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Something Different
Alexandra is my daughter, words I say with pride. She is a wonderful writer, smart and polished, always reaching deep inside herself to bring you something worth spending time with. This morning, she announced the publication of her new book Square Waves, and I am reprinting what she wrote below. Warning: it’s a Romance Novel. If that scares you, go away. Now, here’s Zan.
Last August, I drove up to Berkeley and stayed in an Airbnb tucked into a narrow, winding hillside. I spent a few days in town: drank a flight of vermouth with my friend K, had dinner with A and some of his friends in their perfect Craftsman. We ate late-summer produce — tomatoes, peaches — and they filled me in on the neighborhood gossip. This was technically research for my next book, SQUARE WAVES, which takes place in the Bay.
That was the fun part. The scene-setting, the vibe-curating. The emotional arc of the book was something I did not need to research. That I had to pull, slowly and carefully, out of my own guts.
I am not Cassidy — not hardly — but I once had a relationship that was like hers in an important respect. In 2016, I wrote an essay for The Awl (RIP) that summed up how it left me: “I want to allow people to love me without being terrorized by the sense that I will hurt them, or that they will hurt me. That when you get down to the deepest parts of me, all you find is a…
