This March 9-14, I’m participating in and being the program director for the Jacaranda Writing Retreat in Mexico City, produced by Hechale Productions. I’m really excited to have found three wonderful teachers in other genres—Thea Matthews in poetry (author, most recently of Grime, City Lights Press), Emmy award-winner Xandra Castleton in screenwriting, and Shanthi Sakeran in fiction.

The fun thing about the retreat is that it will be an opportunity to explore other types of writing. The first day, everyone will participate in a session where each teacher will talk about their genre. Then students will pick a class but will be welcome to audit a couple of other classes during the course of the week. This is exciting: I’ve never taken a poetry class, for instance. And I’ve always thought I was a terrible fiction writer. But speaking to these women, I realize how much all of our genres overlap–we’re all concerned with telling a good story, with creating memorable imagery, and using specific, sensory details. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be inspired enough to try writing a poem or a short story.

Scan the QR code for details about the retreat!

Working with Shanthi led me to want to re-read her wonderful book, Lucky Boy (2017). It’s a novel about two very different pictures of immigration and two very different women with one goal: a baby named Ignacio. The birth mother is Soli, whose tale of getting to Berkeley, CA from a small pueblo near Oaxaca—enduring hunger, mistreatment, rape, violence, and daily indignities—is both harrowing and a realistic look at what has become a sadly common experience for immigrants from south of the border. Kavya, who becomes Ignacio’s foster mother, is a second-generation Indian-American with a husband who works in Silicon Valley. The stark contrast between these women is like the nannies at the playground and the yoga-clad mothers who come to pick their babies up in their SUVs, inhabiting two different worlds. The Berkeley moms are well-intentioned, to a point. The nannies live with fear that the slightest move, the slightest paper out of place in a house they’ve cleaned, will end up with them being fired or deported.

I spoke with Shanthi about the book, and all the complexities of a situation where a foster mother can provide more of what society deems desirable for a child —good schools, toys, a room of their own—but the birth mother is the mother. Soli’s endless difficulties trying to get her son back through bureaucratic red tape—she can’t attend required parenting classes while she’s in an immigrant detention facility, or even make phone calls out—show the monstrous burdens and expectations placed on immigrants, especially working mothers. The novel is, of course, very timely as ICE agents crawl our streets, looking for anyone Latinx to deport (not usually Indian), tearing apart families and making good people desperate.

No side is “right” in this book—they’re both humanized, and we feel the attachment and love both women feel for little Ignacio. “That’s the point of fiction,” Shanthi told me. “To humanize experience.”

Shanthi, who is of Indian-American descent, visited Oaxaca to do research for the book, though she readily admits she can’t possibly really understand the Mexican immigrant experience. She also did extensive research on border crossings, as well as the foster system and immigration detention centers in the US. I was glad to have an opportunity to read this empathetic, engaging novel.

Meantime, Shanthi has been writing for television for a few years, for New Amsterdam. So she’ll bring her genre-crossing chops to the retreat.

Another book: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” a 2025 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel by Kiran Desai, has been making a lot of best-of 2025 book lists (including Barak Obama’s). Like Shanthi’s book, it explores the culture clashes and alientation that young immigrants face in America, this time from India. Sonia (an aspiring novelist) and Sunny (a struggling journalist), have navigate family and traditional gender and class expectations, love, racism, and their search for identity, both in India and the US. The book is an epic tale full of wonderful characters and a love story that, while relying on a pretty chancy encounter on a train, is nonetheless convincing, and hard to put down.

I always hated that question, partly because I am not a stellar example of someone who has a disciplined writing habit. I would usually reply by quoting another author who said that the muse only hits when you’re already sitting in your chair, writing. And indeed, discipline is key if you want to eventually get something out of your head and onto the page, much less published. As a book editor, I’ve been frustrated with some short-lived clients who wanted to have written a book, with their photo on the jacket, without having taken the time and work they needed to actually write one. I have parted ways with those clients because I don’t like to try to vacuum books out of people’s brains. Fortunately, I’ve been able to collaborate with some other hard-working authors to midwife their books into existence, learning a lot along the way about their fields. That’s a huge pleasure.

Writing a book takes work, more than most people realize. As for process, many admirable and productive writers get up at the crack of dawn, meditate, make a pot of tea, and then hunker down until a late lunch, after which they take care of their correspondence, shopping, and other bothersome tasks that get in the way of their writing. They get a lot done.

I’m not one of those people, alas. I like to get a lot of sleep and cuddle with my husband in the morning, then eat breakfast, read the “paper,” and do the crossword puzzle with him. By the time I work out and shower, it’s coming up on 11:00. Then I check my emails and, like every other distracted person on the planet, scroll through Instagram. Now it’s almost noon, around the time those 5 a.m. writers are getting ready to pack it in for the day. I usually end up writing in the afternoon. I’m calm and settled by then. That works for me, though I’m not as productive as I’d like to be.

