The Beautiful Now

Chapter one of a novel in progress

Ditch Plains, Montauk ©Deborah Copaken

Editor’s note: Last week, I asked if you’d want to read the first chapter of my novel in progress. The majority of you responded yes. For those who’d rather wait until it’s published, please feel free to delete today’s newsletter. Everyone else, below the line break at the end of this editor’s note is the first chapter of what I’m calling, for now and maybe forever, The Beautiful Now. I’m throwing it out there to the universe—or, rather, only to you at this point, as no one but my partner and my sister Jen have read this yet—for two specific reasons:

1. Selfishly, I’d like to know if, after reading this first chapter, you’d be inclined to keep reading. You know, the way you browse the opening chapters in a bookstore.

2. I’m hoping that publishing this chapter here—plus reading the feedback it sparks (or not!)—will either be the kick in the ass I need to keep writing or critical information for me to consider as I edit.

Most novels these days are written on spec. My last novel, The Red Book (Hyperion, 2012), was not, but that was a different publishing era. Back then, based on a conversation I had with my then editor, Barbara Jones—she’s now a top notch literary agent—and the sales of my prior books, I was granted a $125,000 advance to write that novel and the luxury of eighteen months to turn it in. This was hugely useful and welcome in every way you can possibly imagine (food, medical bills, rent, etc.) and then some. The money provided the runway and peace of mind to write the novel stress free, and the book’s themes—midlife reckonings—gave me the courage and clarity to eventually leave what I realized, over the course of writing the book, was an unhealthy marriage. That novel went on to become a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the Women’s Prize for fiction. But again: that was then; this is now. Acquiring editors at publishing houses prefer to read entire novels these days, not an idea for a novel or a partial novel, before committing actual dollars to it. Hence my slow pace finishing this new one, as I have to fit it in between paid work.

Like my other two novels, this one came to me fully formed. I immediately knew why I wanted write it. I knew how I needed to write it. And I could already imagine the final scene, which for me, at least, is the key to any writing: if I know where I’m going, I can probably hack away at the weeds and find the path there. The challenge would be to steal from my own life and turn fact into fiction, which is something I’ve never done so blatantly before but have always wanted to try.

In fact, the works I’m most drawn to—Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse, Annie Ernaux’s L’Evenement, or, more recently, Lena Dunham’s Too Much, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, Eva Victor’s Sorry, Baby, etc., etc., etc.—are based on the artists’ real life experiences transformed into autofiction or roman à clef or TV/film à clef or whatever you want to call it, although if you asked me to explain the difference between autofiction and something à clef, I’d be hard pressed to say. What I can say is that I know it when I see it, and I love it.

All of this to say that none of this written below happened exactly or even at all as it is written, nor are any of the flashbacks from my actual life, although they totally could be (shout out to Cabin John Junior High, that one time our whole math class got detention for being noisy, and all those 1979 disco bar and bat mitzvahs.) What I’m trying to capture is the essence of growing up in the suburbs, failing at marriage, and falling in love much later in life after a bazillion wrong turns, not the actual step-by-precise-step narrative arc of the story: emotional truths, not narrative accuracy.

That being said, yes, one of the three main characters in this love story is, like my partner, married to a woman living with early onset Alzheimer’s. And, yes, we did, like our fictional counterparts, meet on an asymmetrically blind date in Montauk. I kept the Montauk part the same because I fell in love with the location, and I kept the Alzheimer’s part the same because that is the heart of this book: I’m interested in exploring what it means to be the three of us—my partner, his wife, and me—while also presenting it as a love story. To do this well, I decided, I needed the cover and privacy of fiction. I needed to live in my characters’ heads in the present tense via the second person (“You do this, you do that…”), so that readers, too, could put themselves in each of these characters’ shoes. And I needed to completely make up who we and particularly who our grown children are and what they want out of life because god knows my own kids have had quite enough of me writing about them, and I wanted to be able to explore how late-in-life love often has to contend with the wishes and desires of the lovers’ offspring, which has not been a big issue for us but definitely is and has been for many of the couples in our (admittedly small but mighty) support group for people in our same situation: those who have either living or late spouses with early onset Alzheimer’s as well as new partners.

Every romantic comedy since Greek New Comedy (Menander, et al.) has either a central obstacle or character keeping the main characters from falling in love. I would have assumed, before meeting my partner, that one person being married to another person living with a neurodegenerative disease would have been our central insurmountable obstacle. In reality, not only was I wrong, but what I thought would be the main barrier keeping us apart has not only brought us closer together, it—she!—is an integral part of the rich fabric of our lives, making our tapestry all the more beautiful for it.

Moreover, after speaking with Eleonora Tornatore, President and CEO of CaringKind, New York City’s leading experts on Alzheimer’s and dementia caregiving—which we support—I realized I had to write this novel. At a recent CaringKind roundtable, Tornatore told me about the many Sunday night calls she gets from both men and women caring for partners with Alzheimer’s. By Sunday night, she said, it’s been a long and lonely weekend of being married to/caring for someone who used to love them but now no longer knows them as their spouse, and these caregiving wives and husbands are aching not only for real companionship but essentially for permission— from Tornatore, from society—to go out and find it.

“Really,” she said to me, “we need to bring this out of the shadows and into the light, where it belongs.”

I am hoping, by writing this book, not only to grant that permission to those caring for partners with dementia but also to normalize unorthodox solutions to our basic human need for love.

Anyway, enough throat-clearing. Here you go…

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Chapter 1

September, 2022

Picture this: it’s 5:13 am, the moon’s a falling comma in the still-dark sky, and for the next three hours, more or less—probably less, traffic is light—you’ll be driving along the Long Island Expressway to meet a married man for a blind date.

The man does not know this is a blind date. He thinks he’s been tasked with showing you the surf scene in Montauk during September’s hurricane season, when the waves are high, the density of the crowds low. Can you get here by 8 am?, he’d texted. The parking lot at ditch can fill up early.

Ditch is not the ditch you are picturing—a hole in dirt for crops, a corpse—but rather Ditch Plains, the famed Montauk surf spot not quite famous enough for you to have heard of it. Sure, you wrote back. I’ll leave Brooklyn by 5.

A 4 am alarm to meet a married stranger, three hours away, in a ditch: a new low, even for you. But beggars, you’ve learned, can’t be snoozers.