Nine Women Writers Find a Place of Their Own

In the first dark months of COVID, very much alone in my New York City apartment, I got an invitation from a writer friend who was starting an online group called "Writing about Your Mom Without Guilt." I was up half the night rather tormented, debating whether I was willing to write about my mother at all because it was such a painful subject for me.

With much anxiety, I joined to find eight other women some thousands of miles from each other, most of us strangers and a few good friends. Because we were on Zoom and quite distant from each other, it was a safe space and we all poured out little memoir pieces on things we had never previously told a soul.

COVID was an unusual, terrifying time everywhere. I lived then as I do now in an Upper West Side apartment building high above the street, a short walk from the Hudson River. I seldom went out in those first months for fear of infection, always double-masked, always feeling that the next trip to buy bread at the small grocery might be my last. The streets were largely empty. Ambulances screamed by day and night. I was living alone at the time and was starved for other people. My sons brought food and left it at the door to protect me. It was truly odd.  

Then I joined the class and learned what it was "to Zoom." I used my iPhone and found that all the other women could fit into the palm of my hand.

We were nine, including me, all of us from our early fifties to late seventies. There was our teacher Andrea, also a New Yorker, lauded for her history of her grandmother's Polish village in the Holocaust and other writing; an Italian language student whose stories swept us away to a bucolic Europe, which no one could visit now; a successful author of many middle-grade historical novels.

There was another novelist who wrote of military families (which opened a world to me); a painter; an ER doctor; a rare bookseller; and a former opera singer. I had published several historical novels of people in the arts, such as Monet and Mozart.

It was strange and wonderful to begin friendships with others as we wrote of the most intimate things in our lives. Stories just burst from us, read aloud to the others too quickly or mumbled. We laughed, we cried. When the formal class ended, we wanted to continue. We gave each other prompts to many different subjects.

How wonderful to go into their pasts and worlds I could not dream of. Picnics and finding birth fathers in the south, life in an Idaho emergency room where some very ill patients shouted at our doctor that there was no such thing as COVID. For me, it was a chance to write about a beloved uncle and my kids when young.

Then we had our vaccinations; and in some of our parts of the world, the worse of COVID seemed to be lifting. My city was no longer the epicenter and my old life slowly cracked open again. More people walked the streets. I bought a ticket to my first Broadway play in a year and a half.  Buoyed by booster shots, we emerged slowly, blinking into our worlds.

Finally, some of us met in person in New York in autumn 2022. Though I had known a few of the women for years, I felt I had not seen them in forever and some I met for the first time. Katherine flew from her home in Seattle to Long Island to give a book reading from her biography of a 19th century painter (we had heard parts of it on the group Zoom calls) and Jane came from North Carolina and Linda from Austin. 

Andrea was in my neighborhood. We thought we wanted to go to museums, but what we really wanted to do was sit and talk and laugh and cry and realize the gift of being with each other.

I was a little dazed at first to find these people not on my iPhone screen, but warm and in the chair next to me in an outdoor restaurant. Real hands on my arm. Laughter in my ear. The autumn wind blowing leaves about our feet.

Most of us were amazed when sometime later, Andrea said she wanted to publish a selection of our writing with an independent publisher. After a few wrong paths, an editor of a respected small press acquired it, having read only the intro and two essays. It debuts in April at an Austin, Texas bookstore.

I cheered and then thought with a small gasp, "What have I done?" Perhaps we all did.

We had been in a safe space during COVID sharing our stories with other women who had become friends. Now strangers would read our secrets. Perhaps not too many strangers, but some and assuredly family and friends, which might be worse.

So, one by one, group members began to withdraw the more difficult first stories we had written on the subject of our mothers. In a few cases, the mothers were still living and if not, there were siblings. I was one of the few who did not withdraw mine though, believe me, I still think of it. As a fiction writer, difficult things from my past are disguised in my novels. Sometimes I do not know that the feelings I give a character are mine.

Maybe five or six of us are able to go to the Austin debut reading in April. The others will come as they have always done, by the miracle of Zoom. We are still trying to figure out how to bring our one Australian member to the U.S. When we meet on Thursday evenings in the U.S., it is Friday morning for Karen.

The relationships between the nine of us have grown. We carry each other's lives in our hearts now. We know each other's wants and needs. If anyone has a loss, or falls in love, or has a child, marries or worries about health, we are there to share it. We call the little group the Lady Bunch (Amy our ER doctor gave us the name) derived from the iconic television show, "The Brady Bunch."

Our published book is called "Here's the Story … Nine Women Write Their Lives."

I am sure other groups met through the miracle of the internet during those early dark and lonely COVID months. I am sure they do now in these better times. I wish them friendship and all wonderful things that can come of it. I wish them a Lady Bunch (of whatever gender) of their own.

We nine group members are: Andrea Simon (group founder, editor, and author), Amy Baruch (ER physician), Stephanie Cowell (novelist), Linda Aronowsky Cox (rare bookseller), Karen Finch (artist), Jane Mylum Gardner (artist), Rhonda Hunt-Del Bene (Italian language studies), Katherine Kirkpatrick (novelist and historian) and Kathleen M. Rodgers (novelist).