All my early writing experience was as a journalist, so I am trained to write to deadlines. That has often meant last-minute sprints after I’ve procrastinated, actually starting early and jamming until late at night. I have very rarely, in my over 40 years of being a writer, missed a deadline; maybe only once or twice, having to do with illness or emergency. Because I have always written on deadline, I write quickly. This is an advantage for getting things in on time, but not so great for the kind of careful polishing and thought that you need to write something that really sparkles. It’s a bit of a problem for me that even when I write fast, I write well. That is to say, well enough. But if I spent more time on what I wrote, as I sometimes do on pieces that mean a lot to me, they’d be much better. There have been many occasions in my career when I’ve whipped off a pitch to an editor and had it rejected because I wasn’t careful enough. Why I don’t spend more time is a mystery to me. It isn’t arrogance or confidence; it has more to do with fear. What if I was as careful and thoughtful and researched as I could be, and it was still rejected? Then I’d have no easy excuse to fall back on.

But back to process. Writing to deadlines only works when you actually have deadlines. But when you’re working on a longer project, as I’ve been doing now for a few years, there are no actual deadlines. That’s when you have to make up deadlines. This is easier to do for, say, a book project where there is a long deadline, like a year, which you can break up into little chunks and tell yourself that in order to finish, you have to do, say, one chapter every three weeks. But that deadline at the end of the year is still real. If you don’t finish the book, you have to pay back your (long-spent) advance.

The book I’m working on now has no deadline. I’ve written no proposal, I have no agent, no advance, and no contract. I’ve done this on purpose because in the past, I’ve written what I thought an agent or publisher wanted so it would sell. Or rather, I haven’t written what I wanted to write because I was told it wouldn’t sell. Or it’s been some combination of floating a half-assed proposal (see above) to try to get a green light to write. The last time I sent out a proposal, it came back from the one agent I sent it to with the comment that while it was well-written, it had all seemed a little pat, a little too much like stories you tell yourself over and over. I needed to dig in deeper, she said, take more time, interrogate my own stories and conclusions, go on a real quest to understand something I didn’t understand when I started out. That was an excellent rejection.

I once visited my mentor William Zinsser, writing guru and author, among other books, of On Writing Well, in his office in Manhattan (Zinsser was the husband of my father’s first cousin, another excellent writer, Caroline Fraser Zinsser). He asked me what book I was working on, and I told him I wasn’t working on a book because my agent wasn’t keen on any of my ideas, and told me that if I didn’t have another best-seller after An Italian Affair (still in print, two decades years later), it would doom my career. Zinsser was blunt. “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You’re a writer, so write.” I took his advice, fired my agent (which I regret; I should have just been more clear with her about what I wanted to do) and wrote my next book, All Over the Map, which was a fine book, if not as sexy, but did not sell well. I did not make back the advance. I suppose my career has been somewhat doomed ever since; the last time I saw my second agent, she said, “You’re mid-career and mid-list and there’s nothing I can do for you,” which is not exactly a vote of confidence. I haven’t been hyper-focused on my platform, as you have to be these days, and since I have had to make money, I’ve taken on other kinds of writing and editing to try to make sure I don’t retire in poverty.

But I still take Zinsser’s words to heart. Don’t simply write for approval or for money. Write what you’re passionate about, what you have to write.

Of course I want whatever I write to eventually sell, but here in my 60s, that’s not my main motivation (if making money had been my motivation all along, I’d be a wealthy lawyer or something). I have always been clear about trading financial comfort and security for independence and creativity, something I’ve only been able to do in San Francisco thanks to rent control.

I’m taking a break from other money-making projects now because, these days I have only so much time and energy left. I’m thankfully in excellent health, but I can see old age on the horizon. I have lost a lot of people in my life a lot sooner than I thought they would go. So I’m focusing on writing a book. I’ve told precious few people what the topic of my current project is, because I am sensitive to criticism; one writer friend’s negative comments about my idea shut me down for far too long. I have decided to step away from the publishing machine and write the book I want to write, the way I want to write it. This has been difficult, because holding my cards close means that no one is helping to coach me along. But I’m at the point in my career and life where I need to mainly listen to, and trust, my own advice. It doesn’t mean I won’t eventually be open to feedback and edits, but I want my vision of the book to be fully realized before other people come at it with their sharp red pencils. I want to create a work of art that is strictly and honestly my own.

That still leaves me with the problem of deadlines. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; I have about 200,000 words in various documents, some of which I can never find (if you want to talk about process, talk about version control in Scrivener). I’ve written a few scenes over and over, then changed them again. I’ve done things in the past tense and in the present tense, and I’ve mixed them. I’ve succumbed to stupid perfectionism. But recently, I found the right voice and the right way into the material, and I’m on a roll.

So I’m going to give myself a deadline, a year, Oct. 29, 2026, to finish. Maybe I’ll be done before that; I hope so. But it’s not a bad thing to take my time.

And in the meantime, I’m happy to have Substack as an outlet for writing things fast. Thanks for reading. Now, I have a chapter to work on.

Before you go! I’m the program director for the Jacaranda Writing Retreat in Mexico City in March, with three amazing teachers: Xandra Castleton, screenwriting; Jesus Sierra, fiction; and Maw Shein Win, poetry. I’m teaching memoir and personal essay. Come immerse yourself in this vibrant city and in your writing!

When I started this Substack I promised paid subscribers a discount on my writing workshops. This is the first I’ve pulled together, and I’m excited to be doing it with award-winning photographer Dan Borris in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico this September 13-19.

This Substack is all about the workshop, so pardon the self-promotion and skip this one if it doesn’t appeal to you. I’ll be back soon with a meatier Substack.

