me? Or are you asking how one gets published?’
‘No, with the other books. Did you get permission to write them?’
‘Permission to write about my own life?’
‘But it’s not just your life. It’s your parents, your stepmother, friends. Did you let them read it first?’
‘No. They knew what I was doing, though. And I fact-checked as much as I could, admitted the fallibility of my memory throughout. In fact that’s a recurring theme in my work.’
The woman was clearly unsatisfied with the answer. As others lined up to have their books signed, she stalked to the cash registers at the front of the store. Cassandra would have loved to dismiss her as a philistine, a troublemaker irritable because she had nothing better to do on Valentine’s Day. But she carried an armful of impressive-looking books, although Cassandra didn’t see her own spine among them. The woman was like the bad fairy at a christening. Why do I get to write the story? Because I’m a writer.
Toward the end of the line—really, thirty people on a wet, windy Valentine’s Day was downright impressive—a woman produced a battered paperback copy of Cassandra’s first book.
‘In-store purchases only,’ the manager said, and Cassandra couldn’t blame her. It was hard enough to be a bookseller these days without people bringing in their secondhand books to be signed.
‘Just one can’t hurt,’ said Cassandra, forever a child of divorce, instinctively the peacemaker.
‘I can’t afford many hardcovers,’ the woman apologized. She was one of the few young ones in the crowd and pretty, although she dressed and stood in a way that suggested she was not yet in possession of that information. Cassandra knew the type. Cassandra had been the type. Do you sleep with a lot of men? she wanted to ask her. Overeat? Drink, take drugs? Daddy issues?
‘To…?’ Fountain pen poised over the title page. God, how had this ill-designed book found so many readers? It had been a relief when the publisher repackaged it, with the now de rigueur book club questions in the back and a new essay on how she had come to write the book at all, along with updated information on the principals. It had been surprisingly painful, recounting Annie’s death in that revised epilogue. She was caught off guard by how much she missed her stepmother.
‘Oh, you don’t have to write anything special.’
‘I want to write whatever you want me to write.’
The young woman seemed overwhelmed by this generosity. Her eyes misted and she began to stammer: ‘Oh—no—well, Cathleen. With a C. I—this book meant so much to me. It was as if it was my story.’
This was always hard to hear, even though Cassandra understood the sentiment was a compliment, the very secret of her success. She could argue, insist on the individuality of her autobiography, deny the universality that had made it appealing to so many—or she could cash the checks and tell herself with a blithe shrug, ‘Fuck you, Tolstoy. Apparently, even the unhappy families are all alike.’
To Cathleen, she wrote in the space between the title, My Father’s Daughter, and her own name. Find your story and tell it.
‘Your signature is so pretty,’ Cathleen said. ‘Like you. You’re actually very pretty in person.’
The girl blushed, realizing what she had implied. Yet she was far from the first person to say this. Cassandra’s author photo was severe, a little cold. Men often complained about it.
‘You’re pretty in person, too,’ she told the girl, saving her with her own words. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if you found there was a book in your story. You should consider telling it.’
‘Well, I’m trying,’ Cathleen admitted.
Of course you are. ‘Good luck.’
When the line dispersed, Cassandra asked the bookstore manager, ‘Do you want me to sign stock?’
‘Oh,’ the manager said with great surprise, as if no one had ever sought to do this before, as if it were an innovation that Cassandra had just introduced to bookselling. ‘Sure. Although I wouldn’t expect you to do all of them. That would be too much to ask. Perhaps that stack?’
Betsy/Beth/Bitsy knew and Cassandra knew that even that stack, perhaps a fifth of the store’s order, could be returned once signed. So many things unspoken, so many unpleasant truths to be tiptoed around. Just like my childhood all over again. The book was number 23 on the Times’s extended list and it was gaining some momentum over the course of the tour. The Painted Garden was, by almost any standard, a successful literary novel. Except by the standard of the reviews, which had been uniformly sorrowful, as if a team of surgeons had gathered at Cassandra’s bedside to deliver a terminal verdict: Writing two celebrated memoirs does not mean you can write a good novel. Gleefully cruel or hostile reviews would have been easier to bear.
Still, The Painted Garden was selling, although not with the velocity expected by her new publisher, which had paid Cassandra a shocking amount of money to lure her away from the old one. Her editor was already hinting that—much as they loved, loved, loved her novel—it would be, well, fun if she wanted to return to nonfiction. Wouldn’t that be FUN? Surely, approaching fifty—not that you look your age!—she had another decade or so of life to exploit, another vital passage? She had written about being someone’s daughter and then about being someone’s wife. Two someones, in fact. Wasn’t there a book in being her?
Not that she could see. This novel had been cobbled together with a few leftovers from her life, the unused scraps, then padded by her imagination, not to mention her affectionate memories of The Secret Garden. (A girl exploring a forbidden space, a boy in a bed—why did she have to explain these allusions over and over?) On some level, she was flattered that readers wanted her, not her ideas. The problem was, she had run out of life.
Back in her hotel room, she over-ordered from room service, incapable of deciding what she wanted. The restaurant in the hotel was quite good, but she was keen to avoid it on this night set aside for lovers. Even under optimal circumstances, she had never cared for the holiday. It had defeated every man she had known, beginning with her father. When she was a little girl, she would have given anything to get a box of chocolates, even the four-candy Whitman’s Sampler, or a single rose. Instead, she could count on a generic card from the Windsor Hills Pharmacy, while her mother usually received one of those perfume-and-bath-oil sets, a dusty Christmas markdown. Her father’s excuse was that her mother’s birthday, which fell on Washington’s, came so hard on the heels of Valentine’s Day that he couldn’t possibly do both. But he executed the birthday just as poorly. Her mother’s birthday cakes, more often than not, were store-bought affairs with cherries and hatchets picked up on her father’s way home from campus. It was hard to believe, as her mother insisted, that this was a man who had wooed her with sonnets and moonlight drives through his hometown of DC, showing her monuments and relics unknown to most. Who recited Poe’s ‘Lenore’—And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?—in honor of her name.
One year, though, the year Cassandra turned ten, her father had made a big show of Valentine’s Day, buying mother and daughter department store cologne, Chanel No. 5 and lily of the valley, respectively, and taking them to Tio Pepe’s for dinner, where he allowed Cassandra a sip of sangria, her first taste of alcohol. Not even five months later, as millions of readers now knew, he left his
