Monday

Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life, by Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita, is an irreverent self-help book written by two scholars of medieval nuns, using unconventional convent lives, correspondence, and wisdom to illuminate contemporary life. In one section of the book, Garriga and Urbita describe the friendship between two nuns during a plague:

The plague is decimating the city’s population. The thought of María, thirty-three years younger, wasted away from unending headaches and vomiting, her body covered in purulent buboes, plunges Teresa into indescribable anguish. When she finally receives a couple of hopeful letters from María, assuring her that she and all her sisters are safe—enforced seclusion was a very effective way to ward off the plagues—Teresa finds the peace she seeks to surrender to her body’s frailties: “Your letter was a great consolation in that you tell me the nuns are not sick—not even a headache. It doesn’t surprise me that they are well considering the prayers that are offered for them in every house; they even ought to be saints after so many supplications. I at least am ever concerned about all of you and will never forget you.”

For me, the week begins malevolently, my present bout of inflammation persisting. I’ve suffered this mysterious ailment ever since I was a girl, back in Ireland at school in an Ursuline convent. By the time I attended, only a handful of nuns remained, the rest of the teachers were civilians. When I was eight, Sister Ursula, who my mother insisted had been senile even when she had taught her back in the seventies, would check our lunchboxes after break to see if we had eaten all of our sandwiches. She’d become alternately distraught and furious if we had not, crying out: “I wish I could send your food on a magic carpet to the hungry children of India!”

The ailment is this: an itchy rawness around my eyes and mouth begins to bother me, faintly at first, sometimes coming to no more than that, but sometimes lying in wait until a few days later when I go to sleep and wake up grotesquely chafed-looking—eyes swollen half-shut, red rings around them and across the bridge of my nose, skin too sore to apply even the most neutral of ointments. Through my childhood and adolescence, I was tested for allergies but never found any definitive cause, so I accept that it happens every so often and retire to my bed and take industrial quantities of antihistamines, which lead me to sleep twelve hours a day and have wicked dreams. Back in the convent school, I’d take three times the recommended dose of Benadryl and nod off happily in the back of the class.

What bothers me about the condition is that after the initial flare-up begins to heal, all of the skin on my face turns dry and makes me appear hideously (and prematurely) aged. Afterwards, though, it all falls off and I am unusually beautiful for a day or two, which I think of as “God’s Little Microdermabrasion.”

I’m thinking about illness besides my own today too, reading my pal Owen Williams’ book, Atrocity Exhibitions, in preparation for a talk we’ll do together about it. Owen is touring with his band The Tubs, but his book is remarkable too, a weird, short shock of brief essays about banal violence and TikTok as a prism to examine grief, following the suicide of his mother. In the book, Owen writes about his mother having felt morally damned by her cancer diagnosis, and it reminds me of the kind of magical thinking around illness—and especially cancer—back home in Ireland when the word could hardly be spoken out loud. Cancer seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy to some people, that it had come on from some hidden but essential badness which had always been inside them.

Tuesday

On February 8, 1694, Sor Juana, who had a sense of spectacle, reaffirmed her vows as a Hieronymite nun in a telenovela-worthy act: adding to her signature a dramatic “I, the worst in the world.” 

I’m working on my new book today. It’s going really well—I understand what my aims for the project are and I’m working diligently to achieve them. Just kidding! I am deeply confused and ashamed of myself, and constantly feel like the police are going to burst into my apartment. I’m trying to remember that with my first two books I also experienced a level of acute humiliation that felt intolerable, but that eventually they were completed. All my life I thought if I published a book, just one, and of any quality, I would have it as a sort of ego safety blanket until my death, which has not turned out to be true at all. If anything, the other books’ existence mockingly illuminates my every moment spent now not writing a new, better book, and I wonder if this is a sort of pyramid scheme I can never escape from.

While I am busy berating myself, I read about a more productive method of self-flagellation, practiced by Sister Juana de la Cruz, who performed the following marvel: 

“Now, my friends, I shall satisfy and delight you [. . . ]. And at these words, suddenly the wound on her sacred side opened, and from it flowed a stream of very clear and fragrant water; and so it poured into all the chalices and cups [ . . . ]. And from her left hand flowed another very precious and aromatic liquid; and from the wounds on her feet emerged a multitude of delicacies. And then she flew upwards and placed herself upon the tables. And suddenly, from all the wounds and lashes that afflicted her sacred body emerged a multitude of freshly baked and sweet-smelling bread rolls and cakes.”

