It began, as it usually did, as an unsettling feeling in the pit of my stomach. Not painful, really, but vaguely unpleasant—as though something was moving inside of me that wasn’t supposed to be there. I’m a generally anxious person, neurotic about germs, travel, food, and just about everything else, and I have a dozen rituals to get me through the day—but I knew for this, none of them was going to work. Because the feeling was utterly familiar, one that I had grown used to over a writing career that had now spanned 30 years: literary withdrawal, my own personal version of the DTs. It usually hit about three weeks after I’d finish a book—a sense of desperation that started in the pit of my stomach and, if left unchecked, would eventually turn into true panic.

No doubt, the sensation was left over from the decade at the beginning of my career that I spent struggling to become an overnight success. I was always broke then, and my books were the only thing that kept me afloat. Even after the publication of Bringing Down the House—the story of those six MIT kids who beat Vegas—launched my career in narrative nonfiction, it was a constant, never-ending battle to find that next project before my rent came due. At some point, the constant pressure to be writing, always writing, became internalized. I simply reached a point that if I wasn’t working on a story, if I wasn’t moving forward, chasing something, I began to feel physically ill.

April 2024 was no exception. The previous fall, the movie version of my book Dumb Money had hit theaters, and I’d simultaneously finished writing a different book, The Mistress and the Key, a continuation of a historical thriller that had begun with my project The Midnight Ride. I was locked in my basement office in Newton when that familiar desperation began clawing at me—so I started to Google.

This wasn’t how it usually worked. Ninety percent of the time, my stories came through pitches: random, unsolicited emails or text messages that landed in the middle of the night, sometimes from people I tangentially knew, often from complete strangers. That’s how the project I’m probably most known for, The Social Network, had begun—a 2 a.m. email from a total stranger who happened to be a Harvard senior, writing that his best friend had founded Facebook, and nobody had ever heard of him. That friend turned out to be Eduardo Saverin, whom I met two days later in a bar at the Westin in the Back Bay, where he uttered the fateful words that sent me right to my laptop: “Mark Zuckerberg fucked me.”

Sometimes, the pitches came in from Hollywood; producers, directors, even actors would send me ideas that they hoped to develop, attempting to reverse-engineer their way to IP, because successful IP could push film and TV projects incrementally closer to that magical state of being “greenlit,” which was becoming more and more elusive as the movie business continued to contract.

But once in a while, it started with Google.

I couldn’t tell you exactly what I was searching for, because I didn’t know myself; there isn’t a blueprint for what makes the sort of story that compels me to submerge myself in its weeds for the six months to a year it takes to research and write. But there are things that I’m always looking for. Usually, that includes young geniuses who aren’t good with authority, battling through some sort of Shakespearean, personal drama in the gray area between right and wrong—but also with huge, public implications. Hopefully, there are also exotic locales, tons of money, pretty people, and at least the hint of real, physical danger. Throw in a dinosaur or a billionaire, and I’m on the phone with my agent.

That particular April, I started even simpler: I began scouring Google for stories that involved scams, heists, or cons that hadn’t been widely reported. Sifting through literally hundreds of news articles about things I’d either heard too much about already, or didn’t want to hear any more about, I stumbled on something that pricked at me: not a scam, or a heist, but a cheating scandal. It just so happened to take place in the growing-more-popular-by-the-day arena of chess.

According to my search, in September 2022, Magnus Carlsen, the “Mozart of Chess,” widely regarded as the greatest player in history, who had a 53-game undefeated streak at the time, had been utterly destroyed by a 19-year-old kid at the Sinquefield Cup in St. Louis—beaten, unceremoniously, by a brash, outspoken American named Hans Niemann, who had made a name for himself in a series of bizarre interviews and insane twitch streams. Shortly after, Carlsen accused Niemann of cheating, launching an explosive scandal that involved trashed hotel rooms, the billion-dollar rise of Chess.com, and the possible involvement of anal beads.

I was instantly hooked. There had been a few magazine features and some mainstream news stories, but nothing big and flashy and commercial—no book, movie, or major streaming doc. The question became, How close to the story could I get?

My first stop was Instagram and Hans Niemann’s DMs. The Social Network is a hell of an icebreaker, and although he was wary, he agreed to meet with me. After a few phoners, I was on a train to New York. We met in the dark, empty lounge of his Lower Manhattan apartment building, and he was everything I could hope for: angry as hell about what had happened, and raving about what he saw as a chess mafia aligned against him. He spoke about how evil and cruel Carlsen had been in trying to destroy a “kid in his prime,” about how one day, he would be the world champion and show everyone that he hadn’t needed to cheat in the Sinquefield Cup. He wasn’t always believable, and he was clearly spiraling at points into true paranoia, but I genuinely felt for him. And the truth was, I liked him, as I end up liking most of the people I write about. It’s a flaw critics have pointed out again and again.

Tracking down Carlsen turned out to be much more difficult. Famous people have walls around walls. Working through my movie agency, I got a letter to Carlsen’s agent, which was promptly ignored. I turned my attention to Chess.com, which had risen from a dorm-room idea at Brigham Young University to a billion-dollar behemoth at the center of modern chess. Chess.com was also at the center of the story, because they were in the process of partnering with Carlsen in an $83 million deal when Carlsen made his cheating allegations—and it was Chess.com, headed by Danny Rensch and Erik Allebest, that had launched an investigation into the scandal, publishing a report that alleged that Niemann had likely cheated in more than a hundred games on the site. This, in turn, had led to Niemann suing them, Chess.com, and Carlsen for $100 million.

Luckily, Rensch and Allebest were easier to track down than Carlsen. A mutual friend on Facebook made an introduction, and very quickly, I was spending hours on Zoom with them both. Eventually, that led me to Carlsen and, even more usefully, to his father, Henrik, his always-present sometime-manager—a kind and brilliant Norwegian who seemed utterly befuddled by what had happened.

It had only been a few weeks since I’d stumbled into the story via Google, but now I was ready for what has become the most important part of my career: the Hollywood pitch. I hadn’t written a word of the book, but I had enough research for a treatment—a 15-page proposal that laid out the story as I would write it. This process—attempting to sell the movie (or TV show) before the book was something that had begun with The Social Network, and quite by accident.

At that time, after meeting Saverin in that bar at the Westin, I’d crafted a treatment and sent it to my agents. A day later, it leaked onto the Internet; Gawker had decided it was scandalous enough to put on the front page of its website, and within a few hours, all hell had broken loose. Facebook settled with Saverin to try and stop whatever book I was writing. As part of his settlement agreement, he could never speak to me again. At the same time, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin read my proposal and decided he wanted to write it as his next movie. David Fincher also read the proposal and said he wanted to direct it as his next movie—but only if we did it immediately, because this was 2009, and who knew if Facebook would still be around in a year?

The only problem was, I hadn’t written a book yet. So I locked myself up—back in the Westin Hotel—and wrote the book in 11 weeks. Sorkin joined me next door and wrote the script in the three weeks that followed. The book and movie came out simultaneously, which almost never happens, and I realized then and there that reversing the process—selling the movie before the book—made more sense, as long as I could continue to find stories that read like movies, and I could write them like I was on fire.

The movie treatment for Checkmate went out wide to Hollywood on a Wednesday. By Friday, we had a dozen studios, producers, actors, and directors chasing; the following Monday, it was time to make a hard decision. But after a Zoom call with Emma Stone, Nathan Fielder, and A24, I knew where we had to end up. Fielder and Stone understood the story the same way I did: It wasn’t just about cheating in chess; it was Shakespearean and generational, about a wild upstart facing off against an Old World champion, and about how quickly AI is going to change everything—chess being the canary in the coal mine, because now any 12-year-old with a cell phone can beat Magnus Carlsen.

AI is going to change everything—chess being the canary in the coal mine, because now any 12-year-old with a cell phone can beat Magnus Carlsen.

A day after that, it was time to start writing. And traveling—because though this story had started in St. Louis, it went all over the world, concluding in a rematch in Paris, where Niemann and Carlsen went head-to-head once more at, ironically enough, a Chess.com event. I couldn’t have pitched a better ending on my own: Paris is one of my favorite places, because I’ve always been obsessed with The Sun Also Rises—when I was younger, I used to reread it the first of every month, and when I used to drink (I mean really drink) I went to Paris with my dog-eared copy and tried to hit every place Jake drank in the book. It’s a big part of the reason I don’t drink anymore.

So I packed up my laptop and headed to Paris, my wife, Tonya, in tow because she’s my secret weapon. Not only does she speak French, know Paris like the back of her hand, and help me when my plots have stalled or my dialogue is weak, she’s better than I am at getting people like Niemann, Henrik, Rensch, and even Carlsen to talk to the anxiety-ridden, nebbishy writer in the corner of the room.