Photo by Dan Borris

Over the past 30 years, I’ve taught lots of writing workshops—memoir, personal essay, book editing, journalism, getting published, etc. This one is about writing Substacks or other newsletters/blogs—and illustrating them with photos that you’ve taken on your phone.

The focus here isn’t so much on growing and marketing your Substack as on writing them well. I love writing Substacks because unlike much of the writing I’ve done for magazines during my career, I can say what I want to say, and how I want to say it. Substack has given a lot of writers a new venue for personal essays, particularly in these turbulent political times. I think there’s no better place to develop your voice as a writer than in this kind of format. But as with any type of blog post, a Substack doesn’t work unless it’s crafted. It’s an essay, whether personal, political, or based on your professional research. As such, it needs to have some craft and structure—and something to say.

That’s the purpose of this workshop. Come to the colorful, relaxing colonial town of San Miguel de Allende to be inspired to explore your writing. Over the course of the week, we’ll look at what makes an effective essay for Substack or other publications. If you’re not interested in doing a Substack, you can just focus on writing personal essays or pieces of your memoir. We will cover topics including voice, structure, publication themes, and clear, engaging writing. The class is limited to eight students. Since it’s small, we can focus on your particular needs and interests.

Dan Borris never goes with the conventional photo. His work has appeared in numerous national magazines, and shown and collected in the US and Mexico. He’ll be leading the photo workshop and safari.

On the first day of class, we will have a photography workshop with Dan Borris, longtime San Miguel de Allende resident and award-winning photographer, who will take you on a photo safari of this picturesque town, showing you how to take great photos for your Substack or general use. On the last evening of class, we’ll have a dinner with a slide show of our photos and a reading of our Substack essays.

The week will include:

—An evening welcome reception on Sunday, September 14
—Five days of writing instruction, Monday through Friday, 10-1 (15 hours total). This will be held at the Bird House in the historic Centro of San Miguel de Allende.
—An afternoon photo class and photo safari (3-4 hours)
—A one-on-one writing coaching session with Laura, who will read up to a maximum of 5000 words to critique, whether generated before the workshop or during the week (one hour).
—A final meal with a reading and photo show

You will have afternoons to write and explore the town. While we won’t be leading other events tour-bus style, you can explore the nearby hot springs, take a cooking class, go to the botanical gardens, and visit the local art galleries. Laura will give you a list of recommendations (she’s lived in San Miguel de Allende for part of 15 years). She will undoubtedly be going to some of the best live music in town, as well as salsa dancing during the week, and you can come along (she can also hook you up with great private dance teachers).

Not included:
—Transportation to San Miguel de Allende (fly to Leon or Queretaro and take the Bajiogo shuttle, or take a bus from Mexico City, 4 hours away).
—Meals other than the reception and final dinner, though we can make some reservations together. There are several breakfast places and other good restaurants right on the block.
—Housing, except for two spots in the Bird House, where we’re holding the seminar (one King bedroom, and one Queen). There are numerous AirBnBs nearby; I’m on 82A Callejon de Loreto in the historic Centro.

This seminar is not for beginning writers, but people who have some experience and can put together an 800-1000 word essay in a couple of days. It is also for people who feel comfortable getting around a very friendly town mostly on their own. (I am a writing teacher and not a tour guide.)

To apply: Please email me at laura@laurafraser.com and send me a short sample of your writing (1500 words or less) as an application.

I recommend you arrive on Saturday to get settled in and explore the town. Sunday there is music in the country we could go to, or you can visit a winery. Afterwards, we’ll have a welcome reception. We’ll start Monday morning.

Cost: $895. $400 due as a deposit to hold your place and is non-refundable unless I can fill that spot, in which case I’ll refund all but $50 for my time. The balance is due Sept. 1.

Early bird discount before August 15: $795

Paid Substack subscribers: $750

San Miguel de Allende residents: Email me.

Accommodations at the Bird House (See CasasArtisticas.com), $500/week, two spots available.

I will send out a document with information about other housing options, restaurants, transportation, and things to do for a memorable trip to SMdA!

Saludos!

Laura

Laura Fraser is a NYT-bestselling memoirist and journalist who has lived part-time in San Miguel de Allende for over 15 years. She has been a keynote speaker at San Miguel de Allende’s writing conference and taught writing at numerous venues, including Aspen Summer Words, Stanford Continuing Education, Harvard University Narrative Journalism Conference, and UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times ("Modern Love"), Sunset, Oprah, Vogue, Glamour, Elle, Salon, Alta, and many others.

Dan Borris's photos have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian, among many others. His work has been shown and collected in the US and Mexico, including the McNay Museum, Blue Start Art Space, and the Instituto Cultural de Mexico. His photography has been honored by Communication Arts, American Photography, the Society of Publication Designers, and the Art Directors Club of New York.

For Conley, it had been the last straw. For 25 years, despite her innovations in the field, her successes at surgery, and her research studying how the immune system could be harnessed to fight brain tumors (way ahead of her time), she was still being degraded daily by her colleagues. They pinched her, called her “hon,” asked her to get coffee, made sexual advances, belittled and ignored her — all towards a person who, if she had been male, would have been treated like a hospital God, with complete respect and even fear.

In 1991, when Conley didn’t get her promotion, she went public, and started a nascent sort of “me too” movement at the time, with hundreds of academics supporting her. Finally, the university backed down, and promoted her to the position she had long worked for and deserved. In 1988, she published Walking Out on the Boys, a memoir of her experiences in the rarefied white male world of neurosurgery.

