Flirting with the page

Weave a circle round [her] thrice
And close your eyes in holy dread
For [s]he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise
- Coleridge

Dear Ben,

I have just come home from a day in a training session about writing for the web: eight hours devoted to learning how to cut out big words, simplify phrases and eliminate unnecessary 'waffle'.

I came out reeling.

I wanted to wail: "But waffling is what I do. What am I, without my waffling? Cut out big words? I need my big words."

I saw myself again, age five –

Plugging my ears while my father tried to coax me into learning a new song on the violin.

Screaming: "I don't want to learn a new song. I want to play 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!'"

Stamping my foot and going red in the face and threatening to smash my violin on the floor if he didn't let me play 'Twinkle, Twinkle' right now.

Twenty years later, and there I was again, red-faced and wanting to smash something.

But it wasn't all bad. And although our instructor succeeded in systematically shooting to pieces all my ideas about language, the purpose of writing, and what readers want, he also gave us a piece of advice that (of course - what doesn't?) made me think of you.

"Think of your audience – your readers - as one person," he said.

"Give him/her a name - an age - a job. Make him/her real. It'll make it easier to know what your aim is, if you know for whom you are writing."

Walking home - it was raining, the air was heavy, but I would not be stopped, I had to get the afternoon’s coffees out of my system and my rushing thoughts to abate - I found myself thinking about the myriad of pieces ammassed on my desktop that start with the words "Dear Ben".

For example: “I am very judgemental, Ben. The first time I met you I thought you were immensely attractive and as a consequence I assumed you must be an asshole. Then I decided that you weren't an asshole – but I was still suspicious and figured there must be a catch somewhere. I assumed you'd been popular in high school and had always had it easy. And I equated the fact that I'd been miserable in high school with my being, essentially, a better person than you.” Do you remember this? It's from one of my very first letters to you.

Or: “Dear Ben, How is it that Florence becomes more beautiful every time i see it? If I could marry a city I would already be at the altar. Of the duomo, of course. No, maybe Santa Croce […] I love Italy, I adore Florence, I love a lot of people and a lot of things. Maybe the problem is that I love too many things.” Two summers ago, this was.

It's true, what the instructor said: identifying one's reader does help one to focus one's discourse. I should know: I have been using you to focus my discourse for years. Hell, I have been focussing my discourse on you for years.

But not only that: envisioning one’s reader helps to make the fictional seem real. It facilitates the suspension of disbelief: for in inventing a realistic reader, the author makes the narrative itself more realistic.

The very existence of a specific reader immediately creates a sense of time and place, of a before and an after. It implies that there is a story that pre-dates the account at hand (the history between author and reader), that there is a reason why the author is telling the story (presumably something between author and reader needs resolving) and that there are loose ends to tie, something to be resolved… and tension in the air (why else, otherwise, would the author be bothering to speak?).

But I have noticed something else. Having invented a reader, the author changes the hues with which he or she paints his/her canvas… not to convey his/her message more clearly, as the instructor in my class implied, but simply to convey him/herself in a better light.

Because with the invention of the reader, the account turns into a personal affair: a relationship is born, and the author’s mission becomes to appeal to the reader.

Appeal both in the sense of putting forth an argument (the reader as judge and jury), and in the sense of rendering one’s self appealing – ie, luring, attracting, ingratiating (the reader as prisoner).

And so the author leaves out material - in some cases, entire pieces of their life - that jars with the idea they wish their reader to have of them. They invent. They elaborate. In the very act of rendering the fictional ‘true’ they find themselves, paradoxically, transforming the truth into a fiction. Sexing it up, so to speak.

They find themselves using words and turns of phrase that show them in the best light - the literary equivalent of choosing the most flattering skirt length or revealing the right amount of cleavage.

Witness the author, flirting with the page.

I imagine you smiling as you read this. I can see the sideways grin as it slants slightly to the left of your face while, legs crossed (your surprisingly feminine Meg Ryan legs… I still remember your bewilderment when I spotted the resemblance), hands clasped around your knee, foot swinging, you lean forward, the better to understand. Intent, as always, on garnering the full meaning – on observing, assimilating, pondering (My opposite, in every way).

I imagine you, captivated: my captive audience, my trapped judge and jury.

Laughing at the absurdity of what I am saying.

But is it so absurd? Rather, is it not inevitable? After all, to write is to perform – and a performer keeps one’s audience enthralled by attracting them more easily than by repelling them (the idea that there is a fine line between the two will have to be the subject of a future letter).

