I keep all my little virgos in a master file on my laptop. One’s from New York, there’s another from Connecticut, Vermont, London…
All of my main characters are eldest daughters. And, by sheer coincidence, also virgos. I haven’t decided if it’s because I don’t know anything else, or if I simply have a lot to say on the topic. All I do know is that Josie, the main character in my current work in progress, is riddled with anxiety, tired of taking care of literally everyone around her, and hates surprises (a girl must always be able to prepare).
She is the most thinly veiled version of myself I have ever written, and, surprisingly, I’ve never once worried about whether or not everyone could see it. Maybe I want them to. Maybe, for the first time, I want someone to see how much suffering is wrapped up in being both the big sister and the firstborn.
Once I joked that the only difference between us is that she doesn’t cry nearly as much as I do. A few weeks later, I realized that I don’t cry nearly as much as I used to, and that, actually, Josie and I are both swallowing down big, fat lumps of emotion, always—because who has the time? What could crying solve? How would that fix anything?
I find myself crying when she does. There are a lot of nights I end up sitting at my desk, weeping, hands off my keyboard and bunched in my lap, choking on my refusal to sob while the playlist I’ve curated for this novel (and maybe this part of myself) plays on as if I was a girl in a coming-of-age film (hopefully directed by Greta Gerwig). These are the only moments where I don’t fight it. I wonder if it’s the only time I can’t, because I know that Josie needs me to feel all of it in order to get it right. Or maybe I’m the one who needs her. It all gets muddled about a thousand words in.
In undergrad, I was taught that this is something you never do. Conflating yourself with your characters, or modeling them after you, is never supposed to go well. It’s never supposed to work. For those four years, my characters were clean of me. It felt like too much work, but also like I was holding back. I plugged myself up, kept all the leaky pieces of me inside, and made the women in my work completely fearless, brash, STEM brained, and blond. Everything I wrote was disconnected from me. I don’t think those pieces are the worst things I’ve ever written (hello to the short story I wrote and posted on Wattpad at fourteen), but they aren’t as honest or emotional. And if my writing can’t be those things, the exact reasons my favorite novels are my favorites, then what is it? What am I doing this for?
I can’t pretend that Josie is a carbon copy of me, because she’s not. She’s an idealized version; a romanticized version. Even the flaws of hers that are mine are more ideal, lighter, because I’ve had to wrap them up in a pretty bow in order to gift them to her. I apologize while I use her to get through my grief, only look with one eye open as I fold her body over a concrete ledge, and try to type as fast as I can while the man she might love breaks her heart.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m doing her, and this story, a disservice by handling her with kid gloves in a way I wasn’t. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m punishing her more than I’ve punished myself. There are moments, in the middle of the night, where I go over all that I’ve done to her and wonder if her own god would’ve been as harsh, or if I’ve given her too much grace. There’s no way to know.
Those who know her always express the empathy they feel for her and acknowledge how deep her pain hits them in their own, and I take it as a compliment. I thank them and wonder, later, if they knew that it was really me they were empathizing with; if they know it’s my pain that has them taking deep breaths as their eyes move down the page. If they would still feel that kind of empathy then, for the less polished and palatable version of the woman they’ve come to care for.
I never think about this when I’m reading. I never wonder if Casey’s grief is really Lily King’s grief, or if Alice’s anxiety around her literary notoriety is really that of Sally Rooney. Maybe it’s simply because I was taught not to. The inclination to conflate an author’s personal life and beliefs with their work was beat out of me all throughout my higher education. But maybe it’s because it doesn’t matter. I’m not looking for the author in their story—I’m looking for me. Maybe it’s okay that I stood in front of a mirror when crafting Josie, because I’m holding one up every time I read, every time I meet someone new, checking my reflection against their’s, begging: tell me who I am; show me how to be someone new.
Does this count as self reflection? Some twisted form of self-care that reaffirms everything I’ve ever known about myself and makes it so all the bad bits taste better going down? Does it matter? I’m not sure.
All I know is that Josie’s story is quickly coming to an end, and soon she’ll (hopefully) be out in the world, fully formed and mostly healed. And I’ll still be here, in my little apartment, writing a story about a girl I know too well and not at all.