It was a picture
of a man I never met. An autographed picture no less. I carried it to each stop
in my life. I carried it when I went off to college – twice. I carried it to every
apartment or house I shared with buddies in my hometown after dropping out of
college – twice.
I held on to it
with the same firmness as my fondest childhood memory.
It came with me on
a cross country journey from my childhood home in Huntsville, Alabama to a new
beginning in Long Beach, California. I made sure it was with me nearly each
time I moved during my 16 years in California. Sometimes I would put it in my
car during the move but, most of the time, I would gently place it into the top
of one of the boxes. I would label that particular box with the other contents
as well as the picture. For example, a box might read, ‘Dishes’ and ‘Hank
Aaron.’
Hank Aaron was one
of my first sports’ heroes, perhaps the very first. I became an Atlanta Braves
fan for geographical reasons. They were the nearest major league baseball team
and he was their best player. Over time, though, I became more of Hank Aaron
fan than I was an Atlanta Braves fan. For the most part, the Braves were a bad
team during that time – save 1969 when they lost to the Mets in the National League
championship series. Aaron was one of the best players in baseball.
I remember, when I
was a young child, my Dad took the family to Atlanta to see the Braves play the
Pirates. I asked if we could sit in right field to be close to Aaron. We did
and I was mesmerized the entire time. I’m not sure what year it was but do
remember that Roberto Clemente played right field for the Pirates that night.
We shared that corner of the stadium with a pair of Hall of Fame outfielders.
The autographed picture,
I think, came when I was in third grade, so that was probably 1969 or 1970. I
wrote Aaron a letter, telling him how much I admired him as a player, and sent
it to the team’s home office. I didn’t ask for anything in return. I just felt
compelled to let him know I was a fan. I’m not sure how much later it was when
got home from school and had an Atlanta Braves envelope waiting for me in the
mailbox. I ripped it open quickly, not knowing what to expect, and out slid a
5x7 picture of Aaron, autographed in blue ink.
Two days later, I
took the picture, which was secured in a frame by then, to our class Show and
Tell. I repeated that over the next seven or eight weeks until my teacher
finally asked me to come up with something new.
The picture stayed
with me for a long time, always displayed prominently in my room.
I remember a one-bedroom apartment I shared
with my brother and a friend after dropping out of college for the second time.
The place was a wreck. We threw two mattresses on the floor in the bedroom –
neither had a bed frame or box spring – and didn’t have a dresser for our
clothes. The clean clothes were folded – not often neatly – on the floor or in
a closet. Dirty clothes lived in a pile in the corner until my brother’s
girlfriend had enough and did our laundry. Beer cans were piled up in the
kitchen and chicken bones from the Church’s Fried Chicken at the bottom of the
hill were strewn about the floor.The
bedroom door was stuffed in a closet because my brother punched so many holes
in it to render it useless.
The only orderly
thing in a one-bedroom apartment filled with chaos was my Hank Aaron picture
sitting on a night table in the corner of the bedroom. Each day and each night
– and sometimes in between – I would check the picture frame to make sure it
wasn’t crooked. Seeing how I was the only one paying rent, I was allowed one
house rule – don’t mess with my picture.
The picture, as strange as this sounds today,
was a big part of my life. At some point as I made my way around several
residences in the Long Beach area, though, the picture was gone. I was not sure
when I noticed it and I’m certainly not sure when I lost it. My guess is I
eventually got careless when packing and left it in a box somewhere. Or maybe I
made the unconscious decision to take it out of my life. Maybe I decided that
cutting that tie to my youth was necessary for me to move forward in my life. No
matter what happened, I sure would have loved to share that picture with my
son.
They filled your voicemail until you threw your phone into their crowded mouths—the beaches, relentlessly dialing your numbered days; beggars for “any spare change of plans.” All you had to offer were some leftovers: naturally-tanned, pristinely-molded comeliness that you’d been carrying with you longer than only your mother and father could remember. “You’re obviously worthless, you foul, offensively-sandy peasant!” Weighing the options, you saved it for another needy: “I’d give you what I hold, but I’m on my way to deliver them.” Better to upset the edge-of-death stranger than the impatiently-hopeful old chum. Shaking off the bum was your final delay in getting the goods to a more secluded (hermit-worthy, really) spot to go on holiday. “Hurry.” I knew you couldn’t hear me sighing (to ask myself “Awwwww, what’s wrong?!”), but I told myself it would help me breathe more easily, exhaling at the thought of your soft vocal chords, your well-dressed torso, your nearly-bare bottom half. “No more delays.” You stomped the tension into the “WELCOME” mat and I ran to the door, trying as hard as I could to make it sound like a walk. “Get those leftovers into my cold dark room before they spoil all of me at once, undeserving.” You didn’t have to return to high school for an entire week; “love” is seen in the East as losing validity with each frequent proclamation—that is the only thing that we could make out that week before, when the man from Fukuoka tested our patience, dry-heaving his poor English, directly aimed at our flushed cheeks. Not to say mine has any trace of wealthy worth, but there is a short and quiet speech that my language had given me the words to plead: “I will gladly lose my validity for seven, uninterrupted days until I’m sitting in the mouth of the beggar, cursing you, ‘Why can’t you at least have one modicum of ugliness?!’”
No more sorry for first love. No, she couldn’t even pretend to care. No more sorry for second love. No, only when it was convenient. No more sorry on a piece of paper. No, we both signed our names. No more sorry during the heat of passion. No, she didn’t matter, but I mattered less. No more sorry for third love. No pretend, no inconvenience, no contract, no meaninglessness. No more sorry until I regret again.
Holding On
Every
day that goes by, I try to hold on to what little I have left of you. A
smiley-faced cherub who reached out and caressed my face every morning, across the
cool bed, as the sun crept through the
thin sheets that served as curtains in our bedroom. I wanted to keep the light
out, but you ushered it in. You were my savior then. What I thought was a
mistake, you grew into my greatest accomplishment. You would turn, curly lashes
framing those sable eyes, and say, “Hi.” I sniffed in your Baby Magic skin and
devoured your every move. I would talk to you as if you were my twenty-two year
old equal, never using baby talk or considering you less than a little person
who was my friend.
When
we finally moved away from my mom’s house into our own apartment, I tried to
hold on to your baby teeth and hair, although at three years old they were
already drifting away like tufts of dandelions in the wind. You wanted a big
boy bed, so I borrowed an oak bunk bed and covered everything in Teen Titan
decorations. That first night alone, you slept all the way through while I
climbed in the bed beside you. I know those times would not last.
When
you came to me saying you wanted to play football, baseball, basketball,
whatever, I wanted to hold on to the boy who sang Frankie Beverly and Maze
songs with me. I knew you needed the influence of a man, so I relented. When they
piled on top of you on the field, I had to be restrained. When you ran down the
court the wrong way and hit your first shot in the opponent’s net, I cheered
louder than was acceptable. When you missed the last pitch at the championship
game and a parent cussed at you, I fought. You were here for me to protect, to
cherish.
I
held you close every time you came to me crying from the window-sill, waiting
for your father to pick you up. He never came. I would make up excuses for him,
the man whose image was all upon your face. I would tell you how strong and brave
you were. I spoke blessings over your life, and plead the blood of the lamb over
you. We spoke confessions:” I am the head and not the tail. I am above and not
beneath. I am a lender and not a borrower. I am blessed coming in and going out.
Every need in my life is fully supplied and met by my Heavenly Father.” I held
on to the belief that it would be this, and not your Earthly father’s heathen
influence that would take reign over your life and structure your being.