Conley was a trailblazer in other ways. In 1971, she was the first woman to cross the finish line at the Bay to Breakers race. That was the first year women were allowed to race, but in fact, she had crossed the line the year before, registering as “Francis” and wearing an overcoat to disguise her gender.

I was a young journalist at the time, 30, and despite having done a lot of medical reporting, I was intimidated to interview a brain surgeon. It turned out she was down-to-earth and friendly. She invited me to watch a spinal surgery, which I recall being a lot more like woodshop than how I imagined neurosurgery. Dr. Conley wore running shoes, which were not common for female physicians at the time, and it turned out that she crusaded against high heels because they cause back pain. My only discomfort during the surgery was being pimped by a medical student who thought I was another medical student (which in fact was my cover for being allowed in the OR); he quizzed me on what various body parts we were looking at, but Dr. Conley saved me by giving him a look that quieted him down.

My wonderful editor at the time, Peggy Northrop, encouraged me to take the story further than her experience of sexism and into the realm of “micro-iniquities,” the kinds of subtle slights that women and people of color experience all the time in the workplace, which are sometimes too subtle to fight against, so much so that one could become convinced she was oversensitive or reading into things or just not playing along with the game.

Dr. Conley didn’t play along with the game. She fought back. She ended up at the top of her profession, married to an Olympic javelin-thrower, then retired to Sea Ranch.

All these years later, despite her efforts, female neurosurgeons are still rare; only 8.2% of those practicing in the US. Meanwhile, at Stanford, Dr. Odette Harris, promoted to professor in 2018, is only the second female neurosurgeon after Dr. Conley to attain that position. And the Association of American Medical Colleges reports that nearly one in three women still experience sexual harassment in academic medicine. That’s not even to mention how much of medical training is based on medicine for men.

I wrote this story half my lifetime ago. When I see the kind of depth and space that Vogue let me write, I feel both glad to have been working there for those salad days —I made $2/word and this piece ran something like 3500 words—and sorry that the magazine doesn’t run anything this length, and rarely so in-depth. Nor do many other magazines. Anna Wintour green-lit the piece because it’s an issue she cared about; she’s not responsible for the turn in magazine economics that has devalued journalism and shrunken the pages of even the most robust magazines. But it’s fair to say that a story of this length would never run in Vogue today, which is a shame. What made this story work was the subtlety that can never be conveyed in a 500-word post.

A few years after the piece, a friend of mine, Angus McKenzie, an investigative reporter, found out that he had a deadly brain tumor. When he told me that Dr. Conley was his surgeon, I felt reassured that he was in the best of hands, and she likely extended his life for several months. I feel honored to have known Dr. Conley and written about her.

I still miss my mother, but also find myself feeling sad that my memories of her voice, her way of saying things, and her gestures are starting to fade. At the same time, I still get a strong urge to call her sometimes and am struck, again, with the ferocity of grief that I first experienced when she died. I read this piece as a eulogy at her memorial service.

The most annoyed my mother has ever been with me was when I was traveling alone in Egypt and didn't call home for a month. She wasn't exactly happy when I went to Iraq just before the Persian Gulf War, either, and interviewed Yasir Arafat in a house that was bombed to smithereens days later. Both times I explained that, in a way, it was her fault: I inherited my spirit of adventure from her. When I was 5, my mother decided to hop a freight train across Colorado. As a physician's wife and stay-at-home mother of four, she said she needed some excitement and vowed to take more risks in her life. When a couple of younger, footloose friends called with this crazy scheme, she couldn't refuse. Secretly, she remembers, she hoped my father would insist that no wife of his was going to hop a damned freight train. Instead, appreciating the romance of it all, he offered to drive her to the station.

At the freight yards, my mother, who hadn't grasped the nuances of hobo behavior, politely asked a railroad man which train was bound for Grand Junction, as if she had a first-class ticket tucked inside her purse. He snarled at her. "That one," he said, "and don't let me see you." She and the others jumped aboard and watched miles of wide-open western landscape roll by. After a few days, my mother hitchhiked home, but her appetite for adventure hadn't been satisfied, only whetted. She immediately signed up for a grueling wilderness rock-climbing course in Utah, then took off bicycling in Ireland, followed by a horseback trek through the Wyoming Tetons. The summer I was 11, she moved my three sisters and me to Mexico to experience another culture. The four of us always wondered why she wouldn't just play tennis or join the garden club like the other mothers.

My mother, Virginia “Ginny” Fraser, was always game for any outdoor adventure

But she couldn't help it: My mother got her restless spirit from my grandmother, who had an adventurous past of her own. Her husband left her when she was pregnant with my mother, and she raised her child alone, on a teacher's salary, during the Depression. But in the summers she'd pack up the two of them and explore the West, sleeping wherever they landed when night fell—a Navajo chicken yard, a desert gulch. They'd pull out the portable stove and eat pancakes every meal. "It never occurred to me that we were poor," my mother says.

Not long after hopping the freight train, when I was 6 or 7, my mother told me she wanted me to be more "independent" than my older sisters because she was soon going to be very busy. When she explained what independent meant, I decided it sounded like fun. Part of this new independence meant going along with my mother, who was looking for adventure closer to home. When she heard that realtors in our neighborhood wouldn't sell houses to African-American families, she got involved in the civil rights movement and brought me to demonstrations, meetings, and trials. I missed some school, but our outings made a much more lasting impression on me than some of my classes would have. One day we went to a church where I sat enthralled by the words of a compassionate man with a musical voice. Only later did I know how lucky I'd been to hear the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preach.

