He Married a Writer

I had the true and sincere pleasure to attend Pam Houston’s reading at The Tattered Cover tonight. If you aren’t familiar with her work, change that. Seriously. I’ve read every single one of her books (I’m in the midst of reading her latest right now) and not a single one disappoints. My absolute favorites, though? Cowboys Are My Weakness and A Little More About Me.

As I waited for the reading to begin, I paged through A Little More About Me and I was drawn back to all the starred paragraphs, dog-eared pages, and underlined sentences that gripped me the first time I read this book. Read along with me:

“….the ‘what else’ is language:  poems and stories, letters and scripts, the way every minute of my life that matters translates itself into the words that I write, the way the writing sanctifies the best times and makes the darkest times possible to bear. I am writing every moment I am living… My need to write the things that terrify me is matched only by my desire to write the things that surprise and delight. I take what the world hands me in free verse and give it back in something like a form and it is language that lets me complete that circle; it is quite literally the tether that keeps me connected to the earth. Sometimes I feel like a cannibal. Sometimes I wish there were five minutes of my life I didn’t reinvent as I went along” (page 168). 

“But it is in these moments… that I ask myself, Why am I not somewhere else doing something I am good at, like writing, for instance, or taking standardized tests, or growing vegetables, or playing the piano? And the answer is, I must believe that one day I’ll get it right. One day, if I try hard enough, I’ll look like a woman on the cover of Outside magazine, like an ABC sports-highlights cut-to-commercial still, like a poster on the wall of a bar with too many TVs. I will be frozen there in the motion of someone’s memory, and that someone (a man, my father, myself) will say, ‘That was beautiful!’”(page 153).

“I know there are countless professionals of varying reliability out there to help me restructure my relationship to food and weight control, but here at 158 pounds and holding, this is how it seems to me:  I will never put a piece of food in my mouth without feeling guily; I will never look in the mirror and feel okay about my body; and I will never, ever be at a weight, no matter how much I might one day lose, that I will consider ideal” (pg. 144). 

Can you tell why I’m drawn to her? I so want to be her friend. She is incredible.

I could copy passage after passage after passage but there are some words—my own words—that I’d like to add while I’m sitting here in the midst of all of ‘this’.

When the reading finished and I got back into my car, I turned down the radio (another one of those moments where the noise was too much to take) and I was shocked to discover that I was crying. Real tears. And as I tried to figure out what emotion was causing this reaction, I discovered that it’s an emotion that I can’t quite name but that is so incredibly real and loud and pushy that it seeped out of me in the form of tears. I’m not sure what the exact label for the emotion is but I know that the underlying cause is this: I want to be a writer. I want so badly to be a writer. What is that? Desire? Longing? Need?

During the Q&A portion of the reading, Pam talked about the exact moment when she knew she was a writer. It was during the latter stages of her first book tour and she was in Chicago doing a reading and she gave in to the notion that this wasn’t a joke… that she wasn’t a fraud. No one was going to ‘find her out’ and take it all back. And when she looked in the mirror that evening, she finally saw what everyone else saw:  a writer. And when she talked to her editor and learned that her book sales were exceeding all expectations, her editor said to her, “Do you know what this means?” Followed by, “It means that you can do this for the rest of your life.”

And so as I sat in my car, in the middle of a deafening silence, I cried because more than anything, I want someone to say to me, “Do you know what this means? It means that you can do this for the rest of your life.” 

I waited in line to have my book signed and when I got up to the table, I’m pretty sure these are the exact words that spewed out of my mouth: “HiI’mTinaI’msuchahugefanI’myournewFacebookfriendIthinkyou’reamazingthankyouthankyou!”

And she kindly signed my book, smiled at me, looked me in the eyes and said something brilliant that I couldn’t hear because the words in my head were too loud:  She’s talking to ME! She’s signing my book! She just wrote my name! She’s looking at me! Ahhhhhh!

And so when she asked me what my last name was, I blabbered some more:  “It’s Boogren. But it’s spelled weird. It’s pronouned ‘Bow. Grin.’ but spelled like ‘Boo. Gren.’ Nothing at all like it sounds… blahblahblahspewspewspew…” And she smiled again and I moved off to the side to catch my breath and pray that my face would return to its normal color. I just talked to a rock-star. A totally amazing rock-star.

And then I went to my car and burst into tears.