Welcome!
I’m glad we finally found each other.
In recovery circles, we’re told: Tell your story, tell your truth, it’s all you have. But everybody has more than one story. And sometimes, more than one truth, because we each contain multitudes.These are mine.
We are the village. We don’t have to do any of this alone.
I write about forgiving family secrets and the way secrets stain the lives of everyone we touch. About the lies we all tell ourselves in order to be in the world.
For anyone caring for an elderly parent (10+ yrs) or partner with dementia you know we can spend years grieving someone who hasn’t died (yet), going through all the Kübler-Ross stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and hopefully, eventually, acceptance. Sometimes, that’s just a Tuesday.
Occasionally, I take a sober look at the years lost to drugs and alcohol in the long Times Square nights and wasted days in the Lower East Side. Sometimes fun, but what made us treat ourselves in ways we’d never allow anyone else to? I know I’m not the only one.
About me
I’m still figuring out what’s true, what’s not, and what next right thing is
I’m a sixty-something, single, childless, sober writer who’s spent years writing about sex, drugs, and drunkenness. I got sober at thirty-three after picking up a long-haired sober biker cop in a bar, because you never know what your angels will look like. For the last ten years, I’ve been caring for my aging mother and her dementia.
I have an AA in Theater- which qualifies me to be a waitress
I have a BA in English - which qualifies me to…well, nothing
I have an MFA in Creative Writing - so I’m officially certified to use multi-syllabic and hyphenated words like multi-syllabic to tell a story.
Along the way
My essays have appeared in ShortReads, Oldster, Open Secrets, Litro UK, Hippocampus Magazine, drafthorse lit journal, Panoply, BUST, xojane, the fix, and O-the Oprah Magazine, in multiple anthologies: most recently Memoirist Quarterly, Whorephobia, Bearing Life - Women Writing on Childlessness (alongside Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates), and Best American Erotica 1995.
Appeared as a featured guest on Sex and Politics (Brooklyn College radio); the KGB Radio Hour with Ratso Sloman and Mark Jacobson; In Bed with Susie Bright (audible.com); and Minx on Pseudo.com.
Studied with Spalding Gray, Virginia Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo, playwright Gretchen Cryer, author and Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott.
A former mentor with the PEN America Prison Writing Program, I also had the chance to advise a graduate seminar in the art of memoir at Lesley University’s MFA Creative Writing program.
Writing is pretty much the only thing I’m qualified to do. I was a shite waitress.
Multi-syllabic words take a lot of energy to use correctly so there will not be a superfluity of sesquipedalian discourse.
I have the degree, that’s gonna have to be enough for you.
What Readers are Saying…
“Jodi Sh. Doff, who “grew up in the suburbs as someone else entirely,” recalls Henry Miller’s in-your-face exposition. She tells of a night at Diamond Lil’s on Canal Street, where …we see the whole money/sex connection enacted with raw charm and an immediacy that reaches far beyond this strip club…” Toni Bentley, New York Times : Sunday Book Review cover
“[A]t Sex Worker Literati, a new reading and performance series…humorous requests and political gripes were tempered by Jodi Sh. Doff, who read a beautiful, heart-breaking piece about a 15-year-old stripper…claimed by what she referred to as “the machine” – the underworld of drugs, sex and violence in the 80s, where one’s own survival outweighed all else.” Anna Pulley, Chicago Now
“Jodi Sh. Doff, reminds us that she worked during an era when the term “sex worker” hadn’t yet been invented. Her writing is hardboiled [as she] recounts the tragedy of the brutal murder of Lele, a beautiful young stripper she worked with….“ Gerry Visco, New York Press Review
“Jodi Sh. Doff…shows that she can get a whole world – the world of “the pre-Disney Times Square topless business” – across in a few pages, or even a few sentences: a stripper is stabbed by her husband while she dances; the bartender wipes blood off the bottles and keeps serving.” - Sady Doyle, Tiger Beatdown
“In Jodi Sh. Doff’s “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Off” a young woman, afraid she has inherited her father’s abusive tendencies, chooses hysterectomy…An intricate and important anthology, ultimately using childlessness to develop a study of art, female identity, and self-understanding. Bearing Life : Women’s Writings on Childlessness (Feminist Press, 2000)
You’re welcome here. If you like what you read, share Only The Jodi with your friends and on social media. You can usually find me somewhere as @jshdoff