A month later, the book was finished, the movie with Fielder and Stone was in development, and I was back in my basement in Newton, hoping, for once, the literary withdrawal would defer; that the feeling in the pit of my stomach would hold off long enough for me to be able to simply relax and enjoy having finished a book—before chasing the next one. I mean, that could happen. Couldn’t it?

Isn’t it pretty to think so?

This article was first published in the print edition of the June 2026 issue, with the headline,“Eye on the Game.”

Two things to keep in mind. First, we all adjust to our audience. If you’re at the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce, you say Ashland, because there’s a decent chance someone will respond “Clockers!” (high school mascot), and some beautiful connection might follow. But if you know the other person doesn’t know what a Holliston, much less a Taunton, is, you fudge it. Is it completely accurate? No, but so what? “It’s correct-ish,” says Deborah Schildkraut, professor of political science at Tufts University.

And that’s enough for the task at hand. The first rule of making conversation is to keep it going, which might mean you start big, sometimes really big, like saying you’re from Massachusetts, which never gets, “Sorry, I’m not familiar with that.” More likely someone says, “I got family in Hingham,” and then you can take it from there and get to the second rule of making conversation, which is to talk about anything but the weather, your commute, or geography.

And the second thing: People who didn’t grow up here don’t care if you’re not really from Boston. And people who are from here also don’t care. There are 351 cities and towns in the state, with plenty of natives who have never heard of, been to, or could locate Cummington (out west; Hampshire County), Goshen (next to Cummington), or Gosnold (on Buzzard’s Bay; smallest town in the state; around 70 people), and they’re not losing sleep over it. If it gets to a third date, maybe they’ll want to know. Maybe.

The only people who would be bothered are people from Boston who know you’re not from Boston at the exact moment you’re saying that you’re from Boston, and they’re nowhere around. So who cares? If you’re worried about your rep as an honest person, add “just outside of” or “around” to Boston. Anything west of the city along Route 9 or the Pike is understandable, even if it’s 30-plus miles away. But let’s be clear: No one from Cambridge, Somerville, or even Medford would ever say they’re from Boston. They’d rather die. You, on the other hand, are from Ashland. You’ve got nothing to prove. You’re a Clocker, dammit.

Got a question for the Salty Cod? Send it to editor@bostonmagazine.com.

Previously: Do I Have to Run the Boston Marathon to Be a Real Bostonian?

This article was first published in the print edition of the May 2026 issue, with the headline, “I Grew Up in Ashland, but I Tell People I’m From Boston. Is That a Lie or Just Efficiency?”

When my 13-year-old daughter, Emma, asked me to sign us up for something called puppy yoga, I was skeptical. “Are you sure this is an actual thing?” I asked. Yoga—rooted in mindfulness and serenity—paired with puppies: chaotic, wiggly, distractingly cute? I couldn’t quite see it.

But Emma, who’d first spotted the trend on social media, clearly knew what she was talking about. Puppy yoga is very much a thing. The concept, which has grown in popularity recently across the country, blends a gentle, all-levels yoga class with free-roaming pooches. Part wellness trend, part social experience, it’s designed to deliver both light movement and a dopamine hit. Studios often partner with breeders or rescues, and classes, booked well in advance, routinely sell out—proof that the combination of downward dog and actual dogs has undeniable appeal.

So on a recent Saturday, we headed to Puppies & Yoga near South Station, one of the franchise’s two Boston studios. I was still dubious while we waited outside. Then the doors opened.

Seven puppies—golden retrievers and an adorable black-and-white mixed breed—were already tumbling across the floor as the class filtered in. The puppies bounced from mat to mat, hopping into laps, chasing rubber toys, and eliciting a steady soundtrack of squeals.

It should be noted that this was not a room full of serious yogis. Only three of us were over 40; the rest were teens and twentysomethings who seemed perfectly happy to treat the yoga portion as a warm-up to playtime. The 45-minute class was intentionally basic: gentle stretches and accessible poses designed to accommodate everyone. For the first 15 minutes, the puppies continued their romp before gradually tiring. A few curled up and passed out completely, while others wandered lazily between mats. We were encouraged to pause if a puppy climbed aboard our lap—both for safety and because, realistically, no one was going to ignore that level of cuteness.

After the official practice, we had 30 minutes of dedicated puppy time, at which point a blue-eyed dog climbed into my lap, circled once, and fell asleep—warm and heavy, completely trusting. Next to me, Emma was already on her phone editing photos (because this experience was indeed a social media moment) and plotting lunch. “Mom,” she said with a gentle nudge, clearly ready to go. I opted to stay put a few minutes longer, stroking the soft, sleeping pup.

One of my clearest memories from high school in the late 1980s isn’t a specific party, but the hunt for one. A car full of friends, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” blasting on the stereo, driving through the suburbs with no real plan except to figure out where everyone else was headed. Inevitably, we’d end up at 7-Eleven—“Sleven,” as we knew it—where a dozen other cars were already parked, each packed with kids from different cliques, all chasing the same rumor.

Once someone finally got the scoop, we’d pile back into my station wagon and race off to a huge house party that, more often than not, had just been shut down by the cops. Then it was back to Sleven to regroup and figure out what came next.

That was the fun: the motion, the noise, the sense that anything might happen. Music blaring, windows down, shouting jokes to the car full of teenagers stopped next to us at a red light, laughing at absolutely nothing and everything at the same time.

Compare that to the lives of my own teenagers and their friends, and I can’t shake the sense that while they may be safer and getting into less trouble, they’re also missing out on something messier, more communal, and quietly formative. Teens today are not cruising for house parties or throwing keggers in the woods. Few have experienced the rush of fear, adrenaline, and euphoria that comes from scattering into the night when the cops show up, knowing you’ll find one another again eventually. They’re dating less, they’re not drinking as much, and they’re not having sex. According to the biannual MetroWest Adolescent Health Survey of middle and high school students in 25 communities in Boston’s MetroWest region, 12 percent of today’s youth are sexually active, down from 22 percent in 2006.

Sure, there are still some who party hard, but a growing share of teenagers are at home on Saturday nights scrolling through social media. When they do venture out, the parties are invite-only and usually involve a select group of kids. “There’s not a lot of mingling outside your friend group,” one 17-year-old admits.

The downside? What gets lost in the process: the chance to meet someone new—to try on a different version of yourself. At those big house parties from our youth, you’d end up talking to kids from different grades and social cliques. Today, kids are surrounded by the same people, “stuck being who everyone already thinks they are, instead of figuring out who they want to be,” a mom of two told me.

As today’s teens navigate a tightly controlled social life shaped by Snap Map, screens, and social anxiety, parents are concerned. “We raised our kids to be too good,” a mom of a 17-year-old says. “I want my daughter to mess up now, while she’s still in a safe environment, instead of at college, when I’m not there to help her out of a bad situation.”

Even the kids themselves seem a little nostalgic for an adolescence they never had—one that feels looser, louder, and less monitored than their own. After watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High recently, one of my 19-year-old twin boys asked, “Was it really like that when you were in high school?”

I couldn’t sugarcoat it: “Absolutely.” His wistful sigh said it all.

So what’s changed? Ask the kids, and they’ll tell you: There’s nowhere to go. And they’re right. Shopping malls, once the primary social hub for teenagers, no longer stay open late. Movie tickets are more expensive than ever. Tower Records, where you could hang out for hours listening to music and flipping through records and CDs, is long gone, as is Blockbuster. Arcades have been supplanted by at-home gaming.

Private spaces are harder to come by, too, as fewer kids are willing to host parties. Ubiquitous smart security cameras now alert parents to every arrival and departure. Massachusetts’ host liability law—widely promoted and enforced—carries real legal consequences for parents who knowingly allow underage drinking at their homes. And apps like Life360 let you track your children’s locations in real time. (Gone are the days when you told your parents you were sleeping at Jenny’s but were actually in a field somewhere doing keg stands.)

It’s not just the loss of third places that’s stifled how teens connect. The prevalence of the smartphone in the 2010s shifted hangouts from real to virtual. As their social lives have moved online, teens are increasingly likely to spend evenings scrolling or playing video games with friends—connected, but in ways that require little effort.

The shift hasn’t been entirely negative. Research shows that the later kids begin drinking, the less likely they are to struggle with alcohol-related problems as adults. There’s also less drinking and driving these days and fewer alcohol-related injuries, says Wayland school resource officer Shane Bowles. That’s no small thing.

Bowles has seen the change firsthand. When he started on the force nearly 25 years ago, he says, he was breaking up big house parties nearly every weekend. These days, it’s rare. “Kids today are smarter and safer,” he says. As a result, many are choosing to be more cautious. “We think more about the consequences of our behavior,” a 17-year-old told me, sounding far more grown-up than I ever was at that age.

