The Dead Lesbian Writers Project
If 30 is the end of everything, then 40 is when you begin once more, with feeling.
Ten years ago, when I was turning 30, I went on a pilgrimage to New York City. I’d been to there before, but this particular solo trip was to visit the former homes and haunts of some of my literary heroes (among them: Patricia Highsmith, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Bishop). I called it the Dead Lesbian Writers Project with the idea that I’d find where each of these women was on the precipice of 30 and try to live and work more like they had. I thought it could be a book, maybe, and that my own preoccupation with surviving my Saturn Return could manifest into my own version of Annie Leibovitz’s "Pilgrimage” series around Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Georgia O’Keefe. (Or, on a less grand scale, a gay “Julie & Julia.”)
I’d centered the whole thing around a Gertrude Stein quote:
“When you are twenty-nine, it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty, it can be the end of everything.”
Tomorrow, I turn 40, and the Dead Lesbian Writers book never came to fruition. Thanks to Google Drive, I still have the remnants of the project, but the mortification of revisiting my past (and, worse, past writing) has kept me from going to the graveyard until now. Finally brave enough to face what I left behind a decade ago, I found not a publishable book (GOD, no) but something of a birthday gift to myself.
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