Breaking Through

(This article was originally published in my weekly newsletter, The Pub Crawl.)

It’s amazing how the pieces of your life can sit in front of you like a puzzle and you can live with them every single day and not really understand how they’re all connected.

Until one day, when you’re just blow drying your hair, and it suddenly hits you.

Like a fucking subway train.

I typically don’t think of myself as a survivor of trauma. I know that I am, but I try to sublimate it. The truth is, I don’t really 100% understand or remember the details of the trauma that I faced as a child. I just have little bits and pieces of it that float around surreptitiously in my brain. Even now, as I write this, I’m actually crying because I know that I’m tapping into something that’s probably been waiting for a really long time to be seen or noticed.

If you’ve ever heard me speak at an event, you might remember that I’ve made flippant jokes about having daddy issues. I’ve also told a story in jest about how, when I turned 40, I had a mid-life crisis and turned to pole dancing as an outlet. (The story I tell ends like this: “But then, you know, the pole studio shut down because of covid and I figured I’d just be a writer instead.”) I make light of it, but that time in my life was really difficult, and I never truly understood why I chose pole dancing, of all the things, as an outlet. Sure, I love to dance. But pole dancing? There’s a stigma to that, for sure. Especially in my own family history.

When I was 16, my dad left. I’m an only child from Queens, NY. I didn’t know everything about my parents’ marriage, but I knew it was toxic - when you grow up in a small apartment, you can hear the fighting through the walls and some things you just know. I can’t go into all the details here because it still feels too raw, even though it happened 30 years ago - but suffice to say, my father frequented strip clubs. There was more - but I’ll leave it there for now.

I have a vivid memory of driving in our car down Queens Boulevard when I was maybe about 7 or 8 years old. We passed a strip club called Honey’s. (It’s long gone now but I found a photo of it from an old NY Times article, pictured above.) I made a comment from the backseat. “Go girls, go!" like a cheer, in the same vein as the “You go, girl!” of my later youth. That’s what I thought the sign meant.

My dad laughed, I remember. And then someone - I forget if it was my mom or my dad - explained the sign to me. It said, “Go go girls,” which meant ladies who dance without their clothes on for money. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to do that. What’s more, I felt like the sign was misleading, which made me mad, because my iteration of it was definitely a more positive one.

Please know that I have not thought about that sign in a million years. Just this morning, it came back to me, and I frantically searched online for the name of that strip club and a photo of the sign.

My father tore apart our family because of his indiscretions at places like Honey’s. When I was a teenager and he left (really, my mom threw him out), I remember knowing what pole dancing was and directly associating it with strippers. I also remember thinking that he left us for that - for strippers. Pole Dancers. For some seedy, fantasy underworld on Queens Boulevard. That was what he wanted.

We - the wife he hurt and the daughter he left behind - were not enough.

So, years later when I had my mid-life crisis and pole dancing had grown into an art and a sport and a form of empowerment… sure enough, there I was, curious to understand. Wanting to learn more. To see it from the side of the dancer. At that point, I hadn’t seen or spoken to my dad in 11 years, and he lived far away now. I didn’t associate the activity I was curious about with the brokenness of my childhood home.

But of course it was there. I mean, right? It was staring me right in the face.

My whole life, I’ve never felt like I was enough. Ever. Even now. Part of why I work so hard is because I’m just fighting myself, trying desperately to be good enough in all the things: a good enough mother, a good enough wife, a good enough provider, a good enough writer - only there’s no bar set. I’ll consider myself a good enough writer, for example, when I hit the NY Times bestseller list. Only no, I won’t. If I hit the list, I’ll keep pushing and working until I hit it at #1. Even then, I probably won’t stop. I’ll push more until every book hits at #1.

Because the little broken child inside me just wants to be enough. For him. For my dad. Enough for him to want to stay. To fix things. To care more about me than he did about his sex addiction.

And for her. My mom. Who could only care about herself when her marriage was falling apart. Who left me behind because she had been so hurt and broken.

My next two books hit really close to home for me. And even though The End of Summer is a comedy, take note when you read it that the protagonist (whose real name is Gretchen but whose pole name is Summer) is at odds with her father. If you follow their relationship, you’ll see that above all else, she values her family’s opinion of her.

My father is old now. He’ll be 78 in June. We haven’t seen each other in 17 years. He’s never met my daughters. Never met my husband. We talk maybe once a year. One day, he’s going to die, and I don’t know if I’ll see him before then.

But I know one thing: I will never be enough for him.

So the only way to fix it is to be enough for me.