Dead Author Birthday Party
The psychotherapist on the phone suggests we schedule a session with a horse. Like, with Mr. Ed, Psy.D.? I want to guffaw, but instead I ask how that would work. Of course the horse won’t do the therapizing, she explains, but he will stand there and let me pet him as a human psychologist and I conduct a regular talk session. I take a beat and wonder how we got to this place. I called her to discuss equine therapy, which she advertises on her website and which I thought involved activities like grooming, riding, and communing with horses in order to heal from trauma. In truth, I don’t even like horses. I’m terribly allergic to them and have been on too many bad trail rides in my childhood to overcome my aversion. But I’m trying to honor someone who did like horses — who loved them, actually — with an activity she would enjoy. “It was this moment I would keep dreaming of all my adult life,” wrote Lucy Grealy about riding one of her favorite horses at a stable where she worked as a teenager. “Galloping up and away in a smooth commotion of silent, eternal thrill, the simultaneous flying embrace both from and of the world.” I know I can’t channel her with my measly horse riding skills. She’d probably roll her eyes at the plonking, awkward walk I could manage. So I’ve chosen to try equine therapy instead, hoping she’d approve of my petting the horses and cooing at them.
Lucy won’t be there. After surviving a rare form of jaw cancer at age nine and then dozens upon dozens of reconstructive surgeries, she died in 2002, more than 20 years ago. Her memoir Autobiography of a Face made her an It Girl in the 90s literary world, and she appeared on Oprah, Charlie Rose, and the cover of New York Magazine. Yet these days almost no one knows her name. I found Grealy’s writing after complaining to a friend that all the memoirs I read had happy endings. The narrator always learned some lesson and said she wouldn’t trade her experience for the world.
“Read Autobiography of a Face,” she advised.
When I opened the slim book, I was immediately captivated. “Grief isn’t something to ’be gotten through,’” Grealy wrote. “It has no life of its own like that, it’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we’re human.” Everyone experiences grief, but I felt as if she were speaking directly to me. Seventeen years ago my body practically exploded with the onset of an autoimmune disease, landing me in the hospital and almost in the cemetery. I survived — but not without daily medicine and a few ghosts of my own. Now here was someone who had endured a different and also awful experience with illness, someone who didn’t sugarcoat it but rather narrated lucidly about the anguish and grief she experienced when her body betrayed her. As soon as I finished the book, I rushed to Google what else Lucy Grealy had written, where she taught creative writing, and what else she’d been doing with her life. I was shocked to discover she died when she was 39. At the time, I was 38 and struggling with continuing health issues. Would I make it a year longer? Yes, I told myself, Don’t be ridiculous, you’re not in any danger of dying. Still, as the months wore on, I began to be superstitious about turning 39.
I couldn’t have known then that the age of 39 would be one of the hardest years of my life. My migraines and neck pain rocketed into outer space levels of pain. I was diagnosed with a second serious autoimmune disease and began two more immunosuppressive medications. Completely unrelated, I required surgery for an overactive gland I’d never even heard of. The surgery surged my thyroid into overdrive, cascading into an emergency hospital stay. As I recovered from that flood, I realized I could no longer breathe when doing simple movements like walking across the room. I was diagnosed with severe asthma and a heart problem. I spent my days lying in bed or on the couch, binge-watching 90 Day Fiance and eating microwaved meals.
As the year limped forward, I began to wonder on a practical rather than speculative level if I’d make it to 40 — and if I did, in what state my life would be. I often thought of Grealy and writer Flannery O’Connor, who also died at 39. She lived with the same autoimmune disease as me. I decided I’d celebrate my fortieth birthday not only for myself but also for these women who hadn’t made it. As Lucy Grealy was a Gemini like myself, I picked her birthday — June 3 — as the official date. She would have been 60.
Get excited, I alerted my friends. We’re having a birthday party for a dead author.
