In the fall of 1998 I read a book that immediately, like Into the Forest, like Small Changes, became, if not a favorite book, a talisman, only more so than any book had done before. Much more so. It's Mine, as much as the painting The Princess belongs to Randy Melendy. Cathleen Schine, The Evolution of Jane.

I first read about this in The New York Times Book Review and I wanted to read it because of a lost friend. The protagonist loses a friend of eight years at 15 and no one pays any attention; she divorces after six months and everyone is awash with sympathy. I know how that feels, the sympathy when you don't need it but none when you do. And she grew up in Barlow, Connecticut, a town on the shore but that wasn't a summer town. Hmm.

I told someone I had found a book passages of which I should staple to my forehead as an explanation of lisa. He asked, "Was it written from a padded room somewhere?"

In my biography period, I read an illustrated account of the voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle, which marked the beginning of my fascination with Charles Darwin. What I remember most vividly from that book was, first, that Darwin was seasick for the entire five years of his voyage on the Beagle, and, second, that he had to be so very tidy on shipboard. There were pictures of the cabinets used to store specimens, pictures of rows of little bottles and jars and wooden boxes, each labeled in an old-fashioned hand. Life on board ship seemed miniature, like a playhouse full of neatly organized treasures. I'm sure there were pictures in the book of other things as well--birds and volcanoes and ferns--but what I remember most were the boxes and drawers and their orderly tags.
...
During this time, like all my friends, I also read The Diary of Anne Frank and The Story of My Life by Helen Keller. But in addition to blindfolding myself and wandering around the living room to see what it was like to be blind the way we all did, and crouching in the attic with a bologna sandwich, hiding from Nazis, I used to look for fossils. I tired of being blind within a few minutes, and I tired of fossils almost as quickly, particularly because I never found any. I did, however, display and label a row of rocks from the driveway. I didn't know what they were and was too lazy to find out, so I just labeled them by color. But I still felt a proprietary bond with Darwin. Whenever I hear his name, to this day, I experience a sudden alertness, as if my own name has been spoken.

The New York Times reviewer said that Jane is self-absorbed and egocentric, which I know a thing or two about myself. Also that it's an anti-allegory: instead of Christian of Pilgrim's Progress representing mankind, evolution represents Jane, exists to explain Jane. The one consuming event in her life has been the loss of her friend Martha (no strange occurrence to me) and she obsesses on it (as do I). Jane's mother send her on a week-long trip to the Galapagos to get over the divorce. Her eco-tour guide happens to be Martha, who is pleasant but unmoved to her throughout, not much different than she is to the other passengers. Toward the end of the trip, Martha tells her,

"You're so literal-minded and fanciful at the same time."

I was, wasn't I? A black hole, sucking up the world around me to metaphorize it out of all recognizability.

Darwin was right--the habit of comparison leads to generalization....[W]e travelers stay such a short time, able to make mere sketches of what we've seen. And then we fill up the wide gaps of knowledge with inaccurate and superficial hypotheses.

Was that what Martha did as well? No. Martha told stories, but she described what she saw. Detailed observation--just what Darwin valued. The world opened up before her, inspired by her vision and her touch. She used what she found, like my father opening all those misfiled drawers. Whereas all I seemed to do was put things in drawers. I was the one who misfiled in the first place.

Here is something I read in Darwin's journal. He was amused by a theory of a contemporary philosopher, William Whewell. "Says length of days [is] adapted to duration of sleep of man!!! and not man to planets," Darwin wrote. "Instance of arrogance!!"

I pulled Gloria aside. "I got it backwards," I said. "Like Whewell."

"I'm sorry."

"The sun does not bend itself to man's needs. It's the duration of man's sleep that is the adaptation…." I had assumed that the length of the night was the result of my need for sleep. For years I had been asking myself what I could have done to Martha, an action of which I thought nothing at the time, but which cut her to the quick, something unforgivable, unforgivable even to Martha. I had come up with so many possible explanations....

But it had nothing to do with my story. It had to do with Martha, with her story, with her rotations, her travels from dawn to dusk, from horizon to horizon, whatever they were, whatever they had been, journeys beyond my sight that had nothing to do with me, the other side of the moon.

"You see, Martha is the sun…and I'm the male nipple.…I'm the whale's thumb. I was so arrogant and self-centered that I thought it must be Martha, but really it's me! I'm the vestigial organ." …

"For six days she labored to discover humility," Gloria said. "On the seventh day, she rested."

And there's the name Jane. The Cowboy Junkies' "Sweet Jane." Jane Austen, and Elizabeth Bennet's beloved sister Jane. Zora Neal Hurston's Janie. I love the name Jane. Also Martha. In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling, it is Ivy who leaves Martha, but still.