Then,
I realized how far away you are when you did not deign to even leave your room
when I came home from work. I would sit on the edge of your bed and watch you
shoot man after man, soldier after soldier with a precision that would land you
at the head of the marksmen class in military. You slashed through each screen,
implanting knives into your opponents’ skull with a frenzy and joy I never see
any more, expect when you are connected to the screen. I hear voices coming
through the headphones, constantly attached to your head. Antlers to this steed
I create, but can run with no more.
You’re
leaving in two years. I have so many hopes and dreams for you. There is so much
I want to teach you, but you no longer hear me. If I tried to hold your hand in
public, my skin would burn from the speed in which you extracted yours from
mine. I try to hold to the idea that one day you’ll be back here with me. We’ll
be like my mom and I, once enemies, now respected colleagues in this shared
life. Not ashamed to be seen with me. Not afraid to hold on.
We
rose at the cry of the cock and the shrill barks of our wolf-dogs Thunder and
Lightening
We waited
impatiently to relieve the morning pressure, taking numbers to mark our spots
in the line for the bathroom.
We
doubled-up on baths at night to save time and water, luxuries we could scarce
afford.
We
shared beds in three rooms: Granddaddy and Grandmomma, Mom and I, Felicia and
Tee Cheryl, Uncle Freddie and Uncle Darryl, Cousin Toby on the pullout couch
We fought for
the right to eat one of the slices of sous meat leftover from last night, the succotash freshly made from the okra, tomatoes, and corn we grew in an
almost-barren patch in the backyard.
We ate sandwiches
with not meat- syrup sandwiches, mayonnaise sandwiches, ketchup sandwiches,
mustard sandwiches.
We who were
older stayed out late on Tasty Tuesdays, Friday and Saturday nights- Tee’s
Place, The Armory, The Westside Lounge.
We under 18 were
sent to church every week, several times a week- STU, Sunbeam Band, Onward
Christian Soldiers meeting, Youth Choir rehearsal, Mass Choir Rehearsal, Sunday
school, Monday Prayer Service, and Wednesday Bible Study.
We kept those
religious lessons, founding first one church and then another after we were
kicked out of 23rd Street Baptist Church of Ensley. The new church
is named True Love.
To this day, we
all stay within a one mile radius of each in Forestdale, except for me. I’m in
Hoover, the opposite side of town. Always a black sheep.
We have “family
birthday” dinners once a month at rotating houses, even though we see each
other every Wednesday at Bible Study and every Sunday at church.
We are students
(eight).
We are bankers
(six).
We are teachers
(five).
We are engineers
(three).
We are Marines
(two).
We are nurses
(one).
We are the
product of a mulatto from Chicago named Doris and a pool hustler from Orville,
Alabama named Freddie.
I came across an old interview I did
that you might like. It's really long so read at your leisure. She was a
contemporary of Harper Lee's - Helen Norris Bell. The University of
Alabama asked me to write a remembrance of her, so this is what I came
up with, and I'm sharing it with you because she said so many good
things about writing. Helen Norris Bell. She died a few years ago, but
was born in 1916, and I interviewed her in 2007. Again, don't feel obligated to read this, but she said a few funny things that just made me laugh.
I also love how she said, "I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn."
I am thinking of how I could shape her words into a play or a film. I have no idea. I just came across because I have a deadline coming up, and I'd completely forgotten some of the gems she shared with me.
* * *
WORDS OF HELEN NORRIS BELL
“I hear the voice of the story when I’m writing.”
“I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they will burn.”
I
spoke with Helen Norris Bell on a summer afternoon in 2007 in Black
Mountain, North Carolina and then I returned the following summer to
take a picture with her. These are here words that I weaved into an
essay called WORDS ON FIRES about Helen Norris Bell, Mary Ward Brown,
and Kathryn Tucker Windham.
Helen’s own words about an Alabama life
Childhood and growing up
I
am old. I was 91 last month. Can you believe that? I can’t believe
that. I am old but I remember everything. I lie in bed at night and the
“To be or not to be” speech comes back to me. Every word. I remember so
many things. I don’t know if that’s good or not, but I remember. Words,
sonnets, history – all this poetry comes back to me.
There
was a family of eight kids who lived down the road, and we were all
writing our novels. No street, a road – they lived a mile and a half or
so away – I grew up on a 500 acre farm – we walked everywhere. We used
to get together in this dry ditch near my place, a dry ditch – we
thought we’d discovered it – a virgin ditch – and we’d climb down in the
ditch and our write our novels. We wrote them in the seventh grade. We
didn’t want to write short stories. We were writing novels. We didn’t
even know the facts of life, but we were writing novels.
On
our farm, we had 7500 laying hens, 2000 turkeys, dairy cows…I also used
to write plays for the neighbors when I was a child…Of course, I always
gave myself the starring role. We’d get in the kitchen and get all the
ingredients to make fudge and we’d sell it at intermission.
I
wanted to write operettas – I wrote so many when I was young. I
attended the University of Alabama…I did my dissertation, passed the
language requirements. I was still wanting to write operettas, Oh, it
was so romantic, but my hands were small – I couldn’t reach an entire
octave. Then I thought, well, I’ll be a painter, watercolors, but I just
wasn’t good enough. I learned enough to enjoy myself in a museum, but
absolutely the details helped my writing. Everything you do helps your
writing.
Teaching
Then
I needed the money, so I taught for many years at that college in
Montgomery. What’s it called? Huntingdon College. Old age, oh my. I had
to earn money. I was teaching all these things – Shakespeare, I taught
the tragedies and then I taught the comedies. I became the world’s
leading authority on Shakespeare at Huntingdon. I taught 16th
Century prose, Victorian poetry and prose, I taught Chaucer. The Head
of the Department just piled all this stuff on me. The hardest of all
was literary criticism, oh my that was hard, but I put my course
together and students loved it. The students loved me, but I didn’t know
what I was doing. I taught for thirteen years, and then I quit. I
couldn’t write while I was teaching. I couldn’t do it.
Short Stories
I
never had done much with the short story, and after I was finished
teaching, I thought I want to write some short stories. I’m going to
give that a try, but I thought before I write short stories, I’m going
to write some poems. After I wrote fifty poems, I began to write short
stories. I used the techniques of poetry to write my stories. With
stories you have to whittle it down. You have once chance to get your
point across. With a novel, you have the freedom for the neighbors to
say, “I don’t believe they’re getting along, and then a cousin will say,
‘No, I don’t believe they’re getting along either,” and you can have
all these discussion and speculation and conjecture from everywhere, but
you don’t have that freedom with a short story. A short story has to
have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem.
Isak Dineson
I
wrote two volumes of poetry – WHATEVER IS ROUND and RAIN PULSE. I
wanted to call RAIN PULSE by a different title SPEAK LIKE RAIN, because
of Isak Dineson. You know she was in love with one brother, but wound up
marrying the other brother, whom she did not love, but she went to
Africa with him, and they had this coffee plantation that finally went
bust, and they had to give it up…but before they did, she would go out
into the fields and read poetry to the natives. They didn’t even
understand her language, of course, but she read to them, and they would
say to her, “Speak like rain.”
They
heard the rhythm of it, the cadence, and to them it was rain, and so I
wanted to title a book SPEAK LIKE RAIN, and do you know some lady over
in North Carolina took my title for her book. I was so mad. So I had to
come with another, and I was thinking, “Rain Speak” and a friend had
written a poem called “Rain Pulse,” and folks said, “Make that your
title,” so I asked my friend if I could, and she said,
“Well, can I still keep my poem?”
I said, “Of course…”
Oh
it had the most beautiful cover, the first edition – but the second
edition was dark, you couldn’t see the words. Timberlake Press put it
out. But as a writer, we don’t have any choice with our book covers.
More on Short Stories
At
some point, I don’t remember when, the University of Alabama contacted
me and said, “We want your short stories. Have you got any?” I had some
so I told them to come look. It seems somebody from outside had to make
the final decision. George Core of the Sewanee Review liked my sense of
humor, but he would always pick out my sad short stories the ones where
I was hanging crepe. I’d write a funny one and then a serious one.