Moreover, if to write is to exhibit, bare and conceal, the writer isn’t merely flirting: they are veritably performing a strip tease.

Witness the writer, doing the dance of the seven veils.

“Think of your audience – your readers - as one person," our instructor told us.

"Give him/her a name - an age - a job. Make him/her real. It'll make it easier to know what your aim is.”

And so I have invented you, Ben: conjured a picture of you, the better to do my little dance (I doubt very much this was what our teacher had in mind).

Concocted an idea of your likes and dislikes in order to know what – and what not – to reveal.

Propped up your cardboard cut-out, life-sized paper doll figure, then switched on the table-lamp, draped it with one of my fuchsia scarves – the ones that bleed onto my other clothes in the wash and stream scarlet tears every time that, like today, I get caught in the rain – and proceeded to grind my hips.

Witness the writer, eyes closed in order to shut out the real and better embrace the ephemeral fiction she herself has created.

Fiction: in other words, lies.

I have a confession to make, Ben: I have lied throughout this letter.

The training session: it was over a month ago, not today. I didn't walk home - I went to Russell Square, to meet my parents for dinner. It wasn't raining, and I had not had so much coffee as to be buzzing. I had to invent all of that, to create a scene, to enable the suspense to mount. To draw you in.

Writers lie and manipulate even while claiming to confess - and when narrating, the distinction between mendacity and truth is far too easily blurred.

But do you know what I find fascinating? The truth that emerges from an accumulation of fibs. There are clues to be found in a fictitious account: the scene of the crime is littered with evidence, and the reader has only to look for what has not been said. To read between the lines, as it were. To envision the naked skin under the veils, and create for themselves a whole from the glimpse of an undulating hip or the hint of a nipple. To determine for themselves the 'true' version events.

After all, Ben, you didn't think I'd really strip, did you?

Truly,
hushawildviolet

Pink

Barbie pink. Plastic pink. Candy-floss pink. Bubble-gum pink.
Tacky-tacky-tacky pink. As-much-pink-as-I-can-have pink.

Frosting pink. Lacy underwear pink. Princess pink. Transvestite pink.
Lipstick pink. Roses-on-your-birthday pink. I’ve-never-outgrown-pink pink.
Baby bottom pink. Cheeky pink. Ass cheek pink.
Onomatopoeic pink. Poetic pink.
I’m-a-romantic-at-heart pink.

Little girl pink. Training-bra pink.
Understated-pink-for-the-working-girl pink.
Old-pensioner-in-a-nursing-home pink.

I’m-a-waitress-at-Dennys-but-really-I’m-an-actress pink. I-wear-power-suits-even-though-the-eighties-are-over pink.
Acrylic legwarmer pink.
Because-the-eighties-are-back-and-so-is-pink pink.

Pink-even-though-one-day-I-will-be old-and-look-silly, wispy-haired-and-frail-and-docile- in-my-bedjacket-that-looks-so-much-like the-blanket-they-put-me-in-as-a-baby pink.

Prep school boy pink. Gay man pink.
Straight-man-who-can-still-carry-off-pink pink.
Uneducated-girls-who-don’t-read-books pink. Uneducated-girls-who-only-read-Harlequin-novels pink. Uneducated-girls-who’ll-never-amount-to-anything pink.
Educated-girls-who-still-like-pink pink.

Big-titted celebrity pink. Nipple pink. Aureola pink.
Monthly-self-exams-in-the-shower pink. Cancerous pink. She-was-so-young-what-a-shame-what-a-waste-of-potential pink. She-was-so-old-so-who-really-cares pink.
I've-only-got-one-breast pink. You’re-only-half-a-woman pink.

Shut-up-and-be-pretty pink.
You-ugly-bitch pink.
She-isn’t-pretty-but-she’s-got-a-great-personality pink.
She’s-fat-but-what-a-pretty-face pink.

Pink-like-the-Virgin-Mary-if-she-weren’t-so-into-baby-blue pink. Diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend pink.
We-live-in-a-material-world-and-I-am-a-material-girl pink.
Took-a-while-to-get-me-here-and-I'm-gonna-take-my-time pink.
Let’s-get-this-party-started pink.

I’m-a-good-person pink. I’m-so-innocent pink.
Look-at-me-I’m-in-pink pink. Don’t take me seriously, I wear pink, pink. Fresh-faced-and-no-make-up pink.
You’re-young-and-the-world’s-at-your-feet pink.
Only-the-good-die-young pink.

