Yep, I tried to tell him with my eyes. I’m on my own. But everything is going to be fine.
I kept Fake Jo plastered across my face and, waving to the applauding audience, willed the jitters I felt to calm down. Then I reached for the microphone on the seat of the chair to the right of Will and sat down as gracefully as I could.
But not, of course, before I noticed that on the screen behind me, the graphic had changed. Now instead of welcoming everyone to the Little Bridge Book Festival, it showed two gigantic headshots: one of Bernadette, and one of me—our glossy back-of-the-book author photos.
But mine was as I’d looked years earlier, when I’d first started out in publishing, with a hopeful, radiant smile, sparkling blue eyes, and loose curling waves of blond hair, way before Will had ever publicly trashed my writing.
Great. This was not helping at all.
I had no choice but to address it, and the fact that I was alone.
“Wow, would you look at that,” I said into the mic, gazing up at myself. “This is what one night of partying on your island does to people. It killed the author Bernadette Zhang and it turned me from that sweet young thing into this.” I gestured at my black hair and the sunglasses I had forgotten up until that moment that I was still wearing. No wonder Will hadn’t been reassured by my gaze.
For a second or two the audience sat in stunned silence, as if uncertain what it had heard. But I knew the mic was on, because I’d heard my own voice reverberate quite clearly from the back of the auditorium. The acoustics were dynamite.
Then a wave of appreciative laughter came pouring toward me: they got the joke.
And right then the butterflies fled, and I felt fine. Everything was going to be all right … so long as I could Kitty Katz my way through it and keep up the furr-endly banter.
“I’m so sorry that you ordered this,” I said, gesturing toward the photo and then myself again, “but got this instead. But I assure you, I am Jo Wright. It’s just been a while since I updated my author photo. And I’m loving my stay here on your lovely island. Thank you so much for having me.” I gave Will a slice of my smile to show that my thanks extended to him, as well, but he was only staring at me with a sort of stunned expression on his face, so I turned back to address the audience. “Bernadette Zhang’s been called away for a family emergency—all of you parents out there know how hard it is to balance work and family life. But she’ll try to join us as soon as she can. In the meantime, Will and I are going to have a great conversation about female empowerment in children’s fiction today, aren’t we, Will?”
Come on, buddy, I urged him with my eyes. Get it together.
But he had sunk down into the middle seat as if he couldn’t quite believe the mess he’d stumbled into.
Why? Because he had to talk to me alone, on a stage? Was I that scary?
“Um,” he managed. “Yes. Yes, we will.”
“Great!” Oh my God, he was totally leaving me dangling. “Okay, well, we might as well get started. Will, what was your favorite children’s book growing up—one that contained a strong female lead character?”
“Uh.” For such a big man, he looked as if his chair was swallowing him whole, he’d sunk so far back into it. “I don’t—I guess, er—Peter Pan?”
“Oh, Peter Pan.” Peter Pan? Dear God, how was this happening? I glanced at the audience, although honestly the stage lights were so bright I couldn’t see them, even with my sunglasses on. “All right. So the strong female lead you’re referring to is Wendy?”
“Yes.” He appeared to be growing slightly more confident, if the way he was straightening up in his chair was any indication. “Wendy.”
Oh, no. Not Wendy.
But he was serious.
“Wendy,” I repeated. “Okay. You’re sure? The girl Peter Pan abandons at the end of the book after dragging her all the way to Neverland so that she can essentially function as a domestic servant for him and all the rest of the Lost Boys? You see J. M. Barrie’s character Wendy as a symbol of female empowerment?”
While a large portion of the audience sat in silence—probably bored witless—a few people laughed, including, I noted, Frannie. She had a very distinct laugh that I could pick out anywhere.
But Will wasn’t yet down for the count. He sat up even straighter in his seat.
“Peter doesn’t abandon Wendy,” he surprised me by arguing. “She has some agency. He asks her to stay in Neverland—”
“As a mother figure. In the book he informs her that his feelings for her are those of a devoted son.”
“—and she turns him down.”
“Because she doesn’t want to sit around darning his socks all day, competing for his affections with Tiger Lily and Tinker Bell.”
“Right. Which makes her a feminist character.”
Although I was impressed that Will had actually given so much thought to a children’s book, a form of literature he’d publicly declared beneath him, I couldn’t pretend to agree with him, even to be polite. “I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with Wendy’s choice—I wouldn’t want to stay in Neverland, either. I’m just saying hers was the only choice a man writing in J. M. Barrie’s day could conceive of for a female character. Fortunately today there are tons of great books for kids to read that show female characters having all the same opportunities and rights as their male counterparts—”
Will nodded. “Like in my books.”
Whoa. I stared at him. “Excuse me?”
“Like in my books.” He said it again! And went on to say more about it: “In my books, the female characters are treated as absolutely equal to the male—”
“Hold on. You do realize every single one of your books features an unrealistically perfect female character who is unfulfilled until she meets a man—usually a man whose heart has been badly damaged by some sort of ‘evil’ woman.” I made quote marks in the air with my fingers when I said the word evil. “But then that man is healed by the perfect woman’s love. And then, just as they’re about to find blissful happiness together, the same thing happens: tragedy.”
This got a nervous titter out of the audience … and one big horse laugh out of Frannie.
Will stirred awkwardly in his seat. “First of all, that isn’t what happens in all of my books. You obviously haven’t read them all. But secondly, even if that were true, what’s so wrong with that? They’re works of fiction, written to help readers escape reality.”
“You’re right, I haven’t read all your books, but I know how they all end—you yourself call them tragedies. How is that escape fiction? Escape fiction is supposed to make you forget your problems and feel happy.” Like reading about a funny teenage cat who earns her own money, I wanted to add, but didn’t, because that would sound too self-promotional.
“But for some people, having a good cry over a sad story does make them feel happy,” Will insisted. If he was still nervous, it didn’t show anymore. He was no longer slumped in his chair. Now he was leaning forward, clutching his mic with both hands, his elbows on his knees, looking intently into my face. “It was Aristotle who first coined the term catharsis, only he was talking about the emotional release or purge people experience when watching a tragedy take place live onstage. He felt that it could help to get them to move past their own stress or grief.”