Still, those benefits come with a tradeoff. “The sort of brain development that happens when we are in the same room as someone is very different than when we are on a screen,” says Emily Gordon, a Natick clinical psychologist who specializes in treating adolescents and young adults. Without the big moments like asking someone out, talking to someone new, risking a little embarrassment and surviving it, it’s harder for kids to develop the confidence and emotional resilience they’ll need later in life.

But here’s something else to consider: Kids may be glued to their phones on Friday nights because they’re overscheduled, overstressed, and sleep-deprived—and by the end of the week, they’re exhausted. Their lives are far more structured than ours ever were, packed with school, homework, clubs, jobs, volunteering, and sports, leaving them little time or energy to hang out with friends. “It takes effort to make plans,” a high school junior tells me. “It’s easier just to FaceTime.”

Consciously or not, we’ve conveyed to our children that achievement should take priority over social connection. The stress only builds with today’s high-stakes college application process, especially when kids are constantly seeing their peers’ achievements online. For many teens, that comparison quietly reinforces the fear that they’re not enough. “The pressure they are under is exorbitant,” Gordon says, “and adolescence has become sort of a professional activity.”

The consequence of such a regimented lifestyle? Our kids have never been given the opportunity to experience boredom and what comes of it: curiosity, creativity, and, yes, maybe even a little mischief. I caught a glimpse of that firsthand in 2020, when my ninth-grade boys and their friends decided it would be fun to ding-dong-ditch our neighbor’s home. While the other boys clustered nearby on the street, one of them scampered up to the front door, buried his face in his jacket, rang the doorbell, and sprinted away. I know exactly how this went down because my neighbor posted the Ring camera video on my neighborhood Facebook page, asking, “Anyone know whose kid this is?”

To me, this was just a harmless teenage prank. They were bored, and they just needed to press someone’s buttons—literally. And yet they were called out in a public forum. I remember thinking, We’re lucky—they could be doing so much worse.

As parents, we need to recognize the role our own anxiety plays—and how it shapes the way we raise our children.

Here’s the thing, though: These are exactly the kinds of missteps kids should be making—and yet many teens are afraid to make them because, as this incident shows, their mistakes live on. (That video is still on Facebook six years later.) No wonder they’re hesitant to put themselves out there. I recently saw a meme that read, “We survived the ’80s and ’90s because nobody documented our worst decisions.” It’s funny because it’s true.

But as parents, we also need to recognize the role our own anxiety plays—and how it shapes the way we raise our children. When our gut response is to say “no,” when we’re reluctant to let kids out of our sight, we undermine their confidence and autonomy. “We have to understand that our kids are not perfect and risk-taking is not a flaw; they need to try things and make mistakes,” Gordon says. “It doesn’t mean they’re bad kids. It just means they’re kids.”

And that’s really what we want, right? For our kids to be kids—with all the messiness that comes with it. We need to tell them it’s okay that they’re not doing a varsity sport, volunteering, editing the school newspaper, and getting straight As all at the same time, and more important, we need to believe that’s true.

Otherwise, teens end up with fewer real relationships and less practice handling social situations. Gordon believes that one of the reasons kids are struggling in college—with everything from anxiety and depression to substance abuse and eating disorders—is that they haven’t had enough of these social experiences in high school. Indeed, the 2024 World Happiness Report found that in North America, young adults are reporting significantly lower levels of happiness than other age groups, and rates of loneliness are highest in younger age groups. The takeaway is clear: No group chat or FaceTime call can replace the real thing.

The encouraging news is that schools and communities are beginning to acknowledge the problem and act on it. With 96 percent of kids now having a smartphone by age 14, parent-led efforts like the national Wait Until 8th campaign ask families to pledge to delay smartphones until at least eighth grade. The idea is that when parents act collectively, no child feels singled out for being the only one without a phone.

Additionally, a growing number of schools in the Boston area have banned smartphones outright, requiring them to be stored in phone “hotels” or locked pouches during the school day. By taking phones off the table, schools are hoping to create more opportunities for students to interact in person. That could really make a difference during lunch and breaks, when screens often become a social crutch—especially in middle school, the teenagers I spoke with said. Without smartphones, “Kids will actually talk to each other,” a high school junior told me.

School administrators have also brought back school dances—a staple of American adolescence and the setting for so many cringeworthy yet formative moments—after nearly a decade of dwindling attendance and concerns over grinding. At the first-ever homecoming dance at my daughter’s high school in 2024, students danced nearly the entire time, sweat-soaked and grinning ear to ear. By any measure, it was a hit—for the kids, and perhaps even more so for parents. “It was so fun seeing all of them just let loose together,” one of the chaperones told me.

But in the end, maybe we care more about all of this. “It’s a different generation, different world, and they’re just doing it the way they do it,” Bowles, the school resource officer, told me. “I don’t think they’re missing what they don’t know.” And maybe we’ve romanticized some of our own adventures along the way. When I told a group of teenagers about the parties we used to have in the woods—picking our way along rock-strewn paths in the dark—they weren’t impressed. “Sounds cold,” one of them said. She wasn’t wrong. But we were never bored.

I was on the T headed to one of my favorite restaurants in Boston when I found myself thinking about the last time I ate there. I’d been with three of my closest friends, all of whom were visiting from the different cities where they live. As the happy memory of great food and even better company flitted through my mind, anxiety about my upcoming meal curled deep in my stomach. Yes, I was headed to dine on the same delicious food I loved. But this time, every single one of my fellow diners was a complete stranger.

Welcome to the brave new world of making friends in Boston.

A few months earlier, I had realized something startling: I hadn’t made a new friend since college who wasn’t a friend of a friend, a friend of my husband’s, or someone I met at work. I consider myself a social person. I like people. And yet making friends as an adult had somehow become impossible, especially in Boston, where friendliness isn’t known as our defining trait. Hence the question that had been nagging me for months: How do people actually meet people nowadays?

It turns out I’m not unique in this—it’s essentially a universal conundrum. Which is exactly why I ended up at Café Sauvage in the Back Bay sipping a limoncello spritz, having dinner with strangers.

I signed up for this dinner through Timeleft—an international platform that opened shop in Boston in 2024 with the goal of “turning strangers into friends.” The company organizes weekly dinners, bringing together six people, selected to dine together based on their answers to a short online survey.

Groups like these are having something of a moment in Boston. Just this past year, Base, a national platform that bills itself as “designed for people who value depth, curiosity, and authentic connection,” also opened here. Base organizes events and dinners where conversation is focused on a particular topic—and it involves an application, a phone interview, and a monthly membership fee of $100 or more on top of the costs of the individual events. (Friendship, it turns out, isn’t always free.)

These are just two of the many social groups that have cropped up in Boston in recent years, each with its own particular focus. Need people to take walks or work out with? There’s a group for that. Prefer crafting to exercise—or any one of dozens of other hobbies? There’s one for everything, from needlepoint and knitting to video games. There are supper clubs and cocktail meetups and even groups to find people to go clubbing with—yes, really. Think these gatherings sound superficial and can’t possibly facilitate deep connections? There are groups for that, too—those that promise to skip right over the small talk and rocket you headfirst into deeply personal conversations.

All these groups share a common goal: helping people find connection, something ever more elusive these days.

Whatever their focus, all these groups share a common goal: helping people find connection, something ever more elusive these days. In 2023, the surgeon general declared that our loneliness epidemic constituted a public health crisis.

Perhaps counterintuitively, rates of loneliness are even higher in cities, and Boston is no exception. A recent study based on 2024 Census data found that some 43 percent of adults in the Boston metro area reported feeling lonely, which is above the national average. Meanwhile, across the state, 25 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds and 13 percent of all adults reported that they “usually or always” feel isolated from others, according to the 2023 Community Health Equity Initiative survey.

“People want to be seen and valued and connected, but when the rubber meets the road, it can be hard,” says Kristen Lee, a clinical social worker and behavioral science professor at Northeastern University who studies social connection. “It’s challenging to find that community. People are trying to creatively find a way to make connections when it’s not necessarily readily available. That’s why we’ve seen [these groups] arise; they give more opportunity and inroads that aren’t organically happening.”

So are these social groups the antidote to the epidemic? The promises of community, connection, and friendship sure sound like it. But do they really work? And if they do, what does “work” even mean?

I am not the only person who found herself having trouble making friends in Boston—I’m just a little less motivated than some. Take Rebekah King. She moved here from California in 2022 and went online to find roommates. “I noticed there were a lot of people like me who were looking for connection and didn’t know where to find it,” she says. So she started a small Facebook chat that is now an 8,000-strong group of women and nonbinary people in their twenties and thirties, dubbed Boston Babes, that held 119 events last year alone. Eight thousand people. One hundred nineteen events. All because she needed a roommate.

