When he handed me the manuscript back, it had been line-edited, everything written in neat penmanship with red ink, and he said that I would get an A if I just made the suggested revisions, mostly grammatical because, he stressed, my grammar was quite terrible. The class was done, and I spent the rest of the semester sitting on his sofa every Tuesday and Thursday, the one reserved for entertaining, and I would do my homework and study, and he would either read or nap, and sometimes we would drink tea and he would talk about literature, admitting that he understood very little of it, and he was kind and lovely. At the end of the year, he told me that his grandson’s wife was a literary agent for a boutique agency in New York, and he had sent her the book, which she loved, and she was certain that she could sell it and it would be a breakout series for teens. He handed me a card with her information on it. I was crying, which he did not seem to notice, and before I could hug him, he went back to lie down on his sleeping couch. If someone had walked into that office at that moment, to find Dr. Blush snoring on his sofa and me bawling so hard that I was hiccupping, I cannot imagine what they would have assumed. By the end of the summer after graduation, I’d signed a two-book deal with a major publishing house. Because of this old man who did end up dying five months after he retired, which made me cry all over again, his kindness before he disappeared from my life, which was not how people usually left me or I left them.
As Frances Eleanor Budge, I had written four of those books featuring Evie Fastabend causing chaos throughout the town of Running Hollow, both loving and hating her father and sister （their mother long dead）。 And they were all bestsellers, and lots of girls dressed up like Evie Fastabend for Halloween, and, well, again, it was deeply strange to watch this thing I had made in my room in Coalfield that summer spread out into the world. There was always talk of a TV series or movie, but it never quite happened, which was fine with me. I didn’t want it to be that real.
A few years ago, as Frankie Budge, I published an adult novel called Sisters with the Same First Name, which was about a woman who learns that her long-lost father is dying and travels cross-country, picking up all twelve of her half sisters, all born to different mothers, who each share her first name, on their way to his deathbed. And it did not do well, sold poorly, and though the reviews were positive, I could tell that maybe I’d tried too hard to write about my own life, had made it too explicitly autobiographical, and it had gotten messed up in the execution. I’d been embarrassed in the interviews and events when I started to talk about my dad, ancient history. It was fine now. It was a good enough book. I had wondered if my father might read it and contact me, but I had not seen or heard from him since he’d come to my college graduation, when Brian tried to karate kick him before the ceremony even started, and all of us decided, I guess without saying it, that we did not ever need to see each other again. His daughter Frances, who looks nothing like me, is very pretty and has a very active social media presence; she works for a publicity firm in Chicago and the two of us have never exchanged a single word. I think if we met in real life, one of us would explode, would simply cease to exist. I don’t even know if she has any idea who I am. I keep hoping that she will get married, will take the man’s last name, and maybe then, maybe, I wouldn’t hate her quite as much as I do, as petty as that is.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I lived in the world. I was famous in the way you can be as a writer of a book kids loved for a brief period of their lives, and I navigated all kinds of situations where things I’d made were discussed and considered, and sometimes people asked me to join those discussions. I didn’t mind.
And I had a really great husband and a kid who was lovely and beautiful, and I volunteered twice a week at the elementary school library to read to kids who did not give a shit and just wanted to fight over the pillows they got to lie on, and I visited schools in the neighboring counties to talk to teenagers about writing, and it was an entire life that I’d made. But I guess the other thing is that I had built that life over another life, this secret life, this secret thing, and I had told myself that this would all work as long as I kept my life on top of that secret, if I weighed it down so it stayed deep inside of me. And when something comes back, when it reappears, when it emerges from that place inside of you, it takes up real space in the world that you’ve made. And I wasn’t sure how much space it needed, if it would push me so far outside of that life that I’d have to start over, become someone else.