Yet what would we do? In some ways I felt so close to Lucy Grealy that I thought I should know what she would have liked. I had just graduated from the New School’s MFA program, where she had taught in the 1990s, and some of my professors had been her good friends. For my thesis, I worked on a chapter of my memoir that includes a biographical section comparing and contrasting her life to my own experience. I read everything I could find that she’d written, including her out-of-print book of essays, As Seen on TV. I even sourced a rare copy of her MFA poetry dissertation, Everyday Alibis. But the truth is that I didn’t know her, and there is a difference between a person on paper and a person in real life, even when said person is a writer. Yet once someone is dead, especially someone famous, you can do what you like with their memory. This issue had already come to a head in Grealy’s case, with Anne Patchett’s book Truth and Beauty. Grealy’s family and friends challenged Patchett’s portrayal of their friendship. They were offended at the things Patchett revealed, accusing her of capitalizing on Grealy’s fame and untimely death. Even though I hadn’t known her, I worried about making similar gaffes and assumptions.
Regardless, I fantasized that we would be best friends or that she would be a devoted mentor or that she would at least understand and see me in a fundamental way that healthy people couldn’t. As I researched Lucy Grealy, I found that I was one of dozens of girls who believed they knew her, or that they were her. I encountered social media accounts and blogs that lifted quotes directly from her book and others written in her voice, first person, long after she had died. What would Grealy have thought about these devotees, myself included? One of my professors, who had been one of her good friends, quipped that she loved attention and would have been tickled. Then again, the cliche “never meet your heroes” exists for a reason, and Grealy was infamous at the New School for her prickliness. And then there was the birthday party. Underneath the event were my own fears about whether I’ll be remembered 20 years after my death. Grealy published an acclaimed book; my memoir is still in manuscript form. If her literary legacy has already waned, what chance do I have?
Still, I tried to put together something pleasing for her. In my mind, birthday parties equal copious amounts of chocolate cake. But food was tricky for Lucy. By her thirties, she had only a few upper incisors, could barely close her lips, and constantly choked on food and water because years of tubes down her throat had created a lattice of scars. Scratch the chocolate cake. I scoured her writing for hints of what she would like. I read she loved the original The Addams Family and took tango lessons. She craved Reese’s peanut butter cups when she lived in Scotland. She partied with drag queens across New York City. But most of all, she felt at home with horses.
“I imagined she bucked because she was unhappy,” Grealy wrote about a beloved horse named Cocoa at the barn where she worked as a teenager.
I would make her happy, and because I thought that to be happy must equal being loved, I would let her know I loved her. It seemed so simple. I brought her carrots, I brushed her, I put my small, thin arms around her neck. I confided in her, told her that I understood what it was to be unhappy, confessed that I would probably have bucked too.
Her descriptions communicated how much she loved all horses, especially Cocoa.
Her stomach, all wet from the puddles, was a revelation. I saw now how clearly round her underside was, how long, how elliptical, how perfect. The subtle, secret line of flesh drawn where one half of the body meets the other extended itself from her white, hairless belly button to the dark, soft mounds of her udder. The one back leg I could see was stretching and pointing up to the white, just-rained sky, like an arm pointing out an unusual plane or exotic bird passing by.
When I reread those words, I knew horses had to feature prominently.
Cut to my phone call about talk therapy with a horse. I politely decline and then scour the internet for someone who will understand that a small group of literary-minded people simply want to borrow some horses for an hour or so to form their own dead poet’s society, minus Robin Williams. Finally I find Artemis Hill Farm, which rescues horses. Owner Daniela Nastasi seems to get what I’m after and says we can meditate with her five rescues. Even though I’ve done my fair share of meditation, I still picture myself cross-legged on top of a horse chanting “om.” Is it too woo-woo? I recall that Grealy liked I Ching and decide to go with it.
On the muggy Saturday of June 3, five of us arrive at the sprawling green of Artemis Hill and meet Daniela, who introduces herself by saying she likes to keep everyone on the farm — the animals and herself — plump. She’s posed three full-size horses and two miniatures at the far end of the barn, so that we can gaze through the rustic stables and twinkly lights at the beauties lined up by size. The smallest mini — whom I mistakenly call a pony — hovers his front hoof delicately above the dirt. Daniela introduces the big ones as Rose, Scottie, and Bourbon and the littles as Oliver Twist and Moby Dick. We giggle at their names. As we approach, the group moves away from us in a pack. Daniela assures us this is normal, we are just assessing one another’s energy. After a few minutes of stalemate, she fetches a bag of carrots and the vibe shifts. The horses gobble the orange sticks straight out of our hands, their muscular lips tickling our palms. My husband takes photos of me while I pet their coarse manes and get them to follow me a few steps. An empiricist who likes to say he “disagrees to disagree,” he had been wary of the experience. But now that he’s here, he’s charmed, delighted to be with these strange, large animals.
