Thursday, December 12, 2019

Danny and Grace

Timing: From an article at The Cut, in March, 2018 when Danny's second book is coming out. He had just announced his transition, apparently he started talking about it to family in summer and fall of 2017:

So when did you decide to take action?

One turning point was in July and August, when I started talking with my close friends and my sister about it. That was scary. And then another turning point came when I started talking to the rest of my family in November, and started to access different aspects of medical transition and going to a clinic in the Bay Area. And then again, in the last couple weeks, when I decided to talk about it before the book comes out.

Why did you decide that?

It was clear to me that no, I’m not the most settled or the most confident person in the world. But I’ve spent enough time thinking and talking about this, and at this point it’s only about delay. And once my family knew what was going on and they were like, “We’re here for you. We support you. We love you,” then it felt like “Okay, sure.”
Me, writing on Dec 11, 2019: How did Danny go from the support he talks about above to completely severing ties with the Ortbergs? What could have happened? Based on the info below referencing "two weeks ago," I think the incident, whatever it was, happened around November 14-18.


November 16: I'm just seeing this tweet on Dec 14. It sure looks like a response to whatever the bad thing was.


... and this another tweet posted the same day. The word furious caught my eye:







November 19



November 20

November 21





November 26. I assume she's talking about John, and that she and Danny had been living in a house or apartment owned by John and Nancy. The grandson would be Laura's baby. Apparently the conflict, whatever it was, is what generated the very short-notice move to New York. 



November 27



November 28

This is the beginning of the article:

Today, as you likely know, is Thanksgiving in the States. It’s also my 33rd birthday, and the first birthday I have celebrated since becoming estranged from my family of origin. I cannot quite settle on an appropriate term for what these people are to me right now. ‘Biological family’ seems to imply a historical lack of closeness, which isn’t true in my case. ‘Family of origin’ is perhaps the most accurate, but strikes me as clunky and oddly evasive. I could refer to them simply by their names, of course, but there’s something about attempting to eliminate relational language completely that strikes me as wishful thinking: Look at how much I already don’t care about them. Our only connections are haphazard, arbitrary, and genetic. Lucky me, I’m already self-actualized.

In my other job I often find myself in the position of giving advice to other people on the verge of becoming estranged from their own family. While I don’t offer that suggestion lightly, I do think I’ve approached it from a sort-of mathematically perspective – If they do X thing Y times a year and show Z remorse, you should start considering cutting them out of your life, at least until such time they demonstrate an interest in real, good-faith change. The assumption there is that the family of origin has always shown their hand, that you have time to see the estrangement coming and do your level best to avoid it or at least batten down the hatches in advance. I on the other hand, was caught completely off guard. Two weeks ago I learned something I could not live with – asked what had been done about it – learned that nothing had been done, nor would ever – was chided for suggesting it was, in fact, morally necessary to take action immediately – estrangement from my family of origin, which had the day before been the furthest thing from my mind, became a matter of the keenest urgency.

In the last week, I have been able to hastily rewrite the portions of my book concerning my family of origin, and have taken Grace’s last name – feeling, I think quite naturally, a little tired of how many times I have changed my name in the last two years. I have made choices I know I can live with, choices that prioritize loving accountability over secrecy, and encouraged my family of origin to do the same. I am spending my birthday-Thanksgiving with people I love and trust and know myself to be safe with, which I’m enormously grateful for. Now that I’m in a position to slow down and catch my breath, sift through what’s been done and what remains to be done, and assemble my priorities, I find myself with a number of things I cannot so easily estrange from myself—formerly happy memories which now cause me great pain, an impossible desire to remove all mannerisms and habits and turns of phrase that remind me of my origins, a sense of disequilibrium as I reassess the foundation of my existence. Also grief. Also anger. Also a desire to go back in time and do—something. To take new knowledge out of the present and into the past, and so redeem it. Also the flat realization that transition, the act by which I set such great hopes for future models of relating, is of no help to me in this present moment.

