“How to Lose Everything in 12 Easy Steps,” a short essay by Alethea Black, appeared in Issue 28 and can be read here.
We’d love to hear more about this essay.
This is my personal favorite of everything I’ve written, because it describes what will probably be the defining period of my life: the years after I turned 40, when I lost everything I owned, my house, my love, and my health. I like it because beneath the arc of loss, there’s an inverse arc of triumph, where I more fully come into my own power, both as a person and a writer. In the passage at the end, when she’s lying on the pavement and actively shifting, changing—practically shedding her skin—I almost hear drums in my head as she speaks. I say “she” because it’s me but not me: I am no longer that girl.
What was the most difficult part of this essay?
I think the greatest challenge with a piece like this is trying to navigate the paper-thin edge between “smart person who’s in a desperate situation and is trying to think outside the box” and “crazy person.” I try to navigate that edge a lot. After I finished the piece, when I started to think the answer to our health mysteries—and, let’s be honest, almost every disease we know of is essentially a mystery—might lie in physics, I found myself writing emails to physicists, including Nobel laureates, sometimes in the middle of the night. Could the visible universe be taking place at the speed of light? I asked. What if light’s speed is not a speed per se, but rather a relationship between density and speed, where the farther backward in time we are—the denser the universe—the faster the speed of light? Maybe cancer cells are simply too dense and therefore too fast? And afterward, the email would glow on my screen like a hybrid creature, pulled from the phosphorescent deeps: both perfectly sensible, and perfectly insane.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray. Hilarious and true.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Dr. Julia Mossbridge, because I’d love to have a whiskey sour and chat about the science of precognition.
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’ve been submitting my debut novel, TIPS FROM THE AFTERLIFE, to agents. After that, I might write a short story for a change of pace. There’s a new file on my computer, but all I have is the opening line: When my father was in college, he studied just enough philosophy, took just enough physics, and tried just enough LSD that he began to see life as a story we’re all telling ourselves collectively, through language, across the kaleidoscope of time.
Our thanks to Alethea for taking the time to answer a few questions and share her work. Read Alethea’s essay, “How to Lose Everything in 12 Easy Steps”, here: https://www.sequestrum.org/nonfiction-how-to-lose-everything-in-12-easy-steps.
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Alethea Black’s recent memoir (You’ve Been So Lucky Already, Little A, 2018) was reviewed by The New York Times. Her short story collection (I Knew You’d Be Lovely, Broadway, 2011) was chosen for the Barnes & Noble Discover program. Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, Narrative Magazine, and many others, and has been shortlisted for The Best American Short Stories and won the Arts & Letters prize. Born in Boston, she graduated from Harvard in 1991 and lives in Los Angeles. The illness described in this story ultimately led her to examine human health as it relates to the speed of light. https://medium.com/@alethea/special-relativity-the-key-to-disease-c7e862db0dc7.