Windfall's first birthday is this week! To celebrate, I'm sharing a draft chapter I cut from the book.
Hello friends! I have a special treat for you today, as a thank you for your support of Windfall. The book turns one year old on Wednesday, and in celebration, I'm sharing a chapter I cut from it. Consider it your slice of never-before-published behind-the-scenes birthday cake!
As I recall, I wrote early drafts of the chapter in late 2014 and early 2015 and included a version of it in the first draft of Windfall in 2019. But by 2020, I realized the chapter had no place in Windfall. The chapter, which is set at a yoga workshop in South Dakota in 2014, was not even in the book proposal that went out to editors who were considering acquiring the book for their publishing houses.
Looking back, I can see why I had to write the chapter—but I see also why I didn't include it in the finished draft. Sometimes you have to write a bunch of material to understand a problem or to figure out why you feel a certain way or to discover how events and trends connect. Not all of that throat-clearing content belongs on the page, but it serves a purpose. When it comes time to revise, the material often sticks out as unnecessary. So you cut it. If you've done your job as a writer, the connective tissue remains, serving as a scaffold to hold the bigger theme together. Another way to put it is that the thinking shows up in the finished work, but it's invisible on the surface. (I suspect some traces and phrases of the original may linger in Chapter 6 of Windfall.)
So why share what is, admittedly, a flawed piece of writing, one that reads to me now more like a journal entry? Well, it can be interesting to see how books and movies are made, what gets left out and how creative work evolves.
I was inspired as well after listening to Season 3 of The Dream, a podcast by journalist Jane Marie. The Dream looks at multilevel marketing businesses, known as MLMs. You know, pyramid schemes.
In the most recent season of The Dream, Jane Marie examines the personal coaching industry in the United States. She looks at its origins, why we love being told what to do by a stranger (who we pay), and what that says about American culture. In one episode, she interviews a woman who sold personal and home care products for Arbonne, a MLM, and who went on to coach others at the company. My ears perked up when Jane Marie's guest started talking about how achieving a certain level of sales was rewarded with a white Mercedes.
Whoa, I thought. I've heard this white Mercedes thing before! At a yoga workshop in South Dakota in 2014! And I wrote a whole chapter about it for Windfall, and then discarded it.
I've also been reading Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. It opens with Klein's self-examination of why it was so destabilizing when people began confusing her with Naomi Wolf, a once-lauded feminist writer who now espouses anti-vaxx conspiracies. Wolf's work during the pandemic veered even more toward "unhinged assertions," as the New York Times review of Klein's book put it.
One of my favorite chapters of Klein's book is about how—and why—those in the so-called wellness world, including many yoga people, are so susceptible to misinformation and conspiracy theories. As Klein writes it, these are denizens of the "far out," not the far left, and they had figured out how to monetize all that woo. Their businesses came crashing down during the lockdowns of the early pandemic, rendering the "far out" economically vulnerable and therefore more likely to believe and spread falsehoods that reinforce their existing biases about what it means to be healthy.
Something I came to understand from the yoga workshop in 2014 is how easy it is to get caught up in the enthusiasm of a charismatic leader or moment. That group mania was something I'd never experienced, especially as a journalist who had kept so many events and people at arm's length under the guise of objectivity. But after that workshop I could understand how people get swept up, because I was nearly caught up in the current, too.
There in that hot room in South Dakota, I, too, found myself cheering on a woman who wanted, of all things, a white Mercedes. Writing about that experience helped me understand how people like my great-grandmother were drawn to the gamble of homesteading. Getting nearly swept away myself allowed me to make sense of the land mania galloping across the Great Plains in the early 1900s. All it took was a $14 filing fee and the belief that they could be rich...if only they worked hard enough and had the right mindset. I would not have seen the connections had I not written—and then abandoned—this chapter.
And then a decade after that workshop, both Doppelganger and The Dream captured something elemental that I was grasping at in this lost chapter, something that didn't serve the storyline of Windfall and didn't belong in it, but that I had experienced, too. And so now I’m sharing this chapter.
A disclaimer: The 2014 yoga workshop I reference in this chapter was not a part of any multilevel marketing scheme, and the unnamed workshop leader I reference in this chapter is absolutely not connected to pandemic conspiracies. (Just the opposite.) In fact, as you will see, that workshop nearly a decade ago had great value to me. It helped me understand not only that I needed to dig deeper in my own writing but that I needed to be more forthright about what I wanted from my life. I'm eternally grateful for the workshop leader and the fire she lit under me.
