Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham - 15

Old Loves

Jack and I broke up on Saturday. We had a therapy session scheduled for the following Monday, and as I left our house in an Uber, packing a few more pairs of pajamas and a bunch of expired mascara, we agreed that we would meet there to discuss what came next (looking back, there’s something oddly adorable about a pair of childless thirty-year-olds thinking that anything comes next).

As he hugged me goodbye in the doorway, he was more careful and tender than he’d been with me in a long time. It made me want to start from the beginning. That night he texted: “What do you feel like?”

It was confusing to explain. On the one hand, my heart was so heavy, I thought it might sink down and replace my uterus. I couldn’t think too far ahead or too far behind without breaking down into hysterical tears. On the other hand, Nick was in my makeshift bedroom, likely with his head between my legs while I sent the message: “pretty strange.”

I dressed nicely for therapy on Monday, like the kind of woman whose feelings might be facts. Those women wear cardigans and pegged pants, a single pendant necklace. We told the therapist, with a certain measure of pride, how we had made this decision together, that we would remain best friends.

“We both know this is right,” we said. “We are meant to be best friends.”

“I want to be Jack’s family forever,” I said, unaware of just how many young women in the public eye had uttered something similar in order to quell the condescending concern that accompanies losing a good man.

Outside on 10th Street, he hugged me protectively, placing a hand on my head to make sure I didn’t bump it sliding into my Uber. We agreed we wouldn’t worry about moving my things out until after the holidays. He would keep the apartment—“You never liked it anyway,” he said.

I’d keep the house in Los Angeles. “You don’t like that one,” I told him. He nodded—he hadn’t liked that one.

It seemed our life, so carefully constructed, was shockingly easy to split in two.

After Jack and I broke up, things with Nick picked up both speed and mass. “Morning, beautiful,” he would text from his first run of the day. “How’s my sexy girl today?”

“I’ve got to get rid of this guy,” I told my only single girlfriend, someone with a kicky joie de vivre when it came to dating, expertise I sorely needed. “He texts like we’re on a bad soap opera. He doesn’t read. He wears mesh running shorts to dinner.”

“Maybe he’s fun for now,” she said, shrugging, and I wanted to believe I was dallying in the kind of playful, easy sex I imagined very healthy and fit people have.

But a part of me knew there was nothing healthy and fit about this. His need was palpable, and his story was emerging in fits and starts. Since I’d really known him last, fourteen years ago, there had been the stint in the Army, the head injury—the details of which tended to change—and a toxic relationship with a bath salts–addicted air traffic controller, who chased him out of her trailer with a shotgun. It was hard to understand how a kid from a liberal New York City family had ended up in these situations, had found these particular interests. I dismissed the undertones of it all, as if his time in the Army or his love of gun ranges was a twee passion for old-school Americana—but then, if that was the case, wouldn’t he just play the banjo?

And he couldn’t seem to explain why he wasn’t legally allowed back in France.

All he really told me was that he had been living alone in Harlem when his drinking became so severe that he found himself waking up on benches and in the parked cars of strangers. He had a history of driving drunk, showed up to work still slurring, had a case of serious pancreatitis, tried to commit suicide, and then landed in rehab, where he started running fifteen miles a day and fucking married women in the Japanese rock garden behind the exercise center. When he got home four months later, he moved into a sober living facility with a mess of anxious, pink-haired former heroin users and coked-out bankers. He stayed there for four months—which tended to be his limit anywhere—becoming a well-liked leader on this island of misfit toys. I know because I accompanied him there weekly to get his piss tested.

“I know who you are,” a twenty-year-old with self-harm scars on her inner arms and a T-shirt that said Cherry Bomb tittered as I reached for a glass of water in the shared kitchen.

“Oh, people confuse me for her,” I said. It was the only time I ever tried that, and she shrugged, sitting down in front of a Disney movie with a plate of brownies to share with the other girls who were replacing opiates with sugar.

But before I could finish my cup of water, he was storming out, letting a string of expletives loose on his sober companion.

