I read mostly non-fiction. Memoirs, biographies, true crime, graphic novels of historical events and of course, poetry. I write (mostly) non-fiction in my own writings (yeah yeah, names and identifying characteristics changed to protect the innocent, etc, etc). I feel that anybody’s life could make a good book, if written properly. I love knowing that crazy and amazing things could actually happen, and have. I love truth that is stranger than fiction.

The problem with reading non-fiction accounts is that Google is always readily at our fingertips. Have you ever ruined a book for yourself? I totally have and I swear I didn't mean to. In "If You Tell" by Gregg Olsen, a true crime tale that took place in Washington state, I decided half way through that I just HAD to know what this horrible bitch mother looked like in real life and BOOM. The first item in my Google search alerted me that yet another main character was going to be murdered. I also learned that the mother was not nearly as attractive as the character description made her out to be, so there's that. I just learned way more than I bargained for.

So today I feel like I ruined a book for myself ten-fold. I'm currently reading "Skin Deep: Tattoos, The Disappearing West, Very Bad Men, and my Deep Love for them All", (a memoir) by Karol Griffin and I am LOVING IT. I mean, for one, it TOTALLY sounds like an Amber book, does it not? (WARNING: Spoilers beyond this point.) I've loved leaving my little stress-ball life of publication worries and two mentally and emotionally intense nursing jobs to join Karol in a tattoo shop out west with questionable characters on the dawning of my favorite decade (1990). After reading a chapter this morning, I'm thinking, "Karol's cool. We could be friends. It's so fun seeing this life through her eyes. I wonder what else she's written?"
Enter Google and type-y, type-y, type . . .

She's dead.

And now I just have to sit with this for awhile, because I feel like I made a new friend and now she's gone. I'm not even halfway through the book.

Yes, countless authors are dead. But I think it hits differently knowing that going into a book, as opposed to discovering that midway through a modern-day memoir that you're having so much fun with. It's not like Karol was old, she was only 46 when she passed, and it was only seven years after Skin Deep was published, which was in 2003.

I know our books are supposed to outlive us. They are what we leave in this world as an imprint that we existed. That our lives meant something, however so small, that writing them down could alter history, if only for just one person who reads them. Our books are there to entertain, to present a temporary escape, to allow others a glimpse into another's life and to help us all feel less alone. And they will contiue to do this after our death. They're what we leave behind. They're our way (as writers) of saying all graffiti-style, "We were here." They are our legacy.

So I guess I'll be pouring a little unplanned wine out tonight for Karol and her legacy. And if I were a dead author, and someone read my book 12 years after my passing and got as upset about my death as I am Karol's, I'd be looking down and saying, "Well then. That means I did my job." Job well done, Karol. Job well done.

As a takeaway . . .friends, learn from my mistakes. Life is too damn short to make them all yourself. . . .DO NOT google your current read author until AFTER you've finished the book.