When I was about five, Mom told me she wanted me to be more “independent” than my sisters. When she explained what that big word meant, I was all in.

Our home became a refuge for strays. My mother opened the door to Navajo orphans, a Cuban family, and, during the Vietnam War, student activists who were "raising the consciousness" of the suburbs. For months hippies came and went from our guest room, as did their Frank Zappa and Jimi Hendrix albums, until my father decided his consciousness had been raised quite enough.

Mom received the state's Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame.

Years later when my grandmother went into a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease, my mother was outraged by the center's neglect of the elderly, many of whom were tied to their beds, their pleas for attention ignored. Distressed to see my grandmother's free spirit smothered, she made nursing home reform her new passion. She was hired under a federal grant to be the ombudsman for Colorado's elderly, fighting for residents' rights and taking nursing home administrators to task for their shortcomings. Recently, she received the state's Martin Luther King Jr. Humanitarian Award and was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame.

I'm grateful that the lust for adventure runs in my family. But even when I'm island-hopping or riding a camel in the Sinai, I know—from my mother and her mother before her—that the riskiest, most important adventures in life aren't the ones that are physically daring and far away, but those that make a difference in the world close to home.

My mother is retired now, after 20 years of public service, though from the number of e-mails she returns, you'd never know it. These days she is mainly content to stay home and play with her grandchildren, but she's also itching for another trip. At 73, with Parkinson's disease, she wants to take a train ride through the Copper Canyon in Mexico.

Fine, I told her. But this time, get a ticket.

Craft Notes

Read more

With this piece, I’m starting Craft Notes at the end for paid subscribers to discuss how the piece was constructed and edited.

Whenever I think about the kind of person I’d like to become, I think of Maya. She lived on a ranch in Nevada with a wide view of the plains and plenty of room for guests. People were always passing through, bearing wine and ingredients for dishes they’d cook and eat together. When her daughter invited me to stay on the ranch to write a novel, I became part of Maya’s vibrant social circle. She was 90 then, and the fact that she was keen to get to know a woman half her age was testimony to her gift for friendship.

My friend Maya, far right, had the gift of gathering and keeping longtime friendships, as does her daughter, Kit (middle).

When she died, I told her daughter that no one had had such a good old age as Maya. Though she’d been divorced for years and had lost her son, she was rarely lonely. Her friends helped her keep an amused sparkle in her eyes and vigor in her step.

Maya made me realize that the secret of successful aging lies in our friendships—so I’ve been reassessing and reconnecting with people I consider pals. Who are the perennial flowers in my life, those who bring color and delight every year? And who are the weeds, who leave me feeling depleted? At midlife, there’s plenty of time to sow new seeds of friendships that will bring us joy—and as it turns out—good health.

[Note: the language in the above paragraph makes me cringe, and I strongly suspect an editor’s hand was involved. See Craft Notes, below.]

There’s solid scientific research showing that friends actually change the biochemistry of our brains and the functioning of our immune systems. “Good friendships put our brains and bodies in an optimal state of function,” says psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of Social Intelligence. “That state is associated with positive emotions, like joy, which helps strengthen the immune system and the cardiovascular system.”

Scientists have long observed that people with rich social relationships live longer than those who are lonely. The more close friends we have, the more likely we are to be healthy—suffering lower rates of chronic diseases, accidents and psychological impairments.

Being socially isolated is comparable to the negative effects of cigarette smoking for your health

Friendlessness, by contrast, is a major risk factor for disease and early death, comparable to high blood pressure, being sedentary, and other serious health risks. “Being socially isolated is comparable to the negative effects of cigarette smoking for your health,” says James Coan, PhD, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Virginia.

What causes this strong correlation between friendship and health? One theory is that friends provide stress buffering, which is basically social and psychological support. “Friends may encourage health-promoting behaviors like proper sleep and exercise, and nag when you drink too much or smoke,” explains Eric Loucks, a psychologist and epidemiologist at McGill University who studies the effects of social isolation on heart disease. Maya had a lot of friends who served as stress buffers, driving her to the doctor, filling her freezer with soups and calling in the twilight hours, when she’d sometimes feel melancholy.

Scientists are also finding that we’re hardwired to seek out others. Too much alone time and our bodies send out distress signals. “Humans are fragile as individuals, so when we’re alone, we are in a state of potential danger,” says John Cacioppo, director of the center for cognitive and social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. When you feel lonely, your brain responds by increasing levels of the hormone cortisol, putting you on alert, as though an enemy were present.

With long periods of loneliness, the overload of cortisol can harm us, increasing our chances of getting chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease and hypertension, Cacioppo says. It can also destroy neurons that affect memory and interfere with sleep. So much for going it alone.

We’re so wired to make friends that the absence of companionship registers in our brains like pain. Naomi Eisenberger, a research psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, has found that when people experience social exclusion, it activates the same region of the brain as when we’re physically hurt. “Since humans need others to survive,” she says, “we’ve adapted this mechanism to feel distressed when we’re separated from others, so that we’ll seek them out.”