“I don’t know what to say, man. The test doesn’t lie,” he said. The test, Nick claimed, had come up positive for booze because he used rubbing alcohol on a wound. Sure, I thought. Sure.

“I’m a fucking adult, and I’m not planning to drink anytime soon. I’d rather die than drink. So why do I need to piss in a cup?”

“I know, baby. I know.”

Back in the room at the rear of my parents’ apartment, he pinned me by my wrists and whispered, “I love you so fucking much,” as he came. I didn’t know how we’d gotten here, but I supposed he was mine now.

Two weeks into Nick’s and my fuckfest, my vagina gave out. I awoke to the feeling that a knife, dull and ceaseless, was twisting deep inside me. I called out to my mother who, hearing only the tone of my “mama?,” called an ambulance. I was used to ambulances by now—they seemed, in some bizarre way, like the most efficient form of transport, as if I were a cop who occasionally turned on my siren so I could cut through traffic to get home.

In the Lenox Hill ER, where they knew me well by now, I struggled to explain my situation. Finally, my mother butted in: “Let’s just cut to the chase, she started having a lot of sex way too early, but she’s thirty-one years old and it seemed to be improving her mood. Can you just check if she’s ripped her stitches?” The intern nodded, said he’d get a nurse for an internal exam.

As my mother and I waited, her eyes rolling with impatience, the door to my room burst open, and in ran Jack. He was holding one of the large teddy bears I’d left at our house, looking concerned and full of love. “How did you…” I asked, confounded as I received his full-bodied hug.

“He texted me to ask how you were doing. I told him we were in an ambulance,” my mother said.

He asked what was happening, said he wanted to be here as I recovered, thought I might miss my bear.

“I have to…uh…can I whisper something to my mother? It’s not about you, it’s just…it’s vagina stuff you don’t need to hear.”

And then, pulling my mother close, I said, “You find that intern and tell him that when he returns he cannot mention fucking because the guy in this room is not the person I’m fucking and he doesn’t know that I’ve been fucking.”

“Would he care?” she hissed.

“Now is not the time to find out.”

“I’ll try.” She shrugged, disappearing into the hall to explain to some poor medical student that somehow we were living in a French sex farce, if those had a focus on reproductive anatomy and an element of body horror. At least once a year, I apologize to her. But when the intern returned, he looked chastened as he said, “All right, let’s get to the bottom of this…inflammation.”

Jack took the rubber gloves snapping on as his cue to go. Concerned as he was, we were not on vaginal exam terms anymore. I lay on the gurney with my massive teddy bear, like a third boyfriend I didn’t have the resources to manage.

Nick had a seizure disorder that had a sleepwalking element—he said it was a result of the head injury—and so he took a potent mixture of sedatives to fall asleep and stay unconscious every night. He was hard to move and kicked in his sleep, throwing elbows and moaning, and in our five months together, I got used to making myself compact, taking up as little space in the bed as I could, tucking into myself like a living, breathing walnut.

I had become accustomed to this setup, and to the depth of his sleep—would I even be able to wake him in case of an emergency, I wondered—when I saw him have a seizure for the first time. I woke up at three a.m. to the sound of violent choking and turned the light on to find Nick shaking and gasping, his face crimson.

“Baby?” I heard my own voice, as desperate as the doomed slut in a horror movie. “Baby?”

He was still seizing when the ambulance arrived, choking and sputtering on his tongue, trying to speak or maybe just groaning.

“Have you two been doing any drugs?” the paramedic asked, as he took his pulse and strapped him to a gurney, installing an IV line with deft precision.

“No, he’s sober,” I assured them. “I mean, we smoked some weed, but he has a doctor’s note.”

I’ve come to think that it’s easier to register danger than we think, but that the closer it comes, the less aware we are.

Or maybe it was just the fact that I was still on a daily regimen of 4 mg of Klonopin, whatever pain medication I was currently being prescribed, and sometimes a few of Nick’s trazodone at night, just so it was easier to sleep next to someone who slept so deeply.

It’s not like nobody noticed, or tried to intervene. I didn’t listen when my friends tried to tell me gently: “He seems a little bit…erratic.”

