My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, is a published author. She co-wrote a mystery novel that was nominated for an Edgar award, and she’s working on a historical thriller that ought to be done Any. Day. Now. She’s the long-form writer in the family; our deal is she doesn’t write the songs, and I don’t write the books.
But I did, a long time ago. It was back in the days of my innocent youth, when you’d try anything once (depending on your temperament; some people dropped acid, I wrote comic fiction). It doesn’t have a title, and it’s not what you’d call, well, good. But I still have a copy, and I was possessed, for some reason, to go back and read it a while back.
I have a conflicted relationship with the crap I wrote when I was young. On the one hand, it embarrasses me profoundly, since I am loathe to admit that, at any point, I was anything less than a genius. On the other hand, I’ve saved all of it. And when I say “all of it”, I mean every song I’ve ever written, every scrap of lyrics, every cassette tape of ideas – I have it all, just in case, someday, I’m moved to discover that buried among the dreck of my youth is the next contribution to the American songbook.
And it’s not just the songs. I probably have every word of prose, too – my columns from my high school newspaper, the terrible parodies that my friend Steve King and I passed back and forth in English class – and, of course, the novel.
I actually wrote it for a class assignment – writing a novel was one of the options for our senior project in Mrs. Schwartz’ English class. I liked Mrs. Schwartz, but then again, I was a good little doobie’s good little doobie – just about everyone else thought she was a witch, and she looked the part, too – pointy, thin as a rail, and waaaaay too enthusiastic about English. I don’t know what possessed her to allow high school students to write novels as an English project, and I have no idea whether anyone else wrote one, and I have no idea what grade I got (A, probably, because – guess what – Mrs. Schwartz liked me). And I didn’t do it because I was deeply inspired – I would have done anything to avoid a serious assignment in English class, because while I liked Mrs. Schwartz, I hated, hated, hated English.
Soft fade back to the present day.
So I went down to the basement, and dug the book out of its designated box (because you just know that I have a spreadsheet on my computer that lists the contents of all the boxes in my basement) and curled up with this tome on the sofa, sort of the way a Marine throws himself on an unexploded grenade. And I’m pleased to report that I survived, with my ego partially intact. Partially.
It wasn’t good. The dialogue was frequently embarrassing, and the plot had some long bits which were clearly just stalling until the next thing happened, and its attitude toward women was that basic 70’s women’s liberation/sexism thing that you’d get from seventeen-year-olds back then when they thought they weren’t pigs. But parts of it were surprisingly clever, and occasionally it made me laugh out loud (intentionally), and the plot was really well done in places, and the story had a beginning and a middle and an end which actually all made sense, once you assumed the preposterous naivete of my high-school years. So I kind of dodged a bullet, ego-wise.
So what possessed me to revisit this potential humiliation? Well, it seems that I have a terrible memory for my own life. I don’t remember details the way SWMBT does, or my brother does, and it’s pretty frustrating. And one of the things I don’t remember is what I was like in high school. Was I funny? Was I remotely tolerable? So I was hoping that I could gain some insight into my high school self from reading the book.
And you know what? I’m in there. Not all of me, and not completely formed; but some of the gags are exactly the gags I’d roll out today, even to entertain you, my loyal readers. It’s nice to know that I’m consistent, at least. But I’m never doing another novel. My wife is the long-form writer in the family.