But at midlife, we’re more careful about who gets close. “There’s a narrowing and deepening of friendship as we get older,” Coan says. We may have fewer friends, but they’re the ones who can help us be healthy. When we know someone for a long time, he says, we begin to mirror their emotional reactions. If we have many positive interactions with someone, our brain associates that person with good feelings and reacts accordingly.

That’s why, when I’m feeling blue, I call my friend Cristina. It actually doesn’t matter what she says; the fact that we’ve spent so much time laughing together cheers me up. When I went through a difficult divorce many years ago, it was my longtime friends who eased my pain: Mary, who suggested I fill my calendar with a social event every night, and penned herself in first; Cecilia, who called every week to suggest a long hike; and Lauren, who introduced me to a handsome single guy. Now those are good pals.

Like Maya, I love having people over—and it turns out that this may do me as much good as the multivitamin I take daily. When Sheldom Cohen, PhD, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, measured volunteers’ levels of sociability and then exposed them to a cold virus, those with the fewest close relationships were four times more likely to catch a cold.

Even nodding acquaintances—someone, say in a yoga class—can contribute to our health, but close friends are best. When psychologist Lynne Giles, of Flinders University in Australia, looked at the effects of social networks on longevity, she found that of 1,477 people ag 70 or older, those who had the most close friends—four or five confidantes—were 22 percent less likely to die over the next 10 years than those with fewer friends. Whether or not they had children made no difference in longevity. “Not everyone has fantastic relationships with their children,” Giles notes.

My friend Maya lived so well in her old age because she cultivated her old friends, pruned out the ones she couldn’t both with, and stimulated her mind by getting to know new people who told her what they were reading or talked about their recent travels. Since Maya died, I have appreciated my relationship with her daughter even more. It’s wonderful to know that just by being close friends, we can help keep each other healthy for decades to come.

Craft Notes: The classic women’s magazine health piece

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I learned the word “precocious” long before most other kids my age. By the time I was five or six, I heard it often—and I was quick to pick up words. Growing up, I was always younger than everyone around me, and ahead of my peers. Being someone who was defined by a long, difficult adjective made me special; it made me, in some essential way, who I am.

I had to keep up with my smart older sisters; if one of them was reading Little Women, I had dibs on it next. I learned to read early and voraciously, squirreling away splendiferously big words to spring on adults whenever I needed attention, which was often. A psychologist who specialized in gifted children gave me a word-based IQ test and pronounced me a 165, a number I thought was as immutable as the color of my eyes. I skipped a grade, and thrived on being called “smart” and “cute” for being so young and clever. My third grade teacher predicted I was destined to become a great writer at an early age, which I figured would just happen as a matter of course. It’s fair to say a fundamental part of my personality, and my fantasy of the future, was based on being precocious.

I whizzed through school with straight A’s, racking up awards and honors, competing in national speech tournaments, and writing a column for my hometown newspaper at 15. At 17, I entered one of the most competitive colleges in the country—Wesleyan University—and was shocked to find I was no longer head of the class, but the middle of the heap; it turns out there are hoards of smarty-pants out there. Still, I edited the school newspaper, traveled the Mediterranean alone for a year after graduation, and threw myself into a freelance writing career with such fervor that one editor dubbed me “the little engine that could.” But over the years, as my achievements failed to keep up with my ridiculous expectations, and I found myself annoyed anytime anyone younger published a bestseller or won a Pulitzer Prize, that engine chugged slower and slower.

So what happens, at 46, when you’re no longer precocious? Suddenly, I’m older than many of my colleagues. Despite having published hundreds of magazine article and two books, I’m no longer an up-and-comer in my field: there are legions of people younger than me who are much more accomplished. Day by day I seem to be losing my smarts, and we won’t mention my cutes. All those early predictions of my dazzling promise haven’t quite panned out. Most of the peers I was ahead of early in my career have not only caught up, they’ve passed me by, starting their own companies, writing one book after another, buying vacation homes, and even embarking on lucrative second careers. “Precocious,” according to my Oxford English Dictionary, means “flowering or fruiting early,” and it sometimes seems to me that my blossoms have all faded while theirs are still in full bloom.

“Precocious” means “flowering or fruiting early,” and my blossoms have faded         

All of us, in our 40s [now 60s] and beyond, have to come to a reckoning with our dreams of what we wanted to be when we were younger and who we actually are; that’s essentially the psychological definition of “maturity.” Most grown-ups accept the fact that while they may not have become an international opera star or Nobel prizewinner in medicine, they are accomplished in their fields, and have perhaps surprised themselves with successes, experiences, and rewards that were different or beyond what they dreamed. They appreciate the reality of who they’ve become—senior manager if not CEO--and acknowledge their skills, accomplishments, and lessons learned from occasional failures or setbacks along the way. Evolved grown-ups, it seems to me, don’t live in a state of constant disappointment, but pat themselves on the back once in awhile, know themselves well enough to take reasonable risks, and plan positive, creative next steps.

But for those of us whose precociousness forecast an early and spectacular success, our midlife accomplishments are much more difficult to reconcile. No matter what we’ve achieved (I wrote a bestseller, by some fluke), we end up feeling a nagging sense of failure. Our identities are based on being young, but we’re blowing out way too many candles on the birthday cake. Our image in the mirror not only conflicts with how young we feel, it collides with our entire sense of being. I suppose the precocious can take heart in the fact that undoubtedly we were first to coin the term “mid-life crisis.”