And this is the end: 

The thing I had not realized about my own family estrangement until it came was that it was not an act of punishment or anger I could either decide to take or not. It was a moral and emotional reality that I could choose to accept or deny, but the estrangement exists with or without my consent. Many people, many queer people I love and admire, do not spend the holidays with their families of origin; I draw great strength from that and know there is great joy and goodness ahead for me. The loss is real, the wound is deep but not mortal, and I am not alone; today will be a good birthday, and unlike any I have ever had before.

With great affection,

Danny Lavery (click here to read more)


This is Danny's sister Laura, the oldest of John and Nancy Ortberg's three children:







November 30: Grace's newsletter

Dear friends,

It’s been such a remarkably strange month. I spent the first half of it choking with rage about very small things, and then the second half faced with a very big thing, which could have caused rage but in fact stimulated other affective responses: a capacity to remake plans, rebuild worlds, hold it together. And horror, which is not rage. Horror, I felt on the night of the 2016 election, and then two weeks ago. The sense that this moment was already the worst, and yet worse moments were certain to come. And indeed there have been horrors, and shames, continually since November 2016. And something was worked through, too. Early in the month, I was writing about how rage, my own and other people’s, tends to scare me - to return me to the infantile scene of maternal rage which cast me as peacekeeper and scapegoat. Well, by the end of the month, I had found myself able to hold another person’s rage - Danny’s rage - without terror. Danny’s rage, which has not been uncomplicated or unmixed, has felt realer and more necessary to me than rage ever had; accordingly, I would write differently today the three essays on rage that I published a couple of weeks ago.

I mentioned this news yesterday to the subscribers, but to the wider list: over the last few days, hundreds of new people have subscribed to this newsletter, by far the biggest jump that The Stage Mirror has undergone since it launched in February, in fact almost as big as the launch was. I take this as a signal of how many people look to online communities to help process and heal the various consequences of familial estrangement. So, hi, everyone. I’m not usually this sad. But I’m not just sad now, either - I’m nervous, excited, horrified, bound by love and desire, concerned about money, optimistic about relationships, grateful for love and queers, at times gripped by profound grief and terror. A full accountancy of what has been lost and gained over the last couple of weeks will take years. So, I guess my newsletter is going to turn into something even more process-y than it has been. Sorry. And, not sorry.


From Danny's Insta










December 1



December 2

December 3


December 4 This newsletter article is behind the paywall so I can't see it, but the fact that he's talking about being motherless makes me sad


December 4 From Grace's newsletter:

It has been a challenging and exhausting couple of weeks for the two of us, which has of course been felt in this newsletter. So I’m happy to announce two things. The first, not directly newsletter-related, though certain to have implications, is that Danny and I are going to move to New York in a couple of weeks’ time. I’m still teaching at UC Berkeley, but starting from next semester I will start commuting from New York to California on a weekly basis. Danny will be in New York while I’m gallivanting. The two of us just signed a deal to rent a very lovely apartment on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn. So I’ll see you on the east coast more often, god wot.



December 5



December 5, Danny's Insta








A post shared by Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) on










December 8

This is the article Grace links to, in it's entirety: 

A few weeks ago, before anything went down with Danny’s family, I told him that I planned to publish a study of his character on my newsletter, at some point before the wedding. He said he would do the same, and then, benzo’d out on a flight to Honolulu, wrote a gorgeous and mostly pornographic description of my body, which he passed to me to read just as we were landing. “Pornographic” is an imprecise term, in fact: it was sexy, and it had been written in that breathless syntax that wafts the magic of free indirect discourse over prose, that times the rhythms of subordinate clauses as though timing the movements of the body, and that lingers a little, but not too much, over each of the physical elements it names. Later on that day, Danny didn’t remember having written this purple prose, and was pleased and a little self-scandalized to retrieve it from his phone. What the note had imparted to me was primarily the pleasurable feeling that my body was known, and loved, or at least eroticized, even in the regions where I did not love or know it. But that’s not an uncomplicated feeling: one feels dispossessed by it, and a little indignant, as though not only should my body be entirely my own, but my feelings and representations of it should be respected and prevail in all circumstances. Yet of course the truth is that someone who has spent so much time needling, fucking, caressing, and looking at my body knows it far better than I do - who sees it always from a strangely lofty angle. I can’t imagine what it would be to look up to my body, for example, and you have described that experience so beautifully.

