Sincere Flattery was the runner-up in the 2005 3-Day Novel Writing Contest, a ridiculous exercise in self-flagellation and caffeine ingestion.
All 54,000 words were written over a period of 72 hours, during which Jen had 2 bags of salt and vinegar chips, seven pots of coffee, one celebrity encounter, and one near-involvement with a shooting. Hard to believe anything got written...
From Sincere Flattery - A Brief Chronology
12:01 pm. Day One
The second twelve hours. I have already written fourteen thousand words, and twenty-three single spaced pages, and re-read about two dozen essays dating back to my teens and fifty or so pages of notes.
I used to sit in on lectures at the University, for fun. It started in grade twelve during an otherwise unremarkable March Break. I was going nowhere special, like all the classmates who had saved for their drinking and suntanning package tours. I had no interest in tropical destinations. The Dominican had been enough for a long time; the culture shock took months to recover from, and I was still very anti-alcohol. It took me until I moved out to even accept a glass of wine with any regularity, notwithstanding the one drunken night with Paula at her father’s business do. There was a canoe entirely filled with booze.
I didn’t want to have a reason to think less; I was driven to think more. I wanted to know why I felt the way I felt, and I wanted to learn. I have always wanted to learn, the way a sponge wants to soak up liquid. It is in the sponge’s nature, as it is in mine. I can’t help wanting to know things, the more the better. Give me useless facts about rainforests or planets or dead geniuses or seventies pop stars, and I bask in a sun created by the billion-candle wattage of trivial nuclear fission.
I have pages of notes taken in physics classes, astronomy lectures, and poly-sci labs. I have made my own notations and conjectures along the way: “What if you’ve known all along that things are not enough, and therefore do not feel unfulfilled but lonely for purpose?” “In life, we take what we want, and we pay for it. (Spanish proverb)” “The best way to challenge traditional roles is to pre-suppose a contrary to them.” And “If you are materialistic, don’t seek spiritual value. If you seek confrontation, do not expect tenderness.”
The outcome of my outburst to my mother? I was too emotional going in to play it right, I think, but bringing too much passion to it was the only way anything was ever going to get said. This is me, I told her. I am not the person you want to be, and I can’t pretend any more. I will never be the daughter you want. You have to decide. Accept me the way I am, or I can’t be part of this relationship any more. It’s killing me.
She looked at me with the most utter coldness I have seen outside a movie. I know she loves me, and I know she wants the best for me, but she had never to this point, I think, imagined she didn’t know what I wanted, what was actually best for me.
“If that’s who you are,” she said, “I don’t think I’ll be losing much.” And she left the room, and didn’t come back, leaving my father to apologize. That’s not the right word. My father is a wise man, but was almost too even-handed in this case to make me feel the world could ever be right again. He didn’t apologize for her words, or her running out on me. He merely told me that I had to deal with her the way she was. Funny, I had thought that’s what I wanted.
Once, I tried to talk to my father about the problems I had being myself with my mother, with the snide comments she directed at me with such an obvious disdain, seeming to believe I couldn’t understand them for the insults they were. She was trying, in her own mind, to improve me, by nudging me in the right direction, not to hurt me.
He said that I had to decide if I had a problem with her, or if she was the problem herself. I thought about it, and was crushed to see his point. My problem was my reaction to her. She had no problem with me. She was trying to help; it was just that her methods were causing me pain.
It took me years to come to terms with that concept, and longer to learn how to deal with it. Now, I laugh when she hurts me unintentionally with the sharp edge of her disapproval, or with her faint praise that is meant to keep me from thinking too much of myself. She can’t help who she is, but I can stop being adversely affected.
When she told a friend of mine that she was “the daughter she never had,” I was finally able to see the humour in it.
Laughing and weeping. . .
Read more of Sincere Flattery on ebook - coming soon!