At this age, how do we ex-whiz kids cope with what I guess you could call a crisis of postcociousness? The tried-and-true remedies are to start drinking heavily, gripe at the world for never giving us our due, and criticize other, more successful people in our fields for all their defects. Me, I’ve preferred denial.

I’ve long pretended that the reason my precociousness has yet to truly flower is that I’m still relatively young. George Eliot didn’t write her first novel until she was 40, so given today’s life expectancy, that gives me until at least 53 to write a great novel, right? My age, I figure, is a lot like my weight: as long as I exercise and carry it well, no one will ever guess how high the number really is. I take quizzes that show that biologically, my “real age” is 34. I date like I’m in my 20s, get crazy streaks put into my hair, and have otherwise avoided most of the trappings of serious adulthood—marriage, a house, children, financial security, a reasonable retirement plan.

While I’ve discovered a useful big word for my condition—“psychological neotony,” a term coined by British psychologist Tk to describe someone who acts younger than their age, ostensibly to cope with the evolving demands of a society where the flexible characteristics of youth are becoming more useful than the staid wisdom of older age—I have to admit it’s a cover for pretending there’s still time for the spectacular success that has eluded me.

Being young at heart is fine, but at some point, we all have to grow up and face certain realities. On my last birthday—the one that put me in my late 40s—I realized that denial is no longer working. I am no longer young and precocious, and I have not won the Pulitzer Prize or a Man Booker Award.

The problem with being precocious is the notion that talent alone will make you a success.

Where does that leave me? At least, it turns out, among formerly gifted kids, I’m hardly alone. Early intellectual aptitude doesn’t necessarily predict adult accomplishment, as we often believe. In fact, the opposite may be truer. Malcolm Gladwell, in a speech on “The American Obsession with Precociousness,” pointed out that few childhood prodigies go on to become successful musicians. That’s because there’s a huge difference between talent and the application of talent. No matter how easily you may pick up an instrument, you still have to practice more than your peers to get to Carnegie Hall. The adults who succeed in any field, says Gladwell (who, darn him, is two years younger than me), are those who have an over-riding talent for hard work and concentration. I know this from experience: I was born with an ear for language, but it was only daily practice that made me fluent in Italian in my 30s.

The problem with being precocious is the notion that talent alone will make you a success. If everyone tells you at ten that you’ll become a great novelist, you just sit back and dream about your book jackets, which only takes you so far. Not only don’t precocious kids think they have to work hard, but deep down, they believe true effort entails too much of a risk. If your entire identity is wrapped up in becoming a great writer (musician, scientist, politician, chef), what happens if you produce something mediocre? Better, it seems, to hold on to the idea that you could be great than to risk being merely good. Better never to try than to try and fail.

At 46, I finally realized that kind of thinking was getting in my way. I dismissed my actual achievements because they paled against my supposedly spectacular promise. People who read my books and articles would congratulate me on my success, but I felt like a fraud.  It got to the point where not only wasn’t I writing great books, I wasn’t working on any new books at all. I spent half a year writing a novel, but when people who read the first draft didn’t immediately tell me it was brilliant, but that it was a great start and needed a lot of work, I just gave up. I was wasting my time—and my talent.

I needed help. I turned to Martha Borst, an organizational consultant and coach who is President of Avista Consulting Group and author of Your Survival Strategies Are Killing You. I described my difficulties working on a new project, moving forward in my career, and getting unstuck. She had seen my type plenty of times before. “You,” she said, “have an enormous fear of failure.”

Perfectionists always lose

 Well, duh. But what do I do with it?  Borst broke down some of the ways my fear of failure plays out. I procrastinate, working against externally-imposed deadlines, and don’t take control of my time. I look for approval from others—my agent, my editors, the UPS man--instead of deciding for myself if an idea is worth pursuing. I’m critical of myself and others, and see mistakes as catastrophes or character flaws instead of learning opportunities. Most of all, the impossible standards I internalized as a precocious kid have made me a perfectionist. “Perfectionists always lose,” said Borst.

 I had to let go of being perfect, of being precocious, and believing I should be extraordinary. That’s the only chance I had of achieving anything even good. Borst’s advice resonated with what a psychologist told me several years ago when I was stuck writing my first book, which was to just write a good book, not a great one. “You can write a good book, can’t you?” she asked. “The bookstores are filled with good books.” Sure: That advice helped me get to work to write what turned out to be a very good—if not great-- book.

As Borst explained to me, if you strive for excellence, rather than perfection, you can take more risks and be more relaxed because the stakes aren’t so high all the time. If you make a mistake, you can learn from it and try again. If your novel doesn’t work, you can rewrite. Borst offered me some tools—setting aside sacred time for work, breaking tasks down into manageable bites--to help me overcome my fear of failure, and get back to trying to write pieces that, best-case scenario, may make a difference to the people who read them. “When you’re born with talent,” Borst told me, “it’s out of synch not to give it back.”

One day, in the midst of writing something that was never going to win me any awards, I had a revelation: I’ve already failed to live up to my promise of huge accomplishments at a young age. Instead of making me depressed, I started jumping around the room. Time’s up! I can finally throw away ridiculous expectations, take some risks, and work without constant fear of failure.