Without further ado, here is the lost chapter:
A content advisory: Salty language and adult themes, including infertility.
THE WHITE MERCEDES
September 2014 • North Dakota crude: $87.66 a barrel
The day before I returned to Washington, D.C., I found myself, once again, in a suburb near an interstate, this time in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I had heard about a yoga teacher and poet who was teaching a workshop there, just as I was driving through. The teacher's writing was raw and unafraid. One of her famous writer friends described her as having "badass candor." The workshop, which used writing and yoga to help people identify their personal roadblocks, seemed like an insightful end to my journey.
The workshop's theme was "manifestation," a woo word thrown around in yoga circles, and one that normally made me roll my eyes. I could get behind manifestation, though, because I liked the teacher and I respected her legitimate connections in the literary world. I took some comfort, too, in the historical context. The workshop in Sioux Falls was just another event in the long tradition of itinerant teachers, preachers and entertainers who found a way to make a living traveling the towns of the Plains.
The yoga studio was warm. My cheeks flushed with heat within minutes of arrival. There were at least 60 other women there in yoga pants, all with the means to pay $75 for a workshop on a Friday night. Most of us wanted one thing: Someone to tell us how to be less fearful of making our way in the world.
Inside the yoga studio, the teacher asked us to write down what we wanted to manifest. It could be anything but it had to fit on a Post-It note: Goals we wanted to meet, habits we wanted to break, milestones we wanted to achieve before we died. I wrote down two things: "Write A Book About Anna" and "Have a Baby." I drew stars around the two goals, and along with everyone else, stuck the note up on the wall of the yoga studio.
A few minutes later, everyone at the event was asked to pick a note at random. The exercise was to meditate on the note we picked. The first meditation would be to hold someone else's deepest desires in our hearts. The idea was to see beyond ourselves, to see how we are all connected and how we could all support each other, even if it was just to be thinking about someone other than yourself for a few minutes.
I cringed at the first Post-It to catch my eye. Its author wanted a white Mercedes. She also wanted to deepen her faith, and she sought to go on a church mission trip. Try as hard as I could, I didn't think I could fully support in my heart the dreams of that first Post-It, especially when they started with something I considered crass and materialistic.
It violated the spirit of the exercise, but I grabbed a note with goals more aligned to mine: "A happy and successful marriage. Financial security. Strong and healthy body." I was pretty sure it was written by a woman I met on the way in, who told me she was thrilled to have a Friday night away from her 7-year-old, but joked that she didn't think the all-female gathering would help her "manifest" a new husband.
We put the sticky notes on our hearts, then sat on the floor on our yoga mats, breathing and concentrating on someone else's hopes and dreams. Someone has you in their heart, the teacher reminded us. She quoted Freud: "How bold one gets when one is sure of being loved."
And then she asked us to continue, by saying silently to ourselves "I am" followed by who and what it is we want to be. "I am...the artist of my own life," I chanted to myself. "I am...a woman who is trying to tell a story. I am...a woman who wants to be a mother. I am…a little bit of a snob about the woman who wants a white Mercedes. I am...the artist of my own life."
It was such a cliché of modern American womanhood, but in my late 30s, my yoga practice became a refuge, so much so that I learned to teach yoga and enrolled in an advanced training program. The practice made me stronger and I liked learning the philosophy of yoga; its mythology appealed to the storyteller in me. My main teacher, who lived in a yoga ashram in upstate New York for much of her 20s, introduced me to creative movement patterns and obscure, feminist-leaning yogic texts.
Yet my background as a journalist made me too critical to accept without question everything I learned. Many of yoga's claims don't hold up to scrutiny, especially when you begin asking questions about how we know what we know. And then there was yoga's unsettling connection to consumer culture. Yoga in both India and North America has a long history of charlatanism, quackery and hucksterism, so it's nothing new. But in yoga's modern iteration, it often feels as though someone is always trying to sell you something: a workshop, teacher training, an Ayurvedic consultation, a retreat in Costa Rica. I was especially disappointed when a prominent East Coast teacher who I admired started shilling for a multi-level marketing company that sold essential oils. Her involvement in a pyramid scheme wasn't just greedy, but exploitative of her student base.
Nonetheless, like many people, I found great solace in the movement and breathwork of a yoga class. Meditation taught me to observe my thoughts without getting caught up in my thinking. It also gave my brain and nervous system a pattern for wellbeing, one I could recreate even when I stepped off my yoga mat. It was pretty simple: All it took was moving with purpose and an awareness of my breath. Yoga made me feel better, and I enjoyed my side gig teaching other people to feel better, too.
