Whoa again. Also … was it my imagination, or was this guy even hotter when he was riled up about literature?
“So is that why you always write such sad endings?” I managed to keep it together enough to ask. “Are they an emotional release for you? Do they help you move past your own grief about … ?”
I let the end of the sentence dangle, hoping he’d fill in the blank. Come on, Will. What happened just before Novel Con that made you be so mean about my books? Let it out. It will be cat-artic.
But he only gave me an enigmatic smile and leaned back in his chair, crossing an ankle over his opposite knee. His body language could not have been more clear: Back off.
“I think we’re getting a little off topic here,” he said. “Aren’t we supposed to be discussing female empowerment in YA novels?”
Whiskers.
“Right,” I said, leaning back as well and reaching for the bottled water on the end table closest to me. “Yes, of course. Let’s move on.”
But my mind was a blank. I’d done this talk a thousand times with Bernadette as well as other authors, and even on my own, and suddenly I couldn’t remember a single thing on the topic. It had nothing to do with the raw masculinity being exuded from the person in the chair opposite me. Nothing at all.
And I didn’t need the water because I was feeling hot all of a sudden.
“What about you?” Will prompted. “What was your favorite children’s book growing up—one that contained a strong female lead character?”
“Uh …” I hated this question, because the truth was, I didn’t have one: I had a hundred. I’d read voraciously as a kid, using the library to escape my mother’s illness and my dad’s inability to cope with it. The names of dozens of books and authors raced through my head as I twisted the cap off the water bottle. Ouch. Why was this always so hard? I needed to remember to pick one and write it down on my hand before these things began.
“Wait,” Will said, lowering his foot and leaning forward again. “Don’t tell me. I think I know. Would you happen to have been named after its main character?”
I stared at him, startled. “What? No. Who?”
“Really?” He was smiling mysteriously again, like he’d got hold of some secret information about me. “You’re not named after one of children’s literature’s greatest female characters of all time, Josephine March from Little Women?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Wow.
I took a long pull from the water bottle, then said, “No, I’m not named after Jo March, as a matter of fact. My parents were huge fans of the musician Joe Cocker, so they named me after him, only they left off the e at the end because they thought that made it feminine. But since you brought her up, let’s get this out of the way right now, since it’s one of the most important questions in all of feminist literature. Who should Jo in Little Women have ended up with, Laurie or Professor Bhaer?”
Will’s grin went from enigmatic to genuinely warm. “That’s a trick question. The answer is obviously neither of them, since Louisa May Alcott herself remained single all her life, and was famously quoted saying that she never wanted Jo to end up married. She only did it because so many of her young female readers wrote to her asking her whom Jo was going to marry, assuming that marriage was the only conceivable happy ending for a woman. And economically, it was for most women at the time Alcott was writing.”
I frowned, impressed. Bonus points for Mr. Price. He had done some reading. Or perhaps watched the latest film based on Little Women, possibly with his sister or because he’d been trapped with nothing else to do on a plane.
“But my personal feeling is Laurie,” he went on. “Bhaer didn’t respect the thing that mattered most to Jo, her writing, and Laurie did.”
I was appalled.
“That is completely untrue,” I said. “Professor Bhaer did respect Jo’s work. He simply felt that her writing would be better if she wrote from the heart about the things that truly mattered to her, women’s issues and family life, as opposed to the tales of mystery and horror she was writing under a pen name. And, strictly from a financial point of view, he turned out to be right, since her books on those subjects became her most successful.”
“Which brings me to a question I’ve been wanting to ask you.” Will’s gaze was very dark and intent on mine—well, on the lenses of my sunglasses. “Have you ever felt that advice might apply to you?”
What was going on here? “What advice?”
“That instead of writing the stories you write—about talking cats—you might want to try writing from the heart about things that truly matter to you.”
I was so stunned by this that for a moment I couldn’t reply. I think the audience was stunned, too. I couldn’t hear a sound from them—not so much as the rustle of plastic peeled back from a cookie purchased from a Snappette. At the very least, I’d have expected to hear a bark of outrage from Frannie, whose husband, Saul, had been writing quite successfully about gory vampire and ghost attacks for nearly forty years.
But … nothing.
Of course, it was possible they’d all left, bored to tears by our bickering. I still couldn’t see a thing beyond the edge of the stage.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when I could finally find my voice. “Are you implying that my bestselling children’s books about a talking cat who helps the young kittens she babysits through major life difficulties like their parents getting divorced, and moving, and friendship troubles, and bullying, and sibling rivalry, and crushes, and going away to summer camp—just to name a few—aren’t written from my heart and don’t really matter?”
I could feel my body temperature rising, and the spotlights weren’t helping the situation. The lenses of my sunglasses were beginning to fog up so that I couldn’t even see Will anymore. I had to whip them off.
“That isn’t what I—” Will began, but I was so annoyed, I forgot my promise to myself to be gracious to him in front of his adopted hometown audience, and interrupted.
“They may not matter much to you, but I can assure you that those subjects matter quite a lot to kids.”
“I’m sure they do. I just wondered if—” Will appeared to be turning as pale beneath the spotlights as I was turning red.
“And when the tips on how to navigate them are delivered by a cute talking cat and her friends as opposed to printed out on some crappy pamphlet from the school counselor’s office, they become a lot more palatable and accessible to those kids, especially for reluctant readers, which a lot of kids are.”
My tirade had sent Will slowly sinking back into his chair, his eyes wide and his mouth slightly ajar.
“Sure,” he said. “Of course. I know that. More than you can imagine. That—that isn’t at all what I meant—”
Boy, he had not been kidding last night when he’d said that he wasn’t good with words. “Well, then what did you mean?”
Instead of answering me, Will shaded his eyes with one hand so he could see out into the crowd. “I think now might be a good time to take some questions from the audience, don’t you? Does anyone out there have anything they’d like to ask Ms. Wright or myself? I think we’ve got some members of the high school dance team moving along the aisles with microphones, so if there’s something you’d like to ask, feel free to raise your hand, and one of them will be along to hand you a mic.”