Ana Baptista had a similar experience when she moved to Boston from Venezuela more than a decade ago and found it hard to find the time and space to connect with people—not to mention, we were a bit standoffish. She recalls an incident that many Bostonians have experienced some version of—the time she told someone she liked their jacket. “And they just stared back like, Why are you talking to me?” she said.

Like King, she decided to create the community she couldn’t find. She launched Girlfriends in 2018 as a group centered around activities that help facilitate friendships. Today, it has more than 400 members and hosted more than 60 events in 2025 alone, from dance and cooking classes to picnics and boat rides. “Making friends doesn’t need to be hard,” Baptista says. “You need to be in a space where it is fostered.”

These aren’t the only homegrown social groups. The Jar, founded in Boston in 2019, gathers guests to experience a piece of art—a painting, a comedy show, a poetry reading—then prompts them with thematic questions to discuss with everyone in the room. Participants are encouraged to bring one person they know well, two they see often, and two “unusuals,” people different from them in some significant way. “We don’t care where you work. Nobody gives a shit where you went to school,” says founder Guy Ben-Aharon. “We go from zero to intimacy really quickly.” One common kickoff question: What’s something you were known for as a child? Meanwhile, Skip the Small Talk, another Boston-born group now in 20 cities worldwide, takes a similar approach with speed-dating-style conversation prompts designed to bypass small talk entirely.

Maria Colalancia, who started the supper club the Aperitivo Society in early 2023 with the mission of good food and good conversation, has a theory about why so many of these groups have started popping up all over town. “I think there’s a hunger to get away from being so chronically online,” she says. “It’s silly that an introduction has to be an online transaction. People just want to get out from behind their phones.”

The quest for a more analog way of meeting people is something researchers are noticing, too. “We are seeing a drastic change in society in terms of social ties. Especially after the COVID pandemic—we have Zoom, and everything is virtual, and we don’t know our neighbors anymore,” says Koichiro Shiba, an assistant professor of epidemiology at BU’s School of Public Health who studies the health effects of human relationships and communities. In a world where we’re arguably more connected—virtually, constantly—than ever before, he says, there’s a real missing piece. “That’s maybe partly why people are trying to go back to the old days and trying to make connections in person.”

It isn’t just how we interact that has changed, but where. “Third places”—the bars and coffee shops and neighborhood haunts that aren’t your home or your office, where you become a regular, where everybody knows your name (yes, like that bar)—have been disappearing. The neighborhood bars are shuttering. Coffee shops have become coworking spaces with espresso, everyone hunched over laptops, earbuds in, sealed off in their own little productivity bubble, nursing a $7 oat milk latte like it’s a desk rental fee.

I wouldn’t consider myself lonely, exactly. But I do want more friends who live in my city, not scattered across state lines. Making them, it occurred to me, takes a certain kind of muscle—and mine had been slowly atrophying for years. All these groups promising connection and community? I wanted to know if any of it was real—or if I’d just end up with awkward small talk and a $60 candlemaking class to show for it.

Over the course of this winter, I went to a handful of events to test how well these groups actually worked. They ranged from a watercolor painting class to crafting meetups, dinners, and a comedy show. I approached them all with mild apprehension, worried they would feel like networking—performative or contrived, with everyone wanting something from everyone else, except instead of a job, that elusive something was friendship.

And sometimes, that was exactly how it felt. The watercolor class was my first attempt. I sat down with four women, and we bonded, sort of, over how horribly our paintings were turning out. But most of the conversation centered around the basics: where we lived, how long our commutes were, and how high our electricity bills are in the winter. Thrilling stuff. In all the moments that were stilted, awkward, and semi-silent, I was painfully aware of how hard we were all trying and getting nowhere.

But the more groups I tried, the more natural it began to feel. At a meetup of the Boston Drunken Knitwits (a knitting group, though they welcome all handcrafters, including cross-stitchers like me), I felt like I had found my people. We traded stories about failed projects, admired each other’s work, and swapped advice, all while working on our own stuff.

Here’s what I learned: Putting yourself out there in a room of strangers, hoping some of them like you enough to talk to you again, is terrifying. But if nothing else, it was nice to be out of my house, talking to people in person rather than through my computer or phone screen—sharing my favorite hobby, which I usually do alone on my couch, with others. The approach to community was structured, sure. But the conversations themselves? They felt real enough.

Despite my skepticism about just how many real friendships can emerge from these groups, some have an impressive track record. Take Iliana Barrientos, 32, who joined Girlfriends after moving to the Boston area from Florida. She met a now-close friend during a Midnight Runners event, and the two clicked and spent the whole night talking. Recently, they took their respective boyfriends to an EDM festival. Luce Kelly, 28, joined the same group in 2024 after moving to the Boston area. She’s hosting an upcoming birthday dinner with eight women she met through the group—all of whom, she says, she never would have met organically otherwise. “They work in different sectors, or they live in different parts of the city or in other suburbs,” she says. “There would have been no overlap whatsoever with a single one of the people who are my friends now.”

Then there’s Alfredo Rojas, 37, who’s found that activities hosted by the Boston-area “Make Friends After College” Facebook group (20,000-plus members of all ages) facilitate more lasting friendships—ones that continue outside the events—than other groups he’s tried. Meanwhile, Dan Cross, 39, discovered that his once-wide friend group had started to dissipate as he got older—marriages and kids made meeting up more difficult. After trying one singles-focused meetup group, a few of the members spun off and created their own hiking group, hitting up New England’s mountains throughout the year. “I’m not the most social or outgoing person, so events like these help bridge the gap,” he says.

But not every event is a winner. Diane Darling, 60, went to a dinner where one woman was so combatively political that it left the entire table stunned into uncomfortable silence. Another woman told me about an event where she was one of just a few women in a room full of men. What was meant to be a platonic community gathering had the air of a singles mixer—and she was married. Someone else described attending events where it felt like everyone already knew each other. And worse: The connections she thought she had made ended as soon as the event did. She never saw any of them again.

The night of my Timeleft dinner, I walked in my front door to find my husband with a smirk on his face, ready to hear what he assumed would be a horror story about my evening with strangers. Instead, I launched into no fewer than 15 minutes of breathless recap: how I’d waited outside in the cold for an extra 10 minutes because I was so nervous; how I genuinely liked every woman I spent dinner with; how I had developed a newfound desire to add Yellowstone National Park to our travel bucket list and go hiking in the White Mountains this summer. I was nearly bouncing off the walls with excitement, thinking that maybe, just maybe, this time I had made some new friends.

One woman and I discovered early on that we went to the same heated Pilates studio in Harvard Square, and we promised we’d see each other in a class. (It struck me then: Someone I could be great friends with might be right under my nose, if I ever bothered to look up and talk to them.) But in the more than two dozen workout classes I took in the two months following that dinner, I never saw her again—or maybe I did, and in the haze of the 100-degree room, I’d forgotten that I promised to look for her. Either way: We didn’t connect again.

For weeks, I counted it as a failure in the friendship department. Which, if I’m being honest, it was. But here’s the thing about adult friendship—the issue I kept bumping up against all winter: The groups can put you in the room. They can hand you the conversation starters and seat you next to someone who also loves heated Pilates and has strong opinions about Yellowstone. But they can’t do the rest. You have to put in the work. You have to fight the inertia, the voice in your head that says, She probably doesn’t remember you anyway, the exhaustion that makes it so much easier to just go home and watch TV. Real friendships aren’t built in a single dinner. They’re built in the follow-up—the text, the coffee, the showing up again.

So I took a leap. I messaged the woman from Pilates and asked if she wanted to go to a class together. She said yes. We’re going next week, and maybe we’ll grab coffee or a drink after. We might not become best friends. But then again, you never know. And that’s the whole point.

We were in the bland hinterlands of Greater Boston, skiing along the ho-hum Leo J. Martin Golf Course—otherwise known as the worst golf course in America. The traffic of I-95 hummed nearby; a passenger train clanged in the darkness. But my mind knew nothing of the setting, for I was at war.We clambered toward a narrow hairpin turn, four Lycra-clad cross-country ski racers so close I could see the dried white spittle on my competitor’s whiskery face. The pack constricted like water through a pinched hose. Then suddenly we were on a wider expanse of groomed trail, snow glimmering under the floodlights at the Weston Ski Track’s winterlong Tuesday Night Race Series (TNR), which has been around since the facility’s inception in the early 1980s, and I knew it was my moment to pass. I squeezed past the guy flagging before me, our ski poles clacking. Then I kept digging, hoping, a mile into this 3-mile Nordic race, to hang onto 12th place in a field of about 100 competitors spread between two waves.