I didn’t pay attention to his brother, either, when he told me: “I know you love him, but he hasn’t told you the whole story.”

I didn’t pay attention to myself when I got the slithering sense that he was absent from his body and loose with the truth.

Instead, I told myself that good people deserve a chance to be good, that it takes patience to dig it out of them, that what was most important was the sweetness at their core. Maybe I just needed someone to believe that about me.

Nick had always had impossibly good luck with women. At nineteen, he’d been engaged to the daughter of a respected colonel. They lived in a split-level house in North Carolina—he told me stories about church barbecues and Friday night football and volunteering together in matching polo shirts. He had an uncanny ability to slip in and out of new lives, new belief systems, new beds. A lot didn’t add up. When was he in the Army, and what exactly happened to his head? When exactly had he been arrested in France? What about the woman who kept calling from India, demanding to know when he was getting on a plane as he had promised?

“She’s crazy,” he’d tell me. “It was a one-time thing, and she can’t let go.”

And why would she want to? He was beautiful. He had an affable, old-fashioned charm. His hands were strong, and he had the incredible ability to be constantly present and yet ask for almost nothing, offering vague reassurances throughout the day: “You’re bein’ cute, baby.”

And then, a month after our first kiss on the bridge, he proposed—in front of the fireplace, holding a ring he had made out of string, using the old fishing knots he’d learned when we lived on the lake. “I want to be with you until we’re old and wrinkly,” he said, and I shimmied the ring on my finger, pushing it up as far as it would go.

I was high when I said yes. I know that because I was always high these days—sometimes less, sometimes more, sometimes just on what I was prescribed, and sometimes on the thick blunts Nick smoked day and night, or the Adderall Jemima offered me to offset the sleepiness of the other medications. I know that every time I started to get less high, I did something to make sure I was immediately high again. All that existed in those in-between moments was terror, but when I was coming up—when the blunt and the Klonopin and the pain medication all hit just right, and Nick wasn’t talking around the truth but was fucking me, and when nobody I loved was asking me how I was or what my plans were, those were the moments I felt like I was living in some well-deserved freedom I’d been chasing for years.

Later, I asked my parents what they must have thought when we announced—as casually as if we were ordering pizza—that we’d be married that August. They both agreed that—between the continued emergency room visits, the plummeting blood pressure, the pain I swore had barely abated—as long as I was still, they figured they could handle the rest of it later. Nick, my mother reasoned, was like a giant human teddy bear. I was a baby bird and he was my broken wing, and my mother fed him and checked on him during the day, even on the rare days I had something to do. When I went to Los Angeles for a few weeks of work, he stayed in the back room, saying he just felt safer and happier near my stuff (in fact, he’d stopped paying rent).

Later, she would say, “My friends kept asking me why I was dragging this boy everywhere. They thought we were having an affair.”

The hysterectomy was in November, the breakup in December, the “engagement” in January, and in February, I went back to Los Angeles—theoretically to start a new writer’s room with Jenni for a new series that had been green-lit at HBO. I got hair extensions glued to my head to make up for the hormone-induced female-pattern baldness, and I tried to walk through my days like a person with her dignity intact. News of Jack and my breakup finally hit the press, and when I read Twitter, it was various iterations of “ding dong the witch is dead” and “bro is finally free to date someone on his level.” Paparazzi hid in the bushes outside my office, trying to catch photos of me looking heartbroken. Even if I wasn’t registering myself as heartbroken—after all, I had a hot new lover and a very distracting pill habit—I sure looked it, with a frayed ponytail of Russian hair and an extra-large Starbucks, wearing a velvet shirt that said Paradise and jeans that hung low off my hips.

I was so lonely for Nick that I flew him out to visit for the weekend, and we drove out to Venice Beach—hiding in the back of my friend’s Subaru to escape the paparazzi. We stayed with Nancy, the family friend who had hosted me on my first trip to LA. In her guest house, we had sex in the afternoon and fell asleep at four p.m. , and I woke up just before nine to find him choking on his own tongue again, seizing, but I knew enough this time—from his doctor, his parents—to stay calm, to stuff his pills into his mouth and try and shut it. What seemed so terrifying initially was, in fact, routine.

