I reach for the steak knife hiding in the nest of spoons. The black handle is warm. As I pull it free, the blade slices the air, dividing it into slivers. There is Jennifer, packing store-bought cookies in a plastic tub for her daughter's class. There is Dad's empty chair, pretending he has no choice about these early meetings. There is the shadow of my mother, who prefers the phone because face-to-face takes too much time and usually ends in screaming.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corner. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it.
The narrator is Lia, an anorexic teenager who has just found out that her former best friend, Cassie (a bulimic), is dead. Jennifer is Lia's stepmother, who told her the news. The book is Wintergirls (Penguin Group, 2009) by Laurie Halse Andersen. It's pretty good. And that's it.
I recently watched a talk online in which Elizabeth Gilbert admitted, without any apparent bitterness, that her "freakish success" (referring to her bestselling memoir Eat Pray Love) probably doomed her much-anticipated future books to second-best status. Everything she ever wrote would be compared to it, and not much of her subsequent work would be likely to measure up. As a still-young writer, she confessed to her audience, it was possible that her biggest success was already behind her.
Gibert's talk centered on the theme of "genius". Westerners tend to think of genius as something someone is, but Gilbert pointed out that other cultures have identified genius as something as artist has--and not an inherent something, either. A genius (singular form of "genii") is a spirit of creativity that just drops in on an artist, often without warning. The artist's job is to show up for work and be accessible to the genius, which can be frustrating at times and even downright drudgery, but the genius's job is to inject the project with life and brilliance...when it feels like it.
Gilbert enjoys this idea, and I do, too. It takes the pressure off, and truly, it resonates. The only good short story I ever wrote came out of me in high school. And when I say "came out", I mean that's just what happened. I heard the first sentence in my head, and I just sat down and began to write. I barely revised. I turned it in to my teacher, who nominated it for an award. It won. I have never written a passable short story since.
Something sort of like that happened to Laurie Halse Andersen. In interviews she's described waking up in the middle of the night and hearing a young girl crying. Andersen checked on her daughters, found all was well, and went back to sleep. It kept happening. Finally Andersen recognized the voice as coming from inside of her--her genius tapping on her shoulder. She didn't know who the girl was or why she was crying, but Andersen knew she couldn't ignore her anymore; it was her job to write down this girl's pain, to crystallize it and make it known. The girl turned out to be Melinda Sordino, a fourteen-year-old rape victim. The novel that tells her story is Speak, probably one of the most important YA novels ever written and one of the best pieces of fiction I've ever read. If I were going to be a college professor and teach a YA literature class, Speak would be on the syllabus right alongside Little Women and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Wintergirls is OK.
I was told by a children's literature editor that Andersen's historical fiction novel Fever 1793 was turned down by every publisher until after Speak came out. By then Andersen could publish whatever she wanted. But the genius has its own agenda, its own preferences. Andersen's genius insisted on the creation of Speak as Gilbert's insisted on the creation of Eat Pray Love. It's possible that after those pet projects were accomplished, the genii were satisfied and decided to check out for a while. The writers keep showing up for work, as is their job, and they keep turning out books, because we expect them to and because that's what they do best. But the genii come and go. Sometimes they stay away.
Like Gilbert, Andersen's best work may well be behind her, but honestly, what's wrong with that? To be the name on the cover of a book like Speak is not a bad deal for a writer, even if it means nothing else she writes afterward can quite measure up.
As for us YA fans, I say go ahead and read Wintergirls. It contained some powerful moments, like the one I quoted at the beginning, and I often had a hard time putting it down. It's not Speak, so don't expect that, but it's Andersen--minus her genius, perhaps, but still pretty darn good. Besides, we have our job, too: to keep showing up for the important work of reading. When the genius does decide to come around, the writer has to be ready to channel its power, and the readers have to be ready to give it its due.
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