The TNR Series is essentially a beer league, offering amateur skiers the same thrills and bare-knuckled rivalry that basketballers might find playing pickup at Peters Park. The series’ nine annual races, staged between January and March, are cumulatively scored, with everyone scrapping for age-group bragging rights. And they typically play out, thanks to climate change, on tight stripes of manmade snow—on snaking, polycone-lined courses that deliver what may be Nordic skiing’s closest approximation of stock-car racing. Still, a sporting bonhomie prevails. Passing people at Weston, I often get a kindly wheeze of solidarity: “Go for it, dude!”

Often, but not always. Now, in Race 9 of the 2025 season, the guy I’d passed shouted, “I’m going to fucking deck you after the race!”

I skied on, gratified that he was receding behind me, and I reflected on the absurdity of my quest: I am 60 years old, and even three decades ago, I never had the zip and power you’ll see on TV this month when the world’s best cross-country skiers—among them, Johannes Høsflot Klaebo of Norway and Julia Kern of Waltham—take to the snow at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. Still, for me, Weston is the Olympics, for my AARP years have come with a swarm of anxieties. My career as a writer has not gone gangbusters. In my family life, there’s an estrangement so painful I cannot divulge the details. My late middle-aged campaign to find wholeness hinges in large part on skiing. Living in the sticks of New Hampshire, I ski daily in winter. I own 10 pairs of skis. I study technique videos on YouTube. I endeavor, with each race, to eke all I can out of my diminishing sinew.

I finished Race 9 in 10th place, and when my impassioned friend crossed the line 30 or so seconds later, he was yelling and jabbing his finger at me. I considered the possible headlines: “Man, 60, Mauled at Cross-Country Ski Race,” and then I drifted away to find safety in a crowd of recent finishers doubled over in the snow, catching their breath.

For years, I’d heard about the Weston Ski Track. Its habitués would show up at the races I do in northern New England, telling improbable tales of a ski venue whose only sizable hill—a 30-foot-high, skateboard-ramp-steep massif referred to as Mount Weston—was shaped by a bulldozer. I knew that the place had some claims to glory. Kern learned to ski there, taking to the snow as soon as she could walk and then improving so quickly that, by around age 12, she was mixing with grown men in the A Wave every Tuesday. Kern placed fifth in the sprint at last year’s World Ski Championships. “I credit a lot of my drafting tactics to those Tuesday Night Races,” she told me.

Still, I’ve always harbored a northerner’s snobbery toward podunk Weston, with its man-made snow and its rinky-dink hills. That changed only when I decided, early last January, to enter Weston’s Race 1. I found myself hooked by the urban vibe—the rush-hour jostling, and the way 100 skiers would crowd post-race into Weston’s barracks-like, concrete-walled golf shop to scarf down pizza and beer. Their voices formed a happy din; their sweat steamed the windows. I liked how there were skiers who’d recently relocated to Boston bearing the accents of the world’s chicest ski locales—Norway, Sweden, and Japan—and I liked how everyone found joy amid the industrial inflections of Weston’s orange polycones.

Soon, I developed a ritual. Traveling south to visit my partner, V, in Worcester each Tuesday, I’d detour to Weston to race. Each week, I’d arrive to find but a few stray novices poking around like lonely ants on the snow. But then, gradually, the TNR faithful would show up to glide along through their warm-ups. We’d strip off our jackets, and then we’d stand on the starting line, shivering in tights, to share an almost spiritual moment.

Since the early 1990s, the jefe of TNR has been Andy Milne, a retired high school teacher who says he’s witnessed, over his decades in the classroom, a sad decay of the American social fabric. “I used to see kids walking home from school in big groups,” Milne says. “Now they’re almost always alone.”

At the TNR starting line, Milne forces skiers to shake the hands of their competitors. He endeavors to salt the races’ cutthroat energy by telling a groan-worthy dad joke each week. (“What did the snowman say? I don’t know about you, but I smell carrots.”) In a booming, rasping, and slightly menacing exam proctor’s voice, he enunciates a distinct social code. “You are expected to talk to people when you are warming up,” he tells the assembled starters, “to congratulate the person in front of you and in back of you.”

There’s a bit of the tyrant about Milne, but his approach draws the multitudes. He says TNR attendance has increased fivefold under his long watch. Which, of course, makes the racecourse more crowded and the dogfight more intense. Moments after Milne’s weekly disquisition, almost inevitably, some chucklehead will eat it trying to make a dicey pass on the 180-degree turn 200 yards into the race.

The critical question at Weston, I learned, is: How and where to pass? On the turns? Hazardous. On the course’s short, gentle downhills? Not easy, because descent speed is dictated in large part by the type of wax under one’s skis, and my peers and I were equally waxed. On uphills? Yes, that does work, but being old—and thereby lacking in fast-twitch muscle fiber—I didn’t have a ton of game there.

I fared poorly in the first two races, finishing 15th, then 21st. Meanwhile, there was a frustrating inevitability at work: Seconds into each race, a clump of five or six twentysomething chums who’d connected while racing in college bolted out in front. Leading them, always, was James Kitch, recently an All-American at Harvard. Kitch is tall and ripped. In his resplendent white Harvard race suit, he seemed to occupy a caste of his own. Not far behind, always, was the Crimson’s assistant coach, 2022 Olympian Hannah Halvorsen. Her poles punched the snow with smooth, machine-like power and precision.

But every race was a new ball game. When the days were warm and the evenings cool, the slush froze, and the track was a skating rink, wicked fast, so that the leaders averaged more than 15 miles an hour. On cold days, Weston Ski Track made lots of snow, and we skied amid a slow, sticky powder reminiscent of confectionery sugar. As the snow guns opened up new terrain, more polycones appeared. The races grew to 4.02 miles and, eventually, 5.75 miles long.

Race 3 came after a blizzard. Weston was, for a few days, a paradise of soft, fluffy snow, so the Tuesday series time-traveled back to skiing’s roots. Almost invariably, Weston races see skiers invoking a fast, newfangled technique: Ski skating, invented in the 1980s, involves skiers pushing their legs to the side, as ice- and roller-skaters do. But skating through deep powder is laborious, so Race 3 was a “classic” race, with participants scissor-stepping their way along, just as Norwegian émigrés like Herman “Jackrabbit” Smith-Johannsen did when they brought skiing stateside in the late 19th century. I so wanted to be there, racing classic, but the snowy route south from my home was impassible, and I missed the season’s most magical night.

During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: start as fast as you can and hang on.

During Race 5, I embraced a new tactic: Start as fast as you can and hang on. This actually worked. I’m an ornery old bastard, and midway, I found myself eerily all alone under the lights, way ahead of my old peers. There was a fiftysomething guy ahead of me, and the recent collegiate stars were roistering along, as always, in their own rarefied bubble ahead, but I’d arrived in a new land. All I saw before me was a thin white line of snow, spooling out into space like a rope, and it seemed that if I clung to that rope—if I thought of nothing else but clawing my way along it—all the troubles of the world would fall away and, for a moment at least, I’d glimpse bliss.

Could I have arrived in such a flow state skiing alone through the woods of New Hampshire? I don’t think so, for there was something communal about the moment: It sang because I was laboring with like-minded diehards, with some of the few people around who understand that our obscure sport is worthy of fanatical devotion.

I finished 12th that night (trust me, I am a student of results sheets) in a stacked field. In Worcester afterward, I was so ecstatic that V had no choice but to stay up late and listen as I told the unabridged tale of that evening’s journey, polycone by polycone.

In the next race, I finished ninth. It was becoming clear that I’d take the 60-plus men’s laurels for the season. Then came Race 9, during which I wriggled past bodily threat and managed to take a three-way finish-line sprint and crack the top 10 for a second time. Afterward, a friend emailed me, dropping the name of a young Weston racer who typically finished around eighth. Could I reel him in?

It seemed mathematically possible: Race 9 fell on March 4 with tons of snow still on the ground. Hopes for a rare Race 10 rippled through the TNR regulars, and as if to celebrate winter’s lingering bounties, one competitor, Will Meehan, cradled a can of craft IPA as he skied a few dawdling post-race laps. Later, on social media, he proclaimed, “If you aren’t doing the no pole, beer in hand, cool-down ski, why are you even here?”

Meehan, mid-20s, stocky and mustachioed, was my favorite among the series’ top dogs, for he brought a punk-rock insouciance to the proceedings. As I skied beside him after one race, he reveled in the cat-and-mouse game that played out among the leaders, and on the TNR email thread, he encouraged all of us to head north to Vermont for bizarre “Nordic Ski Cross” races featuring “jumps and downhill slalom turns, all on Nordic skis,” he wrote. “It is truly awesome.”

I was with Meehan in hoping that our weekly Weston bacchanal would play on forever—or into April, at least.

