Some thoughts on home

I'm done with book tour and thinking about where I live

On Sunday, I came home from my last This American Ex-Wife-related trip for the foreseeable future. I picked up my dogs, threw on my sweatpants, and went over to my friend’s house for pizza and basketball.

It was good to be back. A few of my other friends had just come back from trips, too. And we talked about how much we missed our homes here. 

It always comes as a surprise when people think I live in New York. As if that is the place all writers must go. And then, when they find out I am in Iowa, so many people ask me when I am going to leave. As if these middle places were only for leaving.

I do sometimes think of leaving. But it’s no more often than a New Yorker burdened by high rent would. Or someone in California working two jobs to afford groceries. Or someone in Minneapolis in February.

Success always seems to mean leaving where you were and going somewhere else. So many success stories involve being the one to get out. So many stories of return to home involve the main character shuddering in horror at the life that was escaped.I think about my dad once telling me that no one wants to be the richest guy in Sioux City; they want to be middle-class in Silicon Valley.

I am not sure that is true.

I have had opportunities to move. In the past four years, I’ve gotten a handful of job offers where I was told it is my writing about Middle America and motherhood that makes me qualified for the position. But eventually, they say, I will have to leave to go to New York or Washington, D.C., and live there on a salary that would barely support a single person — much less a single mother — in one of those cities. But even if I had taken those jobs and left, without fail, every single one would have been restructured and I would have been laid off.

I sometimes get mail from newsletter readers telling me a newsletter would be better if I’d published it in a bigger newspaper or magazine. I don’t know how to tell them how many times I’ve done that only to watch the place collapse and my story get lost to the defunct wasteland of internet history, or see the piece be edited until it said almost nothing. I don’t tell them that whatever I’ve done, I’ve done it backward in high heels and in a cornfield. 

And this place I’ve built for myself here has lasted. This place has meaning.

All places have value. But I wish we’d stop thinking that leaving our little places was success and staying was a failure. 

I have fought hard to stay — built a job out of nothing, a life out of ruin, all in the effort to dig in. To make a home for my kids and safety for us. The little kingdom here of friends and family and a big enough backyard for dogs and a trampoline.

I had a book launch party here in Des Moines because Iowa deserves parties. We deserve people who stay. We deserve people who care, who love it here. Who are not just living always with one foot out of the door.  We deserve people who stay and fight. People who lose elections but keep running. People who run the neighborhood associations and the tourism bureaus, and play the saxophone in the park.

On the airplane to California, I finished Hanif Abdurraqib’s book There Is Always This Year, which is about basketball and fandom and a love letter to Cleveland, his hometown. 

In it, he writes, “And I am from Ohio, which means everyone I roll with from this godforsaken state dreams themselves an underdog. Me and my whole crew embrace this flyover shit. The narrative that might say we only matter during election years, and even then we gotta lie about who we really are just to get the country to give a damn. Fuck is a swing state that swallows the residents at it’s most viscous margins. But I’ll embrace that lie too if I means I gotta fight my way up and out of something, even if that something is pulled from the depths of my imagination, a mirage of an opponent, like shadowboxing, dancing in the backyard while the sun pulls your dark shadow taller along the concrete.”

Being from Iowa means people confuse me with Idaho. And say condescending things about my state without ever having been here. One night in LA, I met someone who kept chalking up my comments to being Midwestern and talking about how racist it is here. Finally, I asked if they had ever been to the Midwest, and the answer was proudly, “No.” 

We do have problems in Iowa. I made a career out of writing about them. But we are not worse than many other places. Blue states can feel better in theory, but are still dragged down by reactionary and condescending politics that ignore vulnerable communities in favor of self-congratulation. Sure, abortion care may not be illegal in your state, but is it accessible? Your city might be more diverse, but do you care for those residents? How’s the housing situation?

Why are you always looking to other places to make you feel better about your own?

I am not here to insult your place. Lord knows, we all struggle. But being a very publicly Iowan writer in a way that is about the state, about its politics and places, I find myself often on the road defending Iowa to people who want to write us off. Who wants to say, “You are a red state and this is what you get.” But places don’t get like this by accident. They get like this by attrition. And what if staying means I have a place to stand to move my corner of the world. What if, for me, staying and giving us something to cheer for means more than getting out? What if the little parties at my house, my dog’s heavy breathing at my feet, the restaurant in town where I spent all my money and they treat me like a dignitary, the neighbor with the aging beagle and the very good pizza place across the road — what if these places are worthy too, not in spite of their complications but because of them?

Why is the answer always retreat? Retreat is sometimes necessary for survival. But it’s not a solution.

I knew it was time to go home when a woman asked me why I was so eager to get back, and I replied rather tersely, “I’m allowed to love my home.”

I am home now. I am thinking of new things to write. New stories to tell. There are thunderstorms outside and my dog keeps farting and smelling up the office and there is no place I’d rather be.

I know I write about this place and its complications and problems. But I can burn this place down, because I know I will build it up again. 

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Further reading:

• My friend

  Molly Monk
  wrote about her gayborhood in Cedar Rapids. Molly also started a substack on running and dealing with POTs, go read it.
  Not So Fast
  .

• In 2022, I wrote about a failed political campaign and what it means to fight and lose.

• I also wrote about everyone moving out of the state.

• And I wrote a review of the TV show “Somebody Somewhere” that talks about middle places, love, and identity