Folks would say, “How can you write such different ones?” Serious, fun,
religious, all kinds…I try to set the words on fire and then maybe they
will burn.
One
of my collections is “A Day in the Life of a Born-Again Loser,” and I
didn’t want my book called that, but they had a meeting of 25 folks or
so and only one didn’t like that title. The rest did, and I said, “Well
if you call it that you’re doing to have to put it at the back of the
book, but I believe readers still go straight to that story first.”
Russia
I’ve
been to the Soviet Union many times, and the Russians will not correct
you when you pronounce a word wrong. They won’t do it. The British will
always correct you. But Americans are just so awful – they want it to be
the way they want it to be – On one of my trips, the Russians learned
that I wanted to be corrected, so they began to correct me. Moscow is
pronounced “Moskva.” Ivan is pronounced “Ifan.”
The Stroke
After
the stroke, I was paralyzed on my right side and so I’ve been working
with right hand drawing loops. Well, this nurse and her husband wanted
me to sign their books, but I spelled their names wrong – I had to cross
something out – it was a mess, and they didn’t understand it was hard
for me to sign my books to them, but they were all excited.
Family
My family never liked my books – never read them.
The nursing home in Black Mountain
Now
there are a lot young people here – nurses in training, I guess, and
they come in my room to hear stories. Yesterday, I had nine young people
in here. They kept drifting in and out. I recited the Hamlet speech to
them, “To Be or Not to Be.” I told them about concentration camps…I
talked to them about history and many acted like they were hearing it
for the first time.
“I can’t believe that!” one of them said.
The Pen Faulkner Nomination and Peter Taylor
I
was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award. They flew me to DC and gave
me 1500 dollars for winning – if you won the whole thing you got 5000
dollars. Peter Taylor got that. He’s a love, dead now. Anyway, they
asked me to go, and I said yes. Part of the evening was that we had to
get up there and read – six minutes – I had no idea what to wear. It was
May and May in Alabama is warm and lovely, but in DC, it was cold. I
had on this thin dress, but thank goodness I had a white wool coat.
Well, William Gaddis was there, and he didn’t want to read. He told them
“I’m not going to read to them. A writer is not a performer. I don’t
write to read aloud, and I’m going to tell them that when it’s my turn
to talk.”
Well,
those folks paid fifty dollars a head to come to that dinner and hear
us read, but he got up there and talked about how he wasn’t going to
read to them, and I realized as he was talking about how he wasn’t going
to read to them that I was going to have to get up and go next. They’d
seated us alphabetically, and I said to Peter Taylor, “I’m next…I have
to follow that?”
And
he nodded – he was very sympathetic, and so they introduced me and said
something about my “courage and wit” and I got up there, so nervous,
and I said, “Well, I can think of nothing nicer than to read to you all
this evening.”
Well,
they were like butter. They just melted. And I read the last six pages
of “The Love Child.” In the back of the room, they had piles of books –
and mine sold out. They told me, “This is the first time we’ve ever had
an author to sell out.” And people came up to me and said, “We can’t get
your book. They’re all gone.” But the PEN FAULKNER folks took
everybody’s name and promised to send them my books if they wanted them.
Peter
Taylor read a story of a man who wanted to be a writer, so he pedaled
himself off on other writers – drank like a fish, smoked like a furnace –
and ruined himself. I still think my short story is better very
long…One aspect of it will shed light on another aspect of it.
A
soap opera actress – I can’t remember who – was trying to market “The
Christmas Wife.” And she said, “How about we get Jason Robards and Julie
Harris to act in it, and Geraldine Fitzgerald to direct,” and I said,
“Well as long as we’re dreaming.”
And
do you know she managed to do it? She knew them all from acting days.
It took them forever to send me the tape. Finally they just sent it to
me, but it was going to be on cable one night, and the men were taking
forever to fix my cable lines, and so I went outside my house and said
to the men, “My story is going to be on TV tonight and I want to watch
it.”
And
the men said, “Well, we’ll take some juice from your neighbor and give
it to you – we’ll take it from both sides, and give it to you.”
My
family wanted to watch it with me, so did friends, but I wanted to
watch it alone. But I almost missed it. I had to go to the dentist, and
then I did some Christmas shopping. I couldn’t find my car. I finally
found it, and I got home about five minutes before it was to start. I
liked it. I liked my story better, but I liked the film. Jason Robards
was so good. And so was Julie Harris.
Helen
Hayes passed the torch to Julie Harris. They repackaged my story
collection, Penguin Chamberlain Books, with the DVD inside…That Kaye
Gibbons wrote an introduction, which I thought we could have done
without. It’s all about how hard it is to Christmas shop.
They
showed ‘The Christmas Wife” here last year in the lounge, and so many
of the old ladies sat down to watch it, and then they began saying, “I
can’t hear it!” and so they started leaving. I had them turn it up, and
so those who stayed were able to hear it.
I
try to get all the flora and fauna right in my stories – that’s very
important to me. But with “The Christmas Wife,” HBO wanted to make it
another “On Golden Pond” set in Canada about 100 miles North of Toronto.
While they were doing the film, they replaced the soap actress who
pulled it all together with another writer, and she called up crying and
crying. Then Julie Harris called up and said, “This is Julie Harris,”
and at first I thought she was somebody from Sunday School, but then it
dawned on me. I said, “Is this the Julie Harris?” and she said,
“Yes, it is. HBO wants to make it a sex movie.” I told her, “But the
feeling in mind is exchanged in a look, which says, “We wish we could
but we know we can’t.”
You
know, marriage can sometimes become a little like prostitution. “You do
what you’re expected to do.” I had relatives like this – it was just
easier for them to give in.”
Mary Ward Brown
Mary
Ward Brown writes stories over and over and over again. She is a true
revisionist. I’m sure she thinks I don’t revise enough. She is such a
fantastic housekeeper. Everything is cleaned from stem to stern. I have a
story. Mary Ward Brown had company year ago - Faulkner’s lover, a
college girl, who just thought he was everything. She wrote her memoirs
after he died, and she told her publisher to go with her to visit Mary
Ward brown.
And
so they went to Mary’s home in Marion, Alabama, and Mary entertained
them for hours. As it got late, she thought they would be tired, so she
showed them the bedroom. After they said good night, Mary went into the
kitchen and cleaned every dish. She washed up everything, but she
slipped on some water and fell and broke her arm.
Now,
she would never dream of waking them, so she roused some relative to
come and pick her up and drive her to the hospital some thirty miles
away. They set her arm, and she went home and went to bed. But she was
up before her guests the next morning making breakfast. That’s just the
way she was.
Now
I know Mary told George Core that one of my stories, “Starwood,” needed
to be cut. Cut it all out. I got the idea of the story when a preacher
said, “If Jesus were alive today, he wouldn’t be allowed to teach in the
public schools.” I thought, well that’s right. His point was that if
something is too good, we don’t want to touch it.
White Hyacinths
“If
I had but two loaves of bread, I would sell one of them and buy white
hyacinths.” That saying is from the Islam religion – and why I named my
story “White Hyacinths.” I loved that story. What is fearful symmetry
but courage, nostalgia, the music of Brahms…Heart not style…art.
Horton Foote He was informed by reality – a memory of a time that is gone but we want to hang on to – childhood.
* * *
A NOTE FROM FAYE GIBBONS LAST WEEK, 2014 Yes,
let’s get together and talk about Helen. She and Kathryn left voids in
my life that no one can ever fill. And I was honored to be compared to
you by Don Nobles. It was good to share this weekend with you.
