Where I Was When I Fell in Love with Writing

I was on the toilet, if you must know. It was the early nineties, I was probably ten or eleven years old, and the magazine keeping me company at that moment was a Redbook with Meg Ryan on the cover. Where these magazines came from, I really had no idea, as my mother would never subscribe to Redbook. I'd never known her to subscribe to anything except things like Better Homes and Gardens and Country Woman. And who wants to read that in the bathroom?

The cover article was all about Meg's new baby, and I remember being intrigued by her saying that it's ""just a science project until suddenly there's a person,"" although I had no idea what she meant. But even such details as a new celebrity mom (complete with pictures of her leaving the hospital via wheelchair) couldn't hold my interest the way the featured short story in the back of the magazine did. A story called ""Second Thoughts,"" it told of a pregnant woman who's man had left her, and her heartbreak had led her to take up a new hobby. The story had me from the first line. ""After Zane left, I started to bake."" The woman's pregnancy leaves her unable to consume very much sugar, but she bakes anyway, keeping her uneaten creations out on the back porch once she runs out of room in the fridge.

I had read books before, so I'm not sure what it was about this story that struck me in particular, but I was amazed at how perfectly I could picture the whole thing. The woman, her porch covered with cakes and eclairs, her fridge boasting pictures of some of her favorite creations of all time. And all this from a story only a few pages long. It hadn't really occurred to me that writing even a relatively simple story could accomplish all this.

The woman spends the whole story wishing Zane would come back, of course, but what blew my ten-year-old mind was that at the end of the story when he finally does, she makes a game-time decision that she doesn't want him. She's gained enough confidence and perspective on her own to realize that she's better off without him. And as a woman, a romantic, a person who has at one point wished more than anything that the loser boy I'd been dating would come crawling back to me, let me tell you that there is nothing more empowering and freeing in this world than what the woman in this story did. An alarmingly powerful lesson for a child to take away from a short piece of Redbook fiction, wouldn't you say?

I had always enjoyed words, but reading that story was when I realized both the ability stories have to immediately create imagery in our heads and the level of depth and meaning that can be conveyed through words, no matter how lowly or unofficial the source. Even with this piece of magazine fiction, I can assure you that the closing lines--where the woman sends Zane packing in his pickup truck and then finally indulges in one of the cupcakes sitting on her porch--had me cheering. From my bathroom.