What I Read and How I Lied

Dear Cute Boys From My Teens and Early Twenties,

Thank you for all the books, movies, and music you introduced me to. I appreciate your hard work to shape me into the perfect girlfriend share your passions with me. Sometimes I even adopted them as my own (see also: Common, X-Men Movies, Bob Dylan). A few of the books you made me read suggested have become lifelong favorites. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for instance — I probably wouldn’t have spent the entire summer after ninth grade reading it if I hadn’t wanted so badly to impress you. I remember lying on a pile of suitcases and sleeping bags in the back of my dad’s 1986 Nissan Stanza wagon, struggling to understand Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality as we drove across the same roads Persig had traveled by motorcycle.

Cute Boy, I haven’t seen you in over a decade, but I still love the book.

Unfortunately, your suggestions weren’t always so successful. You were so earnest when you handed me Jonathan Livingston Seagull, murmuring about how it had really changed your life. When you asked about it later, I held your trembling gaze. “It really spoke to me,” I told you. “It just meant… so much.”

“You really understand me,” you said.

Cute Boy, I lied. JLS didn’t mean anything to me. At 16, I found it both simplistic and strange. The grainy gray photos of actual seagulls distracted from the metaphorical aspect of the story. It’s a story about someone who wants to transcend the bounds of ordinary society! But wait — no, maybe it’s actually about seagulls?

Plus, to be honest? I was starting to notice that you were actually kind of a snob, Cute Boy. Some of my best friends were seagulls. Just because someone doesn’t want to transcend their plane of existence doesn’t mean they’re not fun to pass notes with in study hall. Not to mention, Jonathan Livingston Seagull looks down his beak at all the dull boring seagulls who just think of flying as a way to get food. I have news for you, JLS: seagulls gotta eat. And so do people. Sometimes you have to stop trying to transcend the limitations of your small town life and just take a girl to prom.

Cute Boys, a hint: maybe lower the bar a little when you lend me your books. If you preface it with, “This book totally changed my life and shaped me into the person that I am,” and then I read it and think it’s dumb? Sorry, but I’m going to judge you. I’ll probably still think you’re cute, but not as cute as the boy with great taste in literature.

And also? Know your audience. When you handed me Ishmael with evangelistic zeal and promised me it would, like, totally change my life, I was 21. Honey, I was raised by liberal hippiefolk; I got on the “Humanity Must Love & Respect Mother Earth” train in elementary school. If you’d given me Ishmael in sixth or seventh grade, I bet it WOULD have, like, totally changed my life. But by senior year of college? I was on the “Question Everything! Truth is Subjective! There Are Many Valid Points In The World and Also Many Ways To Poke Holes Through Arguments!” train by then.

Sorry, Cute Boy, you were way too late with this one. But you were also cute, so when you asked what I thought of the book, I stared deeply into your eyes and murmured, “With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?”

And finally, my dear, adorable boy, let’s talk about your favorite book ever. The one that inspired you to find yourself and leave it all behind, you know? Into the goddamn Wild. Cute Boys (and I hate to tell you this, but there were SEVERAL of you who wanted me to read this book), I pretended to understand your need to prove yourself against an imaginary “untouched” American wilderness.

In fact, I researched it!

I read articles and books about feminine and masculine constructions of landscape and wilderness and masculinity and manhood, and even as I lied to you about how much I loved this book, I tried to sneak in alternate perspectives on the story. Like: this is pretty uniquely a boy’s story. A girl couldn’t just hitchhike across the country without constantly being in danger of being raped. Also, a girl couldn’t just go out into the Alaskan bush for months on end without packing several boxes of tampons, which she’d then have to bury so as not to attract all kinds of wildlife who might be interested in human blood.

And also? Abandoning your family isn’t heroic, it’s MEAN. And tramping out into the middle of nowhere with NO RESEARCH and NO EXIT PLAN isn’t heroic, it’s hubristic and dumb.

I don’t care how cute you are, Cute Boys. These days, if you tell me this is your favorite book? I will probably yell at you about the Myth of the American Adam and lack of coming-of-age ceremonies for boys in our culture and how if you love the wilderness so much you shouldn’t just leave your car in a culvert. And then I will shove some books at YOU: Rebecca Solnit and Annie Dillard and Mary Austin. Barbara Kingsolver and Keri Hulme and Jean Rhys and Stephanie Kallos.

Because here’s the thing, Cute Boys: it’s high time you started reading books in attempt to impress ME.

Love,

Molly