Nine Months of Covid – by Margo T Krasne
Margo Krasne knows what it’s like to feel voiceless and invisible. As an aging woman with chronic asthma, in 2020 she found she’d become a member of a club no one wants to join–“high risk for Covid-19”–and she was suddenly forced to watch the year unfold from inside the confines of her NYC apartment. A dynamo who hardly ever slowed down, her experience this year confronted her with the ways so many older women are sidelined, ignored, and left feeling isolated.
But combating these feelings / societal stereotypes–and helping others do the same–has always been Margo’s mission: a former actress who never let her lung complications prevent her from taking center stage, she became a business trailblazer and founder of the Radio Department at Doyle Dane Bernbach Advertising, as well as founding her own public speaking coach program, “Speak Up!”. She subsequently authored the landmark public speaking book, Say it With Confidence.
This year has reinforced her commitment to helping others, particularly older women, feel “heard” and also feel connected to one another through powerful friendships. She’s just released a new book celebrating friendships and strong relationships: What Would I Do Without You?: A Collection of Short Stories About Friendships (Nov 10), written specifically during this year of dealing with pandemic.
We are delighted to feature this piece by Margo.
The last nine months have felt like one long never-ending sentence without commas or periods. One that has been filled with tumultuous waves of emotions, varying levels of anxiety, unexpected outbreaks of gut-wrenching sobs, as well as moments of rueful hilarity, all because of a pandemic that has upended our lives, taking with it an unfathomable number of them. And yet, here I am writing about a book that would most likely have ended up in my computer’s “drawer” if it were not for COVID.
I am one of the lucky ones. I have a roof over my head. Food in the fridge. And can work from home. I am also turning 83 and have COPD. In other words, from March until late June, I wouldn’t venture out. Couldn’t venture out for fear of being infected. And even when from my window, I could finally see more and more people donning masks, I walked outside with trepidation.
Like many of us, during the first month of the lockdown, I maniacally washed, or alcohol wiped everything that came from Amazon and Instacart. I learned how to shop for the week instead of for a day or two—something that takes extraordinary planning for a family, but especially for someone like me who lives alone.
I talked with friends on FaceTime. Read in fits and starts—my concentration sorely lacking. And I watched Cuomo on TV. The book of short stories about friendships that I had started late in 2018 and finished, or so I thought, in February 2020 I put to the side. While I’d shared some of the stories with friends, even had asked a friend to read through for typos, from the outset I’d had low expectations of finding an agent or publisher. No matter that when I told a writer friend I’d begun working on a story about a particular failed friendship, she suggested I write others. “Would make a great book,” she said. “Friendships are hot right now.”
I am not someone who writes daily. I write when I have something that needs to get out of my system, or when I’ve set a project for myself. My friend’s comment created that project. I would write about the various friendships I’d had—disguised of course—and some I could only imagine. And while, as I wrote, a part of me hoped that miraculously an agent would sweep the pages up into loving arms, I knew better. Knew what it would take to get a book of short stories onto bookshelves.
Sometime in April, as life became more routine, and my typo hunting friend sent the stories back with notes no less, I began my own intense editing, the time away having given me a fresh eye.
The original story got tossed. Another went from 25 pages to three. I changed endings, deepened characters, even changed the name of the book. This went on until the end of August when I made the decision to self-publish. At 83, with COVID possibly around the corner, time was not on my side. Within a week I had signed a contract and continued my editing frenzy until finally, in November I pressed “send” and the collection was no longer in my hands.
Clearly, I rewrite far more than I write. My memoir, I Was There All Along was written from beginning to end at least three times from three different perspectives. The stories in What Would I Do Without You? are no different. That I was finally able to read each aloud and feel I could let them out on their own is nothing short of a miracle. But that is not how COVID played into the book’s completion. COVID took away new experiences. While the world raged on around me, I was only a witness.
I could not write George Floyd’s story, nor Breanna Taylor’s, nor those of hospital nurses or their dying patients. I could not stand, as I had pre-COVID, at a Le Pain Quotidien counter waiting for my takeout order listening to a woman who wouldn’t stop talking. An episode that had me racing home to write Mirror Mirror–the final story in the book. Nor could I look up at the stars outside a restaurant on the Cape after dining with a friend, both of us slightly wine-soaked, reciting Star Light Star Bright as if we were six years old—the impetus for the second story in the book. I could go.
It is not that I am an outdoor creature. I far prefer to stay at home. And pre-COVID I constantly had to defend myself for not getting enough “fresh air.” For being what one friend calls “a window cat.” But I did go out when I felt the need, and I did interact with friends as well as complete strangers, those interactions often planting the seeds for another story. And yet, because I became a shut-in not of my own making, I stayed and honed those that already existed and now have a book of which I’m enormously proud.
One last thought. Friendships may no longer be the “hot” topic of the publishing world, but friendships—no matter how complex—have not lost their importance. For how else would we have gotten through these last months without a friendly call, a funny text, a shared despair?
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Margo Krasne, a born and bred New Yorker, has had many careers: actress, ad gal, sculptor, and communications coach. Her books include, Say It With Confidence, I Was There All Along a memoir, and What Would I Do Without You? A collection of short stories about friendships.
WHAT WOULD I DO WITHOUT YOU
What Would I do Without You? is a collection of 13 short stories about the different friendships and all their complexities one can have in one’s life. The characters are artists, writers, business types, women, men, single and married. Their ages run the gamut. Starlight Starbright tells about two women who have known each other since childhood whereas the women in The French Lesson meet in their fifties.
Friendships within a family are explored in the title story as well as Dead Daisies Strewn All Over. There are friendships that grow apart and those that life tears apart. This is a book about attachment, separation, loss and sometimes reattachment. But mostly it is about how friendships sustain us for the time they do exist and even beyond.
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