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 If I’m still unknown and unpublished by age 33 I’ll go die a solitary death in one of those obscure countries of which I’ve never heard), that it is a matter of being called.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.”