“We fully expect you to make big mistakes your first few months here,” my boss told me on my first day of work, after I successfully completed my initiation by putting together my own rolling chair. I am not used to making mistakes–no–I am not used to making mistakes and having them mean something. I think that’s what sets the “real world” apart from the life we knew in college; this isn’t a rehearsal anymore, the curtain’s been pulled back. Now, everything counts in a way beyond emotionality. Everything counts in a way that can be mathematically measured.
I have made plenty of mistakes that have meant something, but perhaps only to me, their impact manifesting as a dark, throbbing coil behind my breastbone. Often times they start with the phrase, “I’m not going to sleep with you. I am not that kind of girl.” The truth is that I have no idea what kind of girl I am. The truth is that the girl I am seems to change as suddenly as the weather patterns. A confident version of me might saunter in with the fog, only to leave again by daylight. I have wasted a lot of energy trying to convince the men I’ve loved that I didn’t love them at all, that I ‘didn’t believe’ in marriage and that ‘kids are just a vanity project,’ but it’s exhausting pretending to believe all of these things, and I am not young enough anymore to feel that pretending is worth the effort. I don’t know what kind of girl I am, but at this point I like to think I know what kind of girl I am not.
I was a voracious reader when I was a kid, and I think this was because the internet didn’t really consume my life the way it does now. When I was in elementary school in the late 90’s, the internet existed solely in the sun room of our row house in Allentown, PA. It was one sturdy desktop computer with a dial-up connection. Now I am online almost 10-12 hours a day, and it feels like there is never enough time for reading anymore.
Mine is a family of readers. We never had enough room for all of the books in our house. When we moved in 2001, a third of the boxes we packed consisted solely of books. My mother was always reading memoirs, my father was always reading biographies about US presidents. Once a week my mother would take my sister and I to the Allentown Public Library and we would spend hours there, twirling around on the orange bubble chairs and picking through YA fiction. Judy Blume, Louis Sachar, Caroline B. Cooney: if it was weird or sad or about “being stuck in this town,” I wanted to read it.
I also had a very bizarre obsession with Holocaust historical fiction. When I go home to Pennsylvania I love to go through my old bookshelves, but it’s creepy how many of the books there are related to the Holocaust. There’s Number the Stars, of course, but there’s also When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit (HUH?), Escape from Warsaw and The Devil’s Arithmetic. Apparently morbidity strikes young. It is easy to blame this on my father’s penchant for reading me Solzhenitsyn and The Atlantic as bedtime stories instead of Dr. Seuss, but I think that excuse is kind of a cop out. The first R-rated movie I ever saw was Schindler’s List. I guess it’s hard to say which came first: my parents’ willingness to cede violent media to me (but nothing sexual, of course!), or my macabre fascination with it.
In an article that most likely would’ve sent her into a rage, and most certainly sent me into one, the NYT Style Section decided to boil down all of Simone de Beavoir’s literary accomplishments into one shallow question: Was Simone de Beauvoir beautiful?
I seriously almost puked when I read that. Give me a break! When I lived in Paris I was inspired by my location to read a ton of de Beauvoir, and subsequently fell in love with her writing. The Mandarins is one of my favorite books at all time, and provides a detailed glimpse into the intimate lives of people struggling with romantic entanglements and political involvements following WWII. It’s an incredible book, as is, of course The Second Sex, which–with a recent reprint–is supposedly the impetus for this absurd NYT piece. It’s the Style Section, so I know that they’re not going to give her the ol’ Kakutani literary treatment; but this is also the New York Times, not Cosmopolitan, so the fact that they crystallize all of de Beauvoir’s amazing philosophical and literary thinking into an analysis of her wardrobe is just upsetting. They would never do this to a male writer. Imagine a feature on Hemingway’s wardrobe.
Yeah, not gonna happen.
When I was little I spent a lot of time in bookstores. Particularly after my parents’ divorce, which wasn’t messy as far as divorces go but was painful nonetheless, I saw bookstores as a place where my deep desire for solitude could be cultivated and–thankfully–go breezily unacknowledged. Bookstores are one of those few public places where nobody questions a person on their own. In restaurants or at movie theaters there’s something deeply shameful about being seen alone. If you have people in your life, why would you ever go to these venues without them? I discourage that kind of thinking, and I love going to movies alone, but it’s bookstores that I favor most because a person alone in a bookstore is a person who is okay with creating and living in their own tiny universe.