The next day, we drove up to Pismo Beach, where we screwed up our hotel reservations and had to spend a night at a Marriott, in a room with a view of the strip mall parking lot. I was still chewing two Percocet every morning, even though it had been three months since surgery, and I spent most of my free time in bed. When Nick went out for a run, I started perusing gossip sites and saw a photo, in Us Weekly, of Jack sitting courtside at a Knicks game with a blond girl we vaguely knew from around the city. Her head was on his shoulder, and they appeared to be whispering. I don’t know what I expected—that he would have all of his dates indoors, as I had the decency to do?—I pulled out my phone and texted him: “Did this really have to happen?”

It felt like every Twitter user—who had told me, again and again, how above my weight I was punching—now had photographic evidence that Jack was finally where he belonged, in the loving embrace of a beautiful girl with a well-tended Instagram grid and no public shame to her name. The worst part was, I was sort of happy for him, imagining her peering gingerly at him across a candlelit table, taking his hand as they strolled through the park, saying yes to fun public activities like sporting events that I never would have attended, no matter how good my health was. (Later, I would meet her, and find out that despite her shiny sheet of blond hair and her massive eyes and her perfectly fitted vintage Levis, she was just as full of anxiety, melancholy, and mayhem as I was. I guess we all have a type, and it’s not always as simple as “brunettes.”)

A few nights later, after Nick had headed home (writing “I miss my beautiful baby already”), Jack landed in Los Angeles, and he came over from the airport to the house, where all of his clothes were still in the closet but he wasn’t staying. My stomach hurt so badly that I retreated to the bed and he sat in a chair beside it. We didn’t have very much to say to each other—the loving delirium of the early breakup had passed, but the idea that we were moving through the world linked had not—and we started to fight like a tired couple again, and he said, “Please don’t do your usual bullshit,” and I said, “You’re not even being a good friend,” and I rolled over and pretended to go to sleep.

I tried to spend days in the writer’s room, but I was either anxious and shaky or sleepy and soft. I couldn’t seem to hit the right note. Jenni and I agreed I’d go back to New York to work on the scripts alone, like I had back before season one of Girls came out, when I couldn’t seem to adjust without being close to my family. Someone else packed my things up from the apartment Jack and I had lived in, and this time the service was not as white glove, which is how I ended up with a bottle of shampoo oozing out onto my Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy.

Only a few days home, and a familiar pain overtook me once more, one I could recognize in an instant as a cyst leaking its acidic contents into my still-raw abdominal cavity. In the emergency room, the pain meds seemed not to touch it, and as I writhed and moaned, a nurse said, “We’re going to try something else; do you know what ketamine is?” They were wheeling me as they spoke, upstairs to an emergency ultrasound.

“Isn’t that for cows?” I asked, and it seemed that no sooner had I spoken, the hall I was moving through began to expand and contract, in a moment endless and narrow and then suddenly bulbous and rounded. Nick’s hand looked tiny and his voice sounded huge, and when I tried to speak, I couldn’t hear mine.

When I came to, Dr. Seckin was by my bed—he seemed confused and distressed, having found another massive and unfortunately named “chocolate cyst.” (So named because of the sludgy brown color of these collections of misplaced tissue filled with old blood. Unlike most ovarian cysts, they’re specific to endometriosis and the strange and insidious ways it finds to continue to do its work.)

“Your body just can’t seem to calm down,” he said.

He met Nick and smiled approvingly at the fact that he was staying close to the hospital: “I’m glad this one’s here to support you.”

But what he didn’t know was that Nick had nowhere else to be.

That night, waiting for surgery, an IV of Dilaudid in my arm and nurses making the rounds every half an hour, I asked Nick to please fuck me. I had gone from excruciating pain to the drug-induced sense that my body was a buzzing chalk outline. Without question, he crawled on top of me and pushed himself inside of me, moving slowly, kissing me as he came silently. I remember feeling I had gotten away with something—all these days and nights in the hospital, and I had finally beaten them at their own game.

