“Were you trying to say that he was finally fully integrated as a person?” asked the guest at a book group I recently attended, referring to a fictional character.
This was immediately followed by the character’s creator, Lisa Williamson Rosenberg, shrugging her shoulders and cocking her head with a wry smile. “Huh,” she said, laughing. “I never thought about it that way, but sure. That’s one interpretation.”
Her laughter was well-earned, almost ironic. Rosenberg, who is half Black and half Jewish, knows a lot about integration, both personal and communal. When she’s not writing novels about biracial characters trying to integrate the various parts of themselves both internally and within the construct of a racially-biased society, she works as psychotherapist specializing in trauma and racial identity, helping her patients do the hard work of integrating themselves into a cohesive whole. You may remember Lisa from the interview I did with her back in 2022, when she published her first novel. Since then, she published her second novel, Mirror Me, while caring for her daughter Zoe, who, three years ago, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer so rare—a soft tissue abdominal sarcoma—that it had neither a name nor a known course of treatment.
Zoe died in March, one week past her 24th birthday. And yet there was her grieving mother, gamely holding court at a book group in Brooklyn on a random Monday in June. Moving on with her work and her life as best she could. Integrating this new painful shard of herself—a mother who has lost both a child to cancer and her family’s savings to that child’s care—into her self-identity. In her spare time, she writes her own Substack, beautifully, about how joy and grief intermingle in constant contrapuntal conversation.
I think we can all agree that caring for one’s ailing child should never financially drain any family in the richest country on earth. And yet it does, every day—30% of all GoFundMe’s in the U.S. are for medical expenses—and now that statistic is only going to get much, much worse. Because while we, at our book group in Brooklyn, were examining fictional characters and their psychological integration late into the evening, real life U.S. Senators in DC were pulling an all-nighter, half of them in defense of an integrated, diverse, humane society, the other half opting for the total disintegration of social safety nets and anything resembling moral or even fiscal decency: making rich white men richer while spending more money on deporting and disappearing the brown ones than our budget can handle; kicking 20 million Americans off their health insurance while driving up the costs for those who have and administer it, meaning rural hospitals will have to close; diverting necessary funds away from public schools, after school programs, nursing homes, the environment, food assistance, hospitals, scientific research, vaccines, childcare, Medicaid, women’s reproductive health, you name it, among other life-saving, society-ameliorating programs, so that billionaires, who don’t need the extra cash, can have tax cuts, and companies like Meta can have a check handed to them for $15 billion for, get this, research to be conducted in 2022, 2023, and 2024—which, as Senator Elizabeth Warren correctly pointed out, would require a time machine.
Allow me, please, to take you back to 1972, when Watergate was first making headlines, and a 7-year-old boy named Robbie was singlehandedly terrorizing the girls in my first grade class by periodically squirting Binaca into our eyes. Part of our terror was in never knowing when and into whose eyes Robbie would strike next. You’d suddenly feel a cool blast of atomized spray, followed by the odor of mint, then your eyes would sting for a good fifteen minutes or so before you could even attempt to get back to doing your schoolwork. My school was a progressive, no-walls, hippy school in the shape of a flower, where all schoolwork was self-directed with minimal teacher instruction—which I loved! don’t get me wrong—but it also meant Robbie could get away with his minty-fresh crimes over and over again, day after day, with minimal witnesses or teacher interference. We girls of Lake Normandy Elementary School were learning a painful lesson that year: Robbie’s cruel actions not only had zero consequences, the cruelty was the point. That was just the way some boys were, we were told by our teachers, just ignore him, which turned out to be a far more important and historically accurate life lesson than learning that Christopher Columbus discovered America. It was also terrible advice. Ignoring him was impossible! He was making our lives miserable.
“Don’t worry,” my dad kept saying, as stories about Nixon ordering his henchmen to break into the DNC headquarters began to proliferate, and Robbie kept squirting Binaca into our eyes. “One day men like Nixon and boys like Robbie will get their comeuppance. They always do. I promise.”
Back then, Dad’s words eventually held water. Nixon resigned. Robbie was sent to the principal’s office. And all the girls in Miss Giancoli’s class could could finally go to sleep that night believing that good eventually triumphs over evil.
Today, however, Dad’s words ring false. In fact, if anything, the Binaca-squirting lunatics in DC have taken over the asylum. Just listen to the whoops, cheers, and applause of all these Robbies in the House last month, celebrating passing a bill that will literally kill hundreds of thousands of future Americans, for lack of access to healthcare, to give billionaires tax cuts.
