I remember once borrowing $20 from a friend to get through the week while I smiled, nodded, and empathized as Blaine talked about how annoyed he was at losing $20,000 on an investment.
When Blaine and I arrive at the restaurant my dad has selected, my stomach drops a little bit. My last dinner with Blaine’s mother was at Jean-Georges, a three-star Michelin-rated restaurant, where she knew the celebrity chef personally.
The restaurant we are meeting my parents at is a literal piano bar. Like, a scene out of Saturday Night Live, Bill Murray-hamming-it-up-in-a-tacky-suit piano bar.
To add to this, my dad hands me a corsage like I am going to prom. It is so beautifully sweet and so horribly embarrassing I feel like splitting in two from the inner conflict of loving my parents so dearly and being so ashamed of them.
I feel like such a narc, such a sellout, such a dating-a-rich-guy whore that I actually have the gall to feel anything but adoration for my one-of-a-kind, well-meaning, utterly bizarre parents. What kind of asshole am I turning into?
“Nice to meet you,” Blaine introduces himself, reaching across the table to shake my father’s hand. Being blind, my dad sticks his hand firmly out in the opposite direction. That childhood feeling is rising inside of me. Of wanting to protect him. Wanting him to be someone different. Wanting him to be exactly who he is. Wanting to just disappear completely.
We settle in to order, and my dad turns to us and says thoughtfully, “Tell us about yourself, Blaine.”
I suddenly catch a shared look with my mom, who knows how worried I am, how uptight, how afraid I am that everything is going to turn into a disaster. She tries to stifle it, but the shared knowledge is too much, and she lets out an inadvertent laugh.
Then I do, too.
Have you ever had one of those laughing-crying-fit epiphanies because you know you are not supposed to be laughing, it is the last thing you should be doing, and so it makes you laugh even harder? Yeah, my mom and I are in the throes of that.
My dad and Blaine both look so confused.
“Sorry,” my mom catches her breath and apologizes. “It’s just, no one makes me laugh like Mandy.”
Blaine and my father eventually feel the infectious laughter and join in, and the rest of the dinner goes by without much of a hitch. There are no major tantrums, no swearing jags, no big scenes. Even my dad’s guide dog is on his best behavior.
Later, relaxing in the hot tub of the hotel, Blaine expresses a sentiment that, depending on how you interpret it, could go either way.
“I’m really glad I met your parents,” he says.
Except, I don’t think he did.
I made sure of that.
chapter six
The Homemaker
2008
Everything changes with the New Year.
Even my roommates, Lola and Juanita, aren’t who they were when I first moved in.
Lola is now pregnant—thanks to an international sperm donor flown in to make his deposit—but Juanita is moving out. Now, it’s just me, Lola, and the twins she is carrying.
I don’t mind, though. I love Lola. She’s funny, kind, generous, and one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met. She rolls with the punches, and she can’t wait to be a mother—even though the relationship with Juanita is not going where she expected.
Lola is an inspiration to me—not least because of how she manages to keep things friendly with Juanita. The two of them have a love for each other that makes me realize that the end of a relationship does not need to be terrible. You don’t have to curl up and cry in defeat. It can sure feel like that at times, but if you’ve built yourself up strong enough, you can and will go on. You will thrive. You’re stronger than your circumstances.
And I’m still not drinking. During this time, Blaine and I plan a trip to Brazil—led by photo editor Luiz Ribeiro—on which we are going to be joined by other Post friends, the most exciting of which is Mackenzie.
Another giant change is that Steve is promoted to editor of the Sunday paper and now Katherine is my new boss. One of the stories she assigns soon changes my life in a way I never could have imagined.
It’s about radical honesty.
The piece is ostensibly about a new TV show centered around the concept, and will include an interview with the founder of the movement, Brad Blanton, and then a first-person documentation of my attempts to be “radically honest.”
But it is Brad Blanton who blows my mind.
I talk to him on the phone, and he is unlike anyone I’ve ever interviewed. He will literally tell you anything that you want to know—including if he wants to have sex with your sister, the fact that he’s let a dog lick peanut butter off his balls, even how much money he makes. This is the theory of radical honesty. He calls “withholding” the most pernicious form of lying. That is when you try to abide by the mores of polite society by not saying things like that you want to fuck someone’s sister.
“Whenever something occurs in the world, there’s always what occurred and then there is the story about what occurred, and then there is the meaning made out of the story about what occurred,” he tells me in explaining why most communication—filled with all of its half-truths, twisted perceptions, and withholdings—is so problematic. “Most people stay lost in the meaning made out of the story.”
It’s true.
I don’t think about reality: “I got divorced.” I think about the story I tell about it: “My ex-husband betrayed
