Here’s an excerpt for you from @elizabetheslami’s gorgeous essay “All the Moon Men We Have Loved” in Writing Off Script:  

After my grandmother’s death, we went to work cleaning out her house. One by one, we wrapped the glass vases no one wanted in newspaper. We rolled up miles of plastic covers, revealing the spotless sofa and the white carpet, as if the house was finally ready for a long-awaited guest of honor. 

But no one was coming. My grandfather had already died years before, of a heart sick and lovesick, in a hospital in a warm city in California far away from his unhappy wife and her legendary tantrums, far from his beloved Washington Redskins. 

My mother and I carried out bags of my grandmother’s Harlequin romances, torrid novels the size of my hand that she bought and sold at St. Bernard’s book swaps to other old women, all of them connoisseurs of stories of love. My grandmother had never really stopped looking for some way out from under the heavy branches.

After the books, we sat on the floor and began boxing up her movies. Once the world switched to DVDs, St. Bernard’s no longer had any use for the videos, and my grandmother took home most of them. An Affair to Remember. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness. Roman Holiday. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? In an hour, we were out of boxes. Some of the videos were so worn they’d lost their labels, and my grandmother had scrawled the titles on stickers affixed to their spines. Her handwriting is what I think of when anyone mentions these movies. Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman.

I didn’t want her jewelry, but I kept a few of her videos, long after her stickers peeled off. I still have them, though they smell more of dust and wood than of White Diamonds.

To read “All the Moon Men We Have Loved” in its entirety, please purchase your copy of Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema here for just $4.99.  Proceeds benefit the Joplin High School film and video production program through the Joplin Schools Tornado Relief Fund.