Grace Nguyen

“Our time together is drawing short, my reader. Possibly you will view these
pages of mine as a fragile treasure box, to be opened with the utmost care.
Possibly you will tear them apart, or burn them: that often happens to words.
Perhaps you’ll be a student of history, in which case I hope you’ll make
something useful of me: a warts-and-all portrait, a definitive account of my life
and times, suitably footnoted; though if you don’t accuse me of bad faith I will
be astonished. Or, in fact, not astonished: I will be dead, and the dead are hard to
astonish.
I picture you as a young woman, bright, ambitious. You’ll be looking to make
a niche for yourself in whatever dim, echoing caverns of academia may still exist
by your time. I situate you at your desk, your hair tucked back behind your ears,
your nail polish chipped—for nail polish will have returned, it always does.
You’re frowning slightly, a habit that will increase as you age. I hover behind
you, peering over your shoulder: your muse, your unseen inspiration, urging you
on.
You’ll labour over this manuscript of mine, reading and rereading, picking nits
as you go, developing the fascinated but also bored hatred biographers so often
come to feel for their subjects. How can I have behaved so badly, so cruelly, so
stupidly? you will ask. You yourself would never have done such things! But
you yourself will never have had to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Testaments