Writing the Modern Love Essay

Melanie Bishop, Faculty Emeritus, Creative Writing, Prescott College

Melanie Bishop’s “Modern Love” essay I Would Have Driven Her Anywhere appeared in The New York Times in 2018. Her novel My So-Called Ruined Life was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Huffington Post, Vela, Glimmer Train, The Georgetown Review, Valley Guide, and elsewhere. After teaching college writing for twenty-two years, Bishop now offers instruction, editing, and coaching through Lexi Services.

The Writer’s Spotlight

“The bit that ended up published in ‘Modern Love’ was originally part of a much longer essay about my mother, titled ‘Final Instructions for Princesses.’ I started it during a month-long residency at Djerassi¹ in spring of 2016 and finished a draft in the spring of 2018, holed up in a studio at Arcosanti². It was long and unwieldy, and I knew it needed more pruning than I’d already done, but I was too close to the material to do the necessary cutting. So I hired an excellent editor, Dawn Raffel. Her comments were enormously helpful, and one thing she said was, “I feel like the mother/daughter car wants to be an essay of its own.”   Read more…

Writing the Modern Love Essay

Two-day workshop on campus, consecutive Saturdays, July 13th and 20th.

Catalog available May 6th, and registration opens on May 20th.

Course limited to 21 participants.

In the last ten days I’ve received so many wonderful letters from people who read the NY Times Modern Love essay, “I Would Have Driven Her Anywhere.”  Some readers wrote comments here on my website, some emailed me directly, and some emailed the editor at the NY Times, who forwarded them to me. I APPRECIATE THEM ALL SO VERY MUCH. Here’s one I just received today, from Whitney in Portland, Oregon.

Melanie:

I just wanted to thank you. Like so many of the people who have commented on your blog, I am a regular reader of the Modern Love column; however, I cannot think of the last time a piece has made me cry. In fact, I’ve read your column a handful of times, and I cannot make it to the last couple of paragraphs before feeling the lump in my throat.

My family lost my grandma to dementia nearly ten years ago, but she only passed away last June. I emailed your column to my dad (he confessed the emotional impact it had on him too), and I really enjoyed getting to reminisce with him over Thanksgiving – she too would cry “Ow!” whenever my dad lifted her into his car, and my sister and I drove her Ford Escort station wagon until it finally died a few years back.

I cannot believe how often I am reminded of her by the silliest, smallest things. But thank you so much for the opportunity to think of her again.

Sincerely,

Whitney

The emails and texts and comments here on the site are such affirming evidence that we are not alone in the trenches of caring for a parent with dementia. When you’re in it, though, it feels alien and isolating. Thanks SO MUCH for sharing reactions and ways the Modern Love essay resonated with you, thereby drawing us all together in this common human experience.

For those of you who said you wanted to read more, here’s a link to an earlier essay I did on grief for Vela Magazine: “In the Form of Birds”

And hoping soon you will be able to read “Final Instructions for Princesses,” a piece of longform nonfiction about my mother. Circulating! Fingers crossed!

Thanks also to Modern Love and New York Times for bringing this essay to readers.

           —Melanie

Thank you to Modern Love for featuring my essay. And thanks to Brian Rea for the wonderful illustration.

Brian Rea