Despite my slow brain, my middling mood, my many insignificant problems, I’ve been writing a lot lately. My return to the world of freelancing has been halting and scattered. I’m going where my interests take me these days. Yes, I’m aware that “I’m a writer who writes about things that interest me” is not really an identity, but it’s a good way in. At the very least it leads me towards topics I find fascinating and personally resonant, and more often than not those topics are books (historical, bawdy and banned) and authors. Surprise!!!!!

I try not to be too invested in people’s reactions to my work. I mean, this Anne Frank piece was not written in reaction to what’s going on in Gaza, thankyouverymuch, but if people need to have that conversation, then so be it. I do notice, however, a certain flaming feeling of vocation in me when it comes to telling the story behind the story.

It’s not so much a need to topple our icons as a desire to know how they work/ed. It really bothers me that people are perfectly content to read the books, but never to look beyond them. Anne Frank is a great example because her story beyond the books is so agonizing. It’s way easier to read “people are good at heart” and be happy that the world gave us sparkling Anne (which I am) and be done with it. But the other Anne, the one who got carted across Eastern Europe in cattle cars, who got scabies and head lice, who was arrested for little reason and treated with little compassion and who is buried in a mass grave…it hurts and sickens and angers to know about that Anne, but there it is, the truth. It’s the other side of the story. I mean, damn, Anne’s words might never have found their way to us if she wasn’t arrested. That doesn’t mean her arrest was a good thing. Not at all; it was sickening. It hurts to write about, to look at. But there it is.

And so I cry my way through writing about Anne and laugh my way through writing about a quite feminist series of romantic novels in a post-50-Shades world and look for that which is human and relatable and funny and surprising and upsetting behind the things I love. It strikes me that this is a very inconvenient habit, and one that makes me a bit less easy to love. Who wants to live with someone who’s always poking everything with the stick of history? But there you have it. I’ve given up on duty in so many ways, but I feel it’s my duty to look at the shelf and the book alike. I’m not sure at this point if this compulsion is a hopeless tic or what. It could be an excuse to spend more time with people I love, even though I’ve never met them and they’ve been dead lo these many years. Then again, it could be why I’m here.

(Hat tip to Nathan Englander for the title.)