{"id":196362,"date":"2026-06-28T15:18:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T23:18:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196362"},"modified":"2026-06-28T16:05:58","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T00:05:58","slug":"rachel-resnick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196362","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Resnick"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rachel Resnick<\/a> (b. 1961) comes home to a drowned hard drive.<\/p>\n

An ex-boyfriend has broken into her cottage and soaked the machine that holds her work, her drafts, her record of herself. She is past forty. She is single, broke, and childless. She has wanted the marriage and the baby and the house for as long as she can remember, and she has none of them. She stands over the ruined computer and asks the question that opens her memoir, Love Junkie (2008): what is wrong with me.<\/p>\n

That scene sits at the front of the book that made her name, and it tells you how she works. She takes the worst hour of a bad year and puts it on the page first, then walks backward to find the road that led there.<\/p>\n

Resnick was born in Jerusalem and moved between Israel, New York, and Los Angeles as a girl. Her father, Henry, a librarian, left home when she was four. He stayed in her life without ever holding her close. Her mother, Jane, carried her own addictions and took her own life when Rachel was fourteen. By then the children had already been moved from house to house, mother and daughter living apart, the custody lost years before. Resnick has written that the abandonment did not end with her mother’s death. It changed form.<\/p>\n

Out of that she got to Yale<\/a>. The distance from a girlhood of shifting addresses to a Yale degree measures the engine that runs through her life: she turns wreckage into narrative and the narrative into a way up. She studied literature. She read closely. She learned the craft that later let her shape her own disorder into books people could not put down.<\/p>\n

Her first novel, Go West Young Fcked-Up Chick: A Novel of Separation*, came out from St. Martin’s Press<\/a> in 1997 and became a Los Angeles Times<\/a> bestseller. The book wore the label fiction and drew its blood from her life. A young woman runs from a ruined childhood through bad men, drugs, and a Los Angeles that promises reinvention and delivers isolation. The themes she returns to are all there: the hunger for closeness, the pull toward the partner who recreates the old pain.<\/p>\n

Between the novel and the memoir she worked. She wrote celebrity profiles and essays for the Los Angeles Times, Marie Claire<\/a>, Women’s Health, and BlackBook. She became a contributing editor at Tin House<\/a>. She worked a stretch as a private investigator, a fit for a writer who watches people for a living and takes notes. Her relationships kept costing her the work. Once she rear-ended a family van on the freeway while speed-dialing a lover. The phone won. The deadline lost.<\/p>\n

Love Junkie names the pattern. Resnick calls herself addicted to the fantasy of romance, marriage, and children, and addicted in practice to men who carry her away from all three. She abstained from sex for more than two years as part of her recovery. She worked the Twelve Steps. The book alternates the childhood scenes with the adult affairs, and each adult affair repeats the childhood. Reviewers praised the candor and the prose. Jerry Stahl<\/a> (b. 1953), who wrote his own addiction memoir, called it a Valentine from hell. Elizabeth Wurtzel<\/a> (1967-2020) called it great fun and finally redemptive. Janet Fitch<\/a> (b. 1955) compared reading it to watching a sleepwalker stroll on a freeway.<\/p>\n

Kirkus<\/a> praised the prose and raised a fair question. Resnick never tells the reader whether the names are real, whether the people are composites, whether she checked her memories against anyone else’s. In an age that had learned to distrust the memoir, that silence is a gap, and it points at the central problem of the confessional form. The writer who turns her life into a book also turns the people in her life into characters. They did not sign the contract. Resnick built a career and a teaching practice on the power of telling the story you are most afraid to tell. The cost of that power lands partly on other people, and the honest reader keeps both halves in view.<\/p>\n

Then comes the second act, and it is the part of her life that repays study, because it shows a literary insider walking out of the literary world and into another one.<\/p>\n

