“I’m trying to even think of how to describe it—a grief work circle, with a group of women?” Author Stephanie Danler and I are chatting about the (albeit appropriated) staples of Southern California mysticism—rose quartz, palo santo, tarot cards—when she describes a recent retreat she attended in February, in Taos, before “the world kind of shattered.”
“I was so uncomfortable signing up [the retreat]—my best friend Carly made me do it. But it was really beautiful. To sit with a group of women and just hold space for each other’s pain was so powerful.”
I’ve reached the Los Angeles-based author at her home in California, after a quick delay at the start (“Hold on—I’m hiding from my son”). Though Danler was born in Southern California, she would go on to spend most of her twenties in New York, famously basing her debut novel, Sweetbitter, after her time as a waitress at the Danny Meyer-owned New York institution Union Square Cafe. I ask Danler, now thirty-six, if she ever sees herself returning to The City.
“No,” she says, in an emphatic, slightly sweet tone that suggests more than a hint of “duh.” As a New York transplant and native Angeleno myself, I don’t blame her.
“I think it was mutual,” she says, “between the City and I. But I do miss it.”
A coming-of-age set in the seductive, sumptuous (and drug-laden) restaurant world, Sweetbitter was an instant bestseller, hailed by the New York Times as “the Kitchen Confidential of our time.” Its cover—a smashed wine glass against a peachy shade of pink, the remaining dregs of a red laying barely inside, the title written as if in pencil eyeliner—became iconic, ubiquitous: the pink popping everywhere, flashing as it slid from the purses and backpacks of commuters on the subway, the jagged edges of the broken glass glistening. The novel begins with “You will develop a palate,” and the reader watches as Tess, whip-smart protagonist thrown into the seedy underbelly of the service industry, does—a fateful taste for late nights, cocaine, and an emotionally unavailable bartender.
But where Sweetbitter was fiction and New York, Stray (Knopf, 2020), Danler’s latest, is memoir and California. Released just last week, the book begins with a sprawling map of Los Angeles County. It juts from past to present and back again, and even gazes toward the future; it bounces from Laurel Canyon to Long Beach to San Francisco and beyond. This sharp turn from genre and setting is surprising. Even to the author.
“I told my editor I was writing a novel for almost two years,” Danler says, “while really I was writing about my parents. Everything was about California, was about the end of this love affair, was about remembering my parents. Or feeling haunted by them.”
Divided into three sections titled “Mother,” “Father,” and “Monster,” Stray chronicles Danler’s turbulent upbringing into her troubled early adulthood. The first segment details her erratic relationship with her mother, the second her time with her drug-addled father. The last relays Danler in the throes of a tempestuous affair with a man aptly and mysteriously called “the Monster.” But, like memory, the lines are blurry. The titles are more suggestive than they are strict. The stories are not laid out chronologically and the characters bleed across sections—the Monster is everywhere.
As a child, Danler’s admiration for her mother is all-consuming (“It’s gross and total, the way I can feel the tug of my love for her”) but this affection begins to unravel as Danler enters adolescence, when their relationship became “abusive and unsustainable.” At sixteen, she is sent to Colorado to live with her father, a character weaving in and out of her life like sobriety does in his. He becomes more peer than parent, with Danler describing him as having “no interest in starting a career in parenting me, which was fine as I didn’t have any interest in being parented … I wasn’t his kid, I was the person who understood him.” Her adoration for her father forms itself into a certain strain of masochism (“I would laugh when he hurt me;” “I was charmed by his cruelty”) that brands itself as Danler’s testy approach to future relationships:
It’s easy to see I was built to love a certain kind of man.
That kind of man is the Monster: a married man perpetually in the process of leaving his wife to launch a fresh start with Danler, whom he sends flowers to mark an anniversary of their affair. The tumult of their on-again-off-again romance is placed against the backdrop of Sweetbitter’s incredible success, and such an imbalance—the Monster’s unpredictability versus the assurance of the novel’s warm reception—is threatening. Danler describes a frenetic scene where, in the midst of explicitly, conflictingly sexting the Monster, she celebrates, in a separate group text thread, the induction of Sweetbitter into the Library of Congress under the category of “Self-Realization in Women:”
Lots of champagne-glasses-clinking, heart-eyed emojis. I smack myself in the face as hard as I can and text back: Yay!
Though returning to the past and her parents is irresistible, it is also harrowing:
The act of remembering them feels like a betrayal. Telling the truth about them, when I’ve been trained since childhood to keep secrets, is unthinkable. But in those days in Laurel Canyon, I cannot write anything else.
When I ask her what it is about now, what it is about this return to California, what it is about “those days in Laurel Canyon,” that made her feel ready to tell these secrets, she insists. “I never felt ready, even when I just turned the book in a few months ago. If I had taken another year, I probably would’ve turned it into a novel.”
Danler mentions the book came “easily,” but she clarifies:
“When I sat down to write the book, after years of taking these notes, I wrote the entire first draft in nine weeks. It just came. So that’s what I mean by ‘easily.’ But I wept everyday. Every single day.”
In Stray, Danler details an adolescence plagued by trauma and abandonment, a family steeped in addiction and instability, and a woman struggling to reconcile these accumulated losses while navigating an all-consuming affair, so the experience of the memoir, even as reader and far-removed bystander, can be as excruciating as it is exquisite. Its material is difficult, but Danler as speaker is reliable and sturdy, even-keeled, with abstractions like “joy” narrowed to a clear-eyed phrase like
Happiness is a filter I apply in hindsight.
Stray is just as much a family history—rife with maps, dates, artifacts, and heirlooms—as it is a family haunting. The lore of lineage plays an almost mystical role (there is talk of a cursed snake ring, bestowed upon the eldest daughter of each generation; a hilarious scene with a psychic), but at the core of Stray is a blaring, bright truth—startling in its authenticity:
Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions.