Danny, I loved reading The Toast. I found myself endlessly thwarted by it, constantly wanting more from it than I could get. I wanted to rouse those disconsolate ladies in art history into passionate engagement, and I wanted to slip off with them into a dream where we could know each other. There was so much dreaminess in them, women who wreathed themselves in dreams, “sort of like a Brigadoon thing.” When we met, the main point you wanted to communicate was “I’m Rochester,” and “I’m the men in the art history posts,” as though you expected me to find those trivial disclosures surprising. I couldn’t understand how you, or anyone, would think different - I didn’t know how your Rochesterness would rebuild your body, or what it all “meant,” but of course nobody could be these arch, glamorous, psychotically disconnected sylphs whom swains would try, and always fail, to bend into submission. That was not, as Terry Castle might say, a position for a person. I knew you had made this insistence - “I’m Rochester” - many times at people you deemed similar to me, and in fact while I think our interview went well, and I flatter myself that I surprised you, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t succeed in knocking you off your perch entirely, as I had planned. At least, not until I took you out for a drink after the event, me smacking down beer like they were running out and you matching me with hot chocolates, when I told you what was happening to my body, which was becoming utterly abject, and you seemed for the first time, shocked by me, rather than merely impressed.

The words you spoke to me on our - was it our second or third? - date may as well be the motto of our life together. They concerned the horrific cycling of late-stage addiction, that had made much of my life into a Soderberg studio flick and my body into an uninhabitable terror, to which you could respond, “perhaps you will have to go to prison. And I would come and visit you in prison and I would still love you.” It took me two years to unscramble everything, and even then, another two months, almost, before I was finally convinced that, whatever answer could be found for this problem, it was incompatible with ever taking another drink or railing up another line. But those words immediately, and irreversibly, changed my heart - a speech of love from someone who had only just met me, but who already knew me better than anyone else, and for whom love was not reducible to glory or even safety. A love that is larger than disgrace. That was your first gift for me; now it is ours.

Sex is at the heart of your story, as it is at the heart of mine - nothing explains more of you than your relation to your sexuality. Some of which belongs behind closed doors, but one part of which can be spoken because it is my story too: decades spent wishing for a relationship to homosexuality that could make sense, that could tie the whole complex of doubt, desire, and disidentification into a tight, functional knot. In gay relationships you could be your own Rochester, but then those relationships risked becoming retroactively heterosexualized, with you placing yourself outside the bonds you were forging. Straight relationships were, obviously, terrible, as they uniformly are: men could only assimilate your love, so full of manly ardor, as though it were merely a vigorous species of feminine extra-ness, the avoidance of which was the major objective of the whole project of straight love. For those of us (me) who love femme extraness, who need it and cannot live without it, that very redirection could look like contempt. (When we used to fight, as friends, it was often because I felt you wanted me to be less feminine in my attachments, or to play straight with a different set of avowals. The Toast, like many transmasculine egg endeavors, didn’t always know what to do with the fact of effeminate cis boys.)

Still, the news that there was sex, and perhaps even a sexuality, for you, came as an enormous surprise. And you discovered fucking, demonically, well into the period of our friendship, and we would meet, and sit in your car, and I would steam as you told me about fucking some guy at the top of a hill, or for hours in your house, or the look on his face as he knelt in front of you. And I listened, femme diva of furious desire, even less equipped to endure these disclosures than you were when I had tossed them in your direction at any point over the previous couple of years. I really was happy for you, but I wanted your desire back, I wanted you to think about how I looked at you when I knelt down for you, which would have been rarer and more precious. I wanted you to whisk me away to fuck me at the top of various hills in the East Bay. Which, eventually, you decided was in your interests as well.

