Janice and Her Readers
A Story about the Frustrations of Writing
Janice felt simultaneous stabs of apprehension and pride whenever a coworker would tell her, “I read your story!” They seemed to be under the impression that if she had books in Barnes and Noble, she must not need to be selling insurance.
“I figured out what your latest book is about,” said Joy, who was always telling Janice that she should put more romance in her novels.
“What is that?” asked Janice, hoping the copier would hurry up and finish so that she could go back and sit down at her desk.
“It’s about you. I read recently that all writers are secretly writing about themselves.”
“You told me that,” said Janice. “You said that about my last book also. And it isn’t true. Do you think Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing about her own experience?”
“Maybe,” said Joy. “Who’s that?”
“Never mind.”
“But it’s totally about you. The main character…”
“Is an unmarried Brahmin man in India at the end of the nineteenth century,” said Janice, who was forty-two and had been married for seventeen years. “Whereas I grew up in West Virginia in the eighties.”
“Yeah, but this article I read said it’s all subliminal.”
Janice thanked Joy for her advice and went back to her desk. She spent the rest of the day plotting her next book instead of selling insurance. She was growing tired of various people reading her books as nothing more than commentaries on the interpersonal drama – or lack thereof – in their author’s life.
So, she intentionally set her next story in a fictional galaxy inhabited by self-replicating mechanical automatons which had been invented by sentient bears who had been killed off by the mechanical automatons when their self-replication got out of control and they used up all the natural resources on the home planet of the sentient bears. The mechanical automatons had gone on to colonize the known universe, all without ever developing intelligence or self-awareness or even a rudimentary form of machine learning.
One critic wrote, “In its sterility and distance, this novel betrays nothing more than the great trauma and exhaustion of the writer, who has so carefully guarded her public reputation as to make discerning readers certain she is harboring some deep and haunting secret which plagues her nearly to the point of insanity. She copes with this by crafting ever colder and emptier novels until her readers finally understand that she is crying out for help.”
Janice didn’t normally give many interviews about her books, but this particular critic wrote for The Times and his review caused such a stir that morning shows were calling her agent asking if she could be booked for the next week. Janice begrudgingly agreed to come on This Morning Today, hosted by Jo Attenborough. Within a week, she was sitting on the set, in a pink chair, in a room with a pink carpet and a green screen which viewers would presumably see as the New York skyline.
“Before we start today’s interview,” said the host after they’d gone live, “I wanted to tell you that we’re here for you. Anything you’d like to share. We’ll be there for you.”
“Actually,” said Janice, clearing her throat, “I’m doing fine. Really, I am. I thought you wanted to talk about my book.”
“Oh, but we are,” gushed the host. “We’ll get to all that. Surely you must have seen that review.”
“Which review?”
“Well, the one that made such a splash. Surely you must have read it.”
“Maybe,” said Janice.
“All authors,” said Attenborough, “are selfish pricks who are severely limited by their own experience. That’s what he said. That’s what the review said.”
“I didn’t know The Times was printing the word, ‘prick,’ in their reviews these days.”
“So, you did read it? You knew it was in The Times?”
“I made a reasonable guess based on the pretentiousness of the reviewer,” said Janice, who had forgotten that line about “selfish pricks.”
“Anyway, so you admit that The Automatons Strike Again is about your traumatic childhood?”
“I admit nothing of the sort. It isn’t. I don’t have any.”
“Well, then what is it about if it isn’t about your dark and traumatic past.”
“Once again, I don’t know what dark and traumatic past you’re talking about. And I think I would know because I was there. But the story is about a universe populated by mechanical automatons which have accidentally killed off their creators by using up the natural resources of their creators’ home planet.”
“Yes, but what is it really about?”
“I just told you.”
“But what inspired you? To write it?”
“Actually, I just wanted to write something so alien and remote that people wouldn’t come up to me and tell me they thought it was about me. I was tired of people reading into my stories something which wasn’t there, so I tried to write a story which couldn’t possibly be construed by anyone to have anything to do with my life. I’m tired of answering questions about my life. I want someone to ask me questions about my writing.”
“So, it is about you,” said Attenborough.
Janice was beginning to regret coming on the show. “It’s turtles all the way down,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s turtles all the way down.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. Nobody said it before. I just made it up right now.”
Janice only managed to get through the rest of the interview by plotting out her next book in her head. She sat down to write it as soon as she got home from the interview. It was a Friday and she’d taken the day off. She wrote for three days straight, pausing only to eat meals with her children – who were fortunately old enough to cook meals for their parents – and go for walks with her husband to talk about whether or not to give their oldest a smartphone or whether to hold off another year until she turned fourteen. Monday, she sent a draft to her agent.
The new book was about a forty-two-year-old, middle class American named Denise who had two kids in middle school and a husband who sold cars. Denise worked in collections for a hospital and wrote novels on the side. She wrote gory vampire-zombie-werewolf romances. When she tried her hand at literary fiction, she discovered that readers who once had admired her salacious plots now wanted to talk to her about whether her latest novel – about an immigrant family living in Peoria – was inspired by her childhood. She continued writing literary novels and found that this kept happening. Reviewers wanted to know whether stories of fishing in the Florida Keys had something to do with a dark secret in her past. Critics accused her of writing about her twenty-first-century white privilege in her historical saga set in Scotland in the eighth century. Her doctor asked her whether a novel about a patriarchal father in colonial America was a cry for help. She wanted to know whether Denise’s husband was abusing her.
In reviewing this latest book, not a single reviewer said anything about Janice. They didn’t pose questions about her secret trauma or her inner life. To a person, they talked about themselves – their own frustrations with career and family and commenters and money and love and loss and social media and anxiety. Television hosts gushed about the novel and opened up about their darkest secrets on air. Millions bought the book and wrote Janice explaining that she had helped them to see the most important bits of their own life stories.
Janice decided her next novel would be a sequel.