I’m-still-a-virgin-pink. I’m-a-born-again-virgin-pink.
You-make-me pink. For-the-very-first-time pink.
You-make-me-feel pink.
Like-a-natural-woman pink.
Let-me-be-your-baby pink. You’ll-always-be-my-baby,baby pink.
It's-not-you-it's-me pink.
Ok-I-just-got-bored-with-you pink.
I’ll-steal-your-boyfriend-and-look-angelic-doing-it pink.

Seduced-and-abandoned pink.
No-one-gives-a-damn-pink.
This-is-not-the-time-pink.
Left-for-dead pink.

I’m-just-going-to-powder-my-nose pink.
I’m-just-going-to-stick-powder-up-my-nose pink.
My-room-was-pink-before-I painted-it-black pink.
It’s-hard-to-be-a-rebel-in-pink-pink.

Nursing-home-pink. Blank-faced-pink. How-did-I-get-here? pink. I-used-to-be-beautiful-and-all-the-boys-liked-me pink. I-wanted-to-be-a-movie-star-and-I-could-have,you-know pink. You-look-so-much-like-my-daughter-she-loved-pink-too pink. Palatial-pink-was-my-favourite-shade-of-nail-polish,
they-don’t-make-it-anymore, it’s-a-shame-and-what-did-you-say-your-name-was-again? pink.

Pink-for-the-romantic-in-me pink.
Pink-for-the-broken-old-souls-who-want-cheering-up pink. It’s-amazing-what-some-flowers-can-do-to-brighten-up-the-room-
don’t-you-think? pink.
Yellowing-dentures-with-pale-pink-gums-smiling-from-the-glass pink. I-still-get-my-nails-done-sometimes pink.

Bathroom-enamel-pink.
Enamel-pink-bathroom-where-I-sometimes-like-to-cry pink.
Cry-baby-pink. Why-are-you-crying-little-girl? pink. The-most-beautiful-girl-in-the-world-pink.
The-sluttiest-girl-in-the-world pink.
If-only-I-were-pretty-pink. I’m-pretty-but-nobody-knows-it pink. I’m-pretty-because-everybody-says-so pink.

This-pattern-of-wallpaper-used-to-be-all-the-rage pink. If-only-we’d-had-time-to-redo-the-bathroom-
before-they-had-to-take-her-away pink.

God-you’ve-got-cheekbones-to-die-for pink.
Anybody-else-would-look-like-a-whore-in-that pink.
Why-do-you-insist-on-looking-so-cheap? pink.
You-fucking-cunt pink.

I-only-buy-pink-toiletpaper pink. I-only-wipe-my-ass-with-pink-toilet-paper pink. My-daughter-only-uses-ecofriendly-toilet-paper-God-knows-why-
I-mean-we’re-all-going-to-die-someday-anyway-even-the-planet-
so-why-not-enjoy-some-colour-until-then? pink.

I'm-leaving-instructions-to-be-buried-in-pink pink.
She-wanted-to-be-buried-in-pink-but-I-just-couldn’t pink. Mrs.Pink-was-buried-in-a-lovely-understated-grey-
and-her-bitch-of-a-daughter-didn’t-even-cry pink.

It’s-a-shame-nobody-wears-pink-anymore pink.

Dear Ben,

Tonight I am full of unspoken words.

Brimming, despite the fact that I have spent nearly all day talking.

On the phone, to my mother.
On the phone, to Girlfriend Number One - Girlfriend Number Two - Girlfriend Number Three.

It is hot out: the heat arrived suddenly, this morning, taking the city by surprise. The streets were full of people with winter-blanched skin and slumberous gaits, eyes hazy with disbelief at summer's sudden appearance. I felt like I was coming out of a collective hybernation.

London, awakening.
London, squinting in the sun.
London, not - quite - ready.

Now, at 11 at night, the room retains the heat of the day. The sliding door that gives onto the terrace is wide open and the hanging laundry on the cold radiators gives off an almost pungent scent. As if it will rot before it dries.

I have been thinking a lot about decay. And destruction. About what makes things fall apart.

Have you read Yeats' 'The Second Coming?' I am thinking, in particular, about the beginning of the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

It is a piece about the second coming of Christ, actually. But I rarely pay attention to context, when I recall lines of songs or poetry. When I get words stuck in my head that won't go away.

The centre couldn't hold, Ben. Things fell apart.

I am giddy in my confusion.

