Just Another Ghost On A Street Corner

The Body, Brain, & Books: Eleven Questions with writer Kelly McMasters

Welcome to another edition of The Body, Brain, & Books. If you enjoy reading these quick, insightful interviews brimming with wisdom and hope, please subscribe to Beyond!

1. What are you reading now?

I’m usually reading about six things at any given time. I like to always keep a book in the car, in my tote bag, on my desk, and a bunch next to my bed. I finally started Rebecca Makkai’s newest novel I Have Some Questions for You this past weekend and I’m glad I finally did. I love her characters so damn much. I’ve also been savoring the meteoric short stories in Innards: Stories by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene since I scored her book in galley form. I was thrilled to see the New York Timesgive it some space this past weekend.

My mentor and dear friend, Sam Freedman (whose amazing new book Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights just dropped), sent me a book in the mail this week that he said would change my life: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage by Bette Howland. I can’t wait to spend serious time with that book this summer. And I’ve got a galley of Brutalities: A Love Story by Margo Steines in my bag right now and I’m very excited to dig in. One of my favorite editors, Drew Weitman, sent it to me with a note about the book’s explorations of masculinity, womanhood, and desire (clearly my wheelhouse!), so I am looking forward to breaking in this afternoon.

2. What are your most beloved books from your youth? Did you ever hide any from your parents?

I still have dozens of my old books from when I was a kid and these were also my sons’ first books. I loved rereading them—often the stories were so different than I remembered. Darker, sadder. Or, sometimes, books I remembered as dark weren’t at all. I have my mother’s childhood copy of Uncle Wiggly, which was wild to revisit after reading the amazing memoir House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis. I cannot handle horror movies, but as a kid I churned through every Stephen King and Christopher Pike book I could get my hands on.

I hid books from my parents all the time. I am an only child so books were my main companions; I’d always smuggle a book to the dinner table in my lap, under the covers after bedtime with a flashlight. I remember skirting the edges of the library’s adult section, slinking over to the YA carousels, which were off-limits to those under thirteen. One I remember clearly was Judy Blume’s Forever. My friends and I traded that around like contraband. There were also books like Clan of the Cavebear, which I read at around twelve and thought was just the sexiest book ever.

3. What’s your favorite book to reread? Any that helped you through a dark time? 

I love re-reading Boys of My Youth by Joann Beard, Sula by Toni Morrison, The Changeling by Joy Williams, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, and anything by Virginia Woolf. I also return to the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, and Elizabeth Bishop.

So many books have helped me through dark times, including Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka, Townie by Andre Dubus III, White Noise by Don Delillo, The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray, and The Sparkling-Eyed Boy by Amy Benson.

4. What’s an article of clothing that makes you feel most like you?

Back in my 20s, I covered fashion for Time Out NY. There were a few designers I fell in deep infatuation with, one line being Proenza Schouler. A few weeks ago, I was searching for something to wear for the Half King Reading Series at Salmagundi hosted by the lovely Glenn Roucher. I am a mom and a professor and a writer so I don’t exactly have a wardrobe full of cocktail dresses, but I wanted this event to feel special so I popped into The Real Real in the next town over. I’d recently sold some vintage beauties there and had a credit and was thrilled to discover, as I pawed through the racks, that someone had clearly unloaded a whole collection of Proenza dresses. Most were too expensive (even with my credit!) and too fancy, but there was one gorgeous belted, button-down midi-dress in this lovely poppy color that felt superb. I paired it with gold strappy sandals.

I got to the event early and it was a beautiful night so I walked around Washington Square Park for a while. I used to live on nearby Great Jones Street and taught at both NYU and The New School, so that area has a lot of what Nicholas Christopher (Veronika—ooh, another great one I love to re-read every 5 years!) would call “dragon points” for me: this is the corner of the coffee shop where I told my NYU class I was pregnant, this is the weird little mews I loved short-cutting across because it felt like walking through the 1800s, here is the building where my old friend Jason lived and died of a heart attack in his 30s, here is Edward and Jo Hopper’s old brownstone. It felt like I was walking among ghosts—other’s ghosts and my own. I never would have chosen this dress when I was in my 20s, or even 30s, because it was both too bright and not sexy enough, but now, closer to 50 than 40, it was the perfect amount of both, and I felt like I was this strange dash of hand-colored paint in an old film reel, moving among memories, which was a very corporeal experience of what I often feel like in my head.