It is one thing to wish and hope for something, and another to do the hard work of making it happen. All the optimism or prayer or stone pendants or magical boulders in the world won't conjure up babies, books or luxury automobiles. There in South Dakota I knew it wasn't enough to write it down on a Post-It, and so did our teacher. "Manifesting" something takes hard work, focus and perseverance, as well as luck and maybe even a little privilege.
So the next step was difficult for all of us in the room, not just me. Our teacher asked us to consider what we needed to let go of in order to achieve what we longed for. We were being asked to identify where we were getting in our own way.
"What is holding you back?" she asked.
I froze, pen poised over my notebook while other women scribbled away. I couldn't identify what was holding me back. Neither the child nor my project in North Dakota were "manifesting." This had for several months felt like a creative double whammy, a betrayal by both my body and mind.
I wasn't sure how much of my failure to have a baby was my fault, or beyond my control. Yes, I waited too long. But I couldn't change my age now. And as much as I wish I could, it was impossible to go back in time to tell my 25-year-old self to dump my lousy boyfriend and find a more appropriate partner before it was too late.
Our teacher began going around the room, asking women to share what they needed to let go of in order to make their sticky note wishes manifest in their lives. Bad boyfriends, unwanted weight, tepid bosses, their own timid instincts, their anger with their children, their strained relationships with parents, their worries about money. I kept my gaze fixed on my notebook, not ready to be called on. They were better at this than me. They were old friends with their flaws and disappointments. They were willing to face them. I wasn't yet.
I listened to the others, even as I tried to own up to what I needed to shed. I am a professional writer, I told myself. I should be articulate and poised, nimble and quick to find words. I am the artist of my own life, I told myself primly.
One woman, abandoning her Midwestern reserve, told us she needed to let go of a boyfriend who called her a "vengeful cunt." Already that evening, the yoga teacher had apologized multiple times for her salty language. She told us she knew it could be offensive to the Midwestern community's values, and that she was working on it. Even so, the word "cunt" seared us all, including the yoga teacher. Rumbles of outrage swept the room. Not so much at the word itself being said, but that it had been directed at this seemingly inoffensive woman, undeserving of such hate.
No one was calling me a cunt, although they certainly had before. I was privileged to face mere creative obstacles, and I knew it. I didn't have unruly children who tested my disciplinary wherewithal. I wasn't afraid to fly, or get a bikini wax – all fears expressed out loud by some of the attendees. I wasn't embarrassed by success, a common theme in this group of modest Midwesterners who worried they were unworthy of being able to afford a $75 event on a Friday night where we got in touch with our innermost desires and fears while dancing to "Lose Yourself" in our Lululemons. I had already surmounted my biggest fear: leaving the kind of full-time job many journalists worked their entire career to achieve.
"The need for the writing to be perfect," I wrote. Then I changed my mind. "This actually isn't right. IT NEEDS to be better. And I need to lose my fear of putting my writing out there. I need to get over myself."
I paused. My words seemed weak, like a cocktail you'd been sipping on for so long the ice had diluted the booze to lime-tinged water. Many of these women were braver than me about facing their fears. Why couldn't I own up to my own? I was more than a little judgmental about the white Mercedes, but I knew I was no better than anyone in the room. Just as flawed, in my own way. Just as lost.
"What's underneath that?" I wrote.
I craved success as a writer, I was willing to admit it. I, too, heard the same whispers my mother did: We could be rich. I didn't define "rich" as a white Mercedes or royalties from an oil lease, though. I defined it as the freedom to pursue my creative dreams, to tell stories I thought were important, and to make my own way in the world unimpeded.
I scribbled my fears in my notebook: "Being labeled a failure after I took a big leap and did something huge and fearless….and it hasn't been 100 percent working or successful," I scrawled. "And I am afraid of what people might think. People who called me brave for taking that leap."
It was just like the fertility rock in Liberty, Ill. I was defining myself according to some imaginary rules for life created by people who existed nowhere but in my own head. I may not have been measuring up to my own expectations, but it was a little presumptuous to assume other people had the same expectations for me. As if to emphasize the point in my own head, our teacher trotted out a quote she attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. Her aim was to loosen up anyone, like me, who was having misgivings about opening up to the group.
"It's worse than you think," she told us. "They're not thinking about you at all!"