After death comes birth. From the flames, the phoenix. When everything breaks down, it is time to re-build.

In my head, I see visions of creation.

I went out today and bought a £175 dress to be a bridesmaid at my best friend's wedding - after having broken up with the man I had, at one point, thought I was going to marry.

I didn't cry.

I walked among racks of dresses - and what dresses, Ben, what dresses! - and I ran my hands through the different fabrics. I fingered the shoes on display and imagined myself buying armloads of them.

Then I took the escalator down to the ground floor and trailed through the maze of perfume and cosmetics counters. I sprayed myself with Issaye Miyake and spent the rest of the day sniffing my wrist.

I rang my mother.
I rang Girlfriend Number One, Girlfriend Number Two, Girlfriend Number Three: "I found the perfect dress!"

On the train home, I sat, holding the bag with the dress pressed against my chest, wondering at my own elation.

And I didn't cry.

The first time I see him is at a party. A friend introduces us. I stare.

The second time - a drum and base night for students. He's wearing a white t-shirt that looks fluorescent under the blue lights. He dances like a crazed person, eyes closed. I wonder if he's on drugs.

The third time is at a meeting for creative writers.

"Write for Tallulah and see your work in print," says the flier in my pigeon-hole.

I'm 19, one month and a handful of days.

I'm 19 and I want to be a writer.

I'm 19 with all my hopes intact.

I tell my roommate I'm going to a meeting of writers. I tell her I'm going to get published.

I wear pink shiny trousers to the meeting because I don't know any better.

Because I'm only 19.

The meeting is in a stuffy room at the end of a labyrinthine corridor. Outside it is raining and the floor on one side of the room is cluttered with wet umbrellas. The air is damp and sticky, and smells vaguely of body odour. The bottoms of my trousers are muddy, my hair streaming. My broken umbrella is in the bin by the door, locked with someone else's in a spidery embrace.

There's a fat girl with pigtails at the front of the room talking to a small group of earnest-looking students. I didn't know writers could be so unattractive, and for a moment I'm caught off-guard. Then I remember the newspaper photograph of Margaret Atwood hanging on my dorm room wall. She does not look anything like the other women who crowd my walls - Liz Hurley, Elle MacPherson, Natalie Portman, the doe-eyed brunette in the Magnum ad.

But fat?

I decide now would be a good moment to choose substance over form. I avert my eyes and try to listen.

She talks an awful lot about creativity. About releasing inner energies. About 'finding space inside to nurture one's self-expression'. She is breathless in her enthusiasm and often trips on her words. Someone near the front sniggers, but her look of hurt bewilderment stops them.

And then a phone rings.

It is the pink panther tune, and it comes, loudly, from the other side of the room.

The girl keeps talking, undeterred, while the phone rings on.

I crane my neck. At the back I see a bowed, blonde head.

It's him.

He doesn't notice me looking as he switches off the phone.

After the meeting, people are invited to mingle. I find myself cornered by an American exchange student with shiny skin and acne scars who has decided to tell me his life story while scrutinising my tits. I cross my arms over my chest and he continues to stare. I'm slightly cowed by his persistence. And confused - aren't Americans meant to be prudish?

I leave the meeting with an armload of brochures. I already know they'll end up in the recycling bin together with the archery, rowing, sailing, swim club, football, and various religious groups' pamphlets I continue to zealously collect in a bid to become part of the university community, only to lose interest after each introductory meeting.

It's fine, though. Because I saw him while I was talking to the American. And he was looking straight at me.

I'm 19 and it's enough for a guy to look at me - for a guy to look like he's looking at me, for it to not to matter that I have no idea how to 'unleash my creativity' -

that I'm not sure I have an aura I want to explore -

that, let's face it, I'm not going to get published thanks to "Tallulah" -

that I have the attention span of a gnat.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be the subject than to have to look for one to write about.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be looked at than look.

I'm 19 and I'm dying, dying, dying to be seen.

La piu' bella [scrittrice] del mondo

I don’t want to be a writer to change people’s lives. Fuck that. I don’t want to make a difference.

And come on. Write about people? About others' experiences? Far-away places? I’ve no idea where most countries are situated geographically, and I’ve even less of an idea of what the people in those countries do, so why would I want to write about them?

No. Please. Let’s be honest (and honesty is my forte: I am nothing if not disarmingly honest. Watch me disarm you with my charming honesty. Just watch).

I want to be famous.

Correction.

I want to be faayyy-muss.