Resnick had taught since the mid-1990s, at UCLA Extension<\/a>, USC<\/a>, Cal Arts<\/a>, Antioch<\/a>, and others. In 2007 she founded Writers on Fire and ran luxury writing retreats in France, Hawaii, and Uruguay. From the outside the life looked finished and glamorous. She has described the truth of it without flinching. One week she ran a retreat at a chateau in France. The next she was back in her Topanga Canyon cottage scrambling for rent and borrowing money. She felt she was living a double life. She felt like a loser. The bestseller, the chateau, and the empty bank account belonged to the same woman in the same month.<\/p>\n

So she changed the offer. In 2012 she moved into business coaching and online courses. She trained under marketing teachers, Ali Brown<\/a> and Marie Forleo<\/a> among them, and she rebuilt Writers on Fire around the claim that a strong personal story sells. The literary titles fell away and new ones arrived. She began calling herself a Literary Alchemist, a Book Wrangler, a Personal Story Samurai. The website language shifted from craft toward income and impact, money-making stories and signature stories and morning rituals. She later named the method DeepStory and pitched it to entrepreneurs, executives, and speakers as well as to memoirists.<\/p>\n

A reader can hear the two registers fighting. The Tin House contributing editor and the Yale graduate wrote one kind of sentence. The coach who promises a money-making story writes another. The same woman writes both. The thread that holds them together is her oldest conviction, the one she built her childhood escape on and her recovery on and her business on: that a person survives by shaping what happened into a story she can stand behind. Tell your story, she tells her clients. You must bleed. Cut to the bone.<\/p>\n

Her most repeated note to students is one word. Specific. She marks it on their pages again and again. Agents and readers go numb at authenticity and healing and spirituality, she argues, and wake up at the concrete noun and the verb that earns its place. It is good advice, and it describes her own best pages, where the drowned hard drive and the freeway crash do the work no abstraction could.<\/p>\n

Resnick left Topanga after eighteen years and now lives near Joshua Tree. She still runs workshops, retreats, and memoir classes. She still coaches private clients toward their books and their public stories. Slake nominated her for a James Beard food-writing award in 2011, the M.F.K. Fisher<\/a> (1908-1992) honor, a reminder that her range runs past addiction and recovery into food and travel and the profile. She has said she keeps adding urgency to her life so she can stay alive and keep growing. She moved from the home she loved, she says, because part of staying gutsy is refusing to fall into the role of victim. She is at work on a new book.<\/p>\n

Set the arc in one line and it holds. A girl loses both parents to addiction and death, gets herself to Yale, turns her ruin into a bestseller, hits bottom again past forty, names the pattern in a memoir, then sells the lesson of that memoir to people who will never write one. The risk in the late work is the risk in all self-help, that the story hardens into product and the specific gives way to the slogan. The strength in it is the strength that runs through the early work. Resnick has tested, on her own life, the claim she sells. She knows what it costs to put the worst scene first. She has done it, and the hard drive is still drowned on page one.<\/p>\n

Rachel Resnick and the Religion of Story<\/strong><\/p>\n

The webcam light is on in Joshua Tree. Rachel Resnick leans toward the lens and tells a room she cannot see to open a vein.<\/p>\n

You must bleed, she says. Cut to the bone.<\/p>\n

On the far side of the glass sit the people who paid for the challenge. A life coach in Scottsdale. A man with a supplement line. A woman who has a logo for the memoir she has not written and a working title for the divorce she has not finished leaving. They lean in. They copy the line into their notebooks. Bleed. Cut to the bone. They believe it because she believes it, that under the day job and the debt, each of them carries a story, and that the story, told right, will save them. It will get them seen. It will get them paid. Some part of them will outlast the afternoon.<\/p>\n