Watching him laugh, I can’t help but remember Grealy’s passage about Cocoa and the way she conflated being happy with being loved. It’s a recurring theme in her writing. Grealy returns again and again to the theme not of love exactly but of being loved. In her mind, being loveable overlapped with being beautiful, and for much of her life, she mourned the idea that because her face was conventionally “ugly” (her word, not mine), she wouldn’t be loved. It’s true that in her short lifetime, she never found the kind of romantic love she desired. She never married. It doesn’t escape my attention that I, on the other hand, am married. One part of me thinks she would have been happy that I’m in a stable relationship; another part feels guilty for finding that comfort.
My worrying is interrupted by Scottie reaching over my shoulder and bonking me on the head to get a carrot. I laugh, but Daniela stops the feeding frenzy.
“This is all about boundaries and having confidence,” she says, pushing Scottie away from both of us. “Tell the horses to back off, and maybe next time it will be easier to set those boundaries with Bob in marketing.”
My friends and I nod at her. She has the corporate retreat lingo down pat. We’re not as worried about Bob in marketing, but in the spirit of the day, we go with it.
Eventually, because I’m the organizer and I’ve told Daniela that my birthday is coming up, she takes me into the arena, where I walk with Scottie around the rail. He’s a former race horse, though with his skewbald markings he reminds me more of a cow. The goal is to walk ahead of him and trust that he will follow. Then at a certain point, when Daniela cues me, I am to walk to the center of the ring while Scottie continues to circle the perimeter. To get him to cooperate, I’m encouraged to simply believe he will keep going. (Never mind the hours of training he has received to do this exact thing.)
“Now you’re going to get him to gallop,” Daniela instructs as she stands behind me. “Direct all of your energy at his flank. Puff out your chest and feel it in your solar plexus. Visualize him running.”
The skeptic in me balks, but I do as she says. I tighten my core and focus on Scottie’s butt, since I’m not sure where his flank is. I feel positive Daniela is making all sorts of hand signals behind me, orchestrating Scottie’s movements. But by golly, he begins to run! As I concentrate on his rump, he glides around the arena, his inky mane and tail fluttering in the wind. I feel good. Successful. Connected to something larger than myself. I feel what Grealy describes:
When I ran my hands down the articulated bones of their legs, or rested my head against their barrel-chested sides, the secret luminous truth of how wretchedness and joy are inseparable brushed past me.
It passes quickly, though, interrupted by the cheers of my husband and friends and the self-consciousness of being watched in the ring. I decide to let others take a turn.
After 30 minutes or so, Daniela releases us to continue our celebration. We sit at a picnic table on the property, and I hand out Reese’s peanut butter cups to everyone as we listen to Grealy read an excerpt from Autobiography of a Face when she was on Fresh Air, in 1994. The mood becomes solemn. Fortunately I’m prepared to change it. Since Lucy used to hang out with Divine and other drag queens, we listen to “Shake It Up” on YouTube, shimmying our shoulders to that raspy voice.
I end the celebration with a reading of my favorite of Grealy’s poems from her dissertation, “Explanation of a Love Letter.” My professor has told me that she considered herself foremost a poet, and so I hope she’d approve of this choice. I suddenly feel a little self-conscious, and my voice cracks as I begin. My husband puts his palm on my leg for support, and I steady myself. The poem is not a love letter but rather the situation around which one might be written. Quickly the reader gets the sense that the love letter itself narrates the stanzas, that it follows the “children sitting beneath a moon” and is “the words that will not come clear.” Grealy is not the speaker. Yet reading this so many years after her death, it’s hard not to imagine she’s talking directly to us. “You are the children,” she wrote, and “I am there with you.” And for a moment, she is.
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About the Author
Megan Giller is the author of Bean-to-Bar Chocolate: America’s Craft Chocolate Revolution and a recent graduate of the New School’s creative writing MFA program. She writes for Slate, Narratively, and Texas Monthly, among others, and her writing for Engadget won honorable mention at the Society for Feature Journalism’s 2020 Excellence in Features Awards. Megan is currently working on a memoir that weaves her story with those of other female artists who live with chronic illness.