This story, I swear, has a happy ending.

I’ll start here, though it’s not the beginning: My father is banging on the wall with his cane.

It was ten a.m. and already the temperature was ninety-seven degrees. Waiting at a stop light in Scottsdale at a very affluent intersection, I could see the heat rising off the asphalt like a moiré. Arizona heat, even in its infant stages before the temperature hits one hundred degrees, is unforgivable. It makes you feel like a piece of meat about to be thrown on a grill. Even I was sweating, sitting in my air-conditioned car that hadn’t yet been able to recover from the hours it had been baking in the driveway since sunrise.  I had nothing to complain about, however, because directly across the street on the corner was a short man holding a giant sign for a shoe and luggage repair shop in the strip mall behind him. His head was tucked under the crook of one arm, trying desperately to shield himself from the relentless, white heat.

Well, Library Boy,  I’m surprised you had the stomach to show up for this, given the—well, maybe you should explain.  Anything you’d like to tell the readers about the person who wrote this book called The World’s Strongest Librarian?  Like, oh, I don’t know, about the librarian in Tennessee who can deadlift more than you can?

Like many writers, I have a complicated relationship with social networking. I’m a loner who loves people, an introvert who craves attention, an exhibitionist who isn’t always comfortable in public discourse. The Internet allows people like me to meet many of these needs without ever leaving the house. It sounds ideal, but there has always been a dark side to the ease of communication online. And I haven’t always been wise to its dangers.

Your new book is titled not Do Animals Grieve? or A Few Big-Brained Mammals Grieve Once in a While but How Animals Grieve.  How come?

I wanted to telegraph what we now understand: a wide variety of animals mourn when a loved one dies. Scientists have known for years about elephants who stroke the bones of the dead, and chimpanzees who become greatly distressed at the body of a loved one.  And very recently, we’ve learned from up-close observations new details about how these big-brained mammals and others, like dolphins, grieve in the wild.

Yesterday, I woke up with a familiar sensation, or what, for me, is a familiar sensation: a tingle in my upper lip. A slight, hair tickle itch. Fizzy, like I’ve rubbed my mouth with the skin of a habanero pepper. I went to the bathroom and turned on the light, unconcerned about burning my eyes with the sharp, sudden brightness. In the mirror, I saw the faint irritation lining a section of my lip about a quarter-inch long, barely noticeable. From experience, I knew it would erupt in the next few hours. A cold sore.

Today the library was hot, humid, and smelly. It was like working inside a giant pair of glass underpants without any leg holes to escape through. The building moved. It breathed. It seethed with bodies and thoughts moving in and out of people’s heads. Mostly out.

Storm Warning was a beautiful thoroughbred with a challenging personality. So many things spooked the horse: umbrellas, bicycles, small dogs, ponies, even people who removed an item of clothing while riding him. Storm, as he was called, was just a bit neurotic. But he lucked out in one way: he enjoyed a fifteen-year close relationship with Mary Stapleton, who happens to be a psychologist. Acutely attuned to people’s fears and anxieties, Mary transferred her insights and calming abilities to the horse. Even as Mary and Storm competed in the dressage ring, they worked together on Storm’s fears. In Mary’s words, Storm “learned to jump and face all of his terrors with great courage.”

Is it really true that you wrote this book while living in a storage unit?

I wrote the monologue in the storage unit – Life in a Marital Institution (20 Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Hour). The book I wrote in a couple of different houses and apartments, after the lease on my storage unit ran out.

How does one end up writing in a storage unit?

I was living in a very expensive coop apartment in New York City, when I finally accepted the material limitation that to pursue my dream of writing autobiographical stories, I needed more time, and to have more time I needed to lower my expenses.

“Most people would rather convince themselves of being in love than of being happy, just as most people would rather believe they are talking to others when talking to themselves.”  –Sarah Manguso

This story will end with two women naked in a bathtub. Let’s say that, for now, it begins with a drive to Marfa, Texas. I was with one of my best and longest-time friends, Kaitlyn, on our way to spend an annual weekend getaway there. As Dallas faded into a haze in the rearview mirror, we half-joked that this time we were going to Marfa to find ourselves, our “center.” What we meant was that we were looking for some kind of fulfillment or self-sufficiency—maybe happiness is the word—but the joke was that, in reality, we would have preferred to bring our boyfriends with us…except that we didn’t have any. “Finding ourselves,” whatever that meant, would just have to serve as a consolation prize.

I was arrested on April Fool’s Day, 2001, for OVWI, “operating a vehicle while intoxicated.” I crashed my jeep into a chain-link fence and a tree, narrowly missing a telephone pole, while coming home from downtown Indianapolis. It was cold and wet outside and the tires didn’t grip. For a long time after the crash, I put the blame on the weather. The reality is that I was drunk, I was driving too fast, missed a turn and blacked out, but the car kept going. I woke up to a face full of airbag.  Opened the door.  Fell out.  Landed on the wet grass. My nose hurt from the impact, and the air stank of sulfur from the deflated airbag. I was twenty-two years old, drunk and depressed, sitting on the wet ground sometime after 3 a.m. I would’ve run away from the scene, but I could hardly walk.

I’m standing on the sidewalk in Blue Hill, a tiny town in upstate New York, hands cupped around my eyes, peering through the plate-glass window of a Victorian house that’s been converted into a café, like a thief, or a real estate agent, or—given the crazed reflection looking back at me from the plate glass— an ex-husband spying on his ex-wife. All of which I may become. But first, I need to eat. I’m insane with hunger, having driven around for three hours now, since shortly after breakfast, trying to find food my wife, Jane, will allow our two young boys to eat. So that I can eat.

Certain films, whether they’re franchise fare like The Hunger Games or The Avengers, or indie tone poems like Tree of Life or Drive, insist on a visceral, almost inchoate, appreciation. Sure, you can talk about how camera angles frame the director’s ethical perspective, or explore how lighting choices illuminate character, but you’d be hamstringing yourself. When Katniss takes her sister’s place in the arena or Captain America sacrifices himself to save a world he doesn’t feel a part of; when volcanic eruptions symbolize a father’s rage, or a chord of 80’s techno-pop evokes a young man’s inability to feel, we watch our own aspirations and insecurities writ large on the silver screen.   

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“Losing My Religion,” by REM

There were the religion classes I was forced to attend in my Catholic high school.

Operation Desert Storm was a month old. I was a senior and attending protests against the war. I had lost my religion, literally, several years before. I used to read the Bible, to silently call to God for wishes, for rescue, until just before I met the junior high teacher who would become my lover.

I won so many spelling bees in elementary school. Certificates with my name on them, little prizes of ice-cream scented erasers.

I loved spelling. It was ordered and rote and made sense to me even when it did not. Bough, ought, caught.

I was indignant when anyone else won. I felt spelling bees were my calling. I took the used workbooks home, the ones I’d completed week after week during the school year.