Getting the Bug in the Jar

When I dabbled with the business of revenge.

The metaphor:

I wrote last week about using metaphors as a tool to figure out what’s true. This week, I wrote about one of my few memories of trying to write fiction.

I read novels for the same reason that I write nonfiction: to explore what it’s like to be a person. But I’m too focused on sorting out fact from fiction in my own head to enjoy making up more myself.

You could say that I write nonfiction like a flashlight to help me feel my way forward areas that still feel dark. Making stuff up would be like trying to navigate at night with a disco ball or strobe light. So the few times I’ve tried, it had to be for a reason.

The story:

I’ve only tried a few times to write fiction. The most memorable wasn’t an act of self-expression: it was an attempt at revenge.

My target was Katherine Paterson, who wrote Bridge to Terabithia in 1977. When I read the novel some 20 years later, I was around 10 and I took it as a personal attack. I was an imaginative kid who loved reading books and playing pretend, and – spoiler alert – Terabithia was two kids’ pretend world where one has a fatal accident. At first, I was devastated by this plot twist. Then, I was livid.

I’d been extremely lucky to encounter grief and loss mainly in stories. I had sobbed over the death of the dogs in Where the Red Fern Grows and Jo March’s sister in Little Women. I’d mourned parents across media, from “The Lion King” to “Stepmom.” I felt somber at the end of Tuck Everlasting, where a young protagonist ultimately dies at an old age.

But nothing had prepared me to read about a modern-day kid like me grieving the sudden, random death of their best friend. The book’s title refers to a bridge the protagonist builds at the end of the story. Before then, he and his best friend get to Terabithia by swinging across a creek on a rope tied to a tree. One day, there’s a big storm, and the friend heads to Terabithia alone: the rope breaks, we’re told, and she drowns.

Typically, I didn’t think much about authors. I had friends who could reel off the names of the people who’d written their favorite books, names I had ignored. I was focused solely on the names inside the pages. But when it set in that the Terabithia accident wasn’t some sort of fake-out on the way to a happy ending, I slammed the book shut and stared at the author’s name. Katherine Paterson planned this terrible loss on purpose? She could’ve stopped at ‘scary injury’ but decided it had to be ‘senseless death’?

I leapt out of bed and huffed to the desk in the corner. I took a legal pad and a pen out of the middle drawer and sat down intently to plan my revenge. On the wall in front of me, there were built-in shelves above my desk that held stuffed animals: a lamb with ballet shoes, a tabby cat, assorted Beanie Babies. Light was shining in a window on the wall to my right, and if I’d looked out, I’d have seen the bedroom window of my own best friend, who lived next door. She was away at camp for the summer: just a few more weeks until she finally came home again.

Two can play at this game, I thought, and began to invent my own story. There were two best friends who lived north of Rochester, near Lake Ontario, which they could see out of the skylight in one of their bedrooms. Though I wrote as quickly as possible, my hand cramping around the pencil, I was annoyed to realize how much time I had to spend on part one of the plan, which was building my own beautiful, made-up world on the roof. I was itching to get to part two, where one friend tumbles to her death, and then part three, mailing the story to Katherine Paterson for sweet retribution. I was like the Inigo Montoya of fiction: You killed a protagonist. Prepare to cry.

I never finished that story, much less mailed it, but I think about it all the time. This is my thirty-fifth weekly blog post. Pretty much every week, I hear a story that leaves me heartbroken and gasping. It’s a way in which someone was failed by a system they depended on, a rope that broke where they should’ve been supported and protected. Like when I was 10 and trying to hurt Katherine Paterson’s feelings, I find myself trying to write a post with an outcome in mind, rather than in pursuit of a question.

Pretty much every week, I want to rage about the Trump administration: how governments should care for and serve people, and how this one does not. Friday morning, before I drafted this, I came across a New Yorker interview with Atul Gawande about the end of USAID. The piece is simply called Hundreds of Thousands Will Die. I read it in bed and cried. Then I pictured, for the hundredth time, writing a screed about how I still can’t believe it’s gone.

If I had done that, and finished it – if I’d made good on the hot indignation that ran out during my revenge fiction experiment – I don’t think it would’ve connected with its readers. There are people who do this well, capturing the pain of the news cycle, just like there are people who found Bridge to Terabithia cathartic for a grief they were carrying. But I’ve learned that what makes writing meaningful to me is the process of figuring something out: pinning down my thoughts like an etymologist catches and labels bugs. And I’ve learned that when I share just the conclusions of that process, it’s as boring to readers as paging through a field guide of bugs, cover to cover. If I can’t show the journey, there’s not much reward in hearing me recite what I learned.

For better or for worse, even as I have my heart broken every week, I also have an unending supply of little questions: new bugs buzzing around that I don’t yet understand. These aren’t all joyful or hopeful ideas, just like the other books I read as a kid were not all uplifting. But what I got from all those other stories was the sense of value to every human life, the gentleness and care that every protagonist deserved, whether it came to them or not. That’s how I knew to be livid when I read Terabithia: it was about the anguish that comes with loss. It was about how we should do all we can to prevent it.

So every week, I try to find a question to follow, a bug that I want to use the net of my essay to catch and study. I may run out of time, or struggle to make the right net, but I never run out of bugs. I hope that in continuing to try and chase down what I don’t know, and to share the chase, not just the findings, I can keep insisting on the humanity that makes the news so heartbreaking.

I can keep proclaiming over and over what this government is not: that we’re all wondrous and worthy, that life is beautiful and valuable. Like I learned through stories by Madeleine L’Engle and Elizabeth Berg and Beverly Cleary and C.S. Lewis and E.B. White and Frances Hodgson Burnett and James Matthew Barrie and Judy Blume and many others, each of us is the protagonist of our own story.

When we know this, it’s obvious that any preventable, random loss is heartbreaking and tragic. We know to leap out of bed in anger, not to take it lying down.

The question: What childhood books have stuck with you?

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