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RECOMMENDED READING In Hindsight.

BY SHARON BONANNO

Advantage Media Group | Dec 2020

It was like being chased by something in the dark. I couldn’t see it, but I knew to be terrified. I was running so fast that I couldn’t get enough air. When the oxygen came, it pierced my lungs and clenched my chest, making it painful to take another breath. At first all that I could think about was moving. Fast. Keeping ahead of whatever it was that was chasing me. I wasn’t thinking about getting away. I wasn’t thinking ahead at all. I was just running and trying to breathe.

Eventually my fear evolved into anxiety. I realized that there was no end in sight. Whatever was after me was not letting up, and I couldn’t maintain the pace. Every cell in my body was on the verge of collapse. I had to stop. I was afraid to stop. I wanted my limbs to give out. I wanted to collapse. All that I knew how to do was to keep running.

I remember that I didn’t sleep that night. Or at least it felt like I didn’t sleep. I fell onto my bed and closed my eyes in the winter-dark early morning, and as soon as I had found quiet, the lights screamed on. When I opened my eyes, Mom and Sharon were standing there in my bedroom.

That morning the accosting felt like it had come out of nowhere. It seemed a random attack. In hindsight, I can see the events that brought us all to that moment. I still don’t remember stealing money from my sister a week earlier, although I believe that I did it— cocaine is expensive. I took less than twenty dollars from her wallet while I was visiting and ran out the door while she was checking her laundry. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to be noticed—mostly because she was noticing other things.

Finally, just the night previous to Sharon and Mom appearing in my room, I’d called Mom at two thirty in the morning. She hadn’t answered. I’d left a message on her answering machine. I had been crying so fiercely that I could barely put words together. I’d told

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her nobody was there for me, nobody understood me, nobody cared about me. I’d told her that I was alone. I’d told her that I knew she loved me. I’d said that I wanted to die.

The truth that I understood later was that I was in a deep depression. I felt sad and alone. So alone. Day after day I had breakdowns. They were constant. I would cry. I would write letters to my sister and Mom. I would pray to God when I went to sleep—“Maybe I don’t have to wake up”— and I didn’t even know if I believed in God. I was too much of a wimp to take my own life. I would look in the Yellow Pages for places where I could get help. I did this every day— the crying, the praying, the searching. Other than finding and doing cocaine, it became my life. It’s hard to explain how truly terrible it was, how empty and worthless I believed I was. I was unbelievably sad. I went through the motions of life, but I wasn’t there. I was a shell, and the real me shrunk away inside, getting smaller and farther away from the surface so that I was barely there. For a while the drugs made things better, then they only distracted me. Eventually they did nothing but clog my nose. I couldn’t go on.

The feeling wasn’t new. I felt this way my whole life. All through my twenties, I had thought that there was something wrong with me, but I didn’t think it was the drugs. I knew that I felt bad about myself. I felt like nobody understood me, and I didn’t fit in anywhere. I always felt so alone. Cocaine stopped my head from telling me that I was crazy and bad. It was pretty good medicine until it stopped working. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

You Wonder How Someone Can Let Things Get So Extreme. In Hindsight, So Much Is Clear.

Lisa and Sharon are sisters who grew up together in what appeared to be a typical suburban family. After their parents divorced, they lived with their mother in the same house throughout their childhoods and visited their father every other weekend. From the outside, everything looked fine. But by their twenties, their lives diverted radically. While Sharon moved into a career, started a family, and embarked on her adult life, Lisa tumbled in a downward spiral of lying, addiction, depression, and shame.

The Essence of Nathan Biddle.

