The Po Show

Reading

The one bright point to the hellacious bout of the flu (or whatever...flu is such a catch-all for the gazillions of viruses that seem to make their way around) that I had for the last week was that I got to read. I can't do much else when I'm really sick (other than the things I *have* to do, like take the kids to school and feed them and so forth). I have a hard time napping when I'm really sick, which is a bummer. I even get insomnia at night, which really sucks. Nothing like staring at the clock for hours and hours when you feel like you might die.

So I read. I finally got to read The Blind Assasin by Margaret Atwood. I'm still wondering how I missed this book before, since she's one of my favorite authors. I do know though: it came out in 2000 and I do NOT buy hardcover books (the last Harry Potter book being the exception, since it was so cheap at Costco!), so I was waiting for the paperback to come out. Then I guess stuff like getting pregnant with Tessa and giving birth to her and having a nervous breakdown and all sort of got in the way and I never picked it up.

Anyway, it was brilliant, and as is often my habit with books I really get into, I not so much read it as devoured it. It's 518 pages and I basically read it in a day, though I was so sick I really should have been resting more.

Reading a really good book makes me want to write. I have no pretensions of wanting to write a really good book, but I want to write *a* book. Especially reading a book like this one, so personal (though fictional), so evocative, one that I so internalized. It ends up pissing me off though, that I have no time, I can't write, I can't get past certain points. And it ends up all about me, and while I know it's common to the point of cliche for first novels to be autobiographical, I don't want to write that. Writing my story is a journal, I feel, not a novel.

But what other stories do I have in me? Perhaps the other stories can't come out, can't get to the front of the queue, till the all-encompassing *me* story gets to see the light of day. It sure as hell is tired of rattling around in my head all the time, and I'm tired of it being there. Would putting it down let me put it away? At least it would be cheaper than more therapy, in dollars if not in pain.