New Jersey Teenager Who Just Wants to Get The Hell Out:
Yes, of course YOU. With the timeless black nail polish and the composition notebook full of freeverse poetry.
I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately and how I want you to know about my dead girlfriend, Cheryl B and her book, which is called My Awesome Place.
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This is the cover. Looks great, right?
First off, don’t get all freaked about the fact that she’s dead and stop listening. A lot of really cool people are dead, and it pretty much seems to happen to everyone anyway. Eventually.
Plus the important point here is not that she’s dead, but that she wrote a book AFTER she died, and how that happened and why it might be a hint for you that your life is not going to suck donkey wang as much as you think it will right now.
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This is actually just a donkey, not a donkey wang. I think you'll agree it's a better choice for illustration
Cheryl grew up in a certifiably insane Italian /Irish working class family in Staten Island and New Jersey. She was a fat, arty teenager and she read a lot of books and wrote a lot of bad poetry and was surrounded by chaos all the time and felt like she didn’t fit in anywhere.
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Cheryl was thinking of throwing herself into the tiger pit. I can guarantee this.
She was smart, but people were all the time the time telling her she was not smart, or that she was a smart ass (that part was true) or that she was too smart for her own good, or that it was bad to be smart.
Her dad broke a plate of pasta over her head when she told him she got into NYU.
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Too smart to be perky, that's for sure
Cheryl survived all this and got the hell out of New Jersey. She moved to New York, graduated from NYU, and became a real live poet, writer, event producer, performer. She was a pothead for a while, and then she wasn’t and then became a crazy drunk, and then got sober. Eventually she bought a little apartment in Sunset Park. She toured cross country as a spoken word performer, even went to England and Australia on some arts grant.
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Rock star in a bookstore, that's my girl!
She dated dudes and she dated women and she had a lot of sex, some of it, by her reports, quite good.
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And kisses. Lots of kisses.
Like every artist living in New York, she struggled with underemployment and self doubt and wondering what her Unique Artistic Contribution would be. She taught memoir writing for a while and you know what? When she got cancer and had to take a break from teaching, one of her 64 year old students wrote a poem about how much she missed her. Cheryl printed that out and taped in the inside cover of her composition notebook.
When Cheryl was sick, it was a nonstop corn-o-fucking-copia of support at our apartment. She was in the hospital for three months and the nurses couldn’t stop exclaiming “Cheryl has so many people who love her!”
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Her friends put together the world's best nerd fundraiser, The Spelling B for Cheryl B. This is Cheryl looking Cancer Chic, and the Bee creator, Bevin Branlandingham
I won’t lie to you, her death was fucked up. She shouldn’t have died; they caught the cancer late because her jackass primary care doctor didn’t listen to her, and they basically overdosed her on chemo (again, the docs weren’t listening) and burnt the shit out of her lungs. I’ll leave the details to your imagination, but it was not pretty. Her friends? They were there all along.
One night towards the end of Cheryl’s time in the hospital, Cheryl’s big deal author friend Sarah Schulman was visiting and offered to be Cheryl’s literary executor. And Cheryl, who refused to communicate directly about anything else having to do with her death; end of life wishes, funeral stuff, wills, etc jumped on that shit. “yes yes yes of course”
Like Sarah said “definitely a writer”
The last day they gave Cheryl a morphine drip and I pulled down the siderails of the bed in the ICU and held her and annoyed her with my questions, and she was a smart ass and at least once an hour while she was conscious one or the other of us was saying “I love you”
And then, at the crazy ass Catholic funeral her mom had for her on Staten Island, with these garish flower arrangements that Cheryl would have hated (don’t worry, we did a real funeral for her later than month) , a funeral all of Cheryl’s queer and artist friends went to, just to represent, even though her family didn’t see her as a queer or as an artist…
At that funeral, members of Cheryl’s writing group, women who had known her some of them two decades said “let’s figure out a way to finish Cheryl’s book.”
So they took the files that Cheryl had been working on, and started reconstructing the book, talking it through, putting it together in the way they thought she would have wanted. And they really knew, right? Because the group had been meeting for nine years.
And when they were done with their part, they met with Cheryl’s literary executor. Then Sarah spent some time editing it, and she named it My Awesome Place and wrote a forward and I wrote an afterword and Sarah found a publisher that she thought would do a good job with the book, and a publisher willing to work with a dead author.
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This is publicity photo for the book. Doesn't Cheryl look like a 50s movie star?
Earlier this summer we all met together, everyone who had worked on the book, the publisher folks, folks who loved Cheryl, her fellow writers, and made a plan for marketing, making sure you would be able to find the book.
So friend, it’s an interesting beautiful irony. The fact that Cheryl’s community loved her enough to make sure this book happened and the very existence of this book about Cheryl looking for her Awesome Place proved, damn, she found her Awesome Place.
You should read the book (if you can’t afford to to buy it Topside will be putting an electronic version online for free) because it’s about getting out, and staying out, and doing it with style and attitude and bright red lipstick. And because it’s hellish and funny and dramatic and traumatic and really fucking well written.
You should read this book not just because it’s a guide to getting the fuck out of New Jersey or wherever it is that you are trapped and misunderstood, but also because it shows you what you should be looking for once you’ve escaped.
We keep trying to tell kids like you that it gets better, but my guess is that you’re too smart for that load of horseshit. You can see this world is not kind to artists, to quiet book readers, to queers. It might not exactly get better, but if you keep looking, if you demand it, and if you (listen carefully here) don’t demand that it be perfect, you will find your community.
You will find Your Awesome Place and you won’t be alone and that will feel a metric fuckton better than anything you can even imagine right now.