Why we write
The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
-- Tom Clancy
She didn't have one true best friend in her life, although there seems to always be one best friend in everybody else's life. Everyone seemed to know some other person so well that they could call him or her in the middle of the night and get him or her to come over for any silly reason. "OK, I'll be right there". She never had that kind of friend. And the minor friends she did have had parents that left her feeling as if she were approaching that relationship not as a friend, but someone hired from some temporary position.
She has no memory of her mother and father hugging. She has no recollection of a kiss, or even a touch. As a girl no one had touched her except when she was sick or very bad.
She noticed these early subtle estrangements between her parents and their haphazard improvisations of ordinary life. Yet she never placed blame on them for those years, no regrets, no accusations. Even after she grew up and learned to scrutinize and judge the past she did not even feel sadness for that lost child. But the adult, in answer, became one that juggled the strange juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity, of both not needing and wanting so much.
At some point she decided she liked drawing and writing precisely because no one had to respond. It somehow satisfied the conflicts within her. The imaginary reader was like a dog: a great listener, man’s best friend, her best friend. Writing and drawing were like creating a new lexicon that would be the speech of all hidden love and understanding. It would be a language that would speak the desire unheard by others. Where touch, feeling, and ecstasy could come murmuring and pouring out of sentence or stroke of a pen and be soothed or possessed somehow and someway by no one.
So that is why her secrets became the reverse of most secrets, instead of the kind you tell only your closest friend it was the kind she only told strangers.
-- Tom Clancy
She didn't have one true best friend in her life, although there seems to always be one best friend in everybody else's life. Everyone seemed to know some other person so well that they could call him or her in the middle of the night and get him or her to come over for any silly reason. "OK, I'll be right there". She never had that kind of friend. And the minor friends she did have had parents that left her feeling as if she were approaching that relationship not as a friend, but someone hired from some temporary position.
She has no memory of her mother and father hugging. She has no recollection of a kiss, or even a touch. As a girl no one had touched her except when she was sick or very bad.
She noticed these early subtle estrangements between her parents and their haphazard improvisations of ordinary life. Yet she never placed blame on them for those years, no regrets, no accusations. Even after she grew up and learned to scrutinize and judge the past she did not even feel sadness for that lost child. But the adult, in answer, became one that juggled the strange juxtaposition of callousness and extreme sensitivity, of both not needing and wanting so much.
At some point she decided she liked drawing and writing precisely because no one had to respond. It somehow satisfied the conflicts within her. The imaginary reader was like a dog: a great listener, man’s best friend, her best friend. Writing and drawing were like creating a new lexicon that would be the speech of all hidden love and understanding. It would be a language that would speak the desire unheard by others. Where touch, feeling, and ecstasy could come murmuring and pouring out of sentence or stroke of a pen and be soothed or possessed somehow and someway by no one.
So that is why her secrets became the reverse of most secrets, instead of the kind you tell only your closest friend it was the kind she only told strangers.
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