Danny Gregory

Steven Heller has written a beautiful and deep article about my book in one of my favorite magazines, the Atlantic.

The Oprah bookclub has just published the list of her reccos for best memoirs.

And a Kiss B4U Go is the cover pick! (alongside other amazing authors like RIchard Russo and Jeannette Winterson…)

Wow! Happy New Year!

P.S. A favor:  There’s a really nice review of the book and I’m sure it would be helpful if people who come up on it knew others had read it too, so please, feel free to comment on it too and share your experience of the book. The more the merrier!

Have a lovely holiday and, if you happen to find A KissB4UGo under your tree, do let me know what you think of it.  I’ll write again around New Year’s.

I sit in the Hong Kong airport, and, somewhat hesitantly, open the folder of my photos of Patti. In the past, I avoided looking at these pictures unless I was willing to lose it, even wanted to lose it. I take a breath and I flip through the vacation pictures, the birthdays, Patti playing with Jack at three, at ten, at fifteen, hugging the dogs, hugging me.

I feel a smile grow, seeing my love, my friend as she was, as she is, full of warmth and fun, all good memories, not sad or heartbreaking but there in me, warming me, keeping me company so far from home, just like she always has. I miss her like I would have done on long journeys past, thinking of how she would feel about what I’m doing now, what she would have thought of the curried noodle chicken soup I had at the airport cafeteria. “Ew, sounds goobery, honey,” she would have said. “Hurry home. I miss you.”

I miss you too, Pandy, I miss you a lot, but the thought of you deep inside me will help me keep on, keep happy, keep living. Our love is forever, no matter what happens, and now I feel like I might just cry, here in the Hong Kong flight club.

http://vimeo.com/53197414

A sad declaration, written in my journal when I was just sick and tired of being sad and tired.

  I have been forced to stand on my own, to define and empower myself as a single unit rather than part of a pair. I have had to take responsibility for things I could get away with not doing, have had to be much more practical and unsentimental about things. Sentimentality is too powerful an emotion to bear now.

The life I define for myself is leaner, stripped down, less indulgent. Like a hard mattress, a rough blanket, a single pillow. In some ways, many actually, this is good for me. I feel more confident, more in control of the edges of my life, less anxious about the next shoe dropping. But my life is a lot less rich and beautiful. My harder, rational side is unmitigated by the gentle flirtations of love. And, while my heart is still here, still beats, is still capable of love, I fear it is also smaller and harder and less romantic.

Patti’s death has changed me forever. Just as Patti’s life did.

This fear has passed, but the memory lingers on.