It started with a conversation last spring. Jess Fechtor was in town for the night for a book-signing, and it seemed like the perfect chance to turn an internet friendship into a real-life friendship. She ubered to our house in outer Portland, after dark, in a downpour, and I offered her microwave popcorn and whiskey, because I am a terrible host. After spending her entire night talking to a large crowd about writing and her new book, she sweetly asked me for some hot water with lemon, and then let me take up the rest of her night, talking about writing and her book, listening to me (intently, warmly, because she is amazing like that) yammer on about the last few years. I told her about Ewan, about Hyperlexia, echolalia, about the things in my life that seemed ironic at the very least, fated at most. That I was once a children’s librarian (and later a book-seller) who wanted a child more than anything. And that after four years of waiting, Ewan was born. And that despite a million odds (or one in ten thousand to be exact), my formerly useless, near-encyclopedic knowledge of children’s books, became significant in a way I could not have predicted. They became his language, our language, when language failed. And somewhere in that conversation, she said, “Well that’s a book, you know.” And I knew she was right.
There is no way to separate the books I read and wrote about and sold for years from this story. Or even this blog. And it is new territory, not knowing how to write about them or even where to begin, or if these stories are mine to tell. We still speak in books, Ewan and I, even though he has his own words now. But I can no longer read the last page of Are You My Mother with any kind of objectivity. I wrote this post, once upon a time, both knowing and not knowing, how differently our lives would unfold. So I am writing now, again, in a completely unfamiliar way. Scenes or maybe chapters or snippets of our life and the books that brought us together. I hope to share things that I am working on here from time to time, to all two (?) or three (?) of you who might still be out there. Time flies like a speed demon. Winter is almost here. There is so much left to write.