Love, Faye Gibbons (Author of HALLEY, New South Books, 2014)
* * *
AN EXCERPT FROM MY ESSAY “WORDS ON FIRE” published in FIVE POINTS, A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE AND ART in 2008.
July 31, 2007
I’m
late for my interview with Helen Norris Bell on a rainy day in late
July due to an accident on I-40, but when I arrive she is smiling
radiantly from her wheelchair wearing fresh lipstick, looking decades
younger than the age of 91. She lives in an assisted living facility in
Black Mountain, North Carolina. She can’t wait to start talking and
points to a trunk of stories that she hopes to get organized. Before I
can ask a question, she shows me her smiling great-granddaughter on the
computer screensaver, where a baby floats across the screen in bold
photo-shopped splotches of purple and pink. We watch a while, and Helen
says, “She looks weird, doesn’t she?” Then she laughs and our
conversation begins, but whenever I write something down, she gets
irritated. “Why are you writing? Don’t write it down! Listen!”
So
I put the pen down and listen. Hard. Helen Norris Bell is a born
storyteller and even the most tangential threads lead to more stories of
her favorite honey from Tupelo flowers in the Florida Everglades to
getting locked inside the P.O. in Montgomery, Alabama. A postal worker
tried to force her to leave even though she’d arrived well before
closing time to stand in a long line. When she refused, he decided to
teach her a lesson and locked her inside and turned off the lights.
Helen’s eyes light up as she describes the scene, “I let out what I
considered to be a most primal scream and was released. I wrote the
newspaper a letter describing the event, and my story made the front
page. I became the lady who was locked inside the Post Office. They
apologized and changed the rules.”
Next,
she talks about delivering the graduation speech at Huntingdon College
on a blistering Alabama morning in June. Dressed in a heavy gown, she’d
been forewarned in increasingly anxious calls by her son “to practice
the speech and to absolutely take an alarm clock or timer so as not to
bore the crowd.” She greeted the graduates by discussing her son’s
concerns, and they burst into loud laughter and applause.
She
moves from one subject to another—teaching, aging, writing. I try to
keep up and not take notes—being under strict orders to put my pen down
and listen. We leave the door to her room open, but after a while I shut
it with her permission. The nursing home is a cacophony of
interruptions from nurses to patients to aids to volunteers to gardeners
outside the window. She has a history for every single person. It
almost feels like we are living in one of her short stories. An aid
comes in with a tray of supper, which she ignores.
When
Helen talks about her childhood, she says, “I am old. I was 91 last
month. Can you believe that? I lie in bed at night and the ‘To be or not
to be’ speech comes back to me. Every word. I remember so many things. I
don’t know if that’s good or not, but I remember. Words, sonnets,
history. These old ladies here don’t even remember George Washington!”
She
grew up on a 500 acre farm with 7500 laying hens, 2,000 turkeys, and
hundreds of dairy cows. As a child she used to write plays for the
neighbors, gave herself the starring role, and served fudge at
intermission. She and a neighbor family of eight children wrote novels
together too. “We didn’t know about the facts of life but we were
writing novels!”
She
smiles when she speaks of Peter Taylor. “I was a finalist for the Pen
Faulkner Award. They flew me to DC and gave me 1500 dollars—if you won
the whole thing you got 5000 dollars. Peter Taylor got that. He’s a
love, dead now. Anyway, they asked me to go, and I said yes. Well,
William Gaddis was there, and he told the audience, ‘I’m not going to
read to you. A writer is not a performer. I don’t write to read aloud.
’Well, those folks paid fifty dollars a head to come to that dinner and
hear us read, but he got up there and talked about how he wasn’t going
to read and too bad for them—and I realized that I was going to have to
get up and go next, and I said to Peter Taylor, ‘I’m next…I have to
follow that?’ And he nodded—he was very sympathetic, and I got up there,
so nervous, and I said, ‘I can think of nothing nicer than to read to
you all this evening.’ Well, they were like butter. They just melted.”
She
talks of her lost library and about her son who sold her home, and how
she came to live in Black Mountain. It’s late in the day by the time she
tells this story, which began with her making a cup of Earl Gray tea
and suddenly feeling very strange. “I can’t really recall what happened,
but I guess I went into the hospital for a time. When I came out, I
didn’t return to my home in Montgomery. I came here. My son arranged it.
Eventually, I asked him about my books. That’s the only thing I really
cared about. My books. A friend had built me wonderful bookshelves in my
home, and they were filled with books, floor to ceiling. My son said he
kept the books that he thought looked important and threw the rest
away.”
She
shrugs, but there are tears. Hours have passed. A thunderstorm blows up
and we stare outside. “I wish it wouldn’t rain. I know we’re supposed
to need it, but it’s so gloomy.” She looks at the red maple. “I do love
my tree. I hope they leave it alone.” Then she moves from her wheelchair
to her bed and wants no help. Thunder cracks the sky, and I tell her
about my plan to write a story of her, Mary Ward Brown, and Kathryn
Tucker Windham.
“What
for?” she asks, unimpressed. “We don’t even like each other. Kathryn’s
popular with the students and the university crowd. And Mary is a true
revisionist. I’m sure she thinks I don’t revise enough. I’m sure she
told George Core that my story, ‘Starwood,’ needed to be cut. She is
such a fantastic housekeeper. Everything is cleaned from stem to stern.”
“What about Harper Lee? Did you like To Kill a Mockingbird?” I ask.
“I
never saw all the fuss. I liked the scene with the pocket watch. Did I
tell you about Russia? Let me tell you about my trips to Russia.”
We
talk some more through the raging summer storm.The sun comes out, and
slowly sinks. I have spent five hours with Helen Norris Bell. I had
meant to take her picture, but now she’s tired and lying in bed. I will
have to return or ask one of the nurses to do it.
She
says, “Please come back. You bring your stories next time.” I say
goodbye, and minutes later I stand outside in the warm air of Black
Mountain washed clean by the rain. I try to catch my breath. I sit on
the curb and write down everything as best as I can remember it. I think
of the first line in Helen’s story, “The Singing Well,” which reads:
“She was Emilu, named for two dead aunts, their names rammed together
like head-on trains.” There was an Aunt Emilu in my husband’s family,
who grew up near Black Mountain—dead now like Peter Taylor. I’ve been to
Taylor’s grave at an old cemetery in Sewanee, Tennessee—but by chance,
not intention. His “new” grave is surrounded by crumbling ones dating
back to the Civil War. Poets at the Sewanee Writers Conference recite
poetry in the cemetery in the summertime, though I’ve recently heard
Taylor’s grave was moved to Memphis. I don’t know where Aunt Emilu is
buried.
Months later, I will hear that Helen’s Harper Lee Award was sold as
part of the Estate Sale. Professors from the University of Alabama are
trying to locate it to return it to her. Her home was sold because
family members were concerned about her health and all the yellow
Post-It notes with scribbling around her house, but a friend of Helen’s
says, “Those Post-It notes were all her story ideas! She’s a writer!” I
think of my son, Flannery, a sunny teenager with rock star aspirations
to be the next David Bowie/T-Rex, growing old and putting me in a
nursing home and throwing away my books that didn’t look important.
I drive through the dark mountains invisible against the night sky of North
Carolina with Helen’s words floating around me: When
I finished teaching, I realized I never had done much with the short
story, so I wanted to write some. I used the techniques of poetry to
write my stories. With stories you have to whittle it down. You have one
chance to get your point across. With a novel, you have the freedom for
the neighbors to say, “I don’t believe they’re getting along, and then a
cousin will say, ‘No, I don’t believe they’re getting along either,”
and you can have all this speculation and conjecture from everywhere,
but you don’t have that freedom with a short story. A short story has to
have the depth of a novel, but the focus of a poem. I try to set the
words on fire and then maybe they will burn.
by Rachel Pastan
Once, going up an escalator in a New York City department store, I casually asked a friend, “So, what kind of school did you have to go to become a museum curator?” She thought I was taking an interest. Really, I was fishing for information for a novel.
