Pages and lives turn
A chance meeting and a health crisis lead to the book Maggie Rowe did not intend to write
Maggie Rowe had intended to title her second memoir “I Am Not Nice.”
The writer and performer had set out to follow up her acclaimed 2017 book, “Sin Bravely: A Memoir of Spiritual Disobedience,” with a “self-expose,” peeling back the layers of her public self as she explored issues of image and “genuine generosity.”
Unexpected events would transform the memoir into “Easy Street,” in which Rowe tells the story of an unexpected and complex friendship with another woman as they both go through very different crises.
“The book took two major turns that I was not anticipating,” says Rowe, who’s written for TV’s “Arrested Development” and “Flaked,” by phone from her office in Los Angeles.
A fateful meeting
Some 15 years ago, Rowe’s husband, television writer Jim Vallely, met and befriended a woman named Sunny and her adult daughter Joanna as they were panhandling outside a Koo Koo Roo restaurant. The pair recognized his name from the credits of “The Golden Girls,” which was their favorite show, and Sunny and Joanna eventually became a part of the couple’s life, coming over to swim or watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” with Rowe and her husband.
But after years of Christmas parties and Halloween get-togethers, Sunny broke a hip, and after a period in a nursing home, she died. Joanna, who was middleaged, was left on the verge of homelessness. Rowe stepped in to help.
Meanwhile, Rowe was experiencing her own challenge: a resurgence of a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder known as “pure O” — “which means the obsessions without the corresponding physical compulsions,” Rowe explains — and was struggling to find appropriate treatment.
Rowe, who had started writing the book before the two events that would come to shape it, pressed pause on the project in the midst of these crises. “I definitely took a break from writing for at least the first six months. I wasn’t doing anything except for surviving,” she says.
Once Rowe resumed writing, she realized there was now a “hero’s journey” for her and Joanna.
“As these two events changed my life, they changed the perspective of the book,” Rowe says. “The concerns about my placement in the world and envy and how I was perceived and how I perceived myself kind of fell away to more urgent concerns, which were my own sanity and Joanna staying alive.”
An underlying theme is how difficult finding help can be. “Joanna and I, at the same time, went through two very different labyrinths,” says Rowe.
“I had great insurance. I had Writers Guild insurance. In some ways, the world was my oyster as far as what I had access to,” she adds. Yet, finding the right mental health professionals was a difficult journey.
For Joanna, the labyrinth involved navigating the Social Security system, finding resources to prepare her for living alone and obtaining housing. “Her life was completely upended,” says Rowe. “She was absolutely dependent on her mother and, when her mother was gone, my husband and I were the only people that she knew.”
It’s in the details that Rowe reveals the faults in systems intended to help people, particularly in Joanna’s case. Sunny was Joanna’s representative payee for Social Security. Upon her mother’s death, Joanna’s disability payments simply ceased and would not start again until she had a new person to receive the funds for her.
“Social Security cannot appoint you a representative. They don’t do that and it’s illegal to pay for one,” says Rowe. “It puts people in the position to have to find somebody who is willing to do the paperwork and the accounting. It’s a big ask for somebody who is in the position of needing someone to help them with that kind of thing in the first place. I bet tons of people fall through the system when their representative dies.”
Comic stylings
Despite its heavy subject matter, “Easy Street” is loaded with humor, such as when Sunny tells Rowe she looks like Katherine Heigl, to which Joanna adds, “But not as pretty.” Rowe’s keen, wry observations about life in Los Angeles say a lot about wealth, privilege and class in the city. Take, for example, her reasoning for wanting Joanna to get a blowout before they check out an apartment.
“For one thing, a blowout is an established urban symbol of disposable income and will signal to the landlord that Joanna is more likely to pay her rent on time than someone who couldn’t tame her hair with both hands,” Rowe writes.
“I totally feel that way. It’s so silly,” says Rowe. “If I can tame my hair, I can tame this problem.”
Overall, though, “Easy Street” is about what Rowe learned through helping Joanna as she was going through her own struggle.
“I think that it became more about reaching outside of yourself,” she says, “and having some focus that others can really be a saving grace in a mental health crisis.”