Yum! I take this as a sign to stop handwringing over my book and instead bake a big round loaf of soda bread. I’ve gone baking mad lately, mostly because it’s a sort of incontrovertible use of time—hours x flours x buttermilk—and when I can’t work it feels better to have something edible at the end than have watched all ten episodes of the Kim Kardashian/ Ryan Murphy soap about an all-female divorce law firm, which I also recently achieved. The bread turns out beautifully and I stand in my kitchen eating it warm with thick slices of cold butter and a drizzle of honey and a bit of salt.

Wednesday

The daughter of Francesco Giuliani and Benedetta Mancini, who had grown up surrounded by the finest tableware in the Duchy of Urbino, would often receive her portions, somehow, miraculously topped with cat vomit, dismembered mice, balls of hair, cockroaches, worms, and leeches, whose oozing blood gave color to the broth.

Nuns are famously insane when it comes to food, but none more so than St Veronica, who wouldn’t stop eating the most repulsive crap imaginable, like a pious (can I say what I mean? I don’t mean pious, I mean smug) version of the bug-eating contestants on Survivor. When her confessor tried to punish her by locking her in a cellar and telling her to lick the ground, she disturbed him by going at the floors and walls with such gusto he had to beg her to stop eating spiders. Okay, okay, Veronica, we get it—you are one crazy, devoted chica. God famously loves it when his followers… gorge on spiders!

It’s January, so with the new year, I’ve been seeing even more aggressive diet and protein-maxxing content on Instagram, where spindly girls eat seeds from a cup in one frame and enormous men eat raw minced beef mixed with egg yolks in the other. I love a good protein binge, but the kind that’s pleasurable: sashimi platters and steak that has been at least a little cooked. I wrap my protein-free soda bread in a tea towel to bring some for my friend Arthur, who I meet across the park for lunch to discuss the ways in which our careers are stalling and have a laugh.

• • •

Afterwards I have booked a room in the Brooklyn Library because there is a radio journalist interviewing me for the German national broadcaster to coincide with the publication of a translation of my second novel. I showed Arthur some of the messages from Tobias, the journalist, which made me laugh. When he asked if we should do the interview outside, during a week of historically low temperatures, I told him it’s too cold  and he responded:

“Ah, I see. I don’t feel the cold like normal human beings and have no jacket.”

When I arrive, he is indeed clad only in a hoodie. It’s an engaging, somewhat intense interview. His final question, made unavoidably Werner Herzog-ish with the German accent, is:

“What, to you…is sacred?”

Friendship, I say.

• • •

“Nuns are famously insane when it comes to food, but none more so than St Veronica, who wouldn’t stop eating the most repulsive crap imaginable, like a pious (can I say what I mean? I don’t mean pious, I mean smug) version of the bug-eating contestants on Survivor. When her confessor tried to punish her by locking her in a cellar and telling her to lick the ground, she disturbed him by going at the floors and walls with such gusto he had to beg her to stop eating spiders.”

• • •

Thursday

“It seems impossible, given my circumstances, that I can write as much as needs to be written.”
—María de San José

“I was very glad to see your letter, but should be far more glad to see you. It would give me special pleasure just now, for I think we should be close friends. There are few with whom I like to talk on many matters as I do with you, for you really suit me exactly, so that it delights me when I realize from your letters that you have realized it too.”
—a letter from St. Teresa to María de San José

On Thursday I work, and then I bake two brown butter salted honey pies: one for tonight’s dinner, the other for tomorrow’s. My friend Elianna has moved to the neighborhood and hosts a lovely evening which includes several English friends I made in London when I lived there, two of whom live in New York now, the other of whom is passing through promoting her new novel. The food, an aubergine curry and lentils, is very good and served exotically late at night. Everyone says kind things about how delicious my pie is. We eat it communally from the tray, squirting whipped cream on the pie, bite by bite. One thing I like about my life now is I have made many more female friends. For a long time, my ratio was skewed because I would befriend men after I briefly dated them, so that the scorecard had only a handful of women for every dozen men. I also think going to an all-girls school left a lasting impact whereby men seemed alluringly alien, which they don’t anymore. Things have evened up now, or the women may even have nipped into the lead.

