There was, there was, and yet there was not. That was the opening to a Georgian folktale my mom used to read to me, and in many ways, this contradictory notion holds true for my book.

 

There was an almighty chaos, which set in after my father died. In no particular order, my family’s finances seesawed, routines went out the window, and my older siblings joined the Sullivanians, a cult that thrived on New York’s Upper West Side until it disbanded in the late eighties. Our mom sought to reclaim her happiness with someone who made us children unhappy, and in my own blunderbuss fashion, I found my moxie with friends who are still my go-to people to this day.

 

Memory is an unreliable narrator. I wanted the freedom to condense time and not be beholden to biographic particulars, so I reimagined these events, firstly by making my fictionalized self eight years older than I was in real life when we were bereaved. I have written truthfully about my experience without necessarily being truthful to the facts. I have taken liberties with events I was not privy to or which I heard about secondhand.

 

By writing in the third person, I allowed Saskia to become a character who is me and not me. This in turn gave me the vehicle to be private in public. The only time I wrote in the first person is in the following excerpt, which was my very first stab at tackling this story.

 

Most importantly, I wanted to portray the exquisite peculiarities of growing up in a New York that no longer exists, and pay homage to a city that will forever make my heart skip a beat. As in any good folktale, we eventually had a happy-enough ending. We pulled through it, and then some, with an abundance of love, red wine, and dark humor.