I recently told my Aunt Bonnie how nervous I was for this book to come out.

“I say some tough things,” I told her. “Things my parents still don’t know.”

She’s the most pragmatic of my mother and her sisters, the most able to handle multiple stresses without raising her voice. Emergency room doctor, mother of an addict child who survived his loss, grandmother, all with the pert ass of a nineteen-year-old and the calm, even, but somehow confronting tone of Diane Sawyer.

“What? What could be so surprising? What don’t they know? I mean, Grandma Dot saw you naked on TV when she was ninety-six.”

“Well…for one, I had sex in the ICU…”

A pause. I wondered if she’d hung up on me in disgust, ready to bar me from all future Passovers.

“And you think you’re the only one who’s had sex in the ICU? Get real,” she said, her eye roll almost audible. “God, that’s your problem. You think you’re so original.”

My mother wanted Nick and me to have a home, like adults—after all, we were thirty-one and thirty-three, respectively—and so she found us an apartment for rent one floor above my parents’ place, where we’d been hiding out. I was also getting the distinct feeling they wanted their spare bedrooms, and their lives, back.

My mother rented it for me sight unseen—“It’s got amazing bones,” she said again and again—and when I finally went upstairs to look, I found that it was a spare, modern one bedroom with glossy cement floors that looked, if you ignored the killer view, like a glorified dorm room. I felt bratty and pathetic complaining about the home my mother had found for me, but in my years resenting Jack and my new-build home, I had often gone to sleep fantasizing about an apartment of my own, a turret room painted chalky white with a fireplace full of books, a mattress on the floor, and nothing but crown molding and arched doorframes to keep me company. Whatever that dream was, this was the opposite—the bathroom had a foggy glass sliding door with a fat silver handle. The bedroom was a masculine blue-gray. The kitchen was tiled with bright blue ’80s squares next to a subzero missing its freezer handle.

Usually, home décor lit me up like a child with a dollhouse fetish, but here, I had no idea what to do with the space besides plant an equally gray Ikea sofa in the center of the living room and then fall back onto it and give up. My mother tried to jazz up the rest, lending me her pink Mongolian fur pillows and a matching satin bedspread, the kind my grandmother had favored. After I’d begged for it since I was a tween, she also gave up her red leather Donna Karan pillow, a gift she had bought herself on Madison Avenue twenty years earlier to celebrate a successful art sale. (The Donna Karan pillow? That was how I knew she was actually worried.) I wasn’t working much, but she put a desk in the corner just in case, hopefully filling a cup with pencils.

There was something so tender about Nick setting his Chinatown-purchased Lucky Cat on our kitchen counter. There was something so terrifying about the fact that, aside from me, it was all he had. I tried not to think of all the women who had rescued Nick—with food, clothing, shelter, reduced sentences, and lenient drug testing policies. Every time doubt rose in me, I just took whatever medicine I had and tried to close my eyes.

The nausea had set in on a March trip to Austin, where I was scheduled to speak on a panel about “politics and narrative” at South by Southwest—a place I had once held dear, but now blurred together with every other bland convention center I’d been escorted through since, trailing an anonymous woman named Rachel or Emily as she led me to get mic’d up in the green room. I had spent the previous hour lying on the cool tile floor of the convention center bathroom in my bedazzled leopard maxi-skirt, trying not to puke. I wore no makeup and no earrings (which, to me, is a bigger deal than not wearing pants), and my three Homer Simpson hairs were scraped into what my father called my “broccoli top” hairdo. “Lena Dunham shows off her natural style,” said the Daily Mail in a story about the panel the next day, clearly unsure of what the fuck to do with the mullet of sartorial statements—disco party down below, severe depression up above.