This is one kind of research for fiction: casual, compelling, undercover. I do it a lot. Sometimes people who know me well catch me at it. Other times they accuse me of fishing when I’m just interested in hot air ballooning or the landscape of Siberia. Not that the wall between fishing and just being interested is impermeable; almost anything may turn out to be useful sooner or later.
When I was working on my second novel, about a Russian literature professor and a herpetologist, I did a lot of library research. I read books about Russian water nymphs and the hag Baba Yaga, and I immersed myself in Sofya Tolstoy’s diaries. I looked up interviews with women scientists, subscribed to The Journal of Herpetology (herpetology is the study of reptiles and amphibians), and even audited a University of Wisconsin course on terrestrial vertebrates.
I learned a lot about frogs, turtles, and lizards in that course, but it was the snakes that seduced me. With their strange beauty, their powerful metaphorical associations, and the way they rouse strong visceral reactions, snakes seemed like the total fictional package. During one of the class field trips, I stomped—seven months pregnant!—across muddy spring fields, peering under stones as we’d been directed to do. When I lifted a rock and uncovered a young snake, I grabbed it and ran to show the professor. In that moment, I wasn’t gathering material and the snake was not a metaphor. It was all animal: cool, wriggling, fork-tongued.
Part of the joy of reading (and writing) fiction is immersing ourselves in lives and worlds very different from our own. As writers, we have a responsibility to get those worlds right—at least respectably (respectfully) so. For the past few months I have been doing research for a novel about a geneticist who works with corn, and trying to getting it right has been some of the hardest work I’ve ever done. I have read biographies of plant geneticists and books about the history of genetics. I have pored over scientific papers and articles. I have studied Wikipedia entries for meiosis, epigenetics, and trilobites; spent afternoons in archives reading old letters; and watched animations of cells dividing.
Then there are the field trips. Last summer, having gathered my courage, I visited a friendly corn biologist at the University of Delaware who, after I emailed him out of the blue, offered to show me his cornfield. Some of the crucial scenes in the novel will take place in a cornfield, and I had never really looked at one before. I had certainly never walked through one with a geneticist and looked at the stalks and ears and tassels (and weeds and pests) through his eyes.
It was a hot August day when the geneticist took me around, and the corn, rustling drily, was taller than we were. He described his research, which had to do with disease resistance. I nodded a lot and scribbled in my notebook, but mostly I was writing things like: “Hard earth, sticky stalks. Trees, outbuildings, pipes, barrels. Tap bag and shake to collect pollen. Selfing— fertilizing a plant with its own pollen. Sibbing—fertilizing a plant with the pollen of a sibling plant. Big black wasps.” These are the kinds of things I need to know to bring a scene a life: some vivid details of the physical world, and a little bit of lingo. Selfing and wasps.
Of course, research shouldn’t overshadow the story, nor should it call attention to itself. As Lily King wrote about her novel Euphoria, based on the life of Margaret Mead: “My research needed to be like an undergarment in the days before people started showing off their boxers and their bra straps. I didn’t want any of it to show through.” This requires discipline: the urge to show off how much one has learned can be potent and dangerous—though sometimes a writer gets away with it. In American Pastoral, Philip Roth lays out the glove-making process in ferocious detail, but, compelled by the power and beauty of his prose style, I devoured every word.
Inevitably some of what one learns—or even a great deal of it—ends up being irrelevant. The herpetologist character in my book got folded, in the course of revision, into the Russian literature professor. Two characters with opposite impulses became one character torn by conflicting impulses. It was a sounder narrative strategy, but the terrestrial vertebrates class turned out to be a waste of time.
Except not entirely. When I was nearly done with the novel, I wrote a scene in which the Russian literature professor’s three-year-old daughter lifts a stone in the park and finds a little snake, which she insists on taking home and naming Stripey. The moment in the muddy Wisconsin field, which I’d thought was just life, turned out to be fodder for the beast of fiction after all.
I wrote this Anaphora poem for my poetry class. I borrowed some things I wrote earlier this semester in our Noises writing spark. This class is the first time I'm doing any poetry (I'm definitely not a poet). I'm trying.
Snapshots
Comfort is children arguing about
arguing.
Comfort is the cadence of rush hour
traffic floating through the pine trees
And Krispy Kreme smells wafting
through the air.
Comfort is the snores of an
overweight dog,
Rattling the windows like a nearby
train on phantom tracks.
Comfort is a cold beer enjoyed on a
muggy summer afternoon,
Or a cold winter evening or just
about any time.
Comfort is coaches screaming, bands
playing, fans fussing.
Comfort is a blank scoreboard.
Comfort is laptop keys clicking.
Comfort is kindergarten stories and
elementary school hullabaloo.
Comfort is early morning hugs.
Comfort is teenage angst and middle
age restlessness,
Meeting together, no longer
strangers.
Comfort is closing the bedroom door
in the middle of the night.
Comfort is still being consumed by
the beauty,
of the woman I’m spending my life
with.
Comfort is the ring is the thing.
Comfort is cackling and weeping.
Comfort is stillness after trees
bending in the wind.
Comfort is small talk with neighbors.
Comfort is in-laws being too far away
to drop by with no warning,
a moat protecting a castle.
Comfort is microwaveable meals.
Comfort is freshly cut lawns and newly
cropped hair.
Comfort is dreaming of a random
airplane’s destination
We are the Rowell family: Willie, Alberta, Nora Mae, Jean and James.
We lived across the track from Mrs. Nichols store which I could see from the house where we lived. I was three and the middle child, James and Nora Mae, one younger, one older.
We lived in a possibly three or four bedroom house.
We the five of us: my daddy, my mama, sister, brother, and me lived in a house together.
We laughed, we talked, we ate, and we played.
We had fun.
We had no toys, I think.
We had a box cut from the top and bottom.
We rolled down the hill both James and I minus Nora, I think.
We, the children, watched television until it was time to go to bed.
We did not know when Daddy and Mama went to bed because we, the children, were asleep.
We, the children, loved kindergarten, I think – but I did.
We, the children, did not fight each other – I don’t think.
We, the children, were ages 2, 4, and six.
We, my entire family in 1958 welcomed a new baby in the family, my sister – Cotrie.
We moved to a new house across the tracks and met new people in the neighborhood.
We, the Rowell family, had lots of fun - together.
Writing can be a daunting task. You sit in front of a blank page. You try to make something where there was nothing, and your only material is language. Yet over the years, NYPL has spoken to dozens of writers who have faced exactly this challenge and ended up on the other side of a finished book. If you want to write, then get ready to take notes. Here are some of the best bits of writing advice from the NYPL video archive.
The Pittsburg [sic] visible-writing machine. Image ID: 1541737
Hook, line and sinker: ‘I prowled Blythe’s Instagram and Twitter, I read her reviews, considered photos of her baked goods and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox.’ Illustration: Anna Parini for the Guardian
In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.
“No,” she said firmly, taking the pen away. “Kathleen, you understand we can’t make any more changes, right?”
“I was just kidding,” I lied. Eventually she had to physically prise the book from my hands.
A lot of authors call this “the post-partum stage”, as if the book is a baby they struggle to feel happy about. But for me, it felt more like one of my body parts was about to be showcased.
“Are you excited about your novel?” my mom asked, repeatedly, often in singsong.
“I’m scared,” I said. Anxious and inexperienced, I began checkinggoodreads.com, a social reviewing site owned by Amazon. My publisher HarperTeen had sent advance copies of my book to bloggers and I wanted to see what they thought. Other authors warned me not to do this, but I didn’t listen. Soon, my daily visits tallied somewhere between “slightly-more-than-is-attractive-to-admit-here” and “infinity”.
