make sure it’s me she’s talking to. She laughs. She laughs.

Then it’s time to walk to the ballroom. We separate ourselves from the pack somehow. There are people three feet in front of us and behind us, but here we are, walking alone, together. I want so badly to be interesting. But she is so cool, and I don’t know how to be cool. I’ve not been cool a day in my life. I am warm—burning up—sweating through my shirt already.

She starts talking, thank God. She tells me about the book she’s about to release. She says, “But things are hard right now. You’ve probably heard.”

“Heard what? I have not heard. What would I have heard, and where would I have heard it?”

She says, “The news, maybe? ESPN?”

“Um, no, I have not heard the news on ESPN,” I say.

She speaks, slowly at first, then all at once.

“I’m a soccer player. Was a soccer player. I just retired, and I’m not sure what I am now. I got a DUI last month. It was all over the news. I watched my mug shot scroll across the ticker for days. I can’t believe I did it. I’ve been really lost and depressed the last couple of years, and I just…I screwed up. I’ve always been about honor, and I ruined my whole legacy. I let everybody down. I hurt the whole team, maybe. And now they want me to write my book as some kind of hero athlete puff piece, but I keep thinking: What if I’m just honest? What if I write the truth about my life?”

I am sad for her, but I am thrilled for me. In our four minutes together she has asked me about the three subjects I know best: drinking, writing, and shame. This is my jam. I’ve got this. Hot damn.

I put my hand on her arm. Electrical currents. I pull back and recover enough to say, “Listen, I have a rap sheet as long as your arm. I’d write it all. I’d be honest. I don’t know much about the sports world, but I do know that out here in the real world, we like real people.”

She stops walking, so I do, too. She turns and looks directly at me. It appears that she’s about to say something. I hold my breath. Then she turns and keeps walking. I start breathing and walking, too. We enter the ballroom and follow the other authors through a sea of round tables, white tablecloths, thirty-foot ceilings, crystal chandeliers. We end up at the dais, climb the stairs, and see that we’ve been seated next to each other. We walk toward our places, and when we arrive, she puts her hand on the back of my chair. She cannot decide whether to pull it out for me. She does. “Thank you,” I say.

We sit down, and the writer seated next to Abby asks where she’s from.

“We live in Portland,” Abby answers.

The writer says, “Oh, I love Portland.”

Abby says, “Yeah.”

Something about the way she says “Yeah” makes me listen very, very hard.

“I don’t know how much longer I’ll be there. We moved there because we thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”

I can tell, just by the way she says this, that there is no we left. I want to save her from follow-up questions, so I say, “Oh, people like us can’t live in Portland. We’re Portland on the inside. We need sunshine on the outside.”

I am immediately embarrassed by what I’ve just said. Portland on the inside? What the hell do those words even mean? People like us? Why did I say us? Us? How terribly presumptuous to suggest the concept of us. Us.

Us. Us. Us.

She looks at me, her eyes widen, and she smiles. I change my mind. I don’t know what I meant, but I’m glad I said it. I decide that heaven is saying anything that makes this woman smile like that.

The event begins. When it is my turn to walk to the podium and speak, I disregard half of my planned speech and say things about shame and freedom that I want Abby to hear. I look at the hundreds of people in front of me and think only of her behind me. When I finish, I sit down and Abby looks at me. Her eyes are red.

The dinner ends, and people begin to approach our table. A line forms in front of Abby fifty people deep. She turns and asks me to sign a copy of my book for her. I do. Then she turns back toward the crowd and starts smiling, signing, making small talk. She is comfortable, confident, gracious. She is used to this.

A curly-haired woman who had walked into dinner behind Abby approaches our table. I can tell she is waiting to talk to me. I smile and motion her over. She leans in to me, as close as possible, and whispers, “I’m sorry. I’ve never done anything like this before. I just, I know Abby really well, like a sister. I don’t know what happened here in the last hour, but I’ve never seen her like this. I just, I really feel like she needs you in her life. Somehow. This is so weird. I’m sorry.” This woman is flustered, and she has tears in her eyes. She hands me her business card. I understand that my answer will be important to her.

I say, “Okay. Yes. Yes, of course.”

My friend Dynna from my publishing house is waiting so that we can walk out together. I look over at Abby, still forty fans left to sign for.

I am not sad to leave Abby. I am excited to leave her so I can think about her. I am excited to leave because I realize I have never in my life felt this alive, and now I just want to go out into the world and walk around feeling this alive. I just want to start being this new person I have just suddenly, somehow become.

I say, “Bye Abby.” Oh my God, I’ve said her name. Abby. I wonder if it’s okay or if I should have asked permission to use this word that sends shock waves rippling through me. She turns toward me, smiles, waves. She looks expectant. Her face is asking a question that one day I’ll answer.

Dynna and I walk out of the ballroom and into a grand hallway. She stops me and asks, “How do you think it went?”

I say, “It was amazing.”

Dynna says, “I agree. You were on fire up there. Different somehow.”

“Oh, you meant the speech. I was talking about the whole night. I felt the oddest thing. I felt like Abby and I had some kind of connection.”

Dynna grabbed my arm and said, “I cannot believe you just said that. I can’t believe this. I swear to God, I felt it, too. I felt something happening between you from all the way in the back of the ballroom. This is so wild.”

I stared at her and said, “It was. It is. This whole night…the connection between us…it was just like…”

Dynna looked hard at me and then said, “Like you two would have been together in another life?”