In the middle of the library, surrounded by thousands of books, I consider only the one not written. There is no more new, no more next. My son's beloved character -- the one he has lived with for weeks, whose every episode has delighted and compelled, whose further adventures he has plotted for days -- has been robbed of resolution. Imagine if the wolf were left prowling on the roof of the brick house, if Sylvester's parents had never found the magic pebble, if Boo Radley had lurked forever in the shadows-- Obviously, this is a kind of death.
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When my older son arrived from college for a rare weekend visit home this summer, one of his first questions was, "So, Mom, are you still writing at four or five in the morning?"
"Yes," I said, "still beating the sun out of bed most days."
My son turned to his girlfriend who had come home with him. "She always did that. She was trying to get away from us kids and the pets."
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So I decided, beginning with Gabriel's first birthday, to build him a library of carefully selected titles. I would present it to him as a "starter library" for his bar mitzvah gift, and continue to add a book on each of his subsequent birthdays throughout high school and college. By age 22, he'd have a shelf of twenty-two handsome bindings, filled with stories and wisdom.
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Of course we're going to read a story. She's the school reading assistant. But instead of jumping right in, I pull the sheet to my face and block her from view. I freeze. The words morph into a meaningless arrangement of letters on the page. Knots of fear grow in my stomach.
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The British novelist Graham Greene called the necessary distance a writer must have from his or her material "a sliver of ice in the heart of the writer." And I did not yet have that sliver of ice. My heart was still warm with worry for my boy.
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Aunt March deems Jo headstrong and incorrigible and unworthy of a grand tour of Europe. So be it. The other characters fade and age. Only Jo is immortal, vibrant and spry after 140 years, still capable of summoning readers to her attic. She is a heroine for all time, the kind of strong female protagonist I always wanted to be. The kind I wanted to share with my daughter.
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