My favorite book in the mystery genre is Dorothy L. Sayers's Gaudy Night.

I could go into the fifty million reasons for this in the way I sometimes do for students--structure! form! setting! logic!--but let's be honest here.

Gaudy Night is my favorite mystery because I knew, the very first time I read it, that Harriet Vane was the woman I wanted to be when I grew up.

She's still the woman I want to be when I grew up.

But note the progression--Harriet Vane didn't rivet my attention because she looked like me. She riveted my attention because I wanted to look like her.

No, because I wanted to BE like her.

But give it a second. I'll get back there.

There are a lot of people these days saying that books should diversify their characters so that more readers--and especially more children--can "see thrmselves" in the stories they read.

And I see nothing wrong with that, although I do think that writers write (fiction) badly when they try to create characters on purpose rather than allow them to develop naturally.

What always gives me pause is the assumption that readers will feel cut off from characters who DON'T look like them--that if they read books where all the blacksmiths are girls, they won't be able to imagine themselves as blacksmiths if they are boys.

Now, I have to assume that there are many readers out there who do in fact respond to fiction this way. They say they do, and I've got no reason to think they're lying.

The problem is that I have never responded to writing this way. I read Hemingway and found 1920s expatriate Paris. I immediately inserted myself into that scene in my head, and I was the American expatriate writer on the left bank, just like Hemingway.

It literally didn't occur to me that I couldn't be that person because the model I was looking at was male and I was female.

There it was, a way of being human. It was a very attractive way of being human. I couldn't see any reason not to try it on.

Part of this may be that I was never looking for representations of myself in fiction in any sense. I didn't want to find myself in books. I wanted to find alternatives to myself, ways I could be that were different from what I was.

I was, after all, pretty damned boring.

As I grew older, there got to be things about my actual and existing self that I liked just fine the way they were and had no intention of giving up.

I still inserted myself as Hemingway in Hemingway's Paris, but my version of Hemingway ditched the anti intellectualism for bookishness and ditched all the sports and physical activity altogether.

It turned out that I found rushing about the landscape Doing Stuff that demonstrated my physical prowess even more boring than being a lawyer's daughter in Fairfield County, Connecticut.

And that's how we get to Gaudy Night and Harriet Vane.

Sayers and I--and Harriet Vane--shared all kinds of things, first and foremost a passionate idealization of what I later learned to call the Life of the Mind, learning for the sake of learning, philosophy and history and literature and painting and music and the Great Tradition.

But what Harriet Vane was not was somebody who "looked like me."

She was somebody utterly unlike me in every way that counted.

And that was the point.

She was an indication that there were ways to be in the world that I could aspire to, even though I was not naturally similar to them at all.

Ojay, I'd better stop.

I seem to be blithering.