OTHER PEOPLE’S STORIES

That was when I noticed I had become a character in other people’s stories. First, B sent me a story she had written: a nonfictiony fiction, she described it, about the friendship of two women. I am the friend in this scenario, the woman described as “a decade older” than the narrator. I am a decade older than B. The narrator describes the me-surrogate as having chapped lips. I often have chapped lips. Late in the story, my-surrogate is described as agonizing over her divorce. Or, rather, in the story, my-surrogate delivers a monologue on the subject of divorce. She speaks of money. She speaks of the difficulty around it: a lawyer, her children, the cats. When I read B’s story, I remembered the night I’d confessed my suffering to her: we’d met for cocktails at a bar in Logan Square, just up from the bar where I’d recently met the man I now loved. It was a liminal moment, though I didn’t know that then.

The pleasure of the date came as a surprise. We ate pretzels, dipped in mustard. He explained something of his work, foreign to me, and I explained something of my work, foreign to him. We laughed about some things and he walked me to my car parked on Sacramento Avenue. He kissed me goodbye on the cheek, and the date was over. I drove home and felt happy in a girlhood way. The next morning the man texted, asked if I would come up to his house for a bike ride: to hear music and have a picnic. I already had plans so I declined but very eagerly and emoji-full, suggesting that we try another time soon. It was weeks before we had another chance to meet and even then it was slow going, on and off until finally as it happened it did happen and now it is four years later and we are in love.

B did not write that story, the story of the man and me and a first date now going on four years. How could she? Instead, B wrote the story of my ex-husband, my not-yet divorce. In those days, it was a story I told. B wrote of another man, my ex, who was causing me pain. Perhaps the man no longer wished to share the story of our past. Or the man refused to maintain the space we had created. B did not write this. B wrote of my children and my pets and my age, changing small details here and there. B wrote of her own despair, which is also not my story, but part of what appeals to me in B. The depth of her feeling, on and off the page. B wrote of a moment, with her mother, when she saw the man I divorced; they happened to share an elevator in a museum, before or after walking through an Ann Collier exhibition. In the story, B describes him as a regular-looking man. I understood that, having heard about my Ex in such dramatic terms, his appearance in the elevator, for B, was uncanny. He could not, in person, live up to my narration.

In fact, the less often I saw my ex, and the more often I spoke of him, the newer he became. More surprising in his humanity. Less one-dimensional, less awful. He was a body, vulnerable and mortal; I had the sense of my own power and complicity.

B did not write that story, either.

About a month after reading B’s story, C sent me the draft of his memoir, which he’d been working on for many years. Often when we spoke, C would say, It’s so weird to talk to you because I’m writing about you in my book right now. Once he said, I’m writing about you and it’s helping me understand you and maybe you will read it and learn about yourself, too. His friend D, our mutual friend, also told me that I was in C’s book and that it might be weird. Because I had already written a book in which C was a character, I did not mind this news. I shrugged, I said I had no ego about it. After all, C was writing the me of 25 years ago – that me was not me at all.

And then most recently, E’s book was published. When I read E’s book two years ago, she was still drafting it. She told me that I was in it, conversations we had, mostly over email. In this book, too, my divorce is a subject. When E asked if she should change my name, I said that I didn’t mind. I liked it, even, and that my divorce was in there, so what? But then years passed. And E’s book came out into the world to some acclaim, and more than one person messaged me to say “I am reading E’s book and you are in it.”

It had been so long since I’d read E’s book and so I returned to it, I looked through my copy, now only reading the G moments, and suddenly I saw that this book, too, was about Female Friendship. One friend was a woman I recognized, named F, who was described as a “more successful writer” than the narrator. I was the other friend. It became clear to me, on this read, that I was the “less successful writer” than F or E, the narrator. The me-surrogate gives a reading, which no one attends; she publishes a book which no one reads; she obsesses endlessly about her ex-husband and his girlfriend. She is the sort of woman who reads Elena Ferrante novels and over-identifies with the main characters. In short, she is exhausting; the narrator looks forward to her departure.

And so imagine my surprise when I read your depiction of the end of my marriage and in particular the attempt to free myself from the narrative – the constraints of the couple form. How could I be a writer within that world and how did you know, how desperate I was to escape? How vividly you portrayed my attempt to release myself from that story. You will say it is fiction; you will claim plausible deniability; and you will laugh but we both know the truth of it, your subtle and magnificent theft.