Well, hello there. Hope you had a delightful Halloween and a restorative Thanksgiving, whatever that might look like for you.

This month over on Substack, Tabby (unlike you, I hope) is having an absolutely dreadful holiday. Here’s a preview to whet your appetite…

The next four days passed in a haze of sleep, TV, pudding, and alcohol. There was a Fame marathon on, the TV show, not the movie, and I watched every episode. I felt very sad when it turned out Julie was a coke addict. I washed my laundry but never actually changed clothes. I was too cold. I was freezing. After my Wednesday bath I had put on a pair of leggings, thick socks, a long-sleeved t-shirt and a wool sweater, but I still couldn’t get warm. And because I couldn’t get warm, I decided I should just stay dressed and not bathe again. I smoked, constantly, like it was a job I’d been assigned. I smoked four packs of cigarettes and then I had to leave the house to get more, which made me very nervous. I didn’t want to drive, because I hadn’t really stopped drinking since Wednesday, so instead I took the dog and walked to town. I slept on the couch in the den, in front of the TV so I wouldn’t miss any Fame, with a space heater pointed at me. I was still cold. I changed the bandage on my hand a couple of times. It hurt like hell, and when I went looking for Advil I found Ben’s stash of medication — Valium and Klonopin, plus a few other things I didn’t recognize. Ben never talked about what he saw and did in Vietnam, but the story was written in little white pills.

To read the rest, click over to Rom-Com Rehab on Substack. As a free subscriber, you’ll get a new chapter every month, and you’ll have a week to read it before it goes behind the paywall. If you’d like the full experience — monthly chapters to read at your leisure plus access to the full archive starting from the very beginning — you can become a paid subscriber for just $5 a month (or $45 a year).

This autumn has been uniquely challenging for Jonathan and me, which sounds like something you’d say in a job interview. In actuality, this autumn has been terrifying, exhausting and (potentially ruinously) expensive. In October, a few weeks after I started a new job, Jonathan went to the emergency room with what he thought was a heart attack but turned out to be multiple pulmonary embolisms — blood clots in his lungs. He’s making a good recovery thanks to the skill and dedication of the health care providers at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn, where he spent five days in the ICU. I’d like to say things are back to normal, or on the way to being so, but there’s no normal to go back to after a health scare like this. There’s just the figuring out how to live with it, the truths that need facing, the changes that need making, and the slow reclamation of the rest of our lives together. People showed up in incredibly kind ways. Other people showed us who they really are. Some of it was heartbreaking. Some of it was funny. We’ll talk about all that another time. If you’d like to see Jon’s One Minute Walking Tour video about all this, it’s HERE.

Also, I cut my hair into a pixie and am letting it go silver because honestly, l cannot spend one more moment of my one wild and precious life pretending I haven’t been going grey since I was 19.

Hope your December is joyful. Here’s to 2024, whatever it’s got in store for us.