“Ariel Castro,” Sharon says. “He went to prison. Committed suicide there.”
“Kidnap, suicide,” Seth says. “Unfortunate he didn’t reverse the order.”
“So why is this book so powerful?” Sharon asks, holding up her copy. “Anyone think it wasn’t?”
Nobody thinks that.
Oscar says it was so powerful he didn’t read past the first chapter. “Too real. Where I come from . . . Too real.”
“I believe you,” Sharon says, “which takes me back to my original question.”
“Stories get into your head in a way the real world doesn’t,” Leah says. “When you read about that Castro guy, you think about what it must have been like for those girls, like how trapped they were and how they couldn’t know the truth about anything going on right on the outer walls of that house, and it’s bad but it’s over at the time you’re hearing about it and everyone’s okay; well, maybe not okay, but alive and getting help. But when you read a story like Living Dead Girl, you walk with her, page by page, like in real time, and you have no idea whether or not everything’s going to be okay.”
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re with her. You could be her.”
Layton gives a short laugh. “You know how the best review a book can get is supposed to be, ‘I couldn’t put it down’? Well, I couldn’t not put this one down. But then I couldn’t not pick it back up.”
Maddy starts to talk, then chokes. “You know what I hated? I hated that she was such a cool kid before he got her, and then she was just more and more scooped out.”
That sends my heart into my throat.
Up goes Seth’s hand. The one outlier. “It was a good book,” he says. “Held together well. I thought the author was a superb word conservationist. But this power you all seem to have succumbed to eluded me.”
Sharon says, “And we know why that is, don’t we, Seth?”
“We know the theory,” Seth says.
“But it’s a theory like evolution, don’t you think? Like . . . solid?”
“Maybe pretty solid,” Seth admits.
“C’mon, buddy, you got to give me this one,” Sharon says. “You have the big figure-it-out brain. The rational brain. These babies . . .”—and her hand sweeps the group—“have the big crybaby brain, the emotional one. Your emotional brain is, like, one-celled.”
“A bit of hyperbole,” Seth says, “but you’re the librarian, so I’ll concede that.”
Sharon slaps both palms on the table. “Good! You guys know what’s next, right? We all agreed? Four weeks telling our own stories. Remember? We tell them, then we write them.”
There is a grudging, collective, “Yeah . . .”
“Hey,” she says, “it’s a writer’s club, too, and lately we’ve been doing way more reading than writing.”
This has always seemed like the most dangerous part of this club to me; it requires way more trust than I’m used to allowing.
Up goes Seth’s hand, again. “I don’t believe I had a voice in this decision. Is there a reason I wasn’t informed about this aspect?”
“There is,” Sharon says. “When your mother called to inquire about this club, she told me you’d be resistant, that self-disclosure isn’t your thing; so we agreed to be honorable. We kept it from you.”
“Did you have conversations with everyone’s mother before bringing them in?”
“No,” she says. “Everyone else joined without assistance from their mother.”
Seth nods in surrender, shows us the closest thing he knows to embarrassment with a head shake and a glance toward the ground. “I guess my mother and I need to have another conversation.”
Seth doesn’t realize how much he’s disclosing, telling us there were other conversations.
“And why would talking about one’s life have anything to do with one’s writing anyway?” He seems indignant.
“Good stories come from life,” Sharon says. “And for most writers, it’s the easiest place to start.”
“Well, it seems like an outlandish waste of time to me, if you want the truth.”
“I don’t want the truth, Seth. Nobody’s going to make you tell your story, but if you listen you might understand why the rest of us will.” She keeps looking at Seth, but the rest is catch-up for us. “See, life happens as much in the imagination as it does out where there’s earth, wind, and fire. How we understand story can be a blueprint for understanding our lives. Things happen in seemingly random order, but if we pay attention to real events the way an author pays attention to story, we’re forced to look at cause and effect, and understanding cause and effect shows us the relatedness of events, and our parts in them.”
“If more teachers knew that,” Maddy says, “we wouldn’t be reading so much shit in our English classes.”
“But if you weren’t reading so much shit in your English classes, I’d have a harder time getting you to my book club, so be nice to your English teachers. And read the shit they give you. Some of it is really good shit. Now, any storytellers?”
Mark says, “This is crazy. I have this . . . I don’t know, almost a compulsion to say something, but it’s swimming around in my head in a way . . . that makes it hard to find, like, the opening paragraph.”
Sharon says, “Remember in our last writing block, we decided it’s not necessary to start at the ‘start,’ that you jump in at the most compelling part.”
Mark shifts around in his seat and he stares into that “nowhere” space a few inches in front of him, and he looks like he’s about to jump into water only Lynne Cox could endure. “You guys scare the heck out of me . . . I mean, this club.”
“Yet here you are,” Maddy says.
“Yeah. Here I am. So here goes. I go to church; my whole family does. We believe what we hear, try to act on those beliefs. As long as we do that, everything is calm at our house. But I have an older sister; she was my hero because she always took