Twenty years before, in a cottage in Topanga Canyon, Resnick came home to a drowned hard drive. A man she had loved had broken in and soaked the machine that held her drafts, her letters, the record of who she had been. She was past forty, broke, unmarried, without the child she wanted. She stood over the dead computer and felt the floor of her life drop. That scene opens her memoir, Love Junkie (2008), and it holds the two fears that run under everything she has made. One fear is the man who leaves. The other is the page that disappears. Her mother carried the first one into the house early and left it there. Jane was an addict who took her own life when Rachel was fourteen, after the custody was already lost and the daughter already moving from one address to the next. To be left. To be unrecorded. Resnick has spent a life building a defense against both.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) gave the defense a name. In The Denial of Death<\/em><\/a> (1973) he argued that a man cannot live with the knowledge that he is an animal who dies, so he enrolls in a hero system, a scheme of meaning that lets him believe he counts in some order larger and longer than his body. The scheme is the immortality project. It might be a church, a nation, a fortune, a book. Becker saw the modern problem with a cold eye. After the gods went quiet, the West handed the weight of cosmic significance to romantic love. The lover became the place a man went to learn he counted in the universe. No lover can hold that. Becker said the partner buckles under the freight of a god, and the romance that promised eternity turns into the sharpest reminder of death.<\/p>\n

Read Resnick’s first forty years against that page and they snap into focus. She loved the way an addict loves, chasing the man who might certify her, choosing the ones who recreated the first abandonment so the certification kept failing and the chase never had to stop. The freeway crash belongs here. She rear-ended a family van because she was speed-dialing a lover. The lover was the immortality project, and she drove into a minivan trying to reach him. The men were her religion, and the religion kept collapsing, because she had built it on creatures who could leave, and they left.<\/p>\n

So she changed gods. When the lover failed as the thing that saves, she moved the weight onto the story. The book lives on forever, she tells her clients now, and the sentence carries more than sales advice. The man walks out. The mother dies. The page, if you get it right, stays. Subtract the boyfriends one by one, which is what the memoir does chapter by chapter, and the residue is the story, the one lover that cannot abandon her, because she writes it herself and her name sits on the cover. Story is her causa sui. It is the word she has made sacred, and like every sacred word it means one thing inside her temple and other things in everyone else’s.<\/p>\n

Carry the word into other rooms and watch it change.<\/p>\n

In a church annex on a Tuesday night the folding chairs make a circle and the coffee is bad and a woman stands and tells the worst of her life to strangers. This is a story too. The room calls it qualifying, or sharing. Its rules run opposite to Resnick’s. The teller gives no last name. The story ends in surrender. It asks for no byline. She tells it to dissolve the I into the we, to go anonymous and therefore safe, to lay the self down so the self might keep living another day. The point of the telling is to be forgotten as a name and held as a member. Resnick learned to tell her story in such a room. Then she carried it out the door, attached her name, sold it to Bloomsbury, and put it on the front table at the bookstore. She took the one practice built on anonymity and made it a marquee. The same act of telling, and the relationship to the surviving self turned inside out.<\/p>\n

Carry the word into a study where an old man reads a tale to a boy. In this house the story is a maaseh, a tale handed down so the covenant holds, and the teller works to vanish inside it. He wants the boy to remember the tale and forget the mouth that spoke it. Immortality runs through the people, generation to generation, and the individual voice is the toll paid, the surviving tale the prize. Resnick’s craft runs the other way. She teaches the voice as the thing to find and keep and brand. The tradition-bearer survives by disappearing into the chain. She survives by signing.<\/p>\n

Carry the word into a glass conference room where a founder pitches three partners in fleece vests. What’s the story here, one of them says, and he means the arc that closes the round, the traction drawn as a rising line, the self repackaged as a brand asset with a moat. Resnick crossed into this room on purpose. She studied the online-marketing teachers, sat through the seminars, came out calling herself a Literary Alchemist and a Book Wrangler and a Personal Story Samurai, and rebuilt her company around the signature story and the money-making story. Here the word means conversion. The tale exists to move the prospect to the cart. The strange thing is how close this sits to the church annex. Both rooms promise that telling the story will transform you. One measures the transformation in surrender and the other in revenue.<\/p>\n

She chose samurai for her own title. Stay on that. The samurai’s cut erases the self into the lord’s name and into silence. Seppuku is the death that refuses to explain. Her cut, bleed and cut to the bone, is the wound that explains everything, opened on a webcam for people who paid to watch. The borrowed word arrives meaning its opposite.<\/p>\n

