The Danger of Being Me (41 page)

So At least I left Allentown College with something.

I tinkered haphazardly with the project for a year while attending Montgomery County Community College as a Liberal Arts major.  It wasn't until I enrolled in a creative writing class with professor Patricia Nestler that I revisited my screenplay, considering for the first time the prospect of writing the story in prose.  Of making it a novel.

I also changed my major to Secondary Education at that time, discovering, finally, an academic passion.  The fact that my uncle personally footed the bill for that particular semester may also have been a motivating factor.  I wound up graduating with honors from MCCC, and transferred to the Education department at Temple University.

I also minored in English there, and met professor Matt Chambers, he of the rectangular eyeglasses and the mop of hair.  I enrolled in British Lit, American Lit, and Intro to the Short Story because of him.  His encouragement led me to return to my own story, and I decided that it would be a novel, and that I would call it
The Danger of Being Me
.

I graduated from Temple University with a Bachelor's in English and most of an Education degree.  I moved to North Carolina and married an infinitely patient girl who had waited seven years for me to grow up.  I got a job in finance.  And I wrote.  Slowly, tediously, ploddingly.

And then I read
The Catcher in the Rye
.  I should have done so years before, one of the many times that I'd been assigned the book in high school or college.  But I waited until I was 27 years old, and 65,000 words into my own novel.  And I didn't write again for more than a year.

The similarities between my story and Salinger's broke my heart.  He'd already written the story I wanted to tell, and he'd done it so much better than I could ever dream.  I abandoned my manuscript, and went about my career in finance.  I actually chose to give up writing fiction.

Just before I turned 29, my wife and I discovered that we were having our first child.  And suddenly I couldn't stop thinking about my novel again.  We were four months along, and I reasoned that if I could write just 250 words a day, I could complete the book before the due date.

Life intervened.  Our daughter came; the novel did not.  And then there was a baby to take care of, and writing got sidelined for a while.  And that's okay.  Because life isn't a support system for art.  It's the other way around.

Stephen King said that.

But I wrote.  Slowly, tediously, ploddingly.

And then I read
Whitechapel
, by an independent author and the brother of a girl I went to high school with.  I read Bernard J. Schaffer's first novel, and I read an interview he gave, and one line stuck inside my brain.  "Stop screwing around," Bernard said, "and finish your damn book."

And it clicked.  Somehow, that was all it took.  I sat at a laptop with no Internet connection on August 14th, and for 85 days, I wrote.  I didn't produce a thousand words every day, but most days I did.  And on November 9th, I wrote the eight most improbable words that I will ever write.

Because after all the years, the story was finished.

When you tell someone that you've written a book, the first question will be inevitable: "What's it about?"

Nothing gives me the shakes like that question.

I've always contended that if I could sum up the story in a sentence, I wouldn't have written a novel.  I'd have written a sentence and moved on.  But that's an arrogant writer's answer, and it doesn't win over any readers.

And more than that, it's really a way for me to avoid an uncomfortable reality: I don't actually know what the book is about.  Not really.  The novel is a deconstruction of my own life in many ways, and a fictionalization of my own memories.  To understand what this book is about, I would have to begin to understand what my own life is about.

But that's a pretty arrogant answer, too.

I once said that the book was a story about the elegant misery of being a teenager.  About the interconnectedness of the past, the present, and the future.  About family.  It's a love letter that doesn't know it's a love letter, and a novel about a kid writing a novel.  I said that it was a book that begins twice and ends twice within its own pages.

All of that is true.  I think.  But none of it is helpful.

Because ultimately it's not for me to say what this book is about.  That's up to you.  You read it.  You tell me.

Anthony J Fuchs

16 July 2012