The Hero of This Book

I closed my laptop and felt the internet burble through the lid, felt it flow into my fingers and hectic wrists. The next day, I decided abruptly, I would spend the whole day out, just my internetless burner phone in my pocket. I would let the city fill my head, and I would be a person on the earth instead of on the internet. I loved the internet,

Never give up your metaphoric bad habits, the way your obsessions make themselves visible in your words. Tell yourself that one day a scholar will write a paper on them, an x-ray of your psyche, with all of your quirks visible like breaks in bones, both healed and fresh.

She was terrible with money and pinched pennies to convince herself that she wasn’t. My mother hated being bad at anything that involved reason.

Bereaved. That I’d own up to. Bereaved suggests the shadow of the missing one, while grief insists you’re all alone. In London, I was bereaved and haunted.

If you want to write a memoir without writing a memoir, go ahead and call it something else. Let other people argue about it. Arguing with yourself or the dead will get you nowhere. Imagine a character who can’t profess her love; how do things change if you show the one moment she can?

THE MILLENNIUM INCLINATOR, a plaque on the wall said. Funny name for a funicular. It began its ascent. I was going to say inexorable ascent, but of course it would stop when it got to the top. It was just very slow. I was a middle-aged woman with uncombed hair in a glass box; I decided to pretend that it and I were a performance piece.

There are certain emotions available to me only when I am alone, minor longings and notions, a wish to filch and misbehave. This is either my truest self or my most artificial, constructed as it is without a fear of contradiction.

I believed the afterlife was, as an atheist might tell a child curious about heaven, the memories of other people. How my mother would have hated that! To cede control to other people’s brains, when her own brain was what she trusted. Still, she loved being thought about.

Like any nameless narrator, I’ve just declined to introduce myself. I apologize if you hate such narrators and such novels. We have this in common. I hate novels with unnamed narrators. I didn’t mean to write one. Write enough books and these things will happen. I never meant to write a novel about a writer, either. I vowed not to. Writers are dull