Invisible Monsters Remix

Chapter 25

here you’re supposed to be is the weekly Dangerous Writing workshop in Tom Spanbauer’s tiny living room in 1991 with writing students and half-written novels all over the house. It costs twenty dollars to attend each Thursday night even if you bring a bottle of wine, which a lot of people do, even if you come on weekends to help Tom clear the rusty junk and thorny blackberries from his property. Which I do. Monica Drake is also here, and because she can’t afford to pay the tuition in cash, each week she brings Tom a table lamp, a clock, some piece of furniture in trade. Tom’s house is filling up while Monica’s is almost empty.

For twenty dollars, Tom Spanbauer tells us, “Establish your authority on the page, and you can make anything happen.”

For another twenty, he tells us, “No Latinates!”

Tom tells us, “Unpack your objects.” And we love Tom so much that we print his advice on buttons, like big campaign buttons, we can wear pinned to our shirts. We’re not teenagers; we’re thirty, thirty-two, thirty-five years old. What’s even more amazing is …we do wear these buttons. In exchange for our cash and our lamps and clearing blackberries, Tom gives us copies of a short story called “The Harvest” by a writer named Amy Hempel. It demonstrates every excellent thing he hopes we’ll learn. Monica is the star of our Thursday nights. Suzy Vitello is a star. Erin Leonard and Joanna Rose and Rick Thompson are stars. Candace Mulligan is a star, but we all want to play the role of Amy Hempel.

I’ve given up all hope of ever being published so I’m writing a loopy tale about a fashion model without a face. My inspiration is the loopy descriptions that narrators read off note cards during fashion shows: a hundred adjectives in search of a noun. “A sumptuous crimson melding of shimmering perfumed extravagance demanding unequaled glamour, demanding liquid romance, ensuring lucid transcendent …” Oh, you get the picture. I pronounce hyperbole as “hiper-bowl.” I pronounce Hermés, the Italian fashion house, as “her-mees”; I’m so obviously stupid that Tom is delighted. I bring in the first draft of a chapter about cosmetic reconstructive surgery, and Erin Leonard brings me a magazine article by a young woman who, as a child, lost much of her face to cancer. Her name is Lucy Grealy, and she’s written the most extraordinary memoir called Autobiography of a Face, which I don’t read, not for years and years, then only after I’ve invented my goofus road trip novel which no one wants to publish. In the interim, I write Fight Club. I write Survivor. Jump to ten years gone by, and I fly to New York to read my work at the KGB literary bar in the East Village. A decade after those twenty-dollar lessons, two pretty women walk into the bar. Like the lead-in to a joke, two pretty women walk into the KGB Bar, and one of them is Amy Hempel and the friend accompanying her is—the only person she could possibly be in this strange, magical, dreamy, miraculous, impossible world—Lucy Grealy.