But winter is shorter and shorter these days, and in the week following Race 9, temperatures reached the mid-50s in Greater Boston. Race 10 became a costume party—an unscored tragicomedy that played out on tiny islands of melting snow. I skipped it, and now my Weston racing career is officially over. V is no longer in Worcester—she left the city this summer, and we now live together in New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region, where, inspired by those Tuesday nights, I just helped resurrect a moribund ski-race series: the Headlamp Hustle, held Thursday nights at the Dublin School.

Whenever a highlights reel of the TNR series plays in my mind, the racing action seems high octane—it’s as though the soundtrack should be AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” But then I see pictures of myself racing, and the story becomes more poignant. I see an old man, stiff and hunched, fighting to hang on.

I’m pretty sure that I was not the only TNR skier bringing my foibles to the starting line. None of us on hand, not even James Kitch, was a pro. No, we were all amateurs, and sometimes we stepped on each other’s skis. Sometimes we even yelled at one another. But we found connection under the lights. In the darkest season of the year, we shone brightly. We lived.

This article was first published in the print edition of the February 2026 issue with the headline: “The Other Winter Games.”

In the car heading west to Aunt Dot’s funeral in Chicago with my sister, Nancy, I’ve been raging—or not raging, exactly, but going on at some length about how angry I often feel with our mother. My anger isn’t about specific things that happened so much as her take on the world. Anxiety and fear loomed large for our mother. She didn’t go out much, since the world was a dangerous place, and it seemed to be our job to get on board with her view. I didn’t—I left at 20. Nancy, for the longest time, stayed put.

Since I’m driving her red Impala, barreling west on the Ohio Turnpike, I don’t look at my sister as she makes a point to show me that she’s not blind to Mom’s darker side. Our mother, now 92 and not up for a road trip to bury her sister, has been talking about a newfound closeness with Nancy ever since my sister retired a few years ago and has more free time. But Nancy knows the supposed warmth between them is really something else.

“Mom is having her needs met and is confusing that with being close,” my sister says. I know without looking that Nancy has closed her eyes tight as she tells me this—something she does when another person’s presence threatens to disrupt her thinking. Groceries and homemade soup delivered to Mom in her old-age home, her cable-TV issues figured out, her simple finances double-checked, all by Nancy, always the worker bee. My sister is tan. At 65, she’s still good-looking. Fine age lines spiral out from those closed eyes, as if something irreversible is only beginning from within—I notice this as I glance at her.

“My problem with Mom is that she knew better—she’s not dumb,” I tell my sister. Our mother told us early on about her tough childhood, when she was never sure whether her father was going to stick around, whether they would go down the tubes financially, whether she and her two sisters would get cast off to live with some relative. Yet for a long time, it had bothered me that our mother constantly perceived danger for Nancy and me, too—not from our parents having problems, but from the trouble she was sure lurked around any corner.

I am 62 years old. I continue complaining to my sister about our mother’s view that disaster was never far: “How were we supposed to live our lives?”

Nancy, as if to get my rant to stop, tells me, “Mom is the reason I didn’t have children.”

I don’t react, at least not outwardly, though I’m thinking, Jesus. Maybe it is even worse than I thought.

Instead, I’ll let her confession—that Mom was the reason she didn’t have children, outrageous as it is—sit. There is time. I’ll dig in and find out more; we’re still a few hours from Chicago. But our mother doesn’t come up again for the remainder of the trip. It’s for another day.

A day that never comes.

Three months after our road trip, Nancy is dead. It happens suddenly, randomly. My sister chokes on her dinner at home, passes out, and though her husband, and then medics, and then doctors at a hospital over four days all try mightily to save her, they can’t.

I am now left with a hole—both from losing my sister and from never fully understanding her. Eight years later, that understanding still feels paramount. My sister became a mystery, and finding her has become a mission.

Nancy once told me that we weren’t part of the same generation. This seemed odd, given she was only three years older than me.

Still, she had a point. For the longest time, I resented doing all the work to get our parents to see how the world was changing circa 1969. Nancy’s big contribution was coming downstairs to breakfast as a high school senior wearing a raincoat, because underneath she had on culottes, which our mother forbade for school. She would graduate number two in her class of 1,100 students.

Nancy was busy, besides studying. She played field hockey, basketball, and softball in high school. None of us ever thought to go to any of her games. Evenings, Dad and I would be in the living room watching The Dean Martin Show and other network fare—me on the floor, Dad in his armchair behind me smoking—and my mother, who made most of my sister’s clothes, would be on the couch sewing, her kitchen table already set for breakfast in the ethereal light of an overhead lamp pulled down low. My sister would be upstairs in her bedroom doing homework. We knew it was calculus if, every once in a while, a “Goddammit!” with her foot pounding the floor would rain down, which meant the answer she came up with didn’t match the one in the back of her math book—this drove her nuts. I could hear my mother’s sewing plop down in her lap with each wrong answer, as if she worried there could be real damage from that pounding foot, but I knew there would be a little smile as well, for my sister going above and beyond what a girl had to do. Nancy was so…ambitious! She achieved; I watched. Dad smoked. Dean Martin was smooth and good-looking and always seemed to be on the verge of kissing one of those dancers.

It was pretty cozy, in its way. But not really so simple.

Small disruptions threw our mother off. When my sister and I were young, Dad got a promotion into management at a turbine factory, and he started coming home at 7:30 or 8 at night—we’d be eating as he came in the back door, and Mom would tell him, more panic than annoyance in her voice, “I can only hold dinner for so long!” She was really afraid, I think, that our father was going to fail, that he might lose his job, though her doctor decided she was suffering from “housewife syndrome,” and prescribed “green nerve medicine,” which is how we always referred to it. Mom’s green nerve medicine, probably Valium, resided in a handy spot on the kitchen counter for some time, just in case her day got out of control.

That was when I began to see my mother’s view of things as strange. She made the mistake of telling Nancy and me, when I was maybe 11 years old, that one day, when my sister was a baby, just after they’d moved into our house, she was vacuuming the bare maple stairs. Midway, she dropped her vacuum cleaner—the one she still used, about the size of a pot roast—right on a step, putting “a big dig in the maple.” I didn’t know why my mother was telling us this, but it seemed important.

“I sat down on that step and cried,” she told us.

“You…cried?” I said. “Because you dropped the vacuum cleaner?” This seemed…weird.

My sister laughed, nervously, at my audacity, as our mother stared at me. Her eyes were very blue. “You don’t understand,” she told me. “You don’t understand how important building this house was to your father and me.”

Oh, we knew. That my father had come along and saved her as a young woman still living with her parents, as Grandpop was still at it—drinking and smashing up cars in the city where Mom grew up, sometimes chasing other women, and that in courting her my father told my mother, “I’ll build you a house myself,” one where he would always come home for dinner. Our mother liked to say that she had a perfect marriage, that she and my father had never had an argument. Not one.

This house was the place where everything had changed for her. And it was her job to make sure that nothing intruded on that.

But here I was laughing about Mom’s reaction to the fresh dig in the maple stairs, and before I upset her with anything more about that, my sister disappeared upstairs, to her room, as if she was the one who had messed up. At 11, I did not understand the depth of our mother’s need to wipe the past clean with a pristine present—all I knew was that something small was suddenly a huge deal.

Sex was another area where Mom had to be vigilant. Once, when she picked up Nancy and me at the local pool, she spied my best friend chasing a thin girl through the water in an endless game of tag.

“He’s going to get that girl in trouble,” Mom announced to us in the car on the way home.

I laughed. Timmy and I were 13. “He doesn’t even know where his dick is,” I told my mother.

My sister, up front with Mom, gasped. Mom was silent for a moment, and then said, “I don’t know what is wrong with you,” which captured not just her annoyance that I would talk to her like I had, but something much bigger: I was missing the real danger here of what was about to happen. This seemed crazy—Timmy, like me, was just a kid playing in a pool, having innocent fun. Why did my mother see a crisis looming?

Later—much later—I would understand a fundamental difference between my sister and me: While she certainly felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different. That day, home from swimming, Nancy went right up to her room, probably to work on her summer reading list. She didn’t rebel. She never even gave our mother a hard time. Nancy was most comfortable alone in her room—she was like our father in that way, who spent almost all of his spare time in his workshop—becoming the smartest girl. My sister would perform her way past the danger Mom saw.

Later, I would understand a difference between my sister and me: While she felt my mother’s anxiety as I did, her method in dealing with it was different.

But that idea fell apart fast.

Graduating number two in high school got Nancy a partial scholarship to a private liberal-arts school. Making friends, though, was always a struggle for her, and she couldn’t connect: The other girls had more money, privilege, and assurance that they were in the right place. After freshman year, Nancy transferred to an inferior teachers’ college closer to home that Bill, her high school boyfriend, had gotten into, and with that, all those hours she had worked and worked, up in her room alone, came to nothing.