When it comes to precociousness, age itself has been the greatest gift. I finally have the opportunity to stop feeling that I was born sprinkled with fairy dust and am waiting for the magic to happen. Already, it’s a huge relief to have outgrown my precociousness, to let go of the expectation of superstar success.

I’m grateful I was born with certain gifts, but at midlife, now I can catch up on others I’ve missed acquiring along the way—concentration, acceptance, and the persistence and flexibility to shift directions and try again when things don’t work.

Maybe by letting go of my precociousness, I can accomplish some surprising things in the next phase of my life. I could write a novel. Who knows—I might even be the first among my peers to become a late bloomer.

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I’ve always been a writer.

It’s the only thing I’ve wanted to do since I was five years old, when Mom’s friend Dolores showed me her office in her home where she worked as a freelance writer. “I write stories about whatever I want, and I don’t have a boss,” she told me. Sign me up.

So I became a writer, reading tons of novels, editing school newspapers from eighth grade to Wesleyan, and then deciding against journalism school (“You already know how to write a news story,” one professor told me) in favor of becoming a freelance writer. I wrote first for local alternative newspapers and then for glossy magazines, eventually writing non-fiction books. Until a recent, brief stint working for a scientist during COVID, I never had a full-time job, and made my living (such as it was) by writing.

My first book, Losing It, an expose of the diet industry, got mostly excellent reviews and, because I predicted the diet pill scandal of the day, landed me on every talk show from the Today Show to Maury Povich, the BBC, NBC, and even MTV. A few years later, after writing a few personal travel posts for Salon.com, I had a New York Times bestseller (An Italian Affair). Magazines like Vogue and Gourmet gave me big expense accounts to write features from other countries, and I thought my career was going to continue on that marvelous upward trajectory of travel, TV shows, writing for two dollars a word and up, landing book contracts, and going on book tours where they pick you up at the airport with your name on a card and whisk you away in a limo to a fancy hotel where you can order room service.

Then, as you may have heard, journalism pretty much died. Most of the magazines I wrote for shuttered, and I’ve aged out of others, though I still write for a few (shout out to Craftsmanship Quarterly and Alta, both kept alive by generous patrons). Book publishing has also become a lot like our economy, where the top 1% get most everything, and I slid down to the middle class. After my bestseller, my next book got orphaned when my editor was fired and it didn’t get much love from the publisher or publicist. Then I parted company with my agent (“You’re mid-list and middle-aged, so I’m not sure I can help you,” she said from her fancy midtown office) . Now I’ve lost whatever luster I once enjoyed in the publishing world. (Originally, that sentence read, “Now I’m dogshit in the publishing world,” which is probably closer to how I feel, but I’m trying to be kind to myself these days.)

To make things worse, I really don’t have a brand. I’ve never wanted to be tied down to one field or set of ideas. The whole point of being a journalist, in my view, is to parachute into other worlds, learn a lot fast, and make some sense of it all. After my book about the diet industry came out, everyone wanted me to write about weight and dieting forever, asking me, for instance, if I’d like to go follow Kirstie Alley around to see what she really ate. No thank you. I’d already said what I had to say on the topic (I have quite a bit more to say about it now, 25 years later, as you’ll see if you stick around). No brand: I just want to write about people and things I’m curious or passionate about.

But for awhile now, with few outlets, I have been Not Writing, at least not very much, and what I have been writing just sits in the bowels of my computer, constipated. For a writer, that’s not just unsatisfying, it’s ridiculous.

It reminds me of the time I went to visit my late uncle William Zinsser (not related by blood; he was married to my father’s first cousin, Caroline, who is an excellent researcher and writer herself), in his Manhattan office. He wrote, among many other books, On Writing Well, and never had an agent, just sent things off to publishers. I told him I wasn’t writing a new book because my agent didn’t think I had a salable idea.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “You’re a writer, so write.” I spent the rest of an hour with him discussing my book and went home to write All Over the Map, which had its literary moments, even though it wasn’t, as my then-agent predicted, a commercial success.

Some of the books I’ve written, edited, or contributed to

Once again, I have to remind myself of my uncle’s advice. I’m a writer, so I have to write. I’m not about to mess up my record and go get a full-time job at this late date (with rampant ageism in the workplace, it’s not like anyone would hire me anyway). So I’m going to start writing fresh essays about travel, body image, reproductive rights, books, climate change, food, and whatever else I feel like writing about here in The Phrazer.

I’ve always enjoyed writing columns —PressBox for the Bay Guardian, Venus Envy for the SF Weekly, even Senior High Times for the Littleton Independent at age 16 (I suppose I could write a column with that same title) right now —so this will a kind of column. I’m also going to go into my considerable archives to republish or comment on articles from the past that are still timely. And as someone who has taught writing for over thirty years, I’m going to write about writing, and offer some tips for you other writers out there. (Like “when in doubt, cut it out.”) I’ll answer all the questions people often ask me about Italy and Mexico, from my favorite restaurants to places to go salsa dancing. I’ll share my favorite recipes. Plus, you’ll get a preview of the book I’ve been working on for, um, about ten years.

I’m excited to start publishing again! I hope you’ll join me, and connect with me about my topics. This is free for now, though eventually I may put some things like writing classes available only to paid subscribers. Thank you, and please share!

Coming to The Phrazer on Thursday: 36 years after my Mother Jones cover story on mifepristone, the abortion pill, has drug technology out-maneuvered the anti-choice Right?

Today in Golden Gate Park