That night, in my Airbnb, the spins were not stopping. I had taken whatever spare pills I could find in the depths of my backpack and passed out while Nick was going down on me. On the plane back to New York, I took too much Dramamine and slept in his lap, comforted by the momentary pause in my seasickness, and over the coming weeks, I experimented with a cocktail of Adderall, Klonopin, and Percocet, desperate to find a solution to the spinning that set in every time I rose from bed.

Finally, at an appointment with my rheumatologist, he asked me to lay out all my medications on his desk, one at a time, and when I explained that I was taking 4 mg of Klonopin daily for anxiety, he said, “Aha!” like a detective who had identified the culprit. “No wonder you’re nauseous!” he proclaimed. “That’s the FDA limit for what someone can take in a day. That’s too much Klonopin. You have a problem.”

I didn’t understand. I was anxious. I was taking a drug for anxiety. I had taken it as prescribed, and when I got more anxious, I asked the doctor uptown and she told me to take more of the drug. Part of the issue was that I had a lot of doctors saying a lot of different things. I hadn’t meant to, but it had happened. When you feel sick and nobody can explain it, you look for someone who can. If you have the money to try and get well in a country that doesn’t want anyone to heal, much less a woman, you spend it, hoping someone will say, “Aha! There it is. Fix this and you’ll be perfect, better than ever.”

This doctor, the one who gave me the Klonopin—I liked her. I had been seeing her since I was thirteen, in her small but chicly appointed office uptown. She had always answered my calls quickly and listened gently. She had a wide-open smile and gorgeous lotioned legs, and a long, empty brutalist vase in her waiting room. She used my name a lot. “That’s so great, Lena” or “Lena, that must have been so hard.” I trusted her. She never told me I was taking too much, and she also never told me it would be hard to stop.

The other doctor, the one with the mustache who used the word problem, told me I needed to lower my dosage. I thought, How hard could that be? I went straight to work and told Jenni that they’d found the cause of my nausea. “I have low iron,” I explained, which was true but not the whole truth. “Also, I may be on…too much Klonopin,” I added as an aside.

She didn’t seem surprised, but she called in our producer Ilene, as if she needed an adult in the room, who looked me up and down.

I know I was wearing a polka-dotted wrap dress, because I took a photo that day, in the lobby of the doctor’s office, meant to show how well I was doing. My hair, still thinning and no longer bearing the weight of the extensions—which gave me migraines and looked absurd—was tied up in a little sprout like a Cabbage Patch Kid’s. Ilene kept saying, “I knew it! Your eyes are pinged out. Your eyes have been pinged out.” I hated this, but I let her say it—who was I to argue? I can’t see my own eyes.

It was agreed that I would fly home to New York for another “little break.” All the little breaks were becoming a longer break. Jenni had been cold to me for months—like everyone who cared about me, I’m sure it was hard for her to make sense of my behavior, and her professional life was being directly affected by my inability to decipher the root cause of my pain, my pains, my various and profound discomforts—but in this moment, she was gentle—cheery, even. “Wouldn’t you like to go somewhere for a month?” she said. “You could relax, do some arts and crafts.” It didn’t occur to me that she was talking about rehab. In that moment, I imagined some kind of spa, or perhaps a summer camp for anxious millennials. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me how relieved she must have been at the idea of getting me out of there—for weeks, I had been calling in sick, every day acting like it was a new surprise. It was for me. My memory, usually a steel trap, was as patchy as my hair.

Everyone who remained close to me—Jenni, my parents, a few friends who had the tolerance to follow the minute ups and downs—agreed I needed a time-out. What kind of time-out was a matter of debate. Some felt the issue was Nick. Others felt it was the pills. Still others felt I was caught in an endless loop of medical anxiety and obsession. My brother wrote me a loving but boundaried text, recusing himself from the discussion. The conversation about my health wasn’t public, insofar as nobody knew the story behind the story, only enough to comment that the body that was once too fat was too skinny, the girl who once had a boyfriend she didn’t deserve was tragically alone, and that my early promise had petered out and been replaced with an irreversible stench of failure. I followed along on the phone that was always resting on the pillow beside me.

