“Then what’s the problem? What’s so important about this next book?”
“I can’t rely on my old work,” I say, though I know I can’t make her understand. “I need to write the next best thing. And then another. Otherwise the sales will whittle down, and people will stop reading my work, and everyone will forget about me.” Saying this out loud makes me want to cry. I hadn’t realized how much this terrified me: being unknown, being forgotten. I sniffle. “And then when I die, I won’t have left any mark on the world. It’ll be like I was never here at all.”
Mom watches me for a long while, and then places her hand on my arm.
“Writing isn’t the whole world, Junie. And there’s plenty of careers that won’t give you such constant heartbreak. That’s all I’m saying.”
But writing is the whole world. How can I explain this to her? Stopping isn’t an option. I need to create. It is a physical urge, a craving, like breathing, like eating; when it’s going well, it’s better than sex, and when it’s not, I can’t take pleasure in anything else.
Dad played the guitar during his off time; he understood. A musician needs to be heard; a writer needs to be read. I want to move people’s hearts. I want my books in stores all over the world. I couldn’t stand to be like Mom and Rory, living their little and self-contained lives, with no great projects or prospects to propel them from one chapter to the next. I want the world to wait with bated breath for what I will say next. I want my words to last forever. I want to be eternal, permanent; when I’m gone, I want to leave behind a mountain of pages that scream, Juniper Song was here, and she told us what was on her mind.
Only I don’t know what it is I want to say anymore. I don’t know if I ever did. And I’m terrified that the only thing I’ll ever be remembered for, and the only method by which I can produce good work, is slipping on someone else’s skin.
I don’t want to only be the vessel for Athena’s ghost.
“You could work with Aunt Cheryl,” Mom suggests, oblivious. “She’s still looking for an assistant. You could move out of DC—it’s too expensive anyhow. Come down to Melbourne with me—you could buy a whole house in Suntree with your earnings. Rory showed me—”
I gape at her. “You asked Rory for my tax returns?”
“We were just planning for your future.” Mom shrugs, unbothered. “So with what you have in savings now, it’s smart that you make some property investments. Cheryl has a few houses in mind—”
“Jesus, it’s precisely this . . .” I take a deep breath, force myself to calm down. Mom’s been like this since I was a child. Nothing short of a brain transplant will change her now. “I don’t want to have this conversation anymore.”
“You have to be practical, Junie. You’re young; you have assets. You’ve got to take advantage of them—”
“Okay, stop, please,” I snap. “I know you’ve never supported my writing—”
She blinks. “Of course I supported your writing.”
“No, you didn’t. You hated it. You’ve always thought it was stupid, I get it—”
“Oh, no, Junie. I know what the arts are like. Not everyone’s going to make it big.” She rubs the top of my head, the way she did when I was a child, only now it doesn’t feel remotely comforting. A gesture like this, between adult women, can only be patronizing. “And I just didn’t want to see you get hurt.”
Twenty
TWO DAYS LATER, I’M BACK IN DC, WITHOUT A SINGLE BOOK IDEA or any clue what to do.
When you’ve got a project in your jaws, a full-time writing schedule feels like a blessing. But when you’re struggling to come up with a concept, the hours feel suffocating, accusatory. Time should be flying by as you sit wild-eyed at your laptop, possessed by the muse, pouring out your magnum opus. Instead the seconds creep to a halt.
I have nothing to do. Nothing to write, nothing with which to distract myself. Most days I occupy myself with housework, counting down the minutes until the distraction of my next mealtime. I water my plants. I arrange my mugs. I can make the ritual of consuming a microwave lasagna last for half an hour. I envy the barista at Starbucks, the clerks at Kramers; at least they can while away the days with their dignified menial labor.
I keep winding up on admissions pages of various graduate school programs. I don’t filter for degrees in any one field in particular. I consider them all—law, social work, education, even accounting—because they all promise a gateway into a wholly different life, after an appropriately long period of educational hand-holding in which I don’t have to do any thinking for myself.
I even consider returning to the Veritas College Institute, if only for something to do, but my willpower evaporates every time I reach for my phone. I told my boss I was quitting to pursue my dreams; I can’t bear explaining why I want to come back.
Most nights I end up curled up in bed, phone clutched inches away from my face, browsing the web for mentions of myself and my books just to feel an echo of that thrill from the time I was a literary darling. I read old press releases about myself: the Publishers Weekly profile calling me “incisive and sensitive,” the New Yorker blurb calling me “publishing’s most exciting new talent.” I read and reread the most glowing reviews of The Last Front and Mother Witch on Goodreads, trying to remind myself that there was a time when people truly loved my work.
Whenever that starts to feel stale—usually when the clock creeps toward midnight—I venture into reading the negative shit.
In the past, whenever I trawled Goodreads, I would filter out everything but the five-star reviews, which I would skim over and over again whenever I needed a little ego boost. But now I go straight for the vitriol. It’s like pressing a bleeding sore repeatedly, trying to see how far you can go with your tolerance for pain, because if you know the limits of it, you gain some sense of control over it.
The one-star reviews contain everything you’d expect:
If I stole a novel, I’d steal something better than this LOL!
Just here to say, fuck June Hayward.
Haven’t read this book, but giving this one star because the writer is a plagiarizing, racist thief.
Took off three stars for the Annie Waters scene alone.
I lie there for hours every night, awash in every cruel thing the internet has ever said about me. It’s cathartic, in a perverse way. I like to concentrate all the negativity, to take it all in at once. I take comfort in the fact that it could literally not get any worse than this.
I’ve entertained, occasionally, the question of what literary redemption might look like. What if I begged my haters for forgiveness? What if, instead of holding the line, I admitted everything and made an attempt at reparations?
Diana Qiu has an article up on Medium titled “June Hayward Must Make Amends, and Here’s How.” The twelve-item laundry list includes things like: “Provide public proof she’s taken a training course in racial sensitivity,” “Donate the entirety of her earnings from The Last Front and Mother Witch to a charity selected by an objective committee of Asian American writers,” and “Post her tax returns from the last three years to confirm how much she profited from Athena Liu’s work.”
Tax returns. Is she fucking serious? Who does Diana think she is?
I can stand to be a pariah. But to bend, to throw away all my savings, to kowtow to the Twitterati and prostrate myself before the taunting, smug crowd—I would rather die.
One night, I see a surprisingly thoughtful take amidst the kiddie pool of filth. It’s a review of The Last Front published two months ago, so verbose that it’s nearly a full-length article.