It reminded me of an anecdote I read about the actress Amy Poehler, in her friend Tina Fey's book, Bossy Pants. Amy, told that one of her ideas wasn't very ladylike, had this reply to one of her male Saturday Night Live cast members who cringed at the tone of a joke. She "went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him. 'I don't fucking care if you like it.'"
"Amy made it clear that she wasn't there to be cute," Fey wrote. "She wasn't there to play wives and girlfriends in the boys' scenes. She was there to do what she wanted to do and she did not fucking care if you liked it."
I, too, needed to care less about whether other people liked me or my writing. I needed to be unafraid to admit my deepest desires, and I needed to be unafraid to ask for what I wanted.
That was when the woman who wanted a white Mercedes spoke up. It wasn't technically about the car, she told the group. She was a big talker about her dreams, and she was afraid of overpromising and underdelivering. The car was a symbol of financial stability to her. About living up to all her big talk.
I understood. Her white Mercedes was a tangible example—no, manifestation—of her hard work. Her faith journey was no different than my yearning for a published book and a child. A desire fulfilled. We had more in common than my initial snobbery let me see. I regretted not meditating on her hopes and dreams. I started to hope she would get that white Mercedes. She was a cute personal trainer, she'd look good in it! High five, girl! Who was I to judge what she wanted? You get a car!
I wasn't done, though. I still hadn't examined why I was so desperate to measure up to the fictional standards of non-existent people or peers. Was it because I was equally judgmental? Afraid of being judged in the same way I judged others?
Our next exercise got me a little closer. We were asked to write a letter to ourselves in the voice of someone who loves us. Or of someone who loved us in the past. I thought about writing it in my mother's voice. I thought I knew what she would say: Do this for me. Be brave where I can't. Be bold where I wasn't. Instead, I wrote a letter to myself in Chris's voice. His support, after all, was the whole reason I could afford to sit on the floor of a yoga studio on a Friday night in Sioux Falls.
"Dear Erika, I love you. I don't want you to worry about how I have been supporting you this year. I believe in you. I believe in your idea. It is probably more real to me than it is to you. I'm okay with the sacrifices we've made to make your idea possible. Because I want to be by your side when it is successful. I want you to be successful. I want you to believe in yourself. I want you to know I believe in you. I love you. Every day with you is amazing. You are loved."
I read it out loud. It was my first group contribution. As I read it, I understood what was going on, what was holding me back, especially as a writer. My letter was polished and pretty, and a little too neatly packaged. Treacly. I was exposing little beyond my insecurities about freeloading off my husband the past year. It revealed no vulnerabilities. I was even showing off a little bit, like a woman with a new engagement ring: "Look at how much this man loves and supports me! So shiny!"
I was a little embarrassed when I finished reading out loud. It was well-intentioned as a thank you to my husband, and I meant every word and planned to share it with him when I returned home. But it lacked vulnerability. It was also trite, a word I first learned when I was eight years old and Mrs. Renniger, my third-grade teacher, critiqued a poem of mine that made liberal use of words that rhyme with "nice." Trite was fine for some people, she told me. Not you.
Yes, I was loved. But I wasn't being bold enough within the support of that love. I wasn't doing enough with it. Among the most moving letters were those from people who needed to let go of guilt about what could have been with people who had been long gone. I thought of my mother and my guilt about whether I had done enough to help her when she was dying. This was a theme I could stand to more closely examine in my own life, and I chose not to, at least on that night in that workshop.
I didn't know these women sharing their fears with me, but I still craved their approval. I wanted them to like my writing. I wanted to prove I was smart. Just like at the fertility rock, I didn't want to look weak or needy. This craving for approval persisted even as it was beginning to dawn on me that their approval – or anyone else's – was the last thing I needed. If I owed them anything at all, it was my honesty.
We went around the room again, this time reading out what we'd do if we weren't afraid. I set out to find Anna with a similar question in mind, the year before, and I welcomed the opportunity to re-examine it.
At this point in the exercise, the words came a little easier, a little more truthfully. I knew in my heart what came next. "If I weren't afraid I would dig a little deeper with my writing," I told the group. "If I weren't afraid, I would leave it all in, even the ugly shit, the unflattering stuff, and the things that might make other people squirm."
"I wouldn't care what other people think about all that stuff just hanging out. Let 'em squirm," I said, a sentence that earned me a nod of approval from the teacher. (I was aware of the irony.)
Then I dug deeper, as deep as I'd get that day, at least.
"If I weren't afraid, I would have added a sentence to that letter from my husband: 'I will still love you even if we aren't able to have a baby.'"