5. What’s the best piece of wisdom you've encountered recently?

I am working on a little birthday letter for a friend and ran across this poem by Andrea Gibson I’d love to keep in mind:

I decided I was

Too soft to last

But then I decided

To be even softer.

6. Tell me about any special relationship you’ve had with an animal, domestic or wild?

When I was around seven, my family lived in this little rental house on a dead end that butted up against a wildlife refuge. We’d often spy bunnies in the backyard and I became obsessed with catching and keeping one. My father helped me plan out different ways to capture the animal, helping me draw out different inventions, one more mouse-trap-like than the next. I settled on the old cardboard-box-propped-upright-by-a-stick method, tying a carrot to a piece of butcher’s twine and looping it around the stick, so that the bunny would bring the box down on itself when eating the carrot. I set up the trap one afternoon, went to bed dreaming of all the possible pet names for my new bunny, and raced out back as soon as I woke up the next morning. Of course, I found the box flat on the ground, as intended, with a neat bunny-sized hole chewed through the back. I have no idea if my father knew this would happen all along, or if the end result surprised him, but this certainly taught me a lesson about the stupidity of humans trying to domesticate animals.

7. What's one thing you are happy worked out differently than you expected?

Becoming a mother. I never expected it, never planned on it, never dreamed about it. I came to motherhood reluctantly, but it has been a singularly gorgeous, bountiful, terrifying, and winnowing experience.

8. Singing in the shower or dancing in the kitchen? Or another favorite way your body expresses itself?

Kitchen dance parties with my kids, hands down. This happens much less frequently now, because they are 11 and 13, but every so often I can still coax them into it. Just now, I was in an empty cereal aisle in Target and Mariah Carey’s Fantasy came on and it was over. 

9. What are your hopes for yourself?

Mary Oliver popped into my head for this deceivingly difficult question:

“I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

10. What’s a kindness that changed your life?

I’ve had too many to list just one. The kindness of strangers always surprises me in a particular way. Once, after a long few days in a Brooklyn hospital after a partner’s traumatic health event, I emerged Thanksgiving morning and walked home to my apartment in Carroll Gardens. I was going to gather a few things and return, and as I walked I realized I’d completely forgotten about alternate side parking. I saw the glare of the orange ticket on the Jeep’s windshield from blocks away. I was hanging by a thread emotionally and physically, so I just grabbed the ticket, got in the driver’s seat, and started crying. Once I came up for some air, I noticed something strange about the ticket—it was perforated, and the return address was weird. I opened it up and saw: You’ve Been Ticketed for Awesomeness! It was a tear-out gag from some magazine and someone had taken the time to fill in the bubbles (ø Looks like you’ve actually been off-roading with your 4x4!) and write funny little comments. It was enough to shock me out of the darkest depth, for even just a moment, and laugh.

In short, humor has often been the root of life-changing kindnesses for me.

11. What’s a guiding force in your life?

I love this question. I’ve been thinking a lot about family mantras recently, and whether or not they are possible without being cheesy. I have not been able to come up with a satisfactory one yet, but my guiding force revolves around hope. I think in order to have hope, you need to be actively thinking about not just today, or tomorrow, but 3 years from now, 30 years, 300 years. It’s the flashforward of my red dress on that grey street moment. I think staying connected to what is and also what never can be permanent, or real, is also key. So, a sunrise is eternal. Bedrock. A Twitter feed? Not so much. Nature can be a beautiful reminder of what does and does not have staying power. One day, I’ll be just another ghost on that street corner, in someone else’s memory moment. That is both the most galvanizing and comforting thing in the world.

***

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother, and former bookshop owner. She is the author of The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (WW Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film ‘The Atomic States of America,’ a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her essays, reviews, and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, The Paris Review, The American Scholar, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction, and Tin House, among others. She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Director of Publishing Studies at Hofstra University in NY.

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Pick a question from above to answer in the comments! What’s a guiding force in your life? What is your biggest hope for yourself today? Tell me all about it.