I came late to my first literary crush, later than most. That Charles
Dickens had been dead for almost a 150 years didn’t ease my
infatuation, when it finally gripped me. I’d read the obligatory stuff
in high school but wasn’t well-formed enough to appreciate it. I knew A Christmas Carol,
but mostly by osmosis, not out of a family tradition of reading it
aloud or trundling off to the theater to see it every December. So, it
surprised me that I became obsessed with retelling it, and doing so,
fell hard for the man who wrote it—“The Inimitable Boz” himself. In
fact, it’s taken me almost 20 years, a screenplay, and a novel to get
over him, if one ever gets over someone who means that much to you.
My book started as a screenplay, a playful twist on how the second
most beloved Christmas story in the world came to be. But the plot
didn’t take shape until well after the initial idea swirled in my mind,
when I bolted upright in bed one morning and knew the whole thing, start
to finish, like it had been handed to me in a dream. That should’ve
been my first clue that deep stuff was at play. By then, Dickens owned a
considerable amount of real estate in my head. The novels helped win me
to his side, of course. But it was the biographies and letters, the
plumbing of his inky depths, that made me read them in a different way. I
became his ardent fan, apologist, sympathizer; I felt close to him—that
I was his intimate—and cared for him with an abiding tenderness. I knew
his flaws, as a husband and father, but understood the darkness he
dealt with all his life, inside and out, and grasped, too, that he
leaned toward the light, with a heart as big as the world.
Now, I was its fleeting guardian. Being a believer in symbols and
talismans (like Dickens, who had dueling bronze toads on his desk for
good luck), I bought a Dickens action figure, all shiny plastic, bright
green vest, top hat, with a quill in his fist, ready for anything. It
was a small, frivolous thing, but even at five inches tall, he felt like
a companion. I had that channeling feeling that if I parked myself at
my computer, especially in the wee hours before my conscious mind took
the day, Dickens would tell me what to say, exactly how he would say it.
He was talking me through it—talking through me—and all I had
to do was write it down. I could find my voice in his. It felt like he
had picked me. That I was Charles Dickens’ muse.
It wasn’t my first merry-go-round. I’d been captivated by men like
Dickens all my life: brilliant, charismatic, complicated, entertaining,
suck-all-the-air-out-of-the-room men, deeply flawed, but with that same
big heart. My own father, whose coming of age was about as knotty as
David Copperfield’s, was the first. And I married another, an
accomplished filmmaker with whom I stayed for 23 years. But here was
Dickens driving it home, my attraction to men who live an enormous
life—almost unimaginable to those of us who sometimes watch instead of
do, think instead of talk, hold back instead of lunge forward. I’d
internalized, from a young age, the idea that if men like that thought I
was special—if they picked me—it conveyed their specialness to me. I
could live off the fumes of their big life, too. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-temptations-of-playing-the-muse/
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