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In March 2001 I received an actual paper letter from RRP written with an actual pen, because she was remembering the huge long letters I wrote (with a keyboard) to her when I first moved to Denver. On vacation with her family, she told me, they were all making fun of the "What are you doing" angle of the "Whazzup?" ad, and this reminded me of another passage that Explains, or at least illustrates, Lisa.

Cynthia Voigt has three books, so far, about two bad girls named Mikey and Margalo. In the third book, It's Not Easy Being Bad, they're in seventh grade and recognize the importance of popularity. Margalo doesn't want so much to be popular as for people to think she's popular so it'll be easier to be Margalo. Mikey wants to be popular because she believes that power comes with popularity. Margalo knows how to get along with people--if she weren't friends with Mikey she'd get a lot further, but she wouldn't give her up--and when someone says "Whazzup?" to her in the hall, she responds, equally impersonally, but equally, "Whazzup?" Mikey doesn't:

"Great blouse," somebody said [to Margalo]. The somebody was Casey..., who now said, "Mikey? Love your cookies. I'm Casey, hihowareyou?"

"Wet," Mikey answered. "Otherwise, pretty good because I got a really good night's sleep. Also, my dad got us bagels for breakfast." She thought about what else Casey might want to know. "I'm staying with my mother this weekend, but I don't start getting jumpy about that until Friday. She likes me better since the divorce, but I'm not exactly her favorite person a lot of the time."

"Oh," Casey said. "Well. That's--Hihowareyou, Margalo?"

"Cool," Margalo said. Whatever that meant, Mikey thought.

I like how Mikey does try to think what else Casey might want to know but misjudges so spectacularly; is so self-involved; and has no idea what Margalo's casual response might mean or why she might have delivered it.

The "What are you doing" of RRP's vacation reminded me of this, so I told her this whole thing, writing it with an actual pen in response to her actual handwritten letter. About two thirds of the way through I realized I was, in fact, being Mikey, that this was way more information that her vacation anecdote should have elicited, but that, unfortunately, since I was writing with a pen, I couldn't stop myself, as I could with a keyboard. So the explanation was by virtue, or nonvirtue, of its length, in addition to its content, proof.

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Long ago, when I first started at Dot Org, someone asked if I had ever been in drama. I told her I have not, which is not an accurate but is a short answer. She expressed surprise, because, she opined, I am so dramatic and expressive and gesticulate a lot (all of which is true).

I am a little ashamed of never having been in drama: not that I was particularly interested in seventh grade, but that's the year my middle school put on Godspell. In eighth grade, deliberately to break my self-diagnosed "General Hospital" addiction, I worked on "The Phantom Tollbooth" and understudied Milo. (Did my schoolyear have no good actors? Of course Jesus should have been played by an eighth-grader, and was, brilliantly; but the next year, an eighth-grader should have played Milo. Right? No, a seventh-grader did--also brilliantly. In ninth grade I was a grind, and after that I worked at PGN. Also I questioned my motives: did I want to be in stage crew because I wanted to be in stage crew, or because my crush hung out in stage crew? And wouldn't it be easier not to be in stage crew, since my first kiss (in ninth grade, and now no longer even meeting my eyes) obviously didn't want me there?

A couple of weeks ago she brought it up again. She knows me better now and the drama thing struck her again. It really would have been a good place for me, except that I can picture myself becoming that girl in "American Pie": "...and this one time? at band camp?"

I know her better now too, and told her more. She understood how the crush and the kiss were valid reasons for my 15-year-old self, which I appreciate. "Funny how one little thing can affect so much, isn't it?" The other thing I told her, because I know her better also, came from a book. I forget why I had Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling off the shelf recently, but I had, and reread this passage just days before Minne made her more recent comment about drama:

[There is to be a play at school for the first time. Ivy wants to sign up for a part along with Martha. Martha wonders why.]

It seems there were many reasons The first was that Ivy had a strong feeling Martha would be good at acting.
"Me?" Martha asked. "Me? Why?"
"Because you're so good at being other people. Like Queen Oleander, for instance. Remember how great you were at being Queen Oleander?"
"Yes, but that was different. No one was watching except you and Josie."
"It's not really different. You can get used to the rest of it, the audience and everything. But the other part--really being someone else--you either have or you don't. Some people are only good at being themselves, and that's all they'll ever be good at. They're just born that way."
"Well, I certainly wasn't born that way," Martha said. "But I'm not sure I was born the other way either."

(The Tree People plays that Martha and Ivy made up, in which Martha played Queen Oleander, led to Snyder's Under the Root, And All Between, and Until the Celebration trilogy.)

I can't say that I am the best person I can be or that being myself is the best way to be, but it's certainly the only person I've ever been able to be with only one way to be her, to my own and others' detriment. I told her about that passage (not the immediately previous, convoluted sentence, but from the book), and she understood. She knows how single-minded and single-faceted I am. It's even a reason I don't write anything but autobiography, and why I'm an autobiographical critic.