I was always better at stories than at real life. Books are a religion I have found to be more lasting than any church-based one. You must read David Foster Wallace, my friend and fellow believer said, like I was going to love his work and it was going to change my life. But some of us are the type to try and ease into love, to approach it sideways or not at all. And change? Change is frightening. I read that novel in the last semester of my undergraduate degree; it felt like I was reading constantly as a way to avoid all the decisions I needed to make. Or as though I would find the answers in Chapters One or Five.
Through four years of school I had been the same as Lenore, the main character who at the beginning of the novel, The Broom of the System, finds her shared dorm invaded by drunk frat boys. I never knew what to do about those boys either; they made me feel indignant and undervalued all at the same time. Like I had passed on something that I should really have tried first. Parties, one of Lenore’s friends says, are “a depressing ritual, a rite that we’re expected by God knows who to act out, over and over.”
I tried to write about a party once, and it was painfully clear how I had hardly been to any parties, how the ones I wanted to attend did not exist. “It would never happen like this, so perfect,” a boy in my Fiction Workshop said. Something needs to light on fire. I was writing to tell the better version, the one in which you are not doomed to awkwardness and listening to everyone else tell their romantic troubles. And so I gave up on writing about school life, I stopped writing about people my own age. After all, most of the books I read had older characters with troubles that felt sad and enchanting and real, the way nothing in my life was.
What do you do when you’ve become a minor character in your own life? When everyone tells you that these years are the climax, the best part of the story. That you should never grow up, because you are going to regret it when you do. But what if I wanted to believe that the best part might still be coming? “You don’t enjoy stories anymore?” a character asks Lenore at one point. I did, but I felt unable to tell them anymore. I became a reader instead, because I had so much free time. And it felt like a small and manageable rebellion, to read all those novels no one seemed to take from the seventh floor of the library, to read them for no reason but pleasure.
And then in the last year of my Creative Writing degree I won a school prize for one of my short stories, and I had another one accepted for publication in a prestigious national literary magazine. Why do you write like someone so much older than you are, the editors asked me. Do you know what other students are writing about, the sex, the dating, the beer?
I had grown up with adults, playing cards and drinking wine and hearing about divorce on a Friday night. Had I always wanted to be one that badly, to escape my own reality? The writing success felt like a trick I had pulled off, a Jay Gatsby version of my life that had fooled everyone. Suddenly it was a good thing to be the world’s oldest twentysomething, like I had been silent and listening for years and finally heard something good. The storytellers are always old, I convinced myself, they have to be out gathering their tales and tracking the stories down, finding audiences. But I was still melancholy, to realize you could outwrite your own life. Lenore’s brother says that she worries “that you’re not really real, you’re only real if you’re told about.” If my life wasn’t worthy of a story, if I couldn’t be the protagonist in my 4000 word piece, who was I?
Because I was never who I was supposed to be at any age, I was the girl on the porch writing at an old school desk. The one who astonished her teachers, they said she had potential and she wanted to believe them, like she could write her way out if she got good enough. Maybe it could protect her, since there was this anxiety no one could protect her from, since she did not even know how to tell them about.
The year I read that book was the year I finally began to open up my life to others, learning that it was alright to talk about things, that it could help me. I had been telling stories, but then in a way I had not been telling them at all. And I found that even the sad stories could be beautiful, the way you can love rain and thunderstorms when you are inside and it is not pain exactly, just a reminder. You have to tell the truth, to really live. And that telling will save you, even if it looks like it will only make you vulnerable. I remember learning that the way to kill a black bear was to shoot for its heart. But it was not going to kill me, that shiver of humiliation as I admitted I was in love with a man who didn’t want a relationship. And I had been inventing a whole plot for the two of us, because I was so good at tales. Our stories, I found, are what make us human. Especially the ones where we are the villain, or the clueless bystander. After all, someone else has to tell the one in which we are the hero. It is such a helpless way to be, and that is the important part.
It is also the part I get stuck on when I try to talk about the novel, the place where love shows itself. Near the end of a witty, smart and cynical book, that scene. Lenore lays in bed with the man she first met when he was a bullish frat boy, and she couldn’t like him them. But when they talk he says, “I remember seeing you in Melinda-Sue’s room that one time, so long ago, and thinking to myself: artist.” Like there was a beauty to that unformed version of her, the one that could not participate in life around her. “You’re weird about words, aren’t you,” he says to her. “Like you take them awful seriously… like they were a big sharp tool, or like a chainsaw, that could cut you up as easy as some tree.” Words are everything to me; I know I watch bodies for the words they have named themselves with. For all the actions that are just unsaid things.
Andy tells her a story of losing his grandmother and how she was losing him, she had lost her hold on life itself. She waited on her porch in Texas every day because she was too senile to realize the family only came on Saturdays. And the characters of Andy and Lenore are young and doubtful and terrified and sarcastic and cynical. Just like I was, just like I am. But that story makes Lenore cry. “At school,” Andy says, “you more or less got to have a thing.”
What if your thing, your purpose, is stories? Because storytelling is not a cynical act. It is the most un-cynical thing in the world, like love if you do it right. Andy is the man who tries too hard, who wanted to be cool when that was what would help him survive. The novel reminded me I was learning how stories show the place where a person hurts, where they have the capacity to hurt themselves. And I listened and knew that I could love someone enough to be selfish and believe that their version was a lie and I knew the truth. I would hold onto them and tell them a story like it was going to save us both, the one where the narrator is benevolent and the protagonist comes out alright in the end. Because I have been doing this my whole life. But I choose it now, this beautiful necessary thing.