Friday

 “The conversations between those who are fond of each other, which are filled entirely with little stories, jokes and laughter, with the main course of their discussions always being how much they love one another.”
—Bernardino de Villegas

One still mostly-male part of my life: my primary and longest standing groupchat, the Taddyheads. Charles, Josh, Francisco, Stan and I met in London ten years ago and have been trading nonsense every day on WhatsApp for about that long. The time difference means I usually wake up to 150-plus unread messages, which is always an encouraging way to start the day. This morning, we discuss a Telegraph article with the unfortunate headline “Celibacy taught me I’m too clever to find love,” and its pull quote: “There don’t seem to be many postgraduate level individuals who read the news, are minimally aware of culture and are also the specific level of attractiveness that I’m usually drawn to.” The author bemoans the fact that the women he usually finds hot are stupid, though not always, in which case he ruins the relationship himself for unrelated reasons.

In the evening my boyfriend David and I take the train from Brooklyn to the West Village, near my friend John’s apartment. John, an excellent cook, has made cassoulet for us and Chris and Elena, both of whom I’ve sort-of-known for years and have been getting to know better lately, which I’m glad of and grateful for. The food—characteristically for John—is excessive and gout-suggestive, calling to mind, not unpleasantly, medieval showboating where dozens of birds were shoved inside each other and stitched to roast pigs. “Better to indulge oneself than to be unwell,” as María de San José has it, though she may not have had this in mind.

Saturday

In 1713, an Italian doctor named Bernardino Ramazzini added a brief essay, entitled “On Protecting the Health of Nuns,” to the new edition of his treatise On the Diseases of Workers and raised the alarm. According to him, the life of nuns was abominably sedentary, devoted to nothing but prayer, sewing, and singing. “While I should not be ready to deny that singing and psalmody count as exercise,” he wrote, “I maintain that they do not suffice if they do not exercise the whole body also with some suitable physical activity… Mere reading and singing exercise the lungs, but not the whole body.” 

On Saturday I am missing my dad and missing exercise, which for me comes mostly in the form of huffing from one end of Prospect Park to the other on my way to the library or Manhattan. The cold has been keeping me pathetically train-reliant, but I resolve to ease both problems by phoning my father while I walk. He’s visiting with some cousins of mine, and I say hello and tell them I’ll see them in April, at which point David, his kids, and I will be over to visit Ireland.

In the evening there is a celebration to precede the launch of my friend Dan Poppick’s book The Copywriter. I love Dan and his writing, and I’m so proud of him. We all are—I glance around the table in the French restaurant Le Paddock and find that nearly all of us dozen or so Dan acolytes are staring at him with big dopey grins on our faces.

Sunday

Life’s trials—be they the Inquisition’s harsh retaliation or the pangs of a broken heart—are only bearable when one is embraced by the warmth of a communal sanctuary.

On Sunday, David and his kids, and my great friend Jean and her daughter, all come over to play in my apartment. They haven’t met before but immediately the two girls are careening around and shrieking and doing gymnastics in my office. We all play a satisfying game of Scrabble, in teams. Jean and I win, though only narrowly, and as she points out it would have been kind of sad if we didn’t as we were the only team with two adults on it. A few hours pass. Hot chocolate and Alice In Wonderland on the television Popcorn everywhere. I begin to get anxious that I haven’t worked today, and eventually bundle everyone off to their various homes so I can try to write.

“Let’s not speak of how much we love each other because it’s endless.”
—Ana de Jesús to Beatriz de la Concepción

I have a strange feeling once I’m alone, though it’s what I asked for. Often, when I am with my friends, or David and the kids, I feel I should be working, but once left to it I am struck with a horrible kind of paralysis where I wonder if I should be with people instead, because looking at my work fills me with shame and revulsion and it’s clear that an infinite amount of my writing isn’t worth even a minute with anyone I love. I battle on for a while, then in the nighttime relent and walk over to David’s place. On the way there, I keep tearing up, and when I sit down on the couch opposite him, I fully cry. He holds me and asks if I’m feeling overwhelmed. He means with work, which I am, but it’s not just that. If I let myself really think about David, the love I feel is overwhelming. Both sorts of profusion combine, so that David’s presence comforts me about how wretched a person I sometimes feel I am when it comes to work and loving him so much makes me want to work harder and make him proud. But it is Sunday night, there is no more work to be done for now, and we sleep.