Tommy Dorfman didn’t set out to write a memoir.
The actress had been interested in writing a book of essays at some point, but wasn’t sure when. But after one fateful tarot pull in Montana, she started writing about each card in the deck. Over the course of a year, she realized that she had enough material to start shopping around a book proposal. The result was her newly released memoir, Maybe This Will Save Mepublished on May 27 via Hanover Square Press.
In case it wasn’t obvious already, Dorfman’s certainly isn’t your average celebrity memoir. As she tells me over a Zoom call from her New York City apartment, she’s been a lifelong devotee of the form. In middle school, she read the memoirs of David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs, and Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis. More contemporarily, she cites writers and multihyphenates like Joan Didion, Patti Smith, and Cookie Mueller as inspirations.
But Dorfman’s voice is singularly her own, weaving together the stories of all of her past selves (and even the stories of her parents before she was born) into a cohesive whole. Even when she’s describing particularly harrowing events — being preyed upon by older men as a young teenager, calling an ambulance for a friend who had overdosed — Dorfman writes with unflinching clarity and specificity.
“Getting to release it into the world feels very similar to opening a play on Broadway,” she tells me. “I am no longer responsible for it, and it can no longer haunt me. And now it is yours and it is out of my body and it is gone. And I do actually feel lighter and less burdened by these seasons of my life.”
Ahead of the release of Maybe This Will Save Me, Them spoke with Dorfman about her relationship with tarot, the other rituals she underwent in the process of writing the book, and how she hopes people receive it.
Your book is structured like a tarot deck. Can you tell me about your relationship to the cards?
My relationship to tarot is one that is grounded in connecting to my own sort of spirituality or trying to find a tool to help me ground myself throughout the day in my life. And it’s just been a part of my daily practice for a really long time. When I was at the beginning of my transition, I was struggling with a lot of anxiety, a lot of fear, a lot of confusion, a lot of frustration around what took so long to transition and what was preventing me from transitioning. Those were the larger, looming questions in 2020 that were going on in my brain.
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