I pull them out and set them on the floor.
I used to live my entire life out of these notebooks. They’re crammed with doodles I scribbled instead of listening during class; full-scale drawings I sketched out after school; half-finished scenes or story ideas or even fragments of lines of dialogue that came to me throughout the day. Nothing in these dream worlds ever became a fully formed product—I didn’t have the discipline or craft skills then to write a complete novel. They’re more like a smorgasbord of creative churning, half-formed doors to other worlds, worlds in which I lingered for hours when I didn’t want to be in my own.
I flip through the pages, smiling. It’s cute to see how derivative my story ideas were of whatever fandoms I was in at the time. Sixth grade: my Twilight phase, and I was clearly infatuated with Alice Cullen because I kept describing a protagonist with the same gravity-defying pixie cut. Ninth grade: my emo phase, and everything was Evanescence and Linkin Park lyrics. By then I’d begun sketching out some gothic, futuristic dystopian cityscape where kids flew around on skateboards and everyone had floppy, skunk-tail bangs and arm warmers. I guess Ayn Rand was an influence at some point in tenth grade, because by then I was writing paragraphs on paragraphs about a male lead named Howard Sharp, who bowed to no one, who had an unassailable sense of pride, who was a “lone believer in truth in a world of lies.”
I spend the rest of the afternoon going through those notebooks. I don’t notice the time slipping by until Mom calls upstairs asking if I want takeout for dinner, and it’s only then that I realize the sun has set. I’ve lost myself for hours in those worlds.
I call down to Mom that takeout sounds fine. Then I root around for a cardboard box to load my notebooks into. I’ll bring them back to my apartment and let them linger in the closet, maybe take them out whenever I’m feeling particularly nostalgic. They won’t suit my current purposes—there’s nothing there that I could turn into a sellable manuscript now. But they’ll remind me, whenever I need it, that writing didn’t used to be so miserable.
God, I miss my high school days, when I could flip my notebook open to an empty page and see possibility instead of frustration. When I took real pleasure in stringing words and sentences together just to see how they sounded. When writing was an act of sheer imagination, of taking myself away somewhere else, of creating something that was only for me.
I miss writing before I met Athena Liu.
But enter professional publishing, and suddenly writing is a matter of professional jealousies, obscure marketing budgets, and advances that don’t measure up to those of your peers. Editors go in and mess around with your words, your vision. Marketing and publicity make you distill hundreds of pages of careful, nuanced reflection into cute, tweet-size talking points. Readers inflict their own expectations, not just on the story, but on your politics, your philosophy, your stance on all things ethical. You, not your writing, become the product—your looks, your wit, your quippy clapbacks and factional alignments with online beefs that no one in the real world gives a shit about.
And once you’re writing for the market, it doesn’t matter what stories are burning inside you. It matters what audiences want to see, and no one cares about the inner musings of a plain, straight white girl from Philly. They want the new and exotic, the diverse, and if I want to stay afloat, that’s what I have to give them.
MOM ORDERS DINNER FROM GREAT WALL, THE LOCAL CHINESE PLACE.
“They’re new,” she informs me as I sit down. “Horrible service; I wouldn’t go back there in person. It took me three tries just to get some water. But delivery is fast, and I like their orange chicken.” She opens a carton of rice and sets it before me. “You like Chinese food, right?”
I don’t have the heart to tell her that it was Rory who liked Chinese, and that Chinese food makes my stomach roil, especially now, since that horrible club meeting in Rockville.
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“I got you the Triple Buddha. Are you still vegetarian?”
“Oh, only sort of, but that’s fine.” I split my chopsticks open. “Thanks.”
Mom, nodding, spoons some pork fried rice onto her plate and begins to eat.
We don’t talk much. It’s always been like this between us—either placid silence, or vicious fighting. There’s no casual in-between, no common interests we can shoot the shit about. Whatever wildness Mom once possessed seems to have evaporated back in the eighties, when she was smoking pot and following bands around and naming her children things like Juniper Song and Aurora Whisper. She went back to work after Dad died, and since then has molded herself entirely into the American ideal of a working single mother: perfect attendance at her office job, perfect attendance at our parent-teacher meetings, just enough savings to put Rory and me through good schools with minimal student debt and to set up a retirement account for herself. The demands of such a hustle, it seems, left no room for creativity. She’s the kind of suburban white mother who buys home living magazines at the grocery checkout counter, who drinks crate upon crate of four-dollar wines from Trader Joe’s, who refers to Twilight as “those vampire books,” and who hasn’t read anything other than Costco discount paperbacks for decades.
Mom always got along better with Rory. I always got the sense that she didn’t quite know what to do with me. It was Dad who could always follow me wherever my imagination went. But we don’t talk about Dad.
We sit in silence for a while, chewing on egg rolls and stir-fried chicken bits so sweet they taste like candy. At last, Mom asks, “How’s your, well, book writing going?”
Mom has always had the particular ability to reduce all my aspirations to trivial obsessions with a simple disinterested question.
I set down my chopsticks. “It’s, uh, fine.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Well, actually, I’m sort of . . .” I want to tell her why I’ve been so miserable these past few months, but I don’t know where to begin. “I’m in a difficult place. Creatively. Like, I can’t think of anything to write about.”
“You mean like writer’s block?”
“Sort of like that. Only usually I have all these tricks to break out of it. Writing exercises, listening to music, going on long walks and whatnot. It’s not working this time.”
Mom shoves some bits of chicken aside to snag a candied pecan. “Well, maybe it’s time to move on, then.”
“Mom.”
“I’m just saying. Rory’s friend can always get you into that class. You just have to fill out the application.”
Mom has suggested that I do a master’s in tax and accounting at American University every time I’ve seen her in the last four years. She’s even gone so far as to print and mail me the application the summer after my debut novel flopped and I resorted to tutoring kids for the SAT to make rent.
“For the last time, I don’t want to be an accountant.”
“What’s so wrong with being an accountant?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t want to work an office job like you and Rory—”
I know what she’ll say next. We’ve been hurling these lines at each other for years. “You’re too good for office jobs? Junie the Yalie won’t put in a hard day’s work like the rest of us?”
“Mom, stop.”
“Rory puts food on the table. Rory has a retirement account—”
“I make more than enough to live on,” I snap. “I’m renting a one-bedroom in Rosslyn. I have insurance. I bought a new laptop. I’m probably richer than Rory, even—”