Jenni told my mother that I needed to be at an inpatient facility. My mother rejected the idea out of hand, as she had long identified Jenni as part of the problem and not the solution, since the days I’d been called back to work with stitches still in. There was nothing in it for Jenni, my going away, except, perhaps, my eventual reemergence as someone with a real creative life force. I am thankful that, after a series of years that caused me to question my role as commodity versus friend, she insisted that the issue was bigger than anyone understood. In her way, she still knew me.

But my mother still thought I could kick the pills at home, safe, with them.

My father rested his head in his hand—thumb on his temple and pointer finger between his brows, like he does when he’s yelled very loudly and is now exhausted—and said: “I’m out of my depths, kid.”

All I knew was that I didn’t see space for myself in my own life anymore. The events of the last six months were almost comical in their volume: the dive-bombing of my career (inadvertent or utterly with purpose, depending on your perspective—I didn’t have a perspective yet), the loss of my fertility, the end of my relationship. This wasn’t even to mention the events of the last six years, which I didn’t have the energy to process. The idea of going away seemed only like an admission of failure, that I’d failed to best the forces aligned against me.

I tried to cut down on my Klonopin immediately—I took half of what I usually would. I wrote sixty pages of unintelligible drivel that seemed genius to me. I realized I couldn’t feel my arms, and when I looked down, they looked like Barbie limbs. I didn’t know much, but knew enough to know that this was cause for alarm. The next day, my mother called my psychopharmacologist, who recommended a “center” where “experts” could help with the withdrawal process, titrating me down carefully, not only to quell the uncomfortable effects, but also to prevent seizures and other more serious complications of stopping benzodiazepines too quickly.

“But aren’t you the fucking expert?” my mother had demanded. The poor psychopharmacologist, who had only ever tried to quell my pain, who seemed to have a very active social life, who wore flared jeans with a thick belt and was actually kind of a hot bitch. She never saw Laurie Simmons coming.

“I ripped her a new one for putting you on those drugs,” my mother informed me. “I said, ‘Let me get this straight: You prescribed my child a medication, and now you’re giving us the name of a rehab so she can get off of it?’ ” As always, points were made.

The place the psychopharmacologist had recommended was a “center” upstate. My father and I took a cab uptown—in the back, I leaned my cheek on the smooth wool of his sports coat—to meet the woman in charge. She was elegant and blond, in a pencil skirt, and she listened to me talk for about ten minutes before stopping to look me in the eye and say, “I think you could use a rest. Do you feel like you could use a rest?”

I stared at my feet, sockless in winter in a pair of slippers, and managed to speak my first honest words in months: “I am so, so tired.”

That night, I told Nick I was going to rehab. I’d never even mentioned the idea that I had a problem. He must have seen me swallow pills, but then again, he also swallowed plenty of pills. We were both overprescribed and unaware, too stoned to eat and too wired to sleep.

“Well, my baby,” he said, wrestling me back onto the bed and pulling his pants down. “I’ll be here waiting.”

We drove to the Center for Motivation and Change in silence, my father in the driver’s seat and my mother next to him and me in the back, staring out the window, like I was five and Cyrus hadn’t been born yet, the way we’d pile in the little white Volvo to head to my grandmother’s house.

Later I realized that my brother—who was employing his newfound boundaries in California, where he’d casually referred to me in an interview about his forthcoming book as his “biological family”—was the only one in the family who suspected I might have an issue with pills. Later, after the years of work it took to find each other again, Cyrus told me that at times, he had felt my pain so acutely that it was too painful to even be in touch. What I perceived to be the callousness of his midtwenties was actually an attempt to save his own sanity, not to go down in the boat with me. I’m so glad he did that, because it ultimately saved us.

My mother had packed for me. She filled the suitcase with everything I had—most of what I owned had gone from the house I shared with Jack right into storage—and she included things like a bikini, high heels, and a lacy formal dress (“in case you have a graduation or something”). She put cute surprises in, like she did when I was little and she was packing my lunch box—a fancy red lipstick still in the packaging, a tiny plastic ballerina, a photo of her at my age, a postcard that said, “I love you, love your Moo Moo Mommy xx.”