Have I Found Her?

So the title for the second book is now HAVE YOU FOUND HER, and it's due to hit shelves on February 26, 2008 – just a scant 168 days from today. I'm sitting here looking at an advance copy of it, flipping through it, my eyes landing on various sentences –

Sam bantered easily with the rest of the girls, praising the shy girl's bracelet in progress, busting on Ellenette for believing in astrology. ("You don't believe in astrology?" asked Ellenette. "Naw," said Sam. "I believe in astrophysics.")

I couldn't get over how thrilling it was, to be walking around the museum discussing art with her, my very own homeless girl, just a more fucked-up version of the homeless girl I'd been in my youth.

Sam gave me the shrug again, and I saw how bony her shoulder was getting, the weathered Psalms 22 tattoo sticking out from her sleeveless black t-shirt.

I rode the train to the hospital the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that; sat by her bedside and watched her sweat, writhe, vomit bloody bile into a kidney-shaped trough. When she was awake, she was in pain, she was afraid. She held my hand, and rasped to me, "I don't want to do this anymore, Janice. I'm scared."

There it is – all of 2005, neatly typeset and laid out into chapters, with succinct, fitting little chapter titles. Chapter Two: New Favorite Alert. Chapter Eight: Make A Wish. Chapter Twelve: Unlucky. Chapter Fifteen: Happiest Place on Earth.

Chapter Eighteen: Since U Been Gone.

So much neater on the page than it was in life. So much I had to leave out of the book. So much I still can't say, not until the book comes out, and not even then. You want to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but there aren't enough pages, not enough trees in the world to sacrifice, to tell the whole truth. Shit, even Proust had to leave stuff out.

You just do your best. Three whole drafts, over 100 pages written and discarded, and you tell yourself it wasn't a waste of time, that you can't get to the final draft without writing the first two. If you're lucky, as I am, you wind up with a brilliant editor, someone who helps slash a path through the overgrown jungle of your own prose, guiding you around pitfalls, pointing to the stars overhead when you feel lost.

And then, finally, two years after the events have transpired, four and a half months after you typed "the end" for the third and final time, you're there at your desk, weighing a galley in your hands, turning it over to see what they wrote about you on the back. You're heartbreaking, it says. You're powerful. You were manically driven to save a girl's life; you nearly gave up your own to do so. And now you live in New York City with your partner, Bill Scurry, and your three cats, one of whom is lying behind you on the desk chair, causing you to perch on the edge.

Oh, wait – that's me. Or a version of me, anyway. She's a paper doll, this Janice, running around in a flattened world, one that doesn't exist anymore, one that will always exist exactly this way. I flip through the pages and watch her dance, always the same steps, always on a precipice, and I can't warn her. I can't make the dance turn out differently.

I close the book. The events are over, but the feelings remain. I can conjure them any time I want to, and often when I don’t. Grief, anger, frustration, and shame. I try to turn them into gratitude. Mostly, I'm grateful that it's over.

168 days, and the book is opened again. Until then, I sit here and wait. I sit here and write, perched on the edge of my desk chair, the two front paws of a tiger-striped cat pressing against me as he stretches, pushing me forward into the new story, the story of today.

Comments

[Heather]

Hey Janice,
Just wanted to say," I am so proud of you." Miss you. By the way, not at the Cov anymore. I'm at GMHC on 24th. Probably in your neighborhood. We should do lunch sometime.
Heather

[Lea]

Wow, what a beautiful post. I really, really feel you, especially in the passages about memoir writing. Just wow.

[Melissa]

If it is half as good as your blog about it, I cannot wait to read it!

[raisin girl]

Rock on! Very happy for you.

[luckydave]

I was there, and I don't remember the events as they took place reading nearly as well. This is an exciting book, I'll say long before I get the chance to give it that awe-struck reading. Of course, early praise comes with early congratulations, so bask in it, bomb.

Hopefully, this is a welcome and long overdue return to blogging? One can only hope...

[eric the beehivehairdresser]

Awesome Janice. :)

[Jennifer]

I loved Girlbomb and am eager for the release of the new book!