From home I brought books. I sold off many others to make shelf-room, and even my Arden Shakespeares, and even The Canterbury Tales which I didn’t like but might need as an English major, and even a Calvino (but I kept Henry Miller to keep Anais company, third shelf down).

From home I brought Peter S. Beagle, and even Patricia McKillip, and even Terry Pratchett, and even, yes, say it, Charles DeLint. From the store I got Margaret Mahy and E. Nesbit.

Four — five? — years ago I lost all my hair, went to New York, and was tongue tied (literally, pierced by a steel shaft and infected and liquid dieting, and cold-headed too with no head-hair) by the books on Ktv’s shelf. There she was, prestigiously Columbian and her mantle covered in classics, also cockroaches, and I thought I had better revamp my bookshelves stat, except the cockroaches. I bought all the things I knew one ought to read and many of them I did read, too, but some have been on my not-yet shelf for years now. I packed most of the fantasy and sci-fi and so on away.

Suddenly there has been, book-wise, a reversion in the brain, a return to fantasy and what Mrs. Butler called “beach reads,” and between you and me I blame the hair. Here it is again, as long as my sophomore or junior year of high school when I used to view all the assigned reading with suspicion and made sure to see the movie first. Maybe it’s time to embrace that old me, snarl-headed and flighty as she was. I still have the bike-chain bracelet, though the long black trenchcoat and the kazoo (which for a solid year I carried around, linty and irritating and why on earth?) have disappeared. I could revert to my old walk, too, sort of a loping stalk more elastic than whatever I’ve got going now. Already I have hour-long phone conversations with Michele every day. Already I live on a diet of bread and cheese again. Already I’m dating my high-school boyfriend. How far do we really go, when we set out to go so awfully far?

I write in capital letters. My cursive was never good for much. Between second and third grade I switched from an experimental hippie-type classroom where we were encouraged to get on with the important business of school–in my case, reading whatever I could get my hands on, puzzling through math problems because they were interesting, writing stories–to an ordinary rank-and-file class where the chief activity was Education. It turned out most kids had gotten a jump on good handwriting while I was busy reading books way beyond my recommended level. Anyway, my teacher was, I think, annoyed by my lack of skill (extra work for her, I guess, so who can blame her?) and her teaching style, largely based in humiliating errant kids in front of their peers, pretty much froze my cursive right where it was. I even sign checks in block letters now, because otherwise my writing is full of the uncertain loops and careful peaks and valleys of an eight year old.

Anyway, I went on struggling with my choice between cursive that looked like someone was trying to force a devil-minded left-handed child to write with the hand of God, and a printing style that was more or less the same. What saved me was Michele. The first time she spent the night at my house, she brought a strange new form of fiction called (though I didn’t know it at the time) British comic fantasy–Terry Pratchett’s Mort, in fact. One of the main characters is the Grim Reaper, who speaks in blocky all-capitals. He had a horse named Binky. This was the funniest thing sixth-grade me had ever heard of.

I spent a lot of time after that writing notes to Michele in the voice of Terry Pratchett’s Grim Reaper, and eventually his writing became mine all the time. On the one hand, it’s sort of morbid to have transformed myself into Death. On the other hand, it beats being transformed into any of the other voices I used when writing notes to Michele (a caveman; an idiot cultist named Brother Dimbulb; a cheese who addressed Michele as Mama Cow Man for some reason, etc.).

I don’t know why I felt compelled to write all this down, except that now that I’ve seen the header of this post, I know what the title of my autobiography should be.

One of my professors likes to remind the class that our favorite authors would not have liked us, had we ever met. “Don’t kid yourselves,” he says, “Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen would not be your friends. They would not invite you round for tea. You are uncouth youthful boors from the underclasses and these women would find you repellent.”

I just finished watching an hour-long video interview with my best friend Anais Nin and have realized that I would never have been her best friend, not in a million years. I can hear her reading the entry about me aloud in her furry accent: “Have just met an aspiring writer. She has been packed half-full of science by her lover and does not understand the self, the vital internal self, the rich tapestry of the unconscious. She sneers at analysis. Every writer must undergo analysis, especially a woman, whose power comes from her deeper self. Also, she dresses like a schoolchild.”

It’s true, I’m neither fish nor fowl these days. And if I go over completely to this fully rational world of the Woods, how can I remain my mother’s daughter, when our family legends read like a magical realism novel? How can I remain the literary daughter of Anais Nin? I’m making a move to throw off this half-worn mantle of reason. Back to massage school, back to D.H. Lawrence, back to Anais, back to crystals. I can’t live in the Woods.

[I still live with a Wood though. Stay tuned for Healing Energy vs. Richard Dawkins train wrecks.]