Meta: I'm No Eggers

During my senior year of high school, my English class read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. It was, at times, both heartbreaking and a work of staggering genius, and it's author made no show of being modest. To the contrary, AHWSG, as we came to call it, was a memior that blurred the line between fact and fiction. It was autobiographical in nature, and yet there were things that could not, or at least should not (we hoped not, as readers, for Eggers' sake) be true. But that was alright, because in addition to making no claims towards modesty, Eggers also made no claims toward truth. His stories may have begun in fact, but ultimately ended in fabrication. In essence, he gave himself the license to say whatever he wanted.

And this, in essence, is what I wanted to do here; the problem is that I am no Dave Eggers, and no matter how much I say otherwise, there will be those of you who believe that my work is just a thinly veiled collection of Mary Sues. In fact, the fact that I deny this over and over again has caused me to question it myself. But then I wonder, if these were really all Mary Sues, why wouldn't I just give every story a happy ending?

Ultimately, I think it comes down to what I want, since I am the author, and you are the reader. I don't want to be the characters in my stories; I don't want to be the girl behind the wheel in Drive or the one who crosses campus at midnight in search of love and adventure in my NaNoWriMo piece. Nor do I want to be the slightly strange but mostly harmless boy in Bad News (though nobody has accused me of that one, yet) or one of the chatty middle schoolers in Love Story and The Beginning of Something? All of these characters are a part of me, in some sense - they came out of my heart - but they are not me, and they live out a seperate existance from me.

Now, once again, happy reading!