BY J. WILLIAM LEWIS

Greenleaf Book Group Press | June 2021

On the first anniversary of Nathan’s death, we went to the sea. We may have been looking for the ungraspable image that Melville said is visible in all rivers and oceans, but I didn’t see it. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized it if it were floating like flotsam on the surface of the water. In any case, I didn’t see the image and I didn’t find the key to it all. We spent two weeks in a little cottage my mother rented, walking on the beach in solemn silence and sitting on the deck in the evenings while the sun sank into the ocean. We talked some about Nathan but not really that much. Neither of us mentioned his death. We had exhausted ourselves in hours of anguished fretting over a death that in any sane world was inconceivable. The ocean didn’t provide any answers but it did envelop us in an almost mystical caressing balm. The beach house stood a couple hundred yards back from the water, built on pilings among the sea oats and bordered on the beach side by a large wooden deck. At twilight, when the sun left nothing but an orange tint on the waves, the ocean flooded the deck with a pungent fragrance and gentle gusting breezes. Even in the half-light, you could see the whitecaps cascading along the line of the beach. The hush of the evening was punctuated only by the incessant, rhythmic pounding of the surf like a gigantic heart. The last night we were there, I was sitting on the deck looking absently toward the surf when I noticed a great blue heron standing alone about twenty yards from the deck. The bird stood on one leg at the edge of the area lit by the flood lamp on the beach side of the house. The wind off the ocean moved the lamppost gently to and fro, so that the ring of light on the ground moved back and forth and the solitary fowl was alternately bathed in light and sheathed in darkness. The bird never moved while I watched him. The light came and went but he just stood there looking wary and maybe perplexed. I still think about that strange, gaunt bird standing on one leg in the pulsing light. It seems unbearably sad to be totally alone and uncomprehending: The heron had no way of knowing and no one to explain why the light came and went or why the ocean throbbed and the wind moaned along the shore. I don’t worry all that much about Nathan’s

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death anymore, but the bizarre monopode randomly sneaks back into my mind and roosts there like a spirit from another world. Maybe because he first showed up in the summer, the hint of warm weather always invites him to return. He seems always to be lurking in the shadows but in the summer he is a constant intruder, yawking wildly if I try to elude him or chase him away. As far back as I can remember, I have expected summers to be wonderful. I don’t know why I delude myself with that notion but I don’t seem to have any control over it. It begins with a giddy sensation in the spring, and I can feel the anticipation rising inside me like a providential tide. But summer is never anything like the images I create in my mind. Last summer was particularly disappointing. My friend Eddie Lichtman’s father hired us to deliver furniture again, and I was tired almost every weeknight. Also, Anna was gone the last month and a half of the summer, working as a counselor at a camp. We had not been getting along very well when she left, and then right before school started everything collapsed. She wrote me a letter in early August saying that she just wanted to be friends. I was already getting more and more nervous and strung out worrying about the meaning of things, and I couldn’t make the “friends” thing work in my mind. It was probably an illusion to begin with, but everything had seemed to be pretty much on track. I had been clacking along, more or less trying to stay with everybody’s programs and schedules, and all of a sudden the trestle seemed to give way under me. My last day of work at the furniture store was on Wednesday of the week before the start of the fall semester. I was tired Wednesday night, so I decided to stay home and read instead of going out. But I really didn’t do much of anything. I fell asleep on the couch. I don’t even remember moving, but I was in my bed Thursday morning. The house was quiet and it was already nine-thirty when I woke up. My mother had left early because she had teachers’ meetings, so I just lay there for a while. I thought about staying in bed all day but, after about thirty minutes, I started getting restless and my thoughts began to roam.

ABOUT THE BOOK

The Essence of Nathan Biddle is a timeless coming-of-age tale that, as novelist David Armstrong observed, "is like discovering The Catcher in the Rye all over again." Protagonist Kit Biddle is a rising prep school senior who finds himself tangled in a web of spiritual quandaries and intellectual absurdities. Kit's angst is compounded by a unique psychological burden he is forced to carry: his intelligent but unstable Uncle Nat has committed an unspeakable act on what, according to the Uncle's deranged account, were direct orders from God.

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I Am Luney: The Untold Story Of The World’s Naughtiest Man.

BY JOSH HICKMAN

Independently published | May 2021

Of course, Beardsley reveled in the newfound pseudo-adulation, affecting a long ivory cigarette holder, dressing his hair with expensive sea turtle oil, and secretly rubbing burnt cork under his eyes to make himself appear older and more mysterious and dehydrated. His face now less cherubic and more drawn and chiseled from manhood, he lingered at the far end of grubby pubs such as The Sow’s Ear, The Toad & Doorknob, or The Platypus & Carburetor, regaling local laborers, literary slummers, and mid-priced streetwalkers with exaggerated tales of communicating with spirits, summoning demons, and mesmerizing young wenches into doing unspeakably naughty things.