For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.
One day, while deleting and rewriting the same tweet over and over (my editors had urged me to build a “web presence”), a tiny avatar popped up on my screen. She was young, tanned and attractive, with dark hair and a bright smile. Her Twitter profile said she was a book blogger who tweeted nonstop between 6pm and midnight, usually about the TV show Gossip Girl. According to her blogger profile, she was a 10th-grade teacher, wife and mother of two. Her name was Blythe Harris. She had tweeted me saying she had some ideas for my next book.
“Cool, Blythe, thanks!” I replied. In an attempt to connect with readers, I’d been asking Twitter for ideas – “The weirdest thing you can think of!” – promising to try to incorporate them in the sequel.
Curious to see if Blythe had read my book, I clicked from her Twitter through her blog and her Goodreads page. She had given it one star. “Meh,” I thought. I scrolled down her review.
“Fuck this,” it said. “I think this book is awfully written and offensive; its execution in regards to all aspects is horrible and honestly, nonexistent.”
Blythe went on to warn other readers that my characters were rape apologists and slut-shamers. She accused my book of mocking everything from domestic abuse to PTSD. “I can say with utmost certainty that this is one of the worst books I’ve read this year,” she said, “maybe my life.”
Other commenters joined in to say they’d been thinking of reading my book, but now wouldn’t. Or they’d liked it, but could see where Blythe was coming from, and would reduce their ratings.
“Rape is brushed off as if it is nothing,” Blythe explained to one commenter. “PTSD is referred to insensitively; domestic abuse is the punch line of a joke, as is mental illness.”
“But there isn’t rape in my book,” I thought. I racked my brain, trying to see where I had gone wrong. I wished I could magically transform all the copies being printed with a quick swish of my little red pen. (“Not to make fun of PTSD, or anything,” I might add to one character’s comment. “Because that would be wrong.”)
At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): “We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer. If you think this review is against our Review Guidelines, please flag it to bring it to our attention. Keep in mind that if this is a review of the book, even one including factual errors, we generally will not remove it.
“If you still feel you must leave a comment, click ‘Accept and Continue’ below to proceed (but again, we don’t recommend it).”
I would soon learn why.
***
After listening to me yammer on about the Goodreads review, my mother sent me a link to a website called stopthegrbullies.com, or STGRB. Blythe appeared on a page called Badly Behaving Goodreaders, an allusion to Badly Behaving Authors. BBAs, Athena Parker, a co-founder of STGRB, told me, are “usually authors who [have] unknowingly broken some ‘rule’”. Once an author is labelled a BBA, his or her book is unofficially blacklisted by the book-blogging community.
In my case, I became a BBA by writing about issues such as PTSD, sex and deer hunting without moralising on these topics. (Other authors have become BBAs for: doing nothing, tweeting their dislike of snarky reviews, supporting other BBAs.)
“Blythe was involved in an [online] attack on a 14-year-old girl back in May 2012,” Parker said. The teenager had written a glowing review of a book Blythe hated, obliquely referencing Blythe’s hatred for it: “Dear Haters,” the review read. “Everyone has his or her own personal opinion, but expressing that through profanity is not the answer. Supposedly, this person is an English teacher at a middle school near where I lived… People can get hurt,” the review concluded.
In response, Blythe rallied her followers. Adults began flooding the girl’s thread, saying, among other things, “Fuck you.”
It turned out that Parker and her co-founders were not the only ones to have run into trouble with Blythe. An editor friend encouraged me to get in touch with other authors she knew who had been negatively reviewed by her. Only one agreed to talk, under condition of anonymity.
I’ll call her Patricia Winston.
“You know her, too?” I Gchatted Patricia.
She responded – “Omg” – and immediately took our conversation off the record.
“DO NOT ENGAGE,” she implored me. “You’ll make yourself look bad, and she’ll ruin you.”
***
Writing for a living means working in an industry where one’s success or failure hinges on the subjective reactions of an audience. But, as Patricia implied, caring too much looks narcissistic. A standup comic can deal with a heckler in a crowded theatre, but online etiquette prohibits writers from responding to negativity in any way.
In the following weeks, Blythe’s vitriol continued to create a ripple effect: every time someone admitted to having liked my book on Goodreads, they included a caveat that referenced her review. The ones who truly loathed it tweeted reviews at me. It got to the point where my mild-mannered mother (also checking on my book’s status) wanted to run a background check on Blythe. “Who are these people?” she asked. She had accidentally followed one of my detractors on Twitter – “I didn’t know the button!” she yelled down the phone – and was now having to deal with cyberbullying of her own. (“Fine, I’ll get off the Twitter,” she said. “But I really don’t like these people.”)
That same day, Blythe began tweeting in tandem with me, ridiculing everything I said. Confronting her would mean publicly acknowledging that I searched my name on Twitter, which is about as socially attractive as setting up a Google alert for your name (which I also did). So instead I ate a lot of candy and engaged in light stalking: I prowled Blythe’s Instagram and Twitter, I read her reviews, considered photos of her baked goods and watched from a distance as she got on her soapbox – at one point bragging she was the only person she knew who used her real name and profession online. As my fascination mounted, and my self-loathing deepened, I reminded myself that there are worse things than rabid bloggers (cancer, for instance) and that people suffer greater degradations than becoming writers. But still, I wanted to respond.
Patricia warned me that this was exactly what Blythe was waiting for – and Athena Parker agreed: “[GR Bullies] actually bait authors online to get them to say something, anything, that can be taken out of context.” The next step, she said, was for them to begin the “career-destroying” phase.
“Is this even real?” I Gchatted Patricia.
“YES THERE IS A CAREER-DESTROYING PHASE IT’S AWFUL. DO. NOT. ENGAGE. Omg did you put our convo back on the record?”
She went invisible.
***
Why do hecklers heckle? Recent studies have had dark things to say about abusive internet commenters – a University of Manitoba report suggested they share traits with child molesters and serial killers. The more I wondered about Blythe, the more I was reminded of somethingSarah Silverman said in an article for Entertainment Weekly: “A guy once just yelled, ‘Me!’ in the middle of my set. It was amazing. This guy’s heckle directly equalled its heartbreaking subtext – ‘Me!’” Silverman, an avid fan of Howard Stern, went on to describe a poignant moment she remembers from listening to his radio show: one of the many callers who turns out to be an asshole is about to be hung up on when, just before the line goes dead, he blurts out, in a crazed, stuttering voice, “I exist!”
I had a feeling the motivation behind heckling, or trolling, was similar to why most people do anything – why I write, or why I was starting to treat typing my name into search boxes like it was a job. It occurred to me Blythe and I had this much in common: we were obsessed with being heard.
But empathy didn’t untangle the knots in my stomach. I still wanted to talk to her, and my self-control was dwindling. One afternoon, good-naturedly drunk on bourbon and after watching Blythe tweet about her in-progress manuscript, I sub-tweeted that, while weird, derivative reviews could be irritating, it was a relief to remember that all bloggers were also aspiring authors.
My notifications feed exploded. Bloggers who’d been nice to me were hurt. Those who hated me now had an excuse to write long posts about what a bitch I was, making it clear that:
1) Reviews are for readers, not authors.
2) When authors engage with reviewers, it’s abusive behaviour.
3) Mean-spirited or even inaccurate reviews are fair game so long as they focus on the book.
“Sorry,” I pleaded on Twitter. “Didn’t mean all bloggers, just the ones who talk shit then tweet about their in-progress manuscripts.” I responded a few more times, digging myself deeper. For the rest of the afternoon, I fielded venom from teenagers and grown women, with a smattering of supportive private messages from bloggers who apologised for being too scared to show support publicly. I emailed an apology to a blogger who still liked me. After she posted it, people quieted down on Twitter, and my inbox quit sagging with unread mail. But the one-star reviews continued, and this time they all called me a BBA. My book had not even been published yet and already it felt like everybody hated it, and me.
