I have a confession to make.
I’m weird. At least, I think that I’m weird.
I may have lost a few of you with that last bit of uncertainty, but I can’t know for sure. My weird may be someone else’s practical normal, and what may be weird to a third person is mind-numbingly common to me. Enough about that though, I’m getting off topic. However I will present my resume of personality to explain to you why I think I may be weird. I love pineapple, it’s my favorite fruit but I refuse to eat it plain. It has to go on a burger, or wrapped in bacon on a hot dog. I like pineapple in tacos al pastor and I love it on pizza. If I didn’t suspect that I lost you at the beginning, I’m certain that quite a few will have left due to that last taste. I’d like to deepen the pineapple hedonism just a bit further, pineapple pizza dipped in blue cheese dressing is pretty much the pinnacle of fast food pizza cuisine.
Do I still have you? I’m pleased to hear it. We might be able to be friends after all. I won’t bore you with too many more details, I promise. I’ll discuss more rapid-fire preferences from here on out. I have a particular set of silverware in my house that feels better in my hands, and I use it almost exclusively. I’ve got my partner trained well enough that when I dish out our dinner every night he immediately knows which plate is his based off the utensil included. I will eat soup and bread for any meal any time of the year, no matter the temperature because there is no more soothing meal in this world than a delicious bowl with dipping bread. I’m no strange to hearing the opinion that others have that I am weird, different, or “special”. I love it though. I love being me, and I love the things that I like and I love loving the things that I like, and being who I am. There is so much more to this feeling, but I’m sure that you get the gist of it. There is that old saying that birds of a feather flock together, meaning that similar people tend to group up and become friends. I think the phrase can be used far more generally. Weird attracts weird. I say all of this to tell you that I love seeking out weird things. I get a tremendous rush when I find a piece of “lost” media that I heard of and spent hours hunting down. It makes me so happy to hear differing view points and eclectic opinions on works of art that I had never considered before. When I find unusual, thought provoking media, and realize that not many people have found the piece and been able to feel the way I am, my heart swells. So of course, when I heard about a book written in the very unusual second person point of view my interest was immediately piqued.
I first heard of Bright Lights, Big City as a awkward fifteen year old ignoring my honors English class lecture to write horrible fan fiction and I became instantly enamored by what I then considered a ground-breaking and radical concept. My peers and the teacher disparaged the idea and thought that a book written that way would be boring and taxing to read. That writ my desire in stone. That same day I started to write a new work of my own in second person, not yet having read the book and having no idea what I was doing. It never went anywhere, but I still have what I began hand written in that class that day. I looked quietly for that book the next time I went to the bookstore and again at the library. I didn’t find it – and while I forgot about the work in my day to day life, I always carried the awe in the concept in the back of my mind. I finally found a copy while browsing ThriftBooks and had that grail in my hands. I began the book enthralled, and while that feeling ebbed and flowed the course of the book the excitement I had reading the first page in the flesh will stick in my memory forever. After the catharsis of finally getting ahold of the book that I had been dreaming of wore off, the book revealed it’s true self.
Bright Lights, Big City is not a long novel, yet within it’s under two-hundred pages it manages to make repeated and frequent use of racial slurs and homophobic/transphobic language. Not far into reading the book it occurred to me that the arrogant yet self-deprecating tone of voice the narrator utilizes to describe the surroundings of the protagonist felt much akin to what I read in American Psycho. I was quite surprised when I checked into the biography of the author Jay Mcinerney and learned that he did in reality spent quite a bit of time with Bret Easton Ellis. I was further surprised to find that BLBC was published half a decade earlier than AP and “You” likely influenced Patrick Bateman than the other way around. All the same, birds of a feather may flock together and they definitely write in the same style.
Despite my initial disdain for the judgmental yet goalless protagonist, I continued reading the book. I had been dreaming of getting the opportunity to read the book for years, and it had inspired my love of writing and I wasn’t willing to give that up yet. For context, “You” are a down on his luck recently divorced wanna-be writer pretending to be a worldly socialite doing research for his great American novel by doing a shipping container’s worth of cocaine and half-assing any task given to him. Jay McInerney has this man maintain his emotional walls to everyone, including himself until an eventful reunion with his brother where it all comes to a head. He admits for the first time how he has made it into this mess and I got it. I know all too well the avalanche of dishonesty that accrues when you must carry someone else’s secrets whether they want you to or not, and they become your secrets. You have to lie for them, and then you have to cover for your role in the story. Then you begin to wonder what caused you to get into the mess in the first place, so you create a story to deal with your own feelings about the issue. You create a story for that story, and hopefully it stops there, but often it doesn’t. I know what it is like to hold in your own voice because you are overwhelmed by the voice of someone else, or you have become so entrenched in someone else’s voice that you can’t hear your own any longer. Even now, it’s so difficult to hear my own voice and I am trying so hard to listen.
I’m confidently certain that BLBC wasn’t intended to solicit these kinds of feelings but I feel seen in the most cutting way than I have in months. I had no idea that the book that had such a large impact on my early writing experience would again affect me in such a significant way.
I never intended to take so long a break from writing, but I am still here. I am still here and I have so many stories in me to put into this world. There is so much we all have in us and it’s never too late to pursue it.
The Cluttered Library 