find a stranger
When I was in high school, I usually walked home with my friend Karen, who was taking creative writing as an elective. She was working on a novel. “It’s about four girls who are best friends, and then one of them gets AIDS and dies,” she said. At the time, it struck me as both melodramatic (I was pretty sure Karen’s experience of AIDS, like mine, was limited to watching And the Band Played On in health class) and genius. Googling '80s YA book covers is actually really getting me in the mood to write. It's Pavlovian. Over the years, I’ve started hundreds of novels in my head. Most of them are terrible, influenced more by sitcoms and eighties YA books than by the authors I name-check as my favorites now. The low-stakes playing-around is the whole point. A lot of the bad-novels-in-my-head are variations on Karen’s theme. Not the AIDS part, necessarily, but the best friends and how they turn out. I’m a little bit obsessed with the idea, and I’m not sure why. Ma...