‘Part of me still longed to hear Judy say, ‘I am Blythe’ and to explain, and then to laugh about it with me so we could become friends through admittedly weird circumstances.’ Illustration: Anna Parini for the Guardian
***
A few nights later I called my friend Sarah, to talk while I got drunk and sort of watched TV. Opening a new internet window, I absent-mindedly returned to stalking Blythe Harris. Somehow, I had never Googled her before and now, when I did, there was nothing to be found – which was weird, considering she was a high school staff member. “Wait a sec,” I mumbled, reaching for my bourbon.
“And then, I don’t know, I sort of lost it,” Sarah was saying. “I just sort of – poof – exploded…”
“Lost what?” I asked, distracted, thinking back through what I knew of Blythe – her endless photos and reviews complete with Gifs and links, which I now realised must have taken hours to write. The only non-generic photo on her Instagram was of a Pomeranian. It occurred to me that a wife and mother with papers to grade might not have a lot of time to tweet between 6pm and midnight. That said, I had a fiance, friends and a social life (if you can believe it), a lot of writing projects, and I still managed total recall of much of what Blythe had said online. I noticed that two of her profiles contradicted each other – one said 8th grade teacher, one said 10th grade – and that most of her former avatar photos had been of the Pomeranian.
“No, lost it,” Sarah said, “like, I went a little nuts and yelled at this stranger who was hitting on me. I can’t remember the last time I yelled at anyone.” In the ensuing silence, she waited as I rummaged in the kitchen for snacks. “Are you OK?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied, trying to open a bag of pretzels with my teeth. But my eyes felt funny, and the bourbon burbled like magma in my stomach.
Was Blythe Harris even real?
***
Over the next few months, my book came out, I got distracted by life and managed to stay off Goodreads. Then a book club wanted an interview, and suggested I pick a blogger to do it.
“Blythe Harris,” I wrote back. I knew tons of nice bloggers, but I still longed to engage with Blythe directly.
The book club explained that it was common for authors to do “giveaways” in conjunction with the interview, and asked if I could sign some books. I agreed, and they forwarded me Blythe’s address.
The exterior of the house that showed up on Google maps looked thousands of square feet too small for the interiors Blythe had posted on Instagram. According to the telephone directory and recent census reports, nobody named Blythe Harris lived there. The address belonged to someone I’ll call Judy Donofrio who, according to an internet background check ($19), was 46 – not 27, as Blythe was – and worked as vice-president of a company that authorises disability claims.
It looked as if I had been taken in by someone using a fake identity. I Gchatted Patricia: “I think we’ve been catfished?”
Patricia asked how I could be sure Judy D wasn’t merely renting to Blythe H? I had to admit it seemed unlikely that I might be right: why would someone who sells disability insurance pose as a teacher online?
“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Sarah said, sending me a car rental link. “Go talk to her.”
“DO NOT DO THIS,” Patricia cautioned me.
“You don’t want to talk to her?” I responded.
“NO STOP IT HOW DO YOU EVEN KNOW YOU’RE RIGHT?”
“I don’t.” I opened a new tab to book a car.
***
I planned my car rental for a few months down the line. I was procrastinating, hoping to untangle the mystery without face-to-face confrontation. I sent a message to Blythe through the book club, asking if we could do the interview via video chat. She vanished for a month, then told the club she’d been dealing with family issues and didn’t see herself having the time to do a video chat.
I suggested we speak on the phone and Blythe countered by pulling out of the interview – she was about to go to Europe, she said, but told the book club she hoped I’d still address “the drama”, a reference to my drunken tweets.
“Europe” seemed a vague destination for an adult planning a vacation. But a few nights later, lit only by the glow of my screen, I watched in real time as Blythe uploaded photos of Greece to Instagram. The Acropolis at night. An ocean view. A box of macaroons in an anonymous hand.
The images looked generic to me, the kind you can easily find on Google Images, but then Blythe posted a picture of herself sitting in a helicopter. The face matched the tanned Twitter photograph.
“Fuck,” I said. What if she was real and had simply given the book club the wrong address?
Then Judy updated her Facebook profile with photographs of a vacation in Oyster Bay, New York. I clicked through and saw the holiday had started on the same day as Blythe Harris’s.
***
As my car rental date approached, I thought it might be helpful to get some expert advice about meeting a catfish in person. So I telephoned Nev Schulman, subject of the 2010 hit Catfish, the documentary that coined the term. He now hosts and produces the MTV programmeCatfish, in which he helps people confront their long-distance internet boyfriends, girlfriends and enemies – almost 100% of whom end up being fakes. Maybe, I thought, he could help me, too.
“Of all the catfish I’ve confronted, there was only one I didn’t tell I was coming,” Schulman said cagily, apparently shocked by my plan to go unannounced. Nonetheless, he had some tips: “This is a woman who is used to sitting behind her computer and saying whatever she wants with very little accountability. Even if she hears from people she criticises, she doesn’t have to look them in the face. She doesn’t know she hurt your feelings, and she doesn’t really care.”
“How did you know that she hurt my feelings?”
“Because you’re going to her house.”
He urged me to listen to whoever answered the door, and not to make our impromptu meeting about my “issues”.
Schulman used the word “issues” so many times that I decided to get in touch with another kind of expert: a doctor. Former film-maker Michael Rich splits his time between teaching pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, and lecturing on “Society, Human Development and Health” at Harvard’s School of Public Health. He is also the director of the Centre on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s hospital, and runs a webpage called Ask the Mediatrician, where parents write in about concerns ranging from cyberbullying to catfishing. Given the adolescent nature of my problem, he proved an excellent source.
“The internet doesn’t make you crazy,” he said. “But you can make yourself crazy on the internet.” The idea that I hadn’t transformed was reassuring. Whatever we become online is an extension of our usual behaviour: I was still myself, just amplified unattractively.
I asked Rich about his catfished patients: how did they react in the months that followed their discovery? “Depression, anxiety. They tend to spend more time online rather than less.” I self-consciously x’d out of my browser window, open to three Blythe Harris platforms. “They’re hyper-vigilant, always checking their phone. Certainly substance abuse.” I reconsidered the cocktails I’d planned for that evening. “The response is going to vary,” he concluded, “but it will have a commonality of self-loathing and self-harm.”
“Great,” I said, double-checking Blythe’s address.
***
I parked down the street from Judy’s house. It looked like something from a storybook, complete with dormer windows and lush, colourful garden. It was only now occurring to me that I didn’t really know what to say, and should probably have brought a present. I needed a white flag.
I searched my bag but all it contained besides notebooks and tampons was a tiny book I’d been given: Anna Quindlen’s A Short Guide To A Happy Life. This seemed a little passive-aggressive, but I figured it was better than nothing.
Before I could change my mind, I walked briskly down the street toward the Mazda parked in Judy’s driveway. A hooded sweatshirt with glittery pink lips across the chest lay on the passenger seat; in the back was a large folder full of what looked like insurance claims. I heard tyres on gravel and spun round to see a police van. For a second I thought I was going to be arrested, but it was passing by – just a drive through a quiet neighbourhood where the only thing suspicious was me.
I strolled to the front door. A dog barked and I thought of Blythe’s Instagram Pomeranian. Was it the same one? The doorbell had been torn off, and up close the garden was overgrown. I started to feel hot and claustrophobic. The stupid happiness book grew sweaty in my hands. I couldn’t decide whether to knock.
The curtains were drawn, but I could see a figure silhouetted in one window, looking at me.
