The Alchemy of Storytelling

Being a memory keeper is complicated — but as Nora Ephron said, everything is copy.

I’m prepping to be a nomad for the foreseeable future, so I’m doing a purge of everything I own. I’ve been reorganizing boxes of old photos, as I wrote about last week; going through them has been delightful, and heart-wrenching. The delight primarily exists in the confirmation that my memory is not, as I often tell friends, a combination of Swiss cheese and Teflon — i.e., full of holes and slippery as shit. I found photos from 20 years ago for a story I’ve been working on for the past year, and there we all were, just as I remembered, doing the things that friends in their twenties do. We were glowing, sexy, tipsy, silly, dressed in outrageous party clothes, performing feats of strength. Picking someone up and pretending to drop them before putting them down was a declaration of love in those halcyon days. Man, we had so much fun.

I unearthed a bunch of old journals and laughed as I read through my Very Serious Writing from 2003 and ‘04. I liked looking back at that girl who was awkward, excitable, confident and terrified all at once. Plus ça change, I guess. I also have every letter, card, and scribbled-on napkin I’ve ever been given. Reading the love letters my sweetheart sent me when I was working on a boat in Alaska in the early aughts moved me to tears. Getting any kind of mail was gold; he went above and beyond, writing to me on the back of photos he’d printed out. They were little snapshots of his life: This was my dinner tonight. I wish you’d been here with me, or maybe not, because the chicken was dry. On a photo of us wrapped around each other, he described missing the way I smelled, laughing with me in bed, and mapping out our dreams together. We were wildly in love. It was sweet and heart-wrenching to read them again, years after we split up.

I’m not one for nostalgia. Looking back has hurt too much. But now, I’m in a new place of recollection. A little over a year ago, I started EMDR therapy, and as ancient, painful things started to shift inside me, I began to write about shame, guilt, and grief. I also wrote about the humiliation of learning that I’d been a secret girlfriend* to the only man I’d ever been with in LA, and how the silver lining of that betrayal was that I was finally getting the help I’d needed for a very long time.

*If you’re new to my Substack, the short version is that I thought this guy was my boyfriend while he told everyone and their dog that he was not with me throughout our six-year relationship.

When I opened up that guy’s love letters, I had to laugh; it was honestly a relief to see that I wasn’t delusional. He worked hard to convince me that I was The One. Take, for example, this Christmas card:

You are it. The real one. The truth. The most incredible. You are it. I AM SO INTO YOU. Like, be ready. Deep love. Deep. MJ. I have no words b/c I can’t describe how exceptional you are. (Merry Christmoose!) There is no one like you, but you. And I’m so thankful I get to love you. — That Guy

It was also infuriating; re-reading it, I felt like Madeline Kahn in Clue. (Did you know she improvised this??)

But mostly, I felt OVER IT — and wowsers, what a nice realization that was. I’m in a radically different place a year and a half after our split. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll never not be angry that that guy kicked me into a pit of despair, but I’m glad I have his crappily-penned declarations of *DeeP LOVe* for a couple of reasons.

One is that broken brains need proof; being emotionally manipulated for a long time is destabilizing and confusing; it makes you question your own reality. It’s gaslighting 101 (which we’re collectively experiencing as the Trump administration tells us not to believe our eyes and listen to their words, amirite?).

Proof that you’re not nuts is really nice.

Another reason I’m glad I have his letters is that everything is copy, as the journalist and screenwriter Nora Ephron so wonderfully put it. In the 2015 documentary about her life, Everything Is Copy, Ephron says:

‘We all grew up with this thing that my mother said to us over and over, and over and over again, which is ‘Everything is copy.’ You’d come home with something that you thought was the tragedy of your life – someone hadn’t asked you to dance, or the hem had fallen out of your dress, or whatever you thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to a human being – and my mother would say ‘Everything is copy.’’

Something that you *thought* was the tragedy of your life. What a fabulous, tough reminder that, even if something is truly the tragedy of your life, it’s your story to tell. Or perhaps it wasn’t the tragedy of your life; it was just some donut of a human being a jackass, and you gave him space for way too long — now, you get to write about it.

Ephron wrote a book about her tumultuous marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein that was turned into a film, Heartburn, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Mike Nichols directed. Ephron wrote the screenplay. Talk about artistic alchemy.

Everyone of us has a tale that could be a book, screenplay, or 50-part TikTok series. Sometimes it takes a while to write from the scar, and not the wound — but once you get there, I say, let ‘er rip (with identifying details redacted, we’re not psychos, people!). As a writer friend once told me, We’re etching our truth into stone with our sacred feminine rage. I’ve considered getting that quote tattoed on my ribcage.

Everything is copy, and storytelling is alchemy. There’s magic in sharing our experiences. Write your story down. If you post it, tag me; I want to read it.

Thank you for subscribing — I’m grateful for your support. Much more to come.

Love, MJ ❤️ xo