This Thanksgiving, my family made the eight-hour trek to my mother’s to join our extended family for the holiday. When I suggested we make a reservation at her private club so we could simply enjoy the day together, she worried the others wouldn’t like the food. I could not persuade her that enjoying each other’s company was more important than the meal itself. Ultimately, I cooked a full holiday meal, striving to deliver the movie in her head: the perfect family gathering around the table, everything homemade, everyone happy.
Like many women, I was fed a steady diet of stories and messaging that told me it was my responsibility to orchestrate perfect endings. More than that, I was told that good women bear this burden with a smile, and that if we do these things perfectly, it will bring happiness to ourselves and the people we love.
I took those messages to heart. My husband teases that I “fly the plane from seat 22C,” because I’m always trying to control outcomes from wherever I am. When we plan family trips, I’m the one sending detailed lists three months out. I still send my grown kids packing lists. I organized my daughter’s entire move from college to her apartment in NYC. For years, I wore this hyper-competence like a badge of honor, believing it would make our lives perfect.
And then that belief nearly killed me.
Four years ago, I had a hysterectomy. That night, I was in extreme pain, but the nurse kept telling me it was normal. For three days, I ignored what my body was screaming at me because the story I’d internalized said I was being weak and shouldn’t make a fuss. By the time I returned to the hospital, I had a perforated bowel and was going septic, which led to an emergency bowel surgery and a nine-day stint in the hospital.
That lesson made it clear that real life doesn’t follow the story arc we’ve been sold. There was no tidy resolution where my suffering made sense. Even this many years later, my body does not work the same as it did before. Alas, no perfect ending.
And so, at fifty-nine, I’m finally questioning a cultural narrative that insists perfection is the only valuable goal and that loose ends mean failure.
The women I know are exhausted from trying to live up to that narrative. We apologize when someone bumps into us. We feel guilty for resting. We lose sleep anticipating every problem and how we might fix it before anyone even notices there was an issue. We’re basically killing ourselves trying to manufacture perfect life stories.
But real life is not tidy. It unfolds in random ways that force us to adapt and accept what we cannot change. My mother has Alzheimer’s, and there is no perfect Thanksgiving that will fix that. In short, we don’t need more stories with neat solutions. We need stories that give us the confidence to live without them.
This realization led me to write The Unwritten Rules of Magic. I’ve always joked that my favorite thing about writing is being able to control everything that happens on the page. That seed helped me create a protagonist (a ghostwriter) who finds a magical typewriter that makes whatever she writes come true. She believes she can use this tool to write herself a safe and certain life—a perfect ending.
Of course, she’s wrong. Things backfire spectacularly. The more she tries to control the narrative, the more chaos she creates, because even in fiction, control is an illusion. Ultimately, this is a story about letting go of the perfect ending and trusting ourselves to handle whatever happens.
The myth of perfect endings keeps women exhausted and anxious. Let’s give ourselves permission to live a different story in which we’re strong enough to face whatever comes, and in which presence matters more than perfection. That’s where the real magic of living resides.
THE UNWRITTEN RULES OF MAGIC: Emerson Clarke can’t remember a time when she felt in control. Her father―a celebrated author―was a chaotic force until he got Alzheimer’s. Her mother turned to gin. And recently, her teen daughter has shut her out without explanation. If only she could arrange reality the same way she controls the stories she ghostwrites, life could be perfect. Or so she thinks.
After her father’s funeral, Emerson steals his vintage typewriter―the one he’d forbidden anyone to touch―and tests its keys by typing out a frivolous wish. When it comes true the very next day, she tries another. Then, those words also spring to life. Suddenly, she becomes obsessed with using the typewriter to rewrite happiness for herself and her daughter.
But the more she shapes her real-life, the more she uncovers disturbing truths about her family’s history and the unexpected cost of every story-come-true. She should destroy the typewriter, yet when her daughter’s secret finally emerges, Emerson is torn between paying the price for bending fate and embracing the uncertainty of an unscripted life.
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