But there were some I craved. When I read, I ceased to be myself, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug. I faded into an absent witness, someone who was in that world but not anyone in it, or who was every word and road and house and ill omen and forlorn hope. I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books. I was a fog, a miasma, a mist, someone who dissolved into the story, got lost in it, learned to lose myself this way as a reprieve from that task of being a child and then a woman and the particular child and woman I was. I hovered about in many times and places, worlds and cosmologies, dispersing and gathering and drifting. A line by T. S. Eliot, the first poet whose work I got to know, comes to mind: “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.” Alone, immersed in a book, I was faceless, everyone, anyone, unbounded, elsewhere, free of meetings. I wanted to be someone, to make a face and a self and a voice, but I loved these moments of reprieve. If moments is the word: they were not intermissions in a normally sociable life; they were the life itself occasionally interrupted by social interludes.
There is something astonishing about reading, about that suspension of your own time and place to travel into others’. It’s a way of disappearing from where you are—not quite entering the author’s mind but engaging with it so that something arises between your mind and hers. You translate words into your own images, faces, places, light and shade and sound and emotion. A world arises in your head that you have built at the author’s behest, and when you’re present in that world you’re absent from your own. You’re a phantom in both worlds and a god of sorts in the world that is not exactly the one the author wrote but some hybrid of her imagination and yours. The words are instructions, the book a kit, the full existence of the book something immaterial, internal, an event rather than an object, and then an influence and a memory. It’s the reader who brings the book to life.
I lived inside books, and though it’s often assumed that we choose books to travel through them to get to the end, there were books I took up residency in, books I read again and again and then picked up and opened anywhere just to be in that world, with those people, with that author’s vision and voice. Jane Austen’s novels, but also Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, Frank Herbert’s Dune, eventually E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, and Michael Ondaatje, some children’s books I returned to as an adult, and early on novels that don’t have much standing as literature. I roamed freely in them, knowing the territory in all directions, and familiarity was a reward as strangeness might be in a book read once just to find out what happened.
I would not call books an escape if that meant that I was only hiding out in them for fear of something else. They were glorious places to be, and they set my mind on fire and brought me in contact with the authors themselves, indirectly in their fictions, directly in the essays and journals and first-person accounts that I gravitated to as I came to understand that my own vocation was going to be essayistic nonfiction.
I swam through rivers and oceans of words and their incantatory power. In fairy tales naming something gives you power over it; a spell is some words you say that make things happen. These are just concentrated versions of how words make the world and take us into its heart, how a metaphor opens up a new possibility, a simile builds a bridge. They let me listen to conversations and thoughts that went deeper and expressed more than most people could face-to-face.
But they were not warm, they had no bodies to meet my body, and they would never know me. There was nonexistence in living through books as well as many other existences and minds and dreams to inhabit and ways of expanding one’s own imaginative and imaginary existence.
4
It is as easy to decide to be a writer as to decide to have a piece of cake, but then you have to do it. I moved into that beautiful apartment as I was in my final semester of my undergraduate education at San Francisco State University. It was an intense spring: I was working to support myself and taking nineteen units of classes, helped along by a handful of prescription speed in the form of little yellow pills that had been the only gift given me by the man I’d been dating before I moved.
I graduated as I turned twenty, and then realized that the world and I were not ready for each other. I got a desk-clerk job a pleasant walk from home in a small hotel, out there on the edge of the Castro District in those last years before AIDS would change everything for the gay men who thronged the streets of the neighborhood. I stayed there for a restorative year of catching my breath and looking around and not being desperate for time or money. The job left a lot of time to read behind a rolltop desk, in between checking guests in and out and taking reservations by phone and mailing confirmations and sometimes making up beds or breakfast trays. There were troubles—a lecherous elderly boss, the sorrows of a refugee housekeeper whose husband beat her, a few crises with customers—but mostly it was peaceful.
After graduation, I had realized that though I had learned to read, I had not learned to write, or to do anything better than sales and service work for a living. In those days before nonfiction was considered creative and taught in writing programs, I applied to the only place that I could afford and that made sense to me, the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and was admitted. The writing sample I submitted was a blithely amusing (but laboriously typed) account of an encounter with a group of women at a punk club when I was eighteen or nineteen.
The women had invited me to audition for a movie that turned out to be an attempt to repeat the process whereby they and the quadriplegic man who’d be the film’s director had groomed a teenage girl via sex work to obey him. They wanted to repeat the process only with a movie camera and with me; sex with him, the women explained, was part of the deal, and he chimed in by spelling out “show me your tits” on his communication board with his pointer. Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.
The Pygmalion myth, whereby a woman is turned from insensate sculpture into a living being, happens much more frequently in reverse, as a story of women who don’t need help being fully alive and aware confronted with the people who want to reduce them to something less. Perhaps in turning the encounter into an essay, I had affirmed my capacity to think, judge, speak, decide, and maybe thereby to make myself. I was going to graduate school to get better at those things.
I didn’t fit into the school well when I started it a few months after I turned twenty-one, because most of the other students seemed to want to be what the school wanted us to be: investigative journalists whose holy grail was the front page of the New York Times. They were more sophisticated about politics, older than me, consciously low key in their appearance while I was still flamboyantly punk rock in thrift-store black and crayoned-on eyeliner. I wanted to be a cultural writer, an essayist, though what exactly I wanted was not nearly as clear as what I did not want. I wanted to be pretty much what I eventually became, but there were not a lot of models and examples that I knew then, just inclinations and excitement from the work of writers like Pauline Kael, George Orwell, Susan Sontag, Jorge Luis Borges.