Recently I received a kind note from someone who has been reading my work for a while. She had written to share a picture of my book at Dussmann, a big bookstore in Berlin (below! I love!), and to let me know she’d been reading this newsletter.

This reader mentioned that her kids are the same ages as mine, and thanked me for discussing, here, the difficulties of writing while parenting. I am grateful to her for her note, not just because it is always a joy to hear from people through my work (!!), but also because it’s a relief to know that this topic—which I, at least, need to talk about, often and desperately!—resonates with her.

I am lucky to have grown up with an artist mother who paved the way for me to take my creative work seriously, and who has told me frankly how, as a working artist with young children, forty and thirty years ago, she was dismissed and discouraged. Other artists, even and especially women who’d chosen not to have kids, freely offered her unsolicited feedback to the effect of, No one can be both a good mother and a great artist. Of, You’ll quit soon, you’ll see. I think of her, and I think: This topic is my inheritance.

She’s still working, by the way.

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When I was three years old, my parents left me with my grandparents to spend a month in Italy, where my dad had been granted a residency as part of his graduate studies at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. My parents didn’t have or come from money. They were each the first in their families to undertake any postgraduate education, let alone college. In fact, of my four grandparents, only my maternal grandmother finished high school.

I imagine it must have felt very bold, almost reckless, for them to take advantage of this opportunity, thirty-eight years ago. To leave their young daughter for a month, to pursue travel and knowledge and their work in the arts, for no material reason. For no reason at all, except to learn, and to experience the world. To enrich their own lives, in other words—and, by extension, mine.

We were lucky enough to return to Italy as a family ten or fifteen years later, in the roaring ‘90s when I was a teen. I remember my dad geeking out about every melodramatic old sculpture, every godforsaken cathedral. I remember the pizza, the pasta, gorgeous Amalfi and its lumpen lemons. I also remember Laocoön. I didn’t care very much, then, about my dad’s beloved Renaissance sculptures, but I learned about them despite myself. Many years later, one of them would make its way onto the dust jacket of my second book.

Of that first trip they took to Italy, without me, however, I recall almost nothing. I was only three. I have only a sense memory of walking to the beach with my Nana, the vague mental image, many times reconstructed, of my parents returning, my mom kneeling beside me on the grass to give me the porcelain doll she brought home for me: pale-faced in a green velvet dress and lace-edged bonnet, with vinyl-lashed eyes that closed when you tilted her.

My children are recently four and almost two, a year older and a year younger than I was then. This October, I will spend a month at a residency in Paris. I am so very honored, so very excited, and, also, to think of being away from my kids for that long is already breaking my heart. It might break my husband! But, while my son (a Cancer) is certainly having big feelings, and my daughter (a Leo) will wail loudly, whimper pitifully, and demand my return, I know my absence won’t break my kids. I know it because they have another loving, responsible parent who will be here with them—and because my parents’ absence didn’t break me.

I suspect too that not only will this residency afford me the greatest gift any writer can ask for—the gift of time—but also that missing my children will end up being useful for the project I’m working on. This book—my third novel, the story of a friendship between two women, told in backward chronological order over the course of 42 years—is about friendship and family, aging and loss, and the ways that close relationships can drift in and out of one’s life, over decades. Being away from the two little people (and one big person) I love most in this world will, I think, help me evoke, to some degree, the specific and personal ways my main character misses her best friend.

In the mean time, I’ve been working on the book in the pockets of time that are available to me. Thanks in part to my husband, in part to my children’s preschools, in part to the tiny writing group I have with two writer friends, I’ve gotten a chapter done here, a section there, during the limited hours when my kids are out of the house or asleep. I’ve recorded Voice Memos to myself while I’m driving. I’ve encouraged the husband to get invested in TV shows I won’t be tempted to watch with him. Last night, after I woke from an anxiety dream and was unable to fall back asleep, I drafted about 900 words in the insomniac hours between midnight and 2 AM.

In these ways, in these pockets of time, I’ve written a little over half of a first draft—just over 50,000 words, last I looked.

I like this phrase, in the pocket. Not its political or financial meaning, but its musical one. In music jargon, in the pocket refers to being on the beat—in the beat, really. A drummer, a bassist, a band that’s really in sync, is playing in the pocket. If you’re in the pocket, you’re not making music so much as the music is making you. You are an instrument in the most literal way, a portal, a channel for the tune. It is the best feeling, no matter what medium you’re working in: that feeling that the work you’re supposedly making is this larger-than-life, thrumming entity, bringing itself to life by means of you.

I’ll be at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn, NY, on 8/6, in conversation with Lena Valencia at the launch of her imminent and delightful short story collection Mystery Lights. . .

. . . and at Odyssey Books on 8/12, I’ll be in conversation with Juliet Grames about her highly entertaining 1960s-era Italian literary mystery, The Lost Boy of Santa Chiona.

I am teaching a free drop-in creative writing class at Belding Memorial Library in Ashfield, MA, on Wednesdays from 6:30-8, through 8/21. It has been lovely. Join us, if you’re in the area.

Very excited to share that the August edition of The Dream Away Reading Series, from 6:30-7:30 PM at Becket, MA’s legendary Dream Away Lodge, will feature poet Sarah Eddy, debut novelist Sarah Seltzer (The Singer Sisters), and international literary hero Ocean Vuong.