Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

Sullivan’s Travels

Wonder Boys

I am, in my beginning, a plagiarist.

As a kid I was effortlessly good at a little bit of a lot of things. Which was fine, but complicated by having benevolently enthusiastic and supportive parents: Twirl a bit, and You can be a ballerina! Swim a few laps without gulping water into your lungs— Aim for the Olympics! Nurse that baby bird back to health— You’ll be a brilliant doctor some day! No future occupation was beyond my casual grasp, thanks to my obvious if gestational talent. One day, when I was around six or seven and feeling bored (or perhaps terrified) by all my looming potential, my mother suggested I go into my room and write something . A poem, a story, a song. I liked the sound of that. I retreated behind my closed door, armed with pencil and paper, to go write something. To go be a writer. I sat on my bed and waited for the easy en pointe twirl, the smooth glide through waves, the robust flap of tiny wings.

Nothing came, except for panic. A fear of failure. The blank, dun-colored page of my school tablet glared.

This wasn’t easy — but the concept of labor required for victory seemed inelegant, even absurd. I waited for achievement to come, magically — and I didn’t know how long a writer should take before coming out of her room with a poem, a story, a song. But I couldn’t come out without having become a writer. Without having written something .

Or — here was a way out — without having something written.

I pulled from my shelf an old book of poems for children, took it into my closet, crouched on the ground next to my Mary Janes, and copied out, word for word, in deceptively bold little-girl block letters, a poem I found there about a little girl and an apple tree. Something about apples, and maybe some baskets to fill. A couple of rhymed quatrains, most likely an apple/dapple, tree/free type of scheme. And presented it with a nervous flourish to my mother. I awaited judgment. The proclamation: A whole poem, you wrote this, it’s brilliant, my God, you’ll be a writer some day, you are a writer, now , already, a fine, fine writer. Go, write!

Six years old, I’m told I’m a Writer, and it’s an abrupt joy to me, a rush, suddenly the coolest, most crucial thing in the world to be. It obliterates the pallid pastel ballerina in my mind, scoffs at the meager dangle of a gold medal around my neck, burns from my nose the medicinal scent of doctorhood. I don’t know why this identity, this label— You’re a writer —hits me so hard, but it lures. It sounds both private and exhibitionist. Adult, yet redolent of mud pies, of popsicle stick creation. It smells of fresh-sharpened Ticonderoga pencils and beloved, transcendent books. And how easy it was! (And I want the victory of it badly enough to ignore the crunch of the lie in my gut.)

I wanted to be a Writer long before I ever wanted to write.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Kids see this question in primary colors, in the rub-a-dub-dub nursery-rhyme world of butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Kids generally don’t proclaim a desire to become systems analysts or data processors; they have to be able to see what people do or make, and see people doing or making it. In my childhood world, my friends and I looked to our mothers and fathers and step-parents, to our immediate experience of going to school, getting booster shots, playing with the family dog, and then we latched on to the corporeal, easily identifiable idea that people become teachers or doctors or veterinarians. Of course, there were also movies and TV to look to, so we also planned to become actresses, ballerinas, and rock stars.

But I didn’t know any writers . There weren’t any down the street or at friends’ houses or school. Both of my parents were readers, which helped, which breathed the printed word out into the daily air and atmosphere — ubiquitous books were used for coasters, makeshift forts, notepads, and tantrum-inspired missals, and gift certificates to B. Dalton were the favorite Christmas, Hannukah, and birthday presents. I was wildly fortunate that books were a quotidian part of life. But there weren’t any writers to see, to watch, to look to or at . The posed author photos on book jackets didn’t count; I studied those faces for their writerly secrets, but they just looked like ordinary frozen-in-a-pose people. Even in the movies or on TV, I just didn’t see any writers around, doing their writerly thing.

So, six years old, and not only do I want to be a writer, I’m supposed to already be one. I can see the product of writers everywhere, the thing the writer makes, and I love the scent of it, the feel of the paper, the pussy-willow corner tips of worn hardbacks, the fanning flip of paperbacks, the look of pages stuffed thick with print. But I can’t see The Writer anywhere, the doing of the writing, the action itself, the model. And I know, of course, that it is a lie, my being a Writer, my first dirty little secret, first fraud, that book of children’s poems buried under shoes in my closet, and my stomach twisting when I think of that, and I know I better find out, fast, how to be a real Writer, before the world is on to me.

The first movie about a writer I ever saw was Julia in 1977, when I was thirteen. 98I was still supposed to be a writer, which is easy when you’re a child — kids can say they’re going to be whatever and don’t need to provide supporting evidence for it. So, aside from that one purloined poem, I never actually produced any writing — I was waiting for the writing to just appear .

Then, Julia . Opening credits, then a lovely twilight shot of an isolated clapboard beach house lit from within, and the sound, the sound of typing — the crisp, old fashioned clack clack clack , the kind you know is generated from a tinny, antiquated manual typewriter before you even see it, and, sure enough, we enter the beach house to find Lillian Hellman typing away, in a chenille robe, her hair rumpled, the toughening touches of a cigarette dangling at her lip and a tumbler of half-drunk amber liquid nearby. It’s 1934 (calendar with Roosevelt on the wall), and she’s writing, writing away. I have no idea who Lillian Hellman is, but here is a Writer , that much is clear. The first living, breathing, moving image of a Writer I’ve seen. I suddenly want that chenille bathrobe, I want that forehead attractively creased up in thought. She stops stabbing at the keys and peers at the page; the typewriter ribbon is black and red, and I vaguely remember my grandfather owning a typewriter like that, one you didn’t plug in, one that didn’t respond to a whisper of touch but that you had to jab at, hard, with your unaccustomed fingers, the firm left-handed push needed for the carriage to drop down a line, and how you hit a certain key to raise the red strip of ribbon up to type in crimson ink for emphasis. I remember what effort it took to type anything, the conviction you needed with each single letter or number or punctuation mark, each decisive punch. I realize I never saw my grandfather actually use that old manual typewriter, and I wonder what he kept it around for — was he, in fact, a writer? Did he type away on hidden novels at night, is there a secret stash of poems and plays? Is being a writer actually in my genes, my blood? I used to play on that typewriter when I was a kid, and I make a mental note to find it; maybe my parents have the thing stashed in the garage.