The fracture runs through her own pages. A reporter’s story survives by being true about other people, names checked, the writer kept out of the frame. When Love Junkie came out, Kirkus praised the prose and asked the question the book never answers, whether the lovers and the family carry real names or invented ones, whether anyone but the author was consulted about how they appear. The confessional saves the confessor by turning everyone she loved into a character, and the characters did not sign. That is the standing cost of her hero system. She buys her immortality partly with other people’s privacy, and she keeps the wound open on purpose, because a healed story stops selling tickets.<\/p>\n

Set the strength and the cost side by side and the woman holds together.<\/p>\n

She tested the doctrine on her own body before she sold it. The worst scene of her life sits on page one of her book, and she put it there. A man can say bleed and mean a marketing tactic. She says it and means a thing she has done. That earns the line.<\/p>\n

The cost is the company the word keeps now. Story carried her out of the church annex into the conference room, and in the conference room the sacred word becomes a product, sold by the seat, and the specific gives way to the slogan she warns her own students against. She knows the difference. She marks one word on their pages over and over. Specific. She knows that authenticity and healing and spirituality go numb on the tongue, and she sells a challenge stocked with those same words.<\/p>\n

Becker holds the last coordinate. A hero system works only for the man standing inside it. It saves him because it is his, the particular wager his particular terror requires. Resnick found the wager that answers her two fears, the leaving and the erasure, and the wager is sound for her. The book will outlast the men. What she sells in Joshua Tree is the wager wholesale, a causa sui for anyone with a credit card and a half-built memoir, and that is the oldest trade conducted in any temple. The priest believes. The priest has bled. The collection plate still goes around.<\/p>\n

September 24, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here’s<\/a> Rachel’s new book on Amazon.com and here<\/a> is her website.<\/p>\n

I interview her at her home Sept. 24.<\/p>\n

She says she’d rather interview than be interviewed.<\/p>\n

Rachel: "I teach a lot. One of the things that gives me huge pleasure is drawing people out or letting them have breakthroughs and revealing things about themselves.<\/p>\n

"Now I am going to give you all these. There’s nothing left for me to reveal after spilling my guts on the page with this book… Because people do get defensive when being interviewed and aren’t used to be listened to, particularly in this city."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Nice place you got here."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "When I was a kid, I read Magic Mountain. I always wanted to be sent away to a place like that."<\/p>\n

Luke: "How long have you been here?"<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Eleven years."<\/p>\n

Luke: "I was scared to death driving up here. It was frightening."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Aside from being a love junkie, I’m sure I’m an adrenalin junkie. I like driving fast on curves…"<\/p>\n

Luke: "Along mountain roads next to the edge."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Huhhmm."<\/p>\n

We talk about sex addiction.<\/p>\n

Rachel: "[Singer] Alanis Morriset, her name album Flavors of Entanglement, she proclaimed that she was a love addict. This whole album sprang from a breakup with an actor. She came up with her own cure for being a love addict — have no-strings attached sex for a year… So maybe she’ll start a new rehab center that has that featured…"<\/p>\n

Luke: "It’s interesting that in all the people you talked about, it is the men with the sex addiction and the women with the love addiction."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "It’s a new addiction that’s coming to light… It’s talked about as a brain disease, which I concur with.<\/p>\n

"Women need to have an emotional component, to make it hot, to kick this whole thing into gear."<\/p>\n

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"<\/p>\n

Rachel: "When I was four, I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and a fortune teller asked me that and I said, ‘Brain surgeon.’ She said, ‘Great. If you stay on that path, you’ll be successful. If you don’t, you won’t.’<\/p>\n

"I’ve never gotten over that…until I thought, ‘Maybe a writer could be considered a brain surgeon.’<\/p>\n

"I’m very superstitious.<\/p>\n

"The other thing I’ve always wanted to be is a writer.<\/p>\n

"My father says that when I was four, I pointed my finger at my father and said, ‘I’m going to write about all of this one day.’<\/p>\n