What I have been looking forward to since the age of three (when I dictated my first story, not knowing yet how to write) is the day when I can stand behind a podium in front of a room full of people whilst I wax eloquent on my youthful, naive aspirations (pause for a chuckle here and perhaps a self-deprecating anecdote or two) and on why I felt called to be a writer in the first place.

For there is no doubt in my mind at present, nor will there be in my mind ten years from now (max, twenty—Zadie Smith managed it at, what? 26? If I’m still unknown and unpublished by age 33 I’ll go die a solitary death in one of those obscure countries of which I’ve never heard), that it is a matter of being called.

Visited by the muse.

Plucked from the multitude of common people and pirouetted into the realm of the bold.

The bold, man. The bold and the beautiful.

Which brings me to my other aspiration—or rather, the aspiration which up until the age of twelve I considered to have already attained (can one attain an aspiration?).

To become – hell, to already be – the most beautiful writer in the world.

I’m not sure what I actually thought that meant, as a child. I think I vaguely envisaged a future of flipping my hair (it would have to be blonde, of course: though by what miraculous transformation I don’t know) casually and seductively over my shoulder whilst hammering away at a noisy electric typewriter that would give a triumphant ‘bing’ at the end of every line.

(Note that this was long before “Sex and the City” and Sarah Jessica Parker’s moments of pensive eloquence whilst sitting in her Manhatten apartment, generally in her underwear and strategically filmed from an angle made to make her look as un-horse-like as possible.)

It is, as it generally is, all my mother’s fault. Hers and that of our relatives on her side of the family, who told me, from the moment I was born, that I was “la piú bella del mondo” (note: not “the most beautiful girl”, “the most beautiful being”, “the most beautiful baby”, but simply “the most beautiful”, in general. Not a lot of people can claim that).

So naturally it was rather devastating when, the summer I turned two, whilst playing contentedly in the sand at the beach, I overheard the old women sitting under the beach umbrella next to ours cooing at her grand-daughter and saying, “Who’s the most beautiful girl in the world? You’re the most beautiful girl in the world!”

I immediately burst into tears and ran to my mother, crying disconsolately and somewhat petulantly, “I thought I was the most beautiful in the world.”

My ego miraculously survived the incident as well as the succession of events that, over the years, continued to indicate I might not, in fact, be “la piu’ bella del mondo”, let alone “la piu’ bella” writer.

In the fifth grade, for example, my best friend Emily and I spent our afternoons after school ringing up all the boys in our grade, asking them out. They all said no, except one who agreed to go out with Emily, which mildly puzzled me since I was so sure I was prettier and cleverer than her. I came to the conclusion that none of these boys could see just how beautiful I was.

It wasn’t until I was twelve that it dawned on me. My God: I wasn’t beautiful. I was, in fact, fat and hideous. Something had to be done: the ‘beautiful’ from my title would have to be omitted.

I would be “the most writer in the world” – without the hair-flicking.

However once one weathers adolescence, the values with which one grew up as a child (presupposing, of course, that one listened to what one was told—but then, as a typical first-born, I always did) tend to claw their way back,.

Thus, my teen years left behind, I accepted once again the importance of eating vegetables, going to bed early, indulging in Catholic guilt, looking both ways before crossing the street, reading books to improve myself, and the unquestionable reality of my infinite.

Which is why, at the age of 25, I still want to be the most beautiful writer in the world. Put simply, I’ve got no qualifications to do anything else.

I’ve been preparing for this beauty pageant since I was born.

I save all my emails on my computer for the day when my biographers (and of course there will be many of them) want to publish my correspondence, I make copious notes in the books I read so as to provide enough content for the publication of my marginalia.

Not to mention the journal I’ve been keeping since I was six. One day, the description of the story “Cat dog fish” in my first-grade journal, the list of “People I hate” and “People I sort of hate” in the 10 Feb 1995 entry, the account of my weight fluctuations throughout each day of 1996 (first thing in the morning, after breakfast, before my mid-afternoon shit, after my mid-afternoon shit, etc) will be the subject of innumerable studies of my juvenilia.

For much the same reason, I try to be in as many photographs as possible (and always ask for copies) so as to facilitate future documentation of my prime (essential, as even the most beautiful writer in the world “needs must wither” eventually).

As for actually writing anything, when anyone asks me about what I’m working on, I’ve gotten quite good at looking slightly vacantly into space, with just the right amount of sorrow in my expression, and saying in a subdued, almost reverential tone, “Ah, I’m actually blocked at the moment.”