MaryTabor's unimaginable lightness of being

When I read anything by Mary Tabor, I do it slowly. Deliberately. I liken the experience to being deeply engrossed in a 5000 piece, handcrafted jigsaw puzzle, each piece just as important and gorgeous as the final image. But there’s more. Solving this puzzle will reveal something I’ve never known about life, so while I must go slowly, there’s also an urgency. I know I speak in metaphor but I’ve spent days trying to find the exact words to describe the incomparable experience of reading Mary. It will change you. You will make discoveries. You will feel her own necessary vulnerability hand-in-hand with your own. Her words will guide you along the vertiginous cliff of love, loss and uncertainty with an assured hand that says “It’s painful, but that very pain will save you.”
Mary’s Substack Only Connect is a confluence of her spanning knowledge and experience as an author, professor, radio show host, and columnist, where she shares her serialized memoir (Re)Making Love, fiction, and essays about the arts, books, movies, and all things literary. “Only Connect” is the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s Howard's End and she claims it’s the best advice she ever got, living this truism not only through nurturing intimacy with writers on Substack but also through her staggering ability to weave together stories of her own pain and seemingly disparate subjects and literary forms. Mary is a one-woman light show of synaptic connections and it was an honor to join the shimmering display for an hour to learn more about her creative process, why she believes writing is a journey of self-discovery and how to find levity in the face of heartbreak and the unknown.
Mary is also “accidentally funny,” and in between Mary’s poised, wisdom-sharing, we burst into fits of laughter, so get ready to learn, feel inspired, and smile.