"I was pissed. The opening word for my essay to get into the MFA program was, ‘Revenge. That’s why I write.’<\/p>\n

"That’s not why I write now but it was then, 1991."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Anger is great fuel for writing."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "It can be but not for what I just wrote."<\/p>\n

Luke: "What did your parents expect from you?"<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Perfection. They were so young. They met in a Shakespeare class. He was at Columbia. She was at Barnard. She got pregnant. They were in their early twenties when they had me. They were not well matched."<\/p>\n

Rachel’s parents split when she was four.<\/p>\n

Her father makes his living teaching Talmud in New York City. He never completed his PhD at Columbia.<\/p>\n

Luke: "Before I read your memoir, I read all of your fiction. When I read your memoir, I was struck by the similarities with your fiction."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "There’s no question there are similarities because I write close to the bone. That’s something that fuels my writing also — scraping away all the bulls—. Go for the jugular. I’ve always admired poets the most of all the writers because they just cut through everything. Growing up, everyone was lying… Why was everyone drinking in the morning? I hated denial.<\/p>\n

"One of the things I loved about poets was that they were flaying their psyches, they were stripping everything away, they were using themselves, which I think is fair, other people is a whole other question… I felt there were a lot of layers I could draw from that could bring some pulse and beat to what I was writing."<\/p>\n

Luke: "In all your stories I read, all the leading female protagonists were love addicts."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Yeah, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know there was such a thing. One reason that the memoir came into being, it was a door of perception that opened. It opened when I used the word addict for myself, when I felt it, when I walked into one of the rooms for 12 step programs, where they gather people who have issues with sex, distorting it, using it, getting high from it, it’s not about relating to another person. It’s that element of brain disease. A complete distortion.<\/p>\n

"I never even recognized the chemicals, the rush that I would get when I was around someone who would resonate, another damaged soul. Yeah! We can really destroy each other. Those ecstatic flames. You recognize that. But I didn’t until I walked into those rooms and identified with everyone who was talking. Goddamnit, I thought it was them. There was that victim thing for years. I would be involved with people who were addicts, alcoholics. Hey, they’re shooting up! It’s not me. I just love them. I’m sticking it out.<\/p>\n

"And I was getting off on the whole thing. They’re obsessed. They’re in love. They’re having a relationship with the bottle or with heroin or hookers. I’m focused, addicted and obsessed with the relationship, with the high I’m getting from how twisted it is. I never recognized that. That gets into the distinction between substance abuse and addiction."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Why did you keep switching voices in your novel Go West?"<\/p>\n

Rachel: "Sometimes you do something instinctively and you look back and go ‘Whoa. A therapist would have a field day with that.’ If you come from a background of trauma, which I never wanted to acknowledge, but that’s one of the reasons writing the memoir has been useful. I’ve flayed my psyche in search of some answers to give to other people. Part of it had to do with realizing that childhood trauma was fueling this addiction… My parents weren’t capable of giving that early attachment thing and if you don’t get that, it does something funky to your brain. You don’t develop right. When I would get that high from falling in love, that brought me up to normal. I had a depressive, alienated ongoing state of being. The cool thing is you can rejigger your brain. You can create new grooves."<\/p>\n

"What happens when you have that kind of trauma is that you fragment. The first, second and third person was an illustration. It was unconscious but it felt right. I would break into different pieces. I wasn’t integrated."<\/p>\n

Luke: "If a genie said, I’ll give you a lifelong happy stable relationship but you have to become Mormon?"<\/p>\n

Rachel: "No."<\/p>\n

Luke: "Orthodox Jew."<\/p>\n

Rachel: "No."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Resnick (b. 1961) comes home to a drowned hard drive. An ex-boyfriend has broken into her cottage and soaked the machine that holds her work, her drafts, her record of herself. She is past forty. She is single, broke, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26369,167,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-addiction","category-jewish-journalism","category-jewish-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t