Even though I didn’t get to practice writing as a kid, I was an expert at consuming OTHER people’s writing and daydreaming about it. The first book that made me think, I wanna get inside this character’s life like a pod person was Anne of Green Gables. I’d seen the miniseries on the Disney Channel (which I hated most of the time because, MAN, were girls dumb and painted pink on there), and it made me track down every single one of the books in the series and read them a dozen times over.
The books inspired me to embrace being as weird as I wanted to be. Because it worked for Anne. I mean, she was also an annoying kid who talked too much and was uppity for her station, and everyone in the books thought she was adorable! At the heart of it, Anne was a fellow redhead I could admire. She and that girl, Khrystyne Haje from Head of the Class. Yeah, it’s superficial, but hair color identification is SUPER important. That’s why I always think, Where’s the redhead one, jerks?! when I see those rows of stupid blonde dolls in the toy aisles. (That American Doll phenomenon is super weird to adult me, but I’d have torn someone apart to get one as a kid. I bet one day they’ll 3-D print them up to make literal doppelg?ngers. That’ll be terrifying/amazing, and I’ll be there to buy mine on day one! Uh . . . for my future daughter, of course. Ahem.)
My fandom about the Green Gables series was serious business. I prayed every night for my eyes to turn greener. I planned on naming my children Anne and Gilbert, which could have been awkward, seeing as they were married in the books. I put on my life’s bucket list: “Move to Canada because Prince Edward Island is certainly the most WONDROUS place on the planet.”
I daydreamed about BEING Anne. Traipsing through nineteenth-century meadows, reciting Romantic poetry (Keats was my fave, because he died with such gruesome panache.) One day, I started creating my own original scenarios of Anne doing her plucky orphan thing. But I didn’t want to deal with the annoying stuff from old-timey days, like sexism and polio, so I moved up the timeline and transported her into modern life as a free-spirited teen heiress. I’d imagine Anne flying to Hong Kong on her private jet, or spying on Communists while she performed gymnastics for the US Olympic Team. Or simple things, like attending a new high school where she’d enter a classroom wearing designer jeans and everyone would gasp at how pretty she was. “Her hair is so long and red. Can I be her best friend immediately?”
I started throwing in other characters from other books into my headspace, and pretty soon I’d built an imaginary town filled with stolen IP. Perry Mason was there (of course), the whole crew from the Trixie Belden children’s mystery series (Anne loved to steal Trixie’s boyfriend away), Lancelot and Guinevere owned the local garden store, even anthropomorphic pigs and spiders from Charlotte’s Web were full residents with voting rights. It got so complicated I had to start tracking my world in an accounting ledger with everyone’s names, addresses, and personality traits in neat little rows. (“Friendly!” “Secret lovers!” “Murderer!”) My town had it all!
I’d love to say that the stories I conjured up were deep and fraught with intellectual themes, but they were not. They were straight out of Gossip Girl. Anne would arrive in town with a bang, and everyone would want to be friends with her. It helped that she was an orphan who’d been left billions (à la Richie Rich) and had no adult supervision. She drove a Porsche and owned a mansion with white Corinthian columns where she threw parties every night. It had an arcade AND a bowling alley. She was such a baller.
Natch, all the cute guy characters wanted to date her. Including Perry Mason and a grown-up Tom Sawyer, for some reason. Everyone referred to her as “Anne with an e,” and if asked: “No last name. Like Cher.” My utopian alternate world lasted a good six months until my mom discovered my census account ledger hidden beneath clothes in my closet.
One day I walked in on her gathering up laundry in my room. The fact that she was cleaning was shocking enough, but then . . . I saw what was in her hands. Oh my God. My ledger!?!
“Oh baby, is this your writing? Do you want to be a writer? We should get you lessons, let me see!” The slow-motion horror of her opening my notebook and starting to turn a page felt like ripping my own skin off with a potato peeler.
“MOM! That’s mine, stop!” I grabbed the notebook and sprinted away, trying to find the nearest bonfire to get rid of the evidence. There wasn’t one around because it was July and I was inside an actual house, so I searched for somewhere else to stash my shame.
I called out over my shoulder. “They’re just math problems! Can I clean your bedroom? Wash the car? Make me your slave and be distracted, please!” I shoved my ledger under the dog bed as she rounded the living room corner, praying I’d been fast enough to dodge her eye line.
I was so embarrassed. I love my mom, but she has a habit of ignoring personal boundaries. She’d have no qualms about barging in the bathroom while I was bathing and say, “You need to shave your legs, honey, you look like a bear down there!”