Nancy had leaped back to the safe life our mother saw for her: a husband, a house, and when kids came, you’d quit the teaching job to stay home. Midway through her senior year, Nancy and Bill got engaged and planned a wedding for that June, right after graduation. It could have been 1957 instead of 1973.

A small problem emerged, though: Bill slept with Nancy’s roommate. He and my sister had not even done the deed yet, she told me—Bill wanted to marry a virgin, though apparently that didn’t mean he had to be one (1957 was intact there, too). After he confessed, the wedding was off.

My mother was sure tragedy had befallen my sister. Nancy was embarrassed but certainly not heartbroken over Bill—something only I seemed to see. I told my mother, “She’s okay. She’s fine.” My mother looked at me like I had two heads: “Her heart is broken.”

I felt bad for my sister, but maybe getting rid of Bill was a good thing, and not just because he’d cheated on her. She called me into her bedroom one night, where she was lying under a sheet just as it was getting dark, as if she were some sort of invalid. As I sat precariously on the end of her bed, I learned she was doing a lot of thinking, and that even when she was engaged to Bill, she’d fantasized, sometimes, about older guys, which sounded like a confession, not quite as bad as what Bill had done in screwing her roommate, but in the same general ballpark.

That fall, my sister would find that fifth-grade boys were brutal in their assessment of everything, including her, their teacher, and she soon quit to take a job with the Social Security Administration; at an after-work happy hour she met Scott, who was slightly older, in law school, wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts, and, as an only child, had dinner every Saturday night with his parents. He struck me as a dweeb. One day, Mom popped over to my sister’s new apartment, decorated with my parents’ old porch furniture, and slipped in—there were Scott and my sister, naked from the waist up. Back home, my mother said to me, “You’ll never imagine what I just saw.” Once she told me what was apparently going on over there, I asked her what, exactly, she expected my sister to be doing in her apartment, alone, with her boyfriend.

Nancy was accused by our mother, after that episode, of “having hot pants.” Leave her alone, I thought. Just let her be normal.

A couple of years later, though, the stakes got higher when Nancy and Scott got married.

When I was in my mid-twenties, I lived in a converted chicken coop at the base of a mountain in the mid-Atlantic. It was a cozy little place, $50 a month in rent, with a bedroom the exact size of a single mattress. I had cable television. I had heat, too, though the plumbing would freeze in winter. My sister came to visit one fall for a weekend, before the cold set in, when my kerosene heater could still get the place plenty warm enough.

I had mixed feelings about Nancy’s visit, which was her idea—what would I do with her?—but I sensed she needed something, some relief from her regular life, which was very regular. Scott had become a lawyer for the feds on immigration, in order to keep the bad guys out of the country. Saturday-night dinners with his parents remained. He had all the charm of Joe Friday.

I was a cabdriver with an English degree, and I told people, especially girls, that I was a writer. Most nights, I got drunk.

I took Nancy to a nearby college town on Saturday, to a café where I was unlikely to run into certain friends I didn’t want to meet her. My sister had very short brown hair, like Billy Jean King, and a certain…nervousness that got worse in public. Our waitress wore a tight white top that showed off her large breasts. She and I had never had a conversation apart from ordering, though I was a regular there. After delivering menus, she returned with just the slightest smile that seemed to say, So you have a girlfriend, before she asked: “Do you know what you want?”

I took my time, looking up at her. Then I held her eyes for a moment. I said, “Yes.”

She smiled.

“Wait until I tell Mom!” Nancy exclaimed.

That evening, in my chicken coop, I lay on the floor, and Nancy sat in my armchair, holding my cat, petting it briskly as she told me she wasn’t sure what was going to happen. Nancy was talking about her marriage. The job at Social Security was the easy part of her life; she was rising in the government ranks. Nancy said that if you had an affair, you should not tell your spouse—she was speaking hypothetically, testing the waters. It was about survival. She sounded hard-edged and selfish, not like my sister at all.

I wanted to tell her that things would be okay, that it would all work out. But we had arrived at the same spot, my sister and I, from opposite directions. She always did what she was supposed to, which seemed like a fool’s errand. I was doing whatever I wanted, which at the moment wasn’t looking like a lot. Most days, it was a challenge for me simply to get out of bed. Now neither of us knew what was next.

After a decade and a half of marriage, Nancy would leave Scott. She had needed a push and got it from the guy redoing her kitchen. He had arrived by way of my parents—Tom had remodeled a bathroom for them. And by way of once having tried to pick up my sister in his ’54 Chevy when he went cruising and spied a girl outside her house one day: Tom was 16, Nancy 14, and she went running inside to report what had just happened—this boy out there—to Mom.

Here she was, at 40, finally ready. I had just moved back East from California, where I’d gone to grow up. I’d gotten married, had a son, and was taking a real stab at writing.

Nancy had transformed; it was a big surprise, and miraculous. She became 18 again. Her skirts came way up. She stopped wearing a bra. She grew her hair.

My parents disapproved of getting a divorce, which had me, during one dinner alone with them, lecturing my mother as Dad smoked, drank his coffee, and, as usual, said nothing. I stared at her blue eyes. She was an open book on the way she felt about everything, including Scott—she didn’t like him. But now it felt like she’d put my sister in a box with no exit, that she was more concerned with moral opprobrium than her daughter’s happiness.

Nancy taking up with a divorced man with two teenage sons—awfully dark, murky waters. I was all for it. They took skiing vacations, she and Tom, with Tom’s sons; they jet-skied and biked all over. He got her to check out NASCAR. There were certainly no Saturday-night dinners with his parents.

Nancy married Tom. I had a second son and began working as a freelance magazine writer. With that, my sister and I were locked in place with our families. I didn’t see Nancy much; it sometimes felt like we were still living a continent apart, as time, that great equalizer, slipped away.

I called Nancy out of the blue one day to ask her to lunch, a few months before the road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral. At this point, Dad had been dead for some time, though making it to 74 after five decades of two and a half packs of Salems a day was a minor miracle. Mom had sold the house and moved to a nursing home. Now there was something I wanted to confess to my sister.

“I judged you,” I said to her at a tiny café. “A long time ago, I decided I was cooler and smarter.”

Her face was going WHOA, with her eyes wide and unmoving as if they were stuck—this was another habit of hers, the opposite of closing her eyes tight in search of solitary thought.

“It’s bullshit, but that’s what I did,” I told her. “I think it was mean. And I’m sorry I did that.”

“Oh…” she said, as our father might have, and then he would have taken a drag from his cigarette with a big exhale, though she had no way to hide, and to my surprise, didn’t need one.

“I had my own way,” Nancy said, her face calm now. “I had the idea that I had the superior career.” She had ended up running her local Social Security office; my long run as a freelancer had ups and downs. “It’s natural for siblings to be competitive.”

That didn’t sound quite right, coming from my sister, who had always given my creative juices appropriate respect.

“You came out of the gate much faster,” I said, feeling a little ridiculous. “Whereas I…”

“You needed time,” she said. “For me, ambition went out with leaving Scott. My goals changed.” She had retired at 57. “Anyway,” she said, “you are smarter and cooler.”

“It’s bullshit.” The stance of being above it all, from the time we were teenagers to deep into my twenties—that’s what it was, just a stance. “We’re all so vulnerable,” I told her. “I was as afraid as you were.”

My sister smiled and then reached across the table and tapped my head. “It’s all in here.”

Later that day, I got an email from her: “Very touched that you felt you wanted to apologize. The compelling thing was that it was important to you. On the one hand, I want you to know that there’s no need for you to say anything, because things are good between us. On the other hand, I don’t want to diminish the emotion that lies behind your desire for us to connect. That’s what touched me.”

I thought two things about her email: She wasn’t just letting me off the hook for judging her, but admiring my risk in telling her so. That was very kind.

The other thing: When the hell did she get so smart?

Three months after my road trip with Nancy to Aunt Dot’s funeral, she and Tom were eating pizza on their den sofa, watching baseball. He happened to look over at her—Nancy’s lips were blue. She slumped over. He called 9-1-1, which advised him to pound her chest to revive her heart. But it wasn’t her heart. She had choked on the pizza and, for some reason, did not make a sound or lurch toward Tom for help before passing out. When I met him at the hospital, my sister was on life support.

It was up to me to go tell our mother what had happened.

She was calm as I talked. In fact, she was so calm when I told her that the prognosis was not good at all, I asked my mother if she understood what I was saying. From her adjustable armchair, command central in her efficiency, Mom said, “I understand.”

I knew she did.

It was the power of our mother, and the strength of her, to take on truly bad news as if it were the order of the day. (What might happen, large or small, that was something different. That was trouble.)
I asked Mom to stand so that I could hug her; tiny now, frail, she did.

