Magic
Recently I read Writers and Lovers by Lily King. My friend Nancy had brought me the book a couple months ago, I had picked it up, read a few pages and tossed it down. Not another contemporary novel written in galloping present tense. The book joined the maybe someday stack next to my bed. But it teased me with its cover, items sitting helter-skelter on a plain table-top: three lemons, an orange, a fork, a day planner, matches, napkin with knife, a small yellow package with a blue bow, a white-out container with two pansies, a water pitcher with red and pink peonies, a bread plate with twelve peas. The title written in blood red on a black background.
So one dreary, soggy day I plopped down on the daybed in a room that houses two desks, a computer and stacks of reading and writing material, and picked it back up. As a fan of long, sprawling sentences with rich metaphors and even richer word choices, I wasn’t sure I could make my way into the story enough to let it capture me. But the protagonist appealed to me, the language apropos to the way she was living her life. She is in transition, the choppy scenes clearly reflect her current state. And reality. Let’s run with this for a while…
What I found was a kindred spirit, this girl trying to find purchase in a world that insists on tossing her about. Passionate about books and even more passionate about writing, Camila, aka Casey Peabody, is determined to pursue her dream about “writing the great American novel.” She laments about the fact that many of her college classmates left their writing dreams, and degrees, behind. She plans every day to finish the novel she’s been working on for six years with not much progress. Casey is drowning in tuition debt and has to rely on a ‘70’s banana bicycle for transportation, works as a server in an upscale restaurant in Cambridge Massachusetts, lives in a potting shed rented to her by her brother’s friend. Her life has been upended by her mother’s recent death, she is estranged from her father whom she refers to as “a perv.” (Once a promising child golf prodigy, she had tossed her golf clubs down after discovering her father, a coach at her high school, had peeping holes in the back closet of his office that looked into the girl’s locker room.)
Casey meets two men who insist on intruding in her life. One is a famous middle-aged author, the other an aspiring writer who happens to be a student in the famous writer’s class on campus. She dates both and is torn between them as the rest of her life falls apart: she loses her job; a routine mammogram shows a lump; her landlord decides to sell his home and the potting shed; she is unable to finish her book, decides it’s all crap anyway; and finally, her father shows up with his new wife to convince Casey to give up the only thing she has left of her mother: a sapphire ring she wears always.
Yikes.
Good reasons to have this story gallop along lest we get mired in her godawful life and find ourselves ready to drown right alongside her. Thank god for part three and the resolutions I won’t divulge. But what pulled me into the story and made me feel a kinship to this thirty-one year old lost soul, were parallels: a recent college graduate determined to write a book while serving tables and barely eking out a living, spinning in place and hoping that the next turn will offer a break. Sometimes making bad choices and sometimes finding a glimmer of what could actually be. Finding hope and holding fast. Because what else is there?
My dreams took the turn of those classmates who gave up on a writing career and turned to more secure and lucrative paths. But I well remember, in that life long ago, telling myself every day that I AM A WRITER. It fortified me in my own times of upheaval. Casey and I were the same age when our lives disintegrated. We both obsessed for years on a book that wouldn’t let us go. Both our lives turned around, in different ways. Without spoiling the ending, let’s just say I’m still working on mine.
The magic of a book that talks directly to us is a feeling like no other. We are validated, soothed, yet excited to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves. Rebecca Solnit once said The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. And when our heartbeat ramps up because we feel a strong connection to the words we are reading the whole world feels magical.
How many magical stories are out there to be discovered? To be written?
