Hilarious. Best thing I've read in a while.Dateline: early spring. A time of renewal. My last visit with Margaret takes place at her loft in downtown L.A. It looks like a Design Within Reach catalogue exploded and someone garnished it with a year’s worth of Dwell. Her advance was modest, she assures me, but she scraped up a down payment by selling some Pan Am stock she’d inherited. It seems she’s really escaped her circumstances, been granted the dream of half-white, half-Cherokee kids who are adopted by black families everywhere: She is truly movin’ on up, and I ask her if she’s a little scared about how normal things have become. We’re a long way from the ghetto, after all.
“Actually, it’s only a five-minute drive, but to answer your question, no. There’s the book, and there’s my life. Two separate things. In the book, I had to keep it going, or as I put it, ‘Double it.’ When I came up with a showstopping set piece, I had to top myself every chapter. I think that’s true for everyone, no matter what kind of memoir you’re writing. That’s two shipwrecks, two killer grizzlies, two penknife amputations. Double it! If you’re writing about how your plane crashed in the Andes and you had to eat all the other passengers to survive, what if when you get rescued, your rescuers’ plane crashes and then you have to eat all of them, too? Double it! Without sacrificing psychological complexity, of course.” She blows on her cappuccino. “But in real life, there’s just living.”
It’s getting dark, and I’ve grown tiresome with all my questions. She reaches over and wipes a smear of foam from my mustache. It’s a surprisingly tender gesture, and I can’t help thinking of all the people she’s killed. “A lifetime ago,” she says, reading my mind. There is no more Pebbles. Only Margaret.
(by the way, this will probably make negative sense unless you are aware of the background)
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