Our vigil for Nancy, looking for some sign that she wasn’t brain dead, lasted four days—with Tom and his sons, in their thirties now, and my wife and our sons, in their twenties. I advised Mom that coming to the hospital was not a good idea.

Then we pulled the plug, and she was gone.

Nancy was like my mother in a sense. She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are.

I did figure out, in the end, an answer to my mother being the reason why my sister did not have children. My sister, I knew, was well aware of Mom’s feelings about Scott, her first husband. Our mother didn’t like that he was wooden and stiff, that when he and my sister came to the house, he had virtually nothing to say to her, that he would sit in the living room and pick up something to read, that she could never quite figure him out. When my mother would go alone to their house to drop off, say, some fresh peaches, she would walk right in. Scott told her not to do that, that she had to knock on the door. Even though my sister had married a successful guy, on one level, given his government lawyer career, it didn’t matter, because my mother had no idea who he was, though she was sure he did not measure up.

Our mother came of age when options were limited. Her one goal was to have a marriage—and family—utterly different from her upbringing. That was all she thought she could do, or wanted to do. My sister’s life, as she saw it, would mirror the one that Mom had escaped to, the one that she had created for us, the one that was trauma-free.

And Nancy was like my mother in a sense: She would escape her childhood home with something different. But family trauma has a strong hold on who we are. She would take in how our mother felt about herself—fearful and limited. Those feelings roiled in my sister as well; they were the air she breathed as a child. The one shot she had was achievement, but when she bailed on her first college at 19 years old and took up again with her boyfriend from high school at an inferior school, she had leaped back into the orbit of our mother.

With Scott, our mother put a veil of judgment over my sister—your marriage is not as good as mine—that Nancy simply couldn’t lift. She felt paralyzed until, at 40, she broke free when Tom came along.

By then, though, the window on having children had closed.

Certainly, she got to a better place with Tom, but not, in the end, fully with herself. As my sister was dying, a nurse revealed that there were two drugs in her system: an antidepressant and another to treat anxiety. This was a surprise to me—and even to Tom—and I knew it would have certainly been news to my mother as well. My sister’s trouble was hers, and hers alone.

She had told me on our road trip to Aunt Dot’s funeral, “What I am doing now is taking care of Tom and Mom”—Tom, at that point, had several medical problems. She was sure she would outlive them both, maybe for a long time. Nancy said she imagined selling their house and living in some garden apartment alone. There was no reason she had to be alone—early-morning sculling had given her the body of a 50-year-old. But I knew that’s how she saw herself, as if it was the inevitable end for her, and in her red Impala crossing Ohio into Indiana, I imagined her living in an apartment building that circled an inner courtyard of beautiful flowers—a sweet government pension had afforded her a comfortable last stop—and Nancy would go out into that courtyard with a paperback and a cup of tea. No one would come to see her. She wouldn’t have a boyfriend or any friends, and she’d read some historical novel written for the masses. Alone.

I knew she was conjuring something like that for herself, as if she had never gotten past the residue of old business. I didn’t challenge her on it, on our road trip. Instead, I talked about my anger at Mom, how difficult her fear and anxiety had been. I privately wanted, even at this late date, for my sister to rise up with me. Nancy didn’t take the bait.

There is, however, another way to look at where my sister landed, especially in her ongoing commitment to our mother. Nancy believed in duty, in coming through on the things she had been taught. She was a girl of her generation, when certain obligations trumped everything else. Now, as I think of my sister up in her childhood bedroom alone, working so hard, a richer possibility comes to me: That she was trying, in the only way she knew how, to make up for what Mom had gone through when she was young. To somehow solve our mother’s fears by being the smartest girl. And that’s a pretty incredible thing.

Over the years, I would learn more about my mother’s childhood: How there was a phone call one day from a woman my grandfather had taken up with, a call that my grandmother answered, with Grandpop God-knows-where, and how Grandmom would confide in my mother, the oldest daughter, about the woes of her marriage. There was no way to know, through the Depression and then the war, if they would make it; though finally, by the time my sister and I came along, my grandfather had stopped drinking, and my grandparents stayed together.

My sister gone, I started visiting Mom often, which surprised her. I asked why. “Your attitude,” she told me in her blunt way—I laughed, but she was right. It was the attitude I’d always had toward her. If my sister had not fully come to herself in the way I thought was so important, I hadn’t gotten all the way there either—not on Nancy’s terms of duty. Since our mother could still see right through me.

Toward the end, though, Mom and I reached a sort of truce. It helped enormously that she was a doting grandmother, and I was finally able to appreciate her smarts and toughness. Mom became a big cable-news junkie, and we’d have at it on politics; lo and behold, we landed in about the same place, able to share our mutual outrage at a world falling apart in her last couple of years.

There’s one more thing, about my sister: She had paved the way for me so that I could be the one to go off into the world. Nancy once said, about the time she came to visit me in my chicken coop after college, that she felt like an only child—she meant it in terms of the responsibility she took on, not judgment. Which allowed me to fumble my way to myself, whatever that might mean. We did reside in different generations, and my sister doing the work of hers gave me the escape hatch I had to have, an opening as big as the freakin’ moon, to do whatever I wanted.

She was a wonderful sister. It seems, in a way, that she was always working on my escape.

When our mother demanded that we weed the flower beds around the house on a summer morning long ago, and I would hem and haw and whine and move maybe 10 feet under the firethorn while my sister did her half through the azaleas and boxwood and rhododendron and hemlocks lickety-split, and then come over to my half, which was probably only a quarter to begin with, and weed almost all of that, too—well, just like that, we’re done!

Did Mom ever know that I couldn’t hold up my end? My sister never said a word.

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the headline: “Searching for Nancy.”

This is part of a winter series on things to do indoors in Boston.

On a Sunday that was too wet to go out and too cold to play ball, as Dr. Seuss so eloquently put it, I found myself at a crossroads: Should I spend the day inside the house, becoming a de facto kiddie cruise director, or go out and let someone else do the work? That’s how I wound up at the Natick Mall’s unofficial children’s wing, staring down a gaggle of tables covered in plastic at the Crafts Zone, a DIY spot offering unique projects that can be completed and taken home the same day.

The most exciting offering for my seven-year-old daughter was decoden, the Japanese art of decorating an item with “cream glue” that resembles frosting, then covering it in fun, quirky charms. Essentially, if you love baking, you’ll love making this craft.

After walking into the gray-and-yellow space, we chose our projects from a sample wall: a jewelry box for my daughter and a digital alarm clock for me. Next, we moved to the charm area, which had boxes full of tiny plastic pieces, loosely organized by color and theme. We picked everything from mini cheeseburgers and ice cream cones to Paw Patrol and Hello Kitty characters, along with plenty of stars and bows. After selecting the recommended number of charms, we chose the colors for our cream glue, which was already neatly loaded into piping bags.

Finally seated at our table, a staffer guided us through the design process, demonstrating how to pipe the cream glue (the shell technique took me a couple of tries). Once the “frosting” was down, we arranged our charms. The final, and most fun, step was the sprinkle station, where my daughter chose five different types of non-edible jimmies to give her masterpiece a sweet dusting.

Walking out with our sticky-fingered handiwork, I realized we’d successfully killed a couple of hours without a single screen—and created something that would take up precious space on her bedroom dresser for months to come. Totally worth it.

Natick, crafts.zone.

This is part of a winter series on things to do indoors in Boston.

On a typical winter weeknight, the Dance Complex in Central Square buzzes with a diverse array of classes, from tango to West African dance. Despite the talented crowd it attracts, the affordable classes welcome all levels, which was essential for me, as my moves had become decidedly “dad-like” in middle age.

I chose a bhangra class, the energetic Punjabi folk dance traditionally associated with the harvest and familiar from Bollywood films. Run by the nonprofit Boston Bhangra, the class on this particular evening included three novices and one expert dancer, all of whom were instantly put at ease by instructor Kit Tempest. Before getting started, he offered these words of encouragement: “Don’t be afraid of failure, and don’t be afraid to feel silly!”

Bhangra is based on heart-pounding, nonstop patterns of jumping and hopping to the beat of the music. I managed the footwork fine, but adding the arm movements threw me completely out of sync. Thankfully, a class regular who danced bhangra all four years in college gave me helpful tips to get me back in rhythm.

With the basic steps somewhat established, Kit moved on to actual choreography: the Horse Dance, a sequence where the gestures tell the story of tough young horsemen confronting rivals. Before we finished, the expert dancer gave us one final instruction: “Smile.” Bhangra audiences always want to see a smile. While I won’t be onstage anytime soon, I was smiling the whole time anyway.

Cambridge, dancecomplex.org, bostonbhangra.com. 

This article was first published in the print edition of the December 2025/January 2026 issue as part of a winter activities package with the headline: “The Great Indoors.”