Loh - The madwoman in the Volvo: my year of raging hormones

A LTHOUGH MOST OF THE men who inspired this books composite male characters might rightly want to seek refuge in various witness-protection programs, I want to single out and thank first and foremost Ben master refinancer Schwarz, who appears on page 1. My longtime editor at the Atlantic , Ben was urging me to write the source material for this book years before I was actually flood-spotting and spot-flooding. He was tireless in pushing me to get it rightI remember many editorial phone conferences that actually took place while I was waiting for the Volvo to be serviced. Due to his remarkable brilliance, care, and attention, Ben is the sort of magazine editor who comes but once a centurythank you.

Thanks, too, to my brother Eugene and his family, whose lovely Pacific Grove home I breezily tend to treat as a second one whenever Im writing (or not). Thanks also to my friend of several decades now, Dan Akst. Wailed I at Pirates Cove: I used to feel really on top of it. I think I was super together around thirty-five. But the older I get, the stupider I feel. It seems more and more like I know absolutely nothing! Replied Dan: Dont worry. Youre not getting stupider. Its just that your perception of yourself is finally catching up to reality. Hilarious, witty, true.

Other men who have been golden in times of stress: John June gloom be gone Fleck, Carlos Rodriguez, and Dave (Mr. Q) Zobel (trading one-handed catches with David Coons).

Its a clich to say one could not have made it through certain life crises without ones girlfriends, but for me thats so to the nth degree. The icing on the cake is that aside from mothers, daughters, artists, geniuses, and renegades, I know some of the worlds greatest writers, who provide hope that eventually the chaos will have a narrative shape. As some of my girlfriends whose fleeting imprints appear in this book may themselves be seeking a witness-protection program, I thank all obliquely but specifically: Anny C. and Danette C. (New Orleans Mardi Gras joy division), Kate C. (surprise fiftieth-birthday-party division), Rebecca C. (for, God, the AeroBed), Donna D. (who literally keeps my family in Playboy binders), Samantha D. (who knows a thing or two about tumult), Janet F. (who always makes us feel heroic, because she is), Caitlin F. (car mitt/cleaning supplies, queen frame and mattress still in plastic, grief counseling), Karen F. and Maria D.H. (fellow Malibu Park Junior High survivors), Annabelle G. (just because), Jude J. (of the perfect English muffins), Gina K. (of iced Grey Goose and emergency blow-up mattresses), Irene L. (I see us living together and going to a lot of theater eventually), Kerry Fightin Writin Mom M., Susan M. (cosmopolitans, shoe closet, Estrogen Mood and Memory Formula), Beverly O. (my home away from home), Joanne School Mom (big quotes) P., Rachel R. (for those yelling-over-desert-sand calls from Burning Man), Erika Dusty Nethers S. (too marvelously complex to reference in parentheses), Kaelyn S. (literally first on lifes speed-dial), Mona S. (whose notable proverb about men in bow ties still haunts), Deb Barn Dance (big quotes) V., and Spike W. (who practices literally the art of menopause). Chiropractor Deb Yerman has also been a lifesaver (TMJ!).

In their own special enigmatic category of life fun, I thank, always, David Schweizer and Frier McCollister.

As Julie Andrews herself is not available for life counseling, I am so grateful to have met and subsequently interviewed the wonderful gynecologist Dr. Valerie Myers of Pasadena, whose calm and enduring wisdom inspires this book.

If I cannot have Pema Chdrn to call every Monday at 8:00, I am delighted to call my kick-ass sister, Tatjana, who has yet to collect royalties on the character of Kaitlin, whom she inspired.

This book would not have happened, of course, without the amazing Jill Bialosky.

BUT MOST of all, my heart belongs to my daughters, who made me find my smile. Only they will know what bad television weve watched together that that phrase is based on; they will giggle, and I do love the sound of that laughter.

ALSO BY SANDRA TSING LOH

Mother on Fire

A Year in Van Nuys

If You Lived Here, Youd Be Home by Now

Aliens in America

Depth Takes a Holiday: Essays from Lesser Los Angeles

B UT THATS NOT WHERE the story of my midlife crisis begins.

Flashback to two years before. Its 9:00 A.M. on a blindingly bright Monday morning. I am forty-seven years old, in T-shirt and overalls. I am weeping as I hurl paperback after paperback into a clanging metal Dumpster in front of a U-Haul storage facility in Pasadena. This is my personal library, those familiar literary classics lovingly assembled in my salad days (college, grad school, etc.). It feels like sacrilege to toss them. Its a betrayal of the concrete blocks, then red milk crates, then black IKEA Billy bookshelves they once stood on. I am jettisoning into the trash all of art, and history, and goodness, and knowledge.

On the other hand, I appear to have no fewer than three separate copies of Gabriel Garca Mrquezs One Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a book that, to be honest, I have never read and that, I now realize, I never plan to. I cannot even remember pretending to read it, though I must have been assigned it in a course (perhaps three times?). Thats the case, too, with my moldering pile of Henry James, which I am also jettisoning.

Im here at U-Haul on a blistering Monday morning because Ive just been kicked out of my home of twenty years. My home, I see in retrospect, was a kind of Eden, a funky hippie enclave in a bucolic part of town, with two pools, a recording studio, and even a charmingly jerry-rigged home office overlooking a hot tub. Thats where my library of unread books had room to loll sunnily, next to unused exercise equipment and unopened boxes of life-improving (one day!) things like TurboTax.

But all this has been packed up and labeled for me in cardboard boxesforty-three of themby my former husband, henceforward to be referred to as Mr. X. I drove the giant shuddering U-Haul truck back home one last time to retrieve the boxes, stacked six feet high, under a blue rain tarp on the driveway. There was so much stuff it didnt all fit into the truck: I left lamps, CDs, and wedding platters scattered along the sidewalk.

It wasnt supposed to end this way. For such a long time our union was happy and solid. Mr. X and I met two decades ago, in Los Angeles. I was twenty-six and at a crossroads. Raised by a Chinese engineer father and a German mother in 1970s suburban Southern California, I had been shuttled to constant piano and ballet lessons with the middle-class idea that these would be nice hobbies to complement a sensible future job in aerospace engineering. But after struggling to earn a degree in physics and then moonlighting for six years in English graduate school (to my fathers horror), I had veered offtrack: I wanted to be an artist. What sort of artist I had no clueI played the piano and composed and wrote and danced and painted and did performance art. I was miserable at all of that, and miserable at being single. I had this dinosaur DNA code that if I had any intimate relations with a man, I would be on his front porch the next morning with packed suitcases, a coffeemaker, and big puppy eyes.

I was lucky then to meet Mr. X, a friend of a friend. Somewhat but not crushingly older than I (eight years), Mr. X was a well-regarded and fully employed studio musician. From a musical family, he had played scales for hours a day from the time he was a boy in Minnesota, and to him making music was as natural as breathing. Mr. X was disciplined about his craft, and as we started to date and he learned of my creative aspirations, he insisted I also be. Crying was not allowed, even if I had a short story rejected sixty times. (Do you know how many auditions I didnt get? he would exclaim. Get up on your feet, girl!) He pushed me to leave my freshman-teaching-and-dodging-my-thesis-adviser grad-school safety zone and approach art like a job. Mr. X was a good person, a grown-up, and a romantic. In summer backyards we drank wine and ate barbecue, listened to Miles Davis, smoked pot, and played Scrabble. He praised me for beingas opposed to his exun-neurotic, a trait I tried to work hard to maintain.