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“Did you ever think you were going to get this far?”
The interviewer stopped, leaned back, and waited patiently for an answer. In the middle of the table sat a silver tape recorder, like an obedient child waiting for directions from a parent. Across the burnished wooden surface, at the other end, sat a tall, slender lady, pondering the question that had just been asked to her.
She had never thought that people would have wanted to know her life, never really thought that her fifteen minutes of fame would last longer than that. Even now, in her third best-selling book, she was still a bit taken aback from all the attention critics showered down upon her.
It all began with words on a page.
At the age of five she had left China for an alien land. American was too big, too loud, too fast for the little girl to bear. The words sounded bizarre, but she could still understand the cruel teasing tone behind their laughs. Then, a kind teacher introduced her to books. Suddenly, the little girl stopped suffering. When she could not understand some of the words, the teacher kindly taught them to her, and slowly she could enjoy the books, could cheer on Wilbur at the state fair or cry with the lonely Maniac McGee.
Page after page, chapter after chapter, book after book, she read.
Her language improved, she lost the awkward accent that was the source of the taunting, no longer speaking in choppy fragments but in the smoothly flowing ebb of a narrative. When the time came to write a paper on her best friend, she chose Aslan, a noble beast of great fortitude and power that had imbued her with strength of her own. Teachers began to compliment her on the language of her writing, noting how remarkable it was that she used “melancholy” and “euphoria” instead of her classmates’ “sad” and “happy.”
~~~
As she reached her teens, she hated the world for forcing her to grow up. Saturated with angst and bitterness, the angry adolescent rejected her childhood favorites, labeling them lame, babyish, and no longer relevant to her almost adult life. But the world didn’t let her stay mad for long. Fate placed The Diary of Anne Frank into her hands; it had been a book that fell out of the shelf at the library. She had picked it up, annoyed, only to stare into the face of a hollowed-eyed teenage girl that seemed to be filled with as much sorrow and sadness as her. Unable to overcome her curiosity, she sat down, opened the book, and began to read.
“The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!” –Anne Frank
With tears brimming in her eyes, she closed the book. The quote burned into her mind, a white hot iron that pressed deeply into her thoughts. Suddenly she didn’t feel so hopeless. The future did not seem so menacing, so full of uncertainties and dark mysteries. She felt a strange calm wash over her, a white foamy spray already erasing the ugly marks she had drawn in the sand. Suddenly she remembered her once-forgotten love of books. Books had shielded her from harm, their fidelity unmatched by any human friend. They had taught her everything that she knew. She decided to dedicate her life to teaching others something as well.
~~~
“Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.” –Virginia Woolf
She fixated her eyes on the words, softly murmuring them to herself. The bookstore was quiet, the signing would not begin for another hour; she had time enough to reflect and gather her jumbled thoughts.
It was an appropriate quotation, she felt, to be placed on the beginning page. Many had helped her get this far down the path; the thank-you she included in her work was not even a fraction of those who had taught her everything that she now knew.
She had first conceived of the novel in college, sitting in an echoing lecture hall as the Professor of English used the walls as a soundboard for his lecture on Shakespeare. Somewhere after Julius Caesar and before Hamlet, her thoughts had shifted to the potential subjects for her book. Many times during the day she would drift off, her mind meandering all over the place, brooding and contemplating on what it wanted to tell the world.
She had chosen to become an English major because she wanted to study the “greats” and learn their secrets, learn the subtleties of a language she may have missed in the time she spent wading through the lingual quagmire. Had she thought her writing abilities were already sufficient enough to captivate the human mind, she would have never enrolled in the class. She didn’t want to be a dilettante; she wanted to be a master sculptor who could shape and mold the language with prodigious skill. After all, that was how one became a Writer.
Fondly stroking the binding of her new book, she realized that the hard work was indeed worth it. The rigorous course of study, the innumerable classics she had consumed, the countless lectures she had absorbed with great diligence—all those things had helped her climb to great success.
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