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Back One White Lie Save as PDF
Chapters (59)
  1. COVER
  2. About the Author
  3. DEDICATION
  4. ONE
  5. TWO
  6. THREE
  7. FOUR
  8. FIVE
  9. SIX
  10. SEVEN
  11. EIGHT
  12. NINE
  13. TEN
  14. ELEVEN
  15. TWELVE
  16. THIRTEEN
  17. FOURTEEN
  18. FIFTEEN
  19. SIXTEEN
  20. SEVENTEEN
  21. EIGHTEEN
  22. NINETEEN
  23. TWENTY
  24. TWENTY-ONE
  25. TWENTY-TWO
  26. TWENTY-THREE
  27. TWENTY-FOUR
  28. TWENTY-FIVE
  29. TWENTY-SIX
  30. TWENTY-SEVEN
  31. TWENTY-EIGHT
  32. TWENTY-NINE
  33. THIRTY
  34. THIRTY-ONE
  35. THIRTY-TWO
  36. THIRTY-THREE
  37. THIRTY-FOUR
  38. THIRTY-FIVE
  39. THIRTY-SIX
  40. THIRTY-SEVEN
  41. THIRTY-EIGHT
  42. THIRTY-NINE
  43. FORTY
  44. FORTY-ONE
  45. FORTY-TWO
  46. FORTY-THREE
  47. FORTY-FOUR
  48. FORTY-FIVE
  49. FORTY-SIX
  50. FORTY-SEVEN
  51. FORTY-EIGHT
  52. FORTY-NINE
  53. FIFTY
  54. FIFTY-ONE
  55. FIFTY-TWO
  56. FIFTY-THREE
  57. FIFTY-FOUR
  58. Acknowledgments
  59. THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

I laughed, her words refreshing. An honest, callous love of money, not the WASPy bullshit that forces us to pretend like it doesn’t make the world go round.

Mom would cringe. Like a slap across the face, the weight of missing my mother. I imagined her subtle indignation: Your new neighbors said what? Out loud?

Vera seemed to pick up on my change in demeanor. ‘You know we’re just joking, right?’

‘I’m not dying anytime soon,’ John added. ‘Porsche or no Porsche.’

‘Of course,’ I said. And then, humoring them, ‘If I were an artist, I might Van Gogh, too!’

As we made our way through the wine, they explained how they first met, nearly fifteen years ago, when John was in art school in the city and Vera was an assistant at a gallery. It was as close as possible to love at first sight, even though they didn’t believe in that, not really.

I filled in the pieces of my history, too.

Vera asked about college, and I told them I’d majored in journalism and minored in computer science at the University of Washington. I neglected to mention the video, the one blasted across every social network: me drunk and dancing, taking off my top in a dive bar, giving a lap dance to anyone who wanted one, letting one guy suck on my nipples for an electric-blue kamikaze shot. In my experience, pity or misplaced anger was worse than any ding to my reputation; plus, in the digital age, I figured we all had less-than-stellar moments living somewhere in the cloud.

And then, reeling from the loss of my parents, New York. Moving here to be a journalist, unaware that ‘journalism’ would turn into something else between the time I set out to do it and now – writing indulgent personal essays and asinine listicles it was hard to have the heart for but that paid the bills anyway, everything from ‘What I Learned from Dating Nerds in My Early Twenties’ to ‘16 Apps to Get Your Personal Finances in Order.’ I explained how I wondered sometimes if I would one day run out of topics to mine for a few hundred bucks, if I should just write a book already, like I’d always imagined I would …

Our faces softened as the solar string lights waned, and maybe there was nothing better in the entire world than sitting outside in the Catskills in the middle of September with new friends and a good bottle of wine.