And look: I know I’m going to lose some of you with today’s missive. Every time I’ve ever brought up politics in this publication or highlighted the dangers of our current corrupt administration, I lose anywhere between ten and fifty subscribers. “Stick to women’s health!” these readers admonish me. Such statements do not take into account that living in a female body in America requires one to pay attention to today’s politics, since men have equal rights in all fifty states, while we do not. In fact, we, as a country, are no longer on the precipice of white nationalist fascism. We are there. We’ve been there for some time. And if I didn’t use my voice to talk about the dangers and horrors of this—did you know, for example, that this bill includes a provision that would eliminate the $200 federal excise tax on gun silencers?—I would be selling out my soul for the sake of my bank account. And I won’t do that. Ever. Even though, thanks to all those Binaca-squirting Robbies, I’m about to lose my health insurance. (My game plan, should this happen, is to work 28 hours a week at Trader Joe’s for the benefits so I can keep writing this during the remaining hours.)
When people ask me what Ladyparts is about—Is it about women’s health? Is it about dating/falling in love after divorce? Is it about politics? Is it about books? Is it about science? Is it about current events? Is it about arts and culture?—what I say is that it’s about all of these things because they are all intermingled. Which is to say it’s about trying to be human in a time of inhumanity. It’s about the re-integration of self after relational disintegration and about the desire for an integration of community in the midst of societal disintegration. It’s about sharing information about broken bodies, broken lives, broken trust, broken bones, and our broken faith in an increasingly corrupt political system while also celebrating small wins: those who have dedicated their lives and careers, whether concretely or spiritually, to healing brokenness and to building us back up again. To me, that’s what being a woman in this world means today: a constant braiding of the personal, societal, and political as we try to integrate all the parts of ourselves into a cohesive whole.
To that end, today I am unveiling a new logo and banner, all of which were created by a kick-ass graphic designer, Kelly Keanneally. I recently made a comically bad attempt at creating my own logo and banner, on the free version of Canva, by simply stealing part of a painting by Georgia O’Keefe, choosing a random font and color, and calling it a day. You might have seen this attempt at a logo—a flying vulva? a dart board? what the hell is that thing?—at the top of my last missive. We will not speak of this horror except to say there’s a reason why I’m a writer, and why my friend Amanda Hesser—whose Substack logo of an orange in the wind I really admire—suggested I get in touch with Kelly, the woman who designed it. Kelly worked efficiently, quickly, tirelessly, and affordably, with endless patience for her numbskull client, considering I had no idea what kind of logo I wanted when I first contacted her. Something, I told her vaguely, that both speaks to the book from which this publication originally sprouted, but also that is new and fresh and, despite everything currently still wrong with womanhood, the U.S., and the world at large, hopeful! Like a puzzle, we finally landed on—eureka!—that might finally, one day, be solved. Or not. Maybe the work we all do, no matter our actual jobs and lives, is to aim for wholeness without ever really getting 100% there. Which is why I love how these four puzzle pieces, with one still askew, speak to the idea of all of us being constant works in progress.
I know that I am, at 59, absolutely still a work in progress, although I feel closer now to personal integration than I have ever felt in my life. I know our nascent country—at nearly 250 years young next July 4, 2026—is definitely still a work in progress, that is if this great experiment in democracy even lasts until next summer. Which I doubt considering it feels gone already every time I watch another video of masked thugs stealing Americans off the street; or read about a braindead body being kept alive, against that citizen’s wishes, because her body was pregnant; or wonder how, in a single weekend, a man who made his fortune off the sweat of writers like me can throw a $50 million wedding to a woman wearing corsets befitting Marie Antoinette while, simultaneously, protesters in wheelchairs, who rely on Medicaid, get zip-tied in the Capitol. I’ll be taking some time this Fourth of July weekend to contemplate what we can all do as a group—and what I can do individually—to fight back against this Big Barbaric Bill, our growing income inequality, and American fascism. I’ll keep carefully rinsing my recyclables, day after day, while those who claim to care about the environment jet off to Venice in private planes. And I’ll keep covering stories and writing essays that speak to our desire to heal, to love, to learn, to combat oppression, and to simply exist as a human in a time of inhumanity.
“Being human in a time of inhumanity.” That is the key. I’m making very careful choices about what I’m reading today, after all the news of yesterday, but when I saw you in my inbox, I knew it would be worthwhile.
Deb, Thank you so much for the incredible shoutout here. Deeply humbled.
Also, I absolutely love the new logo and tagline, and also the thing about this publication that remains unchanged: your amazing talent for distilling the personal/political moment in a way that makes us say, yes, that's exactly it. What woman of our generation can't remember the little girl she once was and the Robbie who terrorized her? (Mine was an Adam, but still.) And here we are today with the Robbies who opt "for the total disintegration of social safety nets and anything resembling moral or even fiscal decency" looking like winners. But your voice inspires the kind of hope and fueling rage to band together and turn the tide against them.