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Adventures in "Journalism" has moved.

I'm currently teaching a profile-writing class. It's mid-semester, and we've reached the point where the students have interviewed their subjects and a few secondary sources. It's the point at which you have way, way more information than you can ever use, and you need to figure out what story that information is telling you before you can pare it all down.

Just as I've been trying to convey to my students how to know when to speak in an interview and when to just listen, and how to wade through their many long transcriptions thoughtfully, I find myself in their shoes.

I thought I was done with . More than a week later, though, after even more damning facts have come to light, I find myself going full .

(Photo by

For five weeks I've been pressuring myself to do something I'm fairly certain I don't want to do, but which has been hard to let go of because it's something I once thought I wanted to do—actually, something I used to do.

I don't share this newsletter, on Facebook. I don't expect family members, childhood schoolmates, and all the other normies I've ever known to what I write about here.

I spent a fair amount of time this weekend searching through my house and garage for a few particular photos. So far I’ve failed to find them, and it’s driving me crazy. In the process, though, I happily relocated a few boxes and bags haphazardly stuffed with pictures in every possible Kodak format taken throughout my 55 years, plus some older family relics.

I kicked myself for never organizing my photographs or placing them in albums. I’d always assumed there were only two reasons I’ve never done this: 1) It’s a family tradition. My mom has always kept her trove of old family photos loose, in big hat boxes from a time when people wore hats. It’s kind of fun to sift through ancient, familiar photos this way; coming up on them in random order makes the experience feel a bit fresh each time. 2) It’s too much tedious work.

^^^ (The Invalid, by Louis Lang, at the Brooklyn Museum)

If the past few years in our increasingly hellish world have taught me anything, it’s that Whoever Is in Charge of The Universe (hence forth abbreviated as “WIICOTU”) has much bigger fish to fry than to bother arranging particular circumstances in the interest of teaching me a lesson. That said, I’m pretty sure there are Big Things I’m supposed to glean from the need to pause imposed by mononucleosis.

After much digging around, I heard from an editor at The New Yorker who gave me the name and email of another editor there to whom I could submit my “Department of Returns” essay. Over the course of a few days I finished and polished the piece, then sent it on.

Headline: The Supreme Sadness of Being Sidelined Through Hot Vax Summer.

After my last installment I received fan mail from a male colleague who has, on more than one occasion, written to let me know that what I wrote resonated with him. For the second time, he included in his missive a link to a two-year-old blog post of his own about how frustrating freelancing has become. After kindly wishing me a speedy recovery from mono, and letting me know how much he identified with specific aspects of my post, he ended his email by asking me to share his link.

I clicked the link and re-read his blog post, and even though I found it exceedingly bitter and self-pitying, I briefly considered just being the nice, helpful lady I was long-ago programmed to be, and sharing it. At the last minute something made me resist that self-defeating reflex. I wrote back thanking him for his kind words but letting him know that while his post resonated with me, I was going to hold off sharing it. Literally after I sent my reply, I received a notice from Buttondown that he’d unsubscribed from my newsletter.

^^^ In my book I tell a story about whispering my feelings into my blue Panasonic tape recorder…accidentally recording over the bat mitzvah chanting practice tape my dad had made for me. I had to ask him to record it again.

Last Friday I turned in my manuscript for on time. And by “on time” I mean I met the most recent deadline I received after three extensions. What a year to be writing anything, let alone a memoir I’ve struggled, all my adult life, to feel entitled to write.

^^^ Me as Guinevere, talking with King Arthur, in the sixth grade production of Camelot.

Just a quickie this week to say hello from the home stretch before I turn in my book, hopefully at the end of next week. 🤞

(^^^ “Outdoorsy Sari” atop a Catskills peak in the fall of ‘98 with What’s-His-Name)

In the final weeks until my book deadline, the Universe has been messing with me, and I do not appreciate it.

In the past couple of days I posted on Twitter about two new gigs I’m about to embark on. One is an adjunct appointment in the MFA program at Wilkes University. The other is curating and publishing the Memoir Monday newsletter founded by Lilly Dancyger (who will continue to run the quarterly reading series by the same name.)

Dear Subscribers,

I’m entering the final month before my book is due, and while I’m freaked out in ways, I’m also having new kinds of fun. I’m making connections between stories and ideas that I hadn’t seen before, and it’s very satisfying to connect those dots. I couldn’t have done that earlier. I had to do a lot of thinking and drafting and throwing out drafts of pieces to get to here.

(^^^ I received this message from Twitter the other day.)

Last week, Twitter notified me it had been 13 years since I’d joined—so basically, it’s my Twitter bat mizvah. ✡️ My first thought was . Then I remembered how much I’ve benefitted from being on the site.

(^^^ Tulips from my sister.)

Let me begin with gratitude.

