From a (hopefully!) new book project for 2015

On the way home to Greenwich, passing what was left of the Greenwich homes. Well, there weren’t any of them left, really. When I was a little kid, there were beautiful trees hiding beautiful houses. White clapboard, black shutters, stone chimneys, imperfect grass. People had dogs they really cared about, but they treated them like dogs. Nowadays, when you ask someone if they have children, the non-children havers get self righteous and answer that they have a dog. To avoid hurting their feelings (because in the twenty first century, we don’t hurt each other’s feelings), you will say, “Well then, you understand.” But it’s total bullshit. If you don’t have a child, you can’t understand, and even though they wake you up at night to bark and poo and piss, a dog is not a child. My point is that I’m working things out, here. Sometimes I’m going to be “I,” and sometimes I’m going to be “Sloane.” It’s going to be confusing, but we’re going to have to deal with it. Come back in the car with me. Let’s look at my old home.

            Everything is new here where I used to live. Childless couples cross the threshold of foreclosed upon McMansions that were built on spec two years earlier and when they see the stainless steel appliances in the kitchen and the kitchen island that is marble when what is cool now is cement, they say to their broker, well, obviously, it’s a total tear down. When I was still in high school, and the private community my parents lived in wasn’t yet a ghost town of foreclosed, too-big homes, a young couple rented the house next to ours while they constructed a house right down the street. They tore down the house that used to be there, a sprawling, three-story Tudor, and when they finished paying someone to build their dream house, they realized that they’d always wanted his and her sinks in the master bathroom, and then they got nervous that they’d forgotten about some of their other hidden wishes, so they started again from scratch. They tore the whole thing down. You will think I’m being sarcastic a lot throughout this book, or that I’m exaggerating. I do, sometimes, but I’m not exaggerating this. Their names were Kenneth Briggs and Jennifer Reilly, of Rochester and Atlanta, respectively, and they tore down their just-built, seven million dollar home because they’d forgotten to ask their builders for his and her sinks.