Calculatingly, Beardsley used this swell in social clout to get himself expelled from joyless Boggydown College just shy of probably not graduating, disappointing the school’s Competitive Posturing Club (which was always looking for a fourth), enchanting the administration and staff, and garnering his father yet another mild coronary thrombosis. Perhaps predictably, his marks at school had not been stellar as of late. Young Beardsley performed well in Literature, Gross Anatomy, Séance Sciences, and Brewer’s Chemistry, even showing some semblance of interest, though he often taunted his professors by claiming he knew more about the subjects than they did (earning him several canings and consistently cold gruel in the dining room). But he failed Prudery and Complacency, Advanced Grieving, The History Of Buttons, Badminton, and Beginner’s Empathy miserably, and his application form for the Sophisticated Savages gentlemen’s beefsteak club was torn up and tossed out before it could be read and rejected (a rebuke at which he smarted, as he had always heard their brown sauce was extraordinary).

Not surprisingly, young Beardsley’s school history had not entirely been a happy one. By the age of eight he had stuck burning candles in piles of horse droppings outside his least favorite teacher’s room while yelling “Fire!,” ensuring the hysterical old spectacled man would race outside and stamp out the

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flame, thus covering himself in manure. And he made sure to hide half-empty bottles of cognac in said teacher’s desk for the later classroom inspection as performed by the enraged headmaster. “Treacle-dark” was one observant and understated headmistress’s description of the smiling little demonic angel’s sense of humor.

As the years went on, he spiked the chapel’s sacramental wine with rotgut rum, glued an obese school nurse to her chair, and replaced one school’s mascot corgi with a steaming pile of sheep entrails. He was accused of commanding a homely nun to “sit” and “fetch,” putting straight pins in Mrs. Glitch’s piles pillow, and passing suggestive notes to a headmaster’s sister while she was reportedly going through the change of life. In these formative years for the young lad, subtlety was apparently not Beardsley’s distinguishing attribute.

But now, as he left formal schooling for good in favor of a failed career in spelunking, he took a dramatically romantic and passionate turn. Free from the constraints of forced learning and institutional homogeny, Beardsley congealed his scattered energies and resolved to seriously study human pleasure and further immerse himself in the arcane and esoteric mystical and occult practices in which he had dabbled for so long. The little “Worm” of old now a man, Beardsley vowed to thoroughly become what he had been accused of his whole life—naughty. In fact, for perhaps the first time, he darkly entertained the unthinkable notion of attempting to be crowned “The World’s Naughtiest Man.” He privately swore to himself that he would eat naughty, sleep naughty, work naughty, and play naughty (and be extra naughty in the “naughty room”). When the world would sanctimoniously zig he would offensively zag, he confided in Bickers, who brazenly predicted without a hint of irony or doubt that his quest for world naughtiness would be staggeringly successful .

ABOUT THE BOOK

Most are shocked to hear the story and legacy of Beardsley Bancroft Luney, his life and “works” having astonishingly slipped through the cracks of history. Born at sea during a tempest off Twatt in the Orknies, Luney darkly flowered from a mischievous and talented child into an unnecessarily libidinous and rebellious rake, remorselessly cleaving polite and starchy Victorian society with his tarnished tongue, his bawdy pen, and his naughty, naughty ways. Thrill at the untold story of Luney’s pursuit of naughtiness in mystical cults, public morality trials, a search for the dreaded Tatzelwurm, a hunt for a destiny-changing mandrake root, and ultimately a quest for a Naughty Elixir of Life high in the mysterious Himalayas, escapades which earned him the title he wore so proudly as “The World’s Naughtiest Man.”

RECOMMENDED READING Life and Other Shortcomings.