(^^^Me in the stairwell of Jami Attenberg’s former building in Williamsburg on the night I mention below.)

Yesterday I published an essay in since leaving in 2005—especially this past year, when Covid made it impossible for me to get there. I mentioned fantasizing about being able to afford a pied-à-terre, but left out the story of when I sort of had a free one in Brooklyn Heights for nine months.

(^^^Me in Oceanside High, as opposed to Internet High, although in both places I have been equally dorky and insecure.)

Often I ask myself, “At what point will I stop seeking external permission for things I have a good hunch about…and also ?” For now, the most accurate answer is, “Not at 55-and-a-half,” which is the age I turned last Friday, April 2nd.

Hello, subscribers, from my new newsletter plaform, Buttondown.email (My final Substack post pretty much explains the switch.)

Earlier this month I made a joke on social media wishing “a happy Endometriosis Awareness Month to those who celebrate.” I’d landed on a silly approach after first considering a more serious one: I was going to point out that when I was first diagnosed via laparoscopy at 18 in 1984, I was told that endometriosis was insufficiently understood, and now 37 years later, that largely remains the case. (For the uninitiated: a painful condition  globally, endometriosis is an autoimmune disorder in which uterine lining appears in other spots around the body, then cramps and bleeds. Zero stars. Do not recommend.)

A lot of have lately the taking . I pore over , the second each one appears.

This week many cheered the implosion of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. It felt like a symbolic end to the Trump era—although it came only a few days after Republicans in the Senate criminally gave him a pass in his second impeachment trial, illustrating how much power he still holds over them.

The impending death of American democracy notwithstanding, I got a little extra catharsis out of the explosion. To me it felt like retroactive validation for a choice I made nearly three decades ago.

I’ve moved a lot of times in my life, and each time I’ve considered trashing at least some of the bags and boxes of memorabilia I’ve been toting around all my life. I’d like to thank Past Sari for hanging on to all that crap, because it’s proved useful as I’ve been writing my book. It all amounts to a treasure trove of writing prompts, and they are helping me jog my memory and make sense of the past from a new vantage point.

Some of it I was afraid to look at. While I’ve always tended to be nostalgic, even for horrible times in my life, I was afraid some of these things would bring up unresolved pain. Surprise! At 55 I’ve finally reached a point where none of this hurts anymore.

Here, in no particular order, I’ll share just a few of the mementos I’ve been happy to find:

1. Here’s a crayon drawing I did in 1989 (I sure have been doing bad crayon drawings for a long time) of the living room I shared with my first husband in an apartment on the boardwalk in Long Beach, NY. We got married that June, and with some of the money we received as wedding gifts we bought overstuffed couches, country French-inspired blond wood furniture, dhurrie rugs, and dinnerware that reminded us of what ’s Hope and Michael had in their home.

Last year at this time I told you about my four worst Thanksgivings. Today I’m going to tell you about my best one — which is saying a lot, because I am not a fan of this holiday, and most others.

Greetings, subscribers, from Kingston, NY, where a dystopian hipster parody is currently playing out.

Kington is an amazing little city where right now many are engaged in fighting systemic racism, and supporting one another through mutual aid. But we’re in the midst of an insane real estate gold rush here, which is having devastating effects on the most vulnerable, often displacing them.

It’s also inspiring sketch-comedy-level tone deaf opportunism among some rich newcomers.

💰💰💰

Start by not writing your book. There are soooooo many reasons not to…

Remember back in February when I wondered whether I was psychic? Well, here’s exhibit #9,437:

A former colleague asked why I even bothered reading _______’s book. First of all, of course I was going to read it! Second of all, it perfectly clarified for me the kind of sexist double standard I was subjected to. Not just the kind of double standard, but the actual, exact one.

This is not your typical installment of “Adventures in *Journalism*” in which I try to make sense of my circuitous career path. I’ve been working on one of those (a juicy one), but in light of the justified upheaval in response to the murder of George Floyd, this doesn’t feel like the right moment to write about myself.

Instead today I want to draw your attention to the assault on journalism when we need it most — and on journalists, literally, when they are making tremendous sacrifices — and ask you to consider contributing some organizations that support them. (List at the bottom.)

A day after my most recent installment I wanted to share a word about this newsletter, my original intentions for it, and how it has been organically shifting in a more serious direction.

Subscribers, just a quickie to say:

After I sent out the last installment, I found even more typos than usual, and a link just hanging out there at the bottom. Sorry about that! I’ve since updated it with corrections, but you can only see the fixed version online, not in your inbox.

Please bear in mind that this newsletter is a labor of love. I toss these pieces off in stolen moments between my job, various teaching gigs, and bigger writing projects that pay.

I’m a writer and editor in my early 50s. These days I have a pretty satisfying career, writing personal essays, working as an editor at , and teaching at places like . But it has taken me a loooong time to get here.