Whatever will have been the story of the being who will have been called Danny Lavery, and who was once called Mallory Ortberg, strange as it is to remember, it will certainly entail a reckoning with the events of the last few weeks. These events have left us dependent on the hospitality of our wonderful friends in the run-up to our wedding; they have left you without blood family, and to some degree without a name. You changed your name, legally, to “Daniel M. Lavery,” without stipulating a name behind the initial beyond snarling, later, “the ‘m’ is for “motherless.”” You have also manifested your goth side on your right arm, which now bears a pentagram along with the word “desdichado,” and now there’s a whole stone thing going on that I’m not going to discuss in detail. It goes without saying that this is you at your best: utterly right, utterly committed to doing justice though the heavens fall, and profoundly aware of the enormous losses necessitated by the primary commitment to justice. What I love most about you has not shifted since I told my bridal shower a couple of months ago, the Christian half of which has since decided not to attend our wedding: the communism of your soul, your intuitive sense of justice. I pledge my life to it, in fact. I suppose that is one thing that might be meant by a wedding taking place the day after the Solstice.

A couple of months before it all went down, we had a fight about hell. It was a big fight, sparked by my asking you, essentially, how you were able to tolerate saying the Nicene Creed, which I thought entails statements that you don’t believe. And some statements that seem both philosophically extremely difficult to untangle, and oddly technical — “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father” — like, not trying to be funny or nothing, but that sounds like Heidegger. I also grew up saying the Creed (the Catholic version) and so I once understood it well enough to feel okay saying it, but now that I try to be very careful about meaning what I say, I couldn’t be sure that I know how to determine what I thought of it. You gave me a jokey answer, telling me it is just one of those things that gently lapsed evangelicals retain with a sense of fondness, much like John Bunyan. I didn’t accept that then - you are far too serious about matters of faith to reduce a creed to empty liturgy - and pushed it, too far, until we got to the real point: you are afraid of going to hell. And part of that fear is also a fear of losing the idea of heaven that you would feel obliged to abandon if you followed through on your own insights and intuitions about the faith of your father, or fathers. I held you while you cried out those two twin fears, of going to hell and of losing the fantasy of heaven, and the fight was over. We fell asleep, or I went to a catwalk show, or something - I forget which. I am so, so proud of you, and proud to be yours.



December 10



December 11 Same with this one. I haven't read the article but it hurts me that he's talking about John Ortberg



I would have said hell would freeze over before one of John's children said publicly and seriously that "my dad sucks."



Grace is pretty "out there" Obviously this wasn't the partner John and Nancy dreamed of for Mallory. Plus, she sure doesn't look like a professor of Literature. I wonder what her professional colleagues think about all this:











A post shared by Grace Lavery (@grace.lavery.pangolin) on



December 14: I looked at some comments about this situation on Reddit and this, written 12 days ago, caught my eye:

Grace is getting a lot of flack for her role in this situation, and honestly it would be best if she didn’t acknowledge it. I can understand that she didn’t want to ignore supportive comments, and she did make it clear that this is Danny’s story to share in detail, if and when he decides to do so. However, that message can be communicated in two sentences, and Grace tends to go on and on. This creates the impression she’s reveling in the attention, even if she’s not. Also, I hope she doesn’t chuck a tenured position at Berkeley over her husband’s family spat. That would be unnecessary and stupid, and I’d worry more for Grace than Danny in that case.

As for Danny, I do question his judgment in making a personal situation public in such a vague way. He has always been close to his family. To declare a permanent estrangement seems rash, and it’s suspicious when public dramatics emerge around someone with a book to promote. This thread alone contains hundreds of speculative responses. Danny’s not a newbie on the internet. He knows what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is meant to increase engagement from strangers on social media.