BY CORIE ADJMI

She Writes Press | August 2020

DINNER CONVERSATION We sit three couples as we always do, boy girl, boy girl, with no married couples next to each other. When we were first married, I didn’t like this. Now I don’t care. It’s 1998 and this New York City restaurant just recently opened. It’s a happening kind of place populated by the cool and the young— part bar, part restaurant, part lounge. Red walls make you feel both sexy and regal. Music beats in the background. It’s the kind that seeps into your skin and pulses under your bones. We sit at a large round table and a waitress, her hair tied back in a ponytail, approaches us. She isn’t wearing any makeup and she exudes a wholesome sexuality that, I have to admit, is alluring. She hands each of us a menu, and lights a candle in the center of the table. She moves like an exotic bird, graceful and deliberate. I have just laid eyes on this woman and already I am threatened by her natural beauty and her presence. She stands beside our table, both feet grounded. I play a game. I spot a person, and based on how they look, what they wear, and how they stand, I draw up a whole life for them— if they’re married or not, where they live, what their apartment or house looks like, and what they do for a living. I decide that she’s an aspiring actress, living in an apartment in the Village, venturing toward her dream. Marisa, a Monica Lewinsky look-alike, sits to the right of my husband, Dylan. They went to high school together and when she married Eric, Dylan marched in their wedding. When Dylan and I started dating, he wanted me to get to know them. He didn’t care much about what his mother thought about me, he wanted Marisa to like me. And she did. Dana, who is tall and blonde, sits to Dylan’s left. She just got back from a spa in California and she’s lost weight. She looks too skinny to me, the bones in her wrist protrude like large marbles. But who am I to judge? Dylan says you can never be too skinny, it’s like being too rich. I watch my husband as he entertains. I pay special attention as he leans in to say something to Dana. She throws her head back and laughs. Dylan and I have been friends with Dana and Peter for close to fifteen years. We met them at a parenting class we took

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before the birth of our first child. Peter was complaining about having to be there on a Monday night during football season, and Dylan overheard him. They took off early and went to a bar across the street to watch the end of the game. We’ve been friends ever since. We know this is unusual. About ten years ago, five years into the friendship, five years’ worth of dinners and vacations and cocktail parties, we named ourselves: we are “The Sixers.” When the waitress returns, she places a basket of bread on our table. Marisa, who is facing the wall, turns her body dramatically, her long black hair swinging over her shoulder. It isn’t often that Marisa doesn’t sit facing out, able to see the crowd, and she wants everyone at our table to notice her strain. “What can I get you?” the waitress asks. I know what Dylan is thinking. He gets that look on his face, the one I recognize all too well. The one he, at one time, reserved for me. His eyes glimmer like two perfect diamonds. “What’s your name?” he asks the waitress. “Judy,” she says, smiling, her teeth lined up like a row of miniature marshmallows. “Hi, Judy,” Dylan flirts. “Nice to meet you. We’ll have two bottles of Pellegrino for the table, and I’ll have a Glenrothes, neat.” Judy takes our drink order and Dylan looks at me. “You’re going to eat that?” I slip the breadstick out of my mouth and scan the table to see who has heard this. I’ve gained weight, and it bothers Dylan that his wife is getting fat. I’m not sure how I feel about it. At first it was a surprise, but now I kind of like the extra weight. It makes me feel stronger, more grounded. But Dylan has no patience for fat. Fat, in his view, is a complete betrayal of a body, and it represents a person without discipline or self-respect. Pregnancy is no exception. And while I felt full and complete, voluptuous and even beautiful as I carried my three children to term, I knew that Dylan couldn’t look at me. After I gave birth to David, our first, just a week after his bris, Dylan replaced the whole milk with skim, and every product in our cabinet said fat free. I suppose he wanted back the wife he’d married, but I could no longer play that part. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Life and Other Shortcomings is a collection of linked short stories that takes the reader from New Orleans to New York City to Madrid, and from 1970 to the present day. The women in these twelve stories make a number of different choices: some work, others don't; some stay married, some get divorced; others never marry at all. Through each character's intimate journey, specific truths are revealed about what it means to be a woman―in a relationship with another person, in a particular culture and era―and how these conditions ultimately affect her relationship with herself. The stories as a whole depict patriarchy, showing what still might be, (and certainly what was) for some women in this country before the #MeToo movement.