The barking stopped.
I dropped the book on the step and walked away.
Over the course of an admittedly privileged life, I consider my visit to Judy’s as a sort of personal rock bottom. In the weeks that followed, I felt certain the conclusion to the Blythe Harris mystery was simply “Kathleen Hale is crazy” – and to be fair, that is one deduction. But I soon found out that it was not the only one.
While pondering that version of this story, I continued to scroll through both Blythe and Judy’s social media pages. And I saw something I had missed: Blythe had posted identical photos of Judy’s dogs, even using their names – Bentley and Bailey – but saying they were hers.
I sent screenshots to Patricia. “It’s the end of an era,” she Gchatted me. Between the emoticons and the lower-case font, she was the calmest version of herself she’d been all year.
Instead of returning to Judy’s house, which still felt like the biggest breach of decency I’d ever pulled, I decided to call her at work. Sarah and I rehearsed the conversation.
“What do I even say?” I kept asking.
“Just pretend to be a factchecker,” she said.
“So now I’m catfishing her.”
I called the number, expecting to get sent to an operator. But a human answered and when I asked for Judy, she put me through.
“This is Judy Donofrio,” she said.
I spat out the line about needing to factcheck a piece. She seemed uncertain but agreed to answer some questions.
“Is this how to spell your name?” I asked, and spelled it.
“Next question,” she snapped without answering.
“Do you live in Nassau County?”
“No.” Her Facebook page and LinkedIn account said otherwise, and that’s where her house was. She was lying, in other words, but I didn’t push it.
I asked if she was vice-president of the company.
“I can’t help you,” she said. “Buh-bye…”
“DO YOU USE THE NAME BLYTHE HARRIS TO BOOK BLOG ONLINE?” I felt like the guy on the Howard Stern show, screaming, “I exist!”
She paused. “No,” she said quietly.
She paused again, then asked, “Who’s Blythe Harris?” Her tone had changed, as if suddenly she could talk for ever.
“She’s a book blogger,” I said, “and she’s given your address.”
“A book blog… Yeah, I don’t know what that is.”
“Oh.”
We both mumbled about how weird it all was.
“She uses photos of your dogs,” I said, feeling like the biggest creep in the world, but also that I might be talking to a slightly bigger creep. “I have it here,” I said, pretending to consult notes, even though she couldn’t see me, “that you have a Pomeranian, and another dog, and she uses photos that you posted.”
She gasped. “I do have a Pomeranian.”
“She uses your address,” I repeated. “Do you have children who might be using a different name online?” I already knew she had two teenagers.
“Nope – I do, but they’re not… They don’t live there any more,” she stammered.
“You know what?” she added. “I am Judy, but I don’t know who this Blythe Harris is and why she’s using my pictures or information.” I could hear her lips smacking; unruffled, she had started eating. “Can you report her or something?”
“Unfortunately it’s not a crime,” I said. “It’s called catfishing.”
She didn’t know what that meant, so I found myself defining catfishing for someone who was, presumably, catfishing me. (And who I was cross-catfishing.) “It happens a lot.”
“A long time ago I used to get books,” she said, her mouth full. “I just put ‘Return to Sender’.”
I told her that publishing houses were sending the books. I told her she might want to check out Blythe Harris’s Instagram, as there were photos on it she would recognise. She didn’t seem to care.
I asked how long it had been since she’d received books. “Like years ago,” she said.
An hour after I got off the phone to Judy, Blythe Harris deleted her Twitter and set her Instagram to private. A contact at a publishing house confirmed that they’d been sending books to Judy’s address all year, and as recently as two weeks ago.
***
“So,” I asked Nev Schulman, after giving him my evidence. “Am I a good catfisherwoman?”
“Do you really need me to tell you that?” he asked. “What’s interesting are the unanswered questions – like, why would she do this? That’s something our show does. It gives people closure.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. On the one hand, I was satisfied that Blythe Harris was a catfish. But part of me still longed to hear Judy say, “I am Blythe” and to explain, and then to laugh about it with me so we could become friends through admittedly weird circumstances. The mystery didn’t feel 100% solved.
“I’m tempted to tell you to call her back and tell her it’s you, and that you lied to her,” Schulman said. “Because, look, I’m curious to know about this chick, too – these people are really interesting, and the lives they lead and the characters they create, it takes a lot of brain power.”
So I called Judy again and this time I told her who I was, and that I knew she was Blythe Harris.
She started yelling. She said she wasn’t Blythe Harris and that she was going to call the police about “this Blythe Harris person”.
I paused. “OK.” I hadn’t anticipated the shouting.
“The profile picture is not me,” Judy cried, referring to Blythe’s Twitter profile. “It’s my friend Carla.”
I gasped. “You know that person?”
“She stole [pictures of Carla] off my website from making my Facebook.”
The way she spoke about the internet – “making my Facebook” – made doubt grow in my chest. Blythe’s blog was nothing fancy, but it had obviously been generated by someone who knew her way around a basic html template.
“The Pomeranian is me,” Judy said. “That picture isn’t me.”
She wouldn’t give me Carla’s last name, but I later found her through Judy’s Facebook. Sure enough, Blythe Harris had dragged her Twitter profile picture from Carla’s. And according to Judy, the only picture on Blythe’s Instagram page that featured an actual person – the one of the woman in the helicopter – had also been repurposed from a Facebook album chronicling Carla’s recent trip to Greece.
I asked Judy if she had told Carla about Blythe Harris. She hadn’t: “I don’t want to alarm her.” Then she started yelling again.
“I’m not yelling at you,” she yelled, and started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I feel like this is my fault,” Judy sobbed.
“How is it your fault?” I wanted to know.
“Whatever,” she whispered darkly. Her tone had shifted. “People are stupid,” she added, her voice flat. “If you track their IP address, you can find them easily.”
This seemed at odds with her earlier Facebook naivety, but I felt too suffocated to parse it all out. “OK,” I said. “Feel better.” When I gave her my name and number, there was no obvious reaction to my identity. “If you discover anything,” I said, “or if there’s anything you feel like you forgot to say, please let me know.” Sweat trickled down my back. I knew, on some level, that I was speaking to Blythe Harris. But after all this time, and all this digging, I still couldn’t prove it. Part of me wondered whether it even mattered any more.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll Facebook message you.”
After we hung up, she blocked me on Facebook. Then Blythe Harris reconnected her Twitter account and set it to private. But she was still following me, which meant I could send her a direct message. I wrote to her that I knew she was using other women’s photos. I filled up three of the 140-character word limits, imploring her to contact me.
“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” I wrote. Channelling Schulman, I emphasised that I just wanted to know more about her experience – to listen, and hear how she felt about all this. Blythe responded by unfollowing me; there could be no more direct messages.
I’m told Blythe still blogs and posts on Goodreads; Patricia tells me she still live tweets Gossip Girl. In some ways I’m grateful to Judy, or whoever is posing as Blythe, for making her Twitter and Instagram private, because it has helped me drop that obsessive part of my daily routine. Although, like anyone with a tendency for low-grade insanity, I occasionally grow nostalgic for the thing that makes me nuts.
Unlike iPhone messages or Facebook, Twitter doesn’t confirm receipt of direct messages. Even so, I return now and then to our one-way conversation, wanting so badly for the time stamp at the bottom of my message to read “Seen”.
![The Pittsburg [sic] visible-writing machine.](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_u_V2x4m04l8er_w4ja1tqzHpKVBzAdfU5wAGjMFpXfvHDy5lk41ihY7qUz_RhMxe-WLgAAq8E-Vx67_x32COqSyKLPDwo-I7Q3CTq49aoso3TmP0WZhKPj9lqfdfBFqD1HgbtZ=s0-d "The Pittsburg [sic] visible-writing machine.")
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