Intimations: A Writer's Discourse

I recently taught a class with Memoir Nation, “Writing with Vulnerability,” a class that’s very dear to me because I think our ability to be vulnerable on the page and in life is the single most important ingredient for human connection, general worldwide kindness—and for our own capacities to love ourselves and others. But it’s hard to be vulnerable. In the Q&A portion of my class, a man asked: “Why are there only two men here and 50 women?” It’s a good question.

I have a love affair with crows. They give me great comfort when I see them on my walks. They watch me so attentively, so curiously. I try to speak with them because I feel like crows always have something they want to say to me. Something like the story of the world. This is why I decided to make this my year of studying crows, and to see what I could learn from them. Crow story no.

I’m teaching a class with Memoir Nation this Tuesday on Writing with Vulnerability. I think it is the crucial topic for any writer. Riveting dialogue, piercing details, a suspenseful plot all go into the construction of a good book—but I’d argue that the ability to be vulnerable on the page is more important that any craft element. That’s because being vulnerable is what connects us beyond all else.

I wonder how a painter brushes the first brush of a painting. I wonder how a musician strikes the first chord. I’m thinking about this because when I write a sentence, I don’t think too much about it. I don’t decide if it’s going to be long or short, winding or blunt, bursting with adjectives or crisp and spare. The sentence just happens. I have a mood and a muse in my head. And somehow the mood and the muse guide the words, shape the contours, make the world.

I always say it’s a writer’s duty to be vulnerable on the page, to write about taboos, to spelunk into the darkness, unearth the dead—whatever it takes to write this nettlesome, knotty, slippery, sharp thing known as the truth. It’s a risky duty, to be sure. Punishing. Sometimes unappreciated. Sometimes even damning. There are few worse things than the fear of being ostracized—to be shamed and banished. To feel alone and alienated. We’re a group species after all.

This is where Dawn is buried. Photo by Gail Butensky. “The good thing about being on the road was that health no longer seemed relevant. Life felt as if it was held in a moving abeyance without consequences. He ate Twinkies for breakfast and snacked on beef jerky throughout the day.

David Foster Wallace wrote this line. I think about it often. The line holds a troubling narrative tension. The beginning of a love inherently holds its end. No matter how eternal a love might feel, you will eventually be haunted by it, whether by death, departure, rejection, the “je ne sais quoi” of abandonment, or who knows what else. But, at the same time, thinking about the ending is one reckoning best to ignore because there is a recklessness that is part of every love—a beautiful abandon.

Madrid. April 2026. I’m visiting my very stylish daughter, and we’re touring the thrift stores in the Malasaña neighborhood. We have different styles of shopping: I can size up what a thrift store can offer me in about five minutes. Perhaps because I am an elder. Meaning I have a hard time slipping into leather pants. Or almost any pants. Simone is more methodical. Which might be why she’s more stylish. She’s also much more slender and lithe.

I taught the class, “Writing with Love,” along with June Gervais, at the Omega Institute, and we spent the week exploring and questioning and wondering about the word “love” and what it means to write with love (more to come on this). The class was born out of a question in Carvell Wallace’s memoir, Another Word for Love.

People who have experienced trauma tend to shape their narratives in a more fragmentary, less cohesive way. That was a fascinating revelation for me when I heard Adam Johnson (he of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award) do a brilliant talk on the subject of trauma and writing 10 or so years ago. I’ve been thinking about that talk ever since.