Tender Stories

May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us—yes, establish the work of our hands.

—Psalm 90:17

One of the true hazards in writing is that you yearn to write deeply honest things that rise up from lessons learned the hard way . . . and then you have to learn those lessons the hard way. I had written a chapter on jealousy, and after I looked at it for a while, it seemed sort of flat and cartoon-y. I prayed for a new way to write that chapter, an incisive and honest way to talk about being jealous. And not a week later, wouldn’t you know it, at dinner with some friends, I found out something about a mutual friend of ours that absolutely annihilated me with jealousy. It was a thousand straws that broke a thousand camels’ backs, and I was tumbling around and around with these vicious, terrible jealous feelings, like I was in the spin cycle with a box of rocks. That’s the last time I pray for a good chapter on anything, except being gorgeous or winning the lottery or something. You pray for wonderful, honest, gritty, tender stories to write, but then you have to live through them.