(0) Prologue, or:

The Baked Alaska of it all.

This is not Eat Pray Love. I feel the urge to say that defensively, even though up until very recently, I had never read or seen Eat Pray Love, and also everything I’ve read that Elizabeth Gilbert has written, I had loved. My resistance is a reaction to others, of course. When someone hears the bones of my story -- a middle-aged woman, separated after a long marriage, traveling the world -- they fill in the only thing they’ve heard before, that makes sense, which is Eat Pray Love. This is a blueprint for when a certain kind of woman goes insane.

Did I go insane?

When I tell the story to strangers, that is the easiest way to start it. See also: lost my mind, had a nervous breakdown. It is shorthand for: And then I did some terrible things that may be very hard for me to explain and even harder for you to understand. I am giving us both an out, by calling myself crazy. We could just dismiss the whole story, right here, so easily.

But the story is important.

Not mine, specifically. It is like everyone’s story -- absolutely vital to some, totally insignificant to others. A story can be life-saving, unspeakably inspirational, and it can also be none of your damn business. What happens once the story is out is none of my business; it is the act of telling that is powerful. It’s not that the world needs your story, or mine. It’s that the world needs people who believe their stories deserve to be told. People who believe their experience matters, their voice matters, their thoughts matter.

(And by the way, I unsurprisingly really liked Eat Pray Love. Her story is much neater than mine.)

There is an episode of The Great British Bake-off in which one of the contestants has his Baked Alaska tampered with, and whether or not this was sabotage was a matter of great debate. But I never really cared if the lady took the ice cream out of the freezer on purpose. What I remember is that because this part of the Baked Alaska had been ruined, Ian threw the entire thing in the trash and refused to present anything to the judges, and that made perfect sense to me.

The general opinion was that this was a highly irrational action -- irrational and childish. Why would you not do the best you could with the other components of the Baked Alaska, present something incomplete and explain what happened?

But I was probably in my mid-30s when I first saw this, and I just nodded, vigorously, at Ian. I got him. I watched him stand in front of the judges, face defiantly blank, and inside I am 22 again, a senior in college, sitting in front of a massive painting in my studio apartment in the middle of the night, holding a kitchen knife.

The painting is bigger than me; I’ve been working on it for months. It is the final piece I will turn in for my capstone class for my major in Art Theory and Practice, done in viscous oils; two figures up close. (It is a visual representation of some lines from “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine, beautiful words from a beautiful song.)

After weeks of staring at this painting, working on it, re-working parts and painting over others, I realize I hate it. In an hour or so, I am going to have to walk this giant canvas onto campus, into the art room and present it to my class, and I feel with a strong simple clarity that that cannot happen. So I slash the painting.

Oh, please picture it -- I am 22, dressed like the slightly more unhinged Olsen twin (Mary Kate) in a T-shirt I had sloppily cut into a crop tank, a long skirt, battered woolly arm warmers even though it is well into May. My hair is long and lank around my face; I look like what I am -- a girl dealing with something unmanageable in life by subsisting on cigarettes, endless cans of Diet Dr. Pepper, one grilled cheese sandwich per week, and steady lines of cocaine. I grab the kitchen knife I never use -- because you don’t need a knife that big to make a weekly grilled cheese -- and stab it straight through the canvas. It’s such a clean slice, a rush of pleasure. The painted canvas tries to curl in on itself at the cut; the next cut is even easier. It starts to feel like its own sort of painting -- what is the difference, anyway, between a brushstroke and a knife stroke? I calmly cut through the figures’ faces, hers turned away, his hand between her knees. But never meant to last, that was always for sure.

I take the slashed painting to my class.

It’s a commentary, I explain, with my hollow eyes and arm warmers, on the inherently private nature of art, on how the artist has a duty to protect her work from outside observation, from unkind and uninformed judgment. I am wearing a silver pendant around my neck that unscrews, and I wonder how many of my classmates and professors know that it’s full of cocaine.

My professor gives me an A on the slashed painting and for the course, and offers no indication that he knows my final presentation was a lie. It will take nearly two more decades for me to understand why I slashed that painting, and to get to the point where I am willing to do the opposite -- which is this.

Offering you here, now, my imperfect story. My melted Baked Alaska; my messy metaphors; my gross monsters. In the end, telling this story is the one thing on this planet I am singularly qualified to do, so I am doing it. I searched my depths for something to offer, and this is what I came up with, the gentle gleaming jewel buried beneath rubble and sand. After all of it -- the things I destroyed, the relationships I broke, the life I ruined -- this is what I took from the wreckage. Impressive or not, it’s the most precious thing I have.

Here you go.