These are not simple things to write or comfortable things to share, but the memoir is unabashedly fair. No one is a saint. The scale weighing Hero and Villain is often tipped; acts of cruelty backpedaled by extravagant shows of affection. One of the most memorable scenes is a recalled trip to Disneyland, a late-in-the-day surprise with all the “lights twinkling,” “vanilla scented” magic Disney can surmise, moving Danler, then a child being picked up last from daycare, to tears. It is a moment described with such tenderness it feels as if it might forgive everything (it won’t). Needless to say, family is…complicated: a love meant to be unconditional but whose parameters are constantly tested. Danler’s relationship to her parents and to her married lover seems a constant game of “How much can you take before breaking?”
The murky world of Stray is an astounding place to visit, made all the more astonishing by the world it eventually gave way to: Danler’s life now looks incredibly different. She is a best-selling, full-time author and writer working in film and television. She is pregnant with her and her husband Matt’s second child, a girl; her son, Julian, is now sixteen months old. The family lives, cozy and comfortable, in a house with a yard (ah, California!). She has, for all intents and purposes, made it.
So the thought of traversing, daily, between these two terrains—the ache of the past and the potential of the future—feels dizzying. I ask: whiplash?
“Absolutely. Disorienting and really unpleasant,” Danler confirms. “There were many times that I would berate myself for not just being present with my son. That’s a really delicate time, and I don’t know that it was the right choice to take on a project that kept me half—more than half, at times—locked up in my darkest places, while at the same time I’m learning how to be a mother. It doesn’t feel productive—to be a new mother, a wife, a working writer—and to be trawling through this underbelly. But that’s the struggle with writing. The struggle with writing all the time is that you, occasionally, have to go to unimaginable places. And you can’t do it and come back unscathed all the time…
…I had a five month old baby, and I would come out of my office to nurse him every three hours, and not understand which life was real: the thirty-one year old woman, feeling like her life is never going to change, or this thirty-six year old woman, with a new family, who is an author, who can support herself, whose life seems to have a structure that will hold somewhat. And in order to write the book, I have to inhabit not only that thirty-one year old who is in a love affair with the great love of her life, but I have to go back to my childhood, to how much I loved and worshipped my mother, to how I worshipped my father. And how I lost these people. That split made me feel crazy.”
How does a writer, a person manage that? For one, Danler has had the same therapist for eleven years.
“I think what she reminded me to do during this time was to ground myself in the present: This is my family. I am safe. I am thirty-six years old. I’m not a little girl anymore. Everyday, when I finished my work, it was about coming back to my life now.”
Sweetbitter begins with an epigram from Anne Carson; Stray starts with an excerpt from Frank O’Hara. As visible in her writing and confirmed by her Instagram, Danler revels in poetry, and Stray is riddled with passages displaying a distinct attention to rhythm and sound, creating phrases that transition from assonance to consonance with both intention and ease:
When I watched her sleep, I understood that to love is neither exhilaration and safety, but instead this: painful, too tender, forcing a forgetting that’s close to forgiveness.
I find Danler’s work seductive for its sparse elegance of language that is simultaneously simple, refined and dangerous, daring. There are innumerable layers of story where there are very few words.
“I think what I’ve taken most is a tone. There’s a sort of spiritual longing that I think some of my work shares with poetry, but there’s also this tendency toward imagistic scenes that work the way poems work: fully expose the moment, really excavate it, and then leave it. Drop it.”
This is true even of Stray. Danler recounts deeply painful stories—a devastating car crash; a violent tangle at the top of the stairs with her mother—with sharp efficiency. She doesn’t dawdle or explain. She doesn’t waste time. Which is not to say the book isn’t emotional, just that it doesn’t dwell, and, with a striking grace, leaves the reader ravaged. Like gulping down a mouthful of whiskey, it is crisp, pristine, and scary.
“I don’t find it necessary, or even that interesting, to sit there and reflect for two pages on what just transpired. So I’ve taken that from poetry as well.”
We chat about New York in quarantine (“You are there!” she cheers, encouragingly. “You are doing it!”), our mutual inability to concentrate (“The idea of being inside a book and making choices out of the infinite choices? I don’t have that capacity at the moment”), and I ask Danler, a wine authority and partner in the Yucca Valley wine store Desierto Alto, for a recommendation.
“An ametzoi rose´,” she says nearly instantly. “From this teeny tiny region in the Basque country, in Spain, called Txakoli. It tastes like watermelon and rocks” (it’s perfect). We measure our commitment to witchy LA trends (“I’m really not as bad as my friends…I don’t have a psychic or an astrologer, or a healer—I think the most LA thing about me since I moved here is that I meditate now”) and discuss her work as a screenwriter (“it’s a very beautiful way of writing, so different from writing books and much more collaborative”). Her voice—sweet and thick, like Campari—is a comfort, and at the end of our call, I feel a strange brand of pride.
Because, after all this, after all the pain a reader of Stray bears witness to, here she is: a woman. With a new family. An author who can support herself. Whose life seems to have a structure that will hold somewhat. She is safe. She is thirty-six years old. She is not a little girl anymore.
Anne Carson wrote “Repent means ‘the pain again,’” and that is just how Stray feels: a repenting. A confession. A burden lifted from the chest, the heart made light again. A grief that makes room for a curious and undeniable hope. A bit like sitting shiva, it is an invitation to observe someone’s unimaginable mourning, and it is an invitation one should accept.
Because to sit with a woman and hold space for her pain?
It’s powerful.
Because as challenging as Stray may be, it is equally satisfying. There are moments of humor and light, slices of hard-fought forgiveness, and the glory of redemption. There is an alchemy: a transforming of tragedy into something that might look a little like peace.