Hello. I am Marie Wilson and I wrote a novel called The Gorgeous Girls. This book has been described by my publisher as “the thinking woman’s erotica.” I had a lot of fun writing it but the summer I was twenty years old I was writing an entirely different sort of novel, one that never got finished.
I was renting a room in an old house in Vancouver that summer. My landlady’s name was Lois Light and her house was known to the locals as The Lighthouse. My room was in the basement and although it was the size of a large closet, there was a lot of light admitted by a window that took up half of one wall. The rent was extremely low.
One day at breakfast another basement-room renter said to me: "You are an enigma." I knew what she meant. I wasn’t saying much that summer. I was working on that novel and when I did speak it was likely about the mysteries of the universe (which was what the novel was about which was why I never finished it).
But I felt that if people were to just quiet their minds and listen then they could decode not only me but the entire shebang. That morning, I downed my orange juice, looked my roomie in the eye and said, “I'm actually an open book." She arched a quizzical brow. I explained: "You just have to know how to read."
In the intervening years I have often wondered what sort of a book, open or otherwise, I might have been then. Or now. An epic romance? A toddler’s board book? A philosophical tome? A dime store potboiler?
Perhaps all of the above, perhaps none. But if I could choose just one book to be it would be the first book I ever fell in love with. I was nine years old and the book was called The Golden Pinecone. I can’t recall its plot or characters anymore; I only know that it was full of magic and wonder. There were fairies in it and of course the eponymous pinecone, which as I recall was an earring... for a giant. It's a book full of enchantment and mystery. As far as deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos, that remains a matter of quieting your mind and knowing how to read.
As a teenager, I fell in love with The Hobbit like no other book had caused me to fall before - and I think I remember you saying you skipped those books for the very reason that they were all the rage at the time and you were a rebel! The very first book that I remember loving as a child was Little Black Sambo - probably it's why I have a son named Sammy - and it was pulled off the shelves decades ago for what has long been shunned as racist artwork depicting indigenous African folks. I didn't know anything about that when I was less than 5 years old though, and I loved the story of brave Sambo and the way he saved his whole village by tricking the man-eating tigers into running around and around a tree, the hotness of the day melting the tigers into a puddle of butter, which was then used by the whole village to have a feast of pancakes. There is a new edition of Sambo since then, with new artwork, but it doesn't resonate with me the way my beloved old Sambo did.
ReplyDeleteOkay I will try again - to post - I am such an idiot sometimes about the actual posting part. Anyway - looked up The Golden Pinecone on the internet - and it sounds wonderful - apparently you can the version that was republished in 1994 online for an astonishing range of prices from $5.00 on up and you can borrow it from the Public Library!
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