As for Nicole: it’s weird to be so thirsty for attention on Twitter that you blast your thoughts all day long and co-opt a friend’s complicated family situation as your own. Such behavior points to an addiction. She’s smart and funny enough to make an impact without being a constant presence, but is too insecure to take a step back.

Another interesting comment from Reddit:

I sometimes wondered if Daniel's unfolding relationship with Grace was too good to be true. I don't mean to lay blame on either one of them, I just mean that nothing could be as divinely perfect as they both seemed to portray it as being. It was just such a nonstop fairytale of dressup selfies and pillow/postcoital selfies and a general sense of mutual worship. I dismissed the thought because for me at least, it's rare to see a trans couple having such a ball in public and seeming so genuinely in love—I wanted to buy in and I did. But the relentless idyll seemed strange. It seems like Danny's first truly serious relationship (at least serious enough to get as far as marriage, where it seems Grace may have been married before)...and definitely one of Danny's most powerful infatuations. I wondered if the bubble would ever burst.

-These latest tweets, Insta posts and newsletters have felt so performative, so COY. Both Danny and Grace are accomplished wordsmiths, and something about all of this feels very...smithed. Marbled with bullshit and semicolons and evasions and obfuscations. Like they're each dancing wildly around what happened and phrasing it as seductively and strangely as possible and trying to command attention and curiosity while at the same time yielding nothing real. Laura's relatively brief share above actually feels like the "real"-er report of what happened in terms of communicating pain; both Danny and Grace's writing on this has felt so wanky and self-absorbed, like they're more interested in the words they can spin out of this anguish and the confusion they can sow than in actually confronting it. The sense of moral triumph and arrival really stuck out to me. (The question remains: if things are so difficult right now, why the hell share at all?) A boy once rejected me via an email that was as circuitous and vague as one of these posts. My mother (more on her below) told me flatly that he was full of shit and not to be trusted.

There was also a long discussion on Reddit of how wretchedly awful and expensive it will be for Grace to commute cross-country. There's agreement that such a short-notice move, with such life-changing inconvenience for Grace, appears to be an ill-advised scorched-earth reaction to whatever caused the estrangement.

This is from Grace's newsletter, dated August 18. Given how much vitriol she and Danny have been throwing at John and Nancy since mid-November, I was surprised to read how good things were before. She says she "adores" Nancy:

My future mother-in-law N., whom I adore, was initially quite skeptical when Danny and I told her that we were dating. She had good reason: about three months earlier, I had introduced her to someone else I had been dating, and - without for a moment wishing to speak ill of a relationship that, quite obviously, was not going to work out - the person to whom I introduced her did not, really, have very much in common. I explained myself to N. by saying that I have a thing for ballerinas - which is maybe true, but also sounds absolutely gak-inducing now I recall it. Anyway, when Danny’s mom heard we were dating, she really couldn’t shake the thought that Danny and me would split up soon, because I was into ballerinas; and that, when we did, it would hurt him. Then one day - it took her about two weeks - she had realization, which I’ve always pictured with a light bulb going off (N. is among that subcategory of women who visibly illuminate when they have an idea): “ah, Grace is the ballerina.”

... I was being welcomed (“showered”?) by N.’s church group, a group of women with whom I have (or so I feared) little in common, not being a Christian myself, and having lived, in plenty of senses, a fairly dissolute and unrepentant life. But N.’s faith, which she shares with her son and (I have now learned) with her church group — the women who organized the event, L. and M., are saints whom I loved with my whole heart — means above all a fluency in the language of emotion, and a capacity to tolerate ambivalence and complexity. Both of these remarkable dimensions of my future mother-in-law’s faith were in use yesterday.

... I loved catching Danny up on the day’s adventures, when we finally reconvened for a family dinner at his parents’ house. By this time, his family became more tangled up in kids and catching up with each other, which was just as well because I was very tired, and glad to cede some of the spotlight to the buzzy toddlers. (Click here to read the entire post.) 

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