I moved to Arizona when I was fourteen- smack in the middle of my eighth grade year. My new honors English class had
just embarked on this "research project" paper that was, for an eighth-grader from Bullshit School System, FL, fairly ambitious. It was the first paper I'd ever been assigned that had to be typed, had to be ten pages, and had to include sources. I was mortified and overwhelmed. And also pretty pissed, since I could have avoided the stupid project completely if my stupid dad had been transferred from his stupid company in stupid March instead of stupid February. Stupid.
I decided that I would do a comparison/contrast paper (oh, how I long for the always steady "comparison/contrast" papers of yesteryear! Explicator! I hear your two-paragraph synopses calling!) on Egyptian versus Greek and Roman mythology. Every day after school my mom would pick me up from school (generally from the office of either the nurse or the principal as there were a group of girls who thought that the pointy new girl needed to have basketballs thrown at her skull EVERY AFTERNOON) and drive me to the public library so that I could do research. She would drop me off, run whatever "secret crack run" errands moms see to, and then gather me up a couple of hours later. What
I would generally do is about nine or ten solid minutes of mythology scouring, and then I would read two hours worth of Jean Auel's
Clan of the Cave Bear novels. I was transfixed! Would Ayla survive alone outside of her clan? Would little Durc be alright without his mother?? I had to know. And then, as the eighth-grade deadline loomed closer; would Ayla and Jondolar make it back to his people, beyond the Great Mother River??? Argh! I finished the third book in the trilogy (positively white-knuckled at the thought of having to wait a whole
year until the latest sequel was published), sighed, and started writing the mythology paper... that was due in twelve hours. My poor mom had to sit up all night at the typewriter and transcribe my longhand accounts of Zeus and Ra thanks to my inability to focus or prioritize. When the paper was through, I remember having to fill out this weird checklist for the teacher: what were the strong points of my paper? What were the weak ones? What grade would I give this paper? Sitting in class with a paper that I had spent
maybe a cumulative five hours on, I was awash in personal anguish and disavowal. "Why hadn't I worked harder??"... "MY PAPER
SUCKS!"... that kind of thing. I checked that I thought my paper deserved a B-minus or a C. I was devastated. Stupid Cave Bear! Stupid Ayla.
I got that paper back. The teacher gave me an A+ and recommended that I skip freshman English.
I was in the library today ambitiously looking up source material for my "narrative reliability in the female protagonists of Anne Tyler" thesis. And did you know? It took Jane Auel TWELVE YEARS to publish that sequel! Shelters of Stone. I'm on chapter four.
