An Open Letter to Tim O'Brien

Dear Tim,

                I am not a dumb cooze. And I really resent hearing that term from a cocktease who spends two hundred and forty six pages playing footsy with his own story. You get me all worked up, asking me to suspend my disbelief and go along with the telling and the retelling and the confession and the denial (“I swear this one is true—no, wait—my bad!”)—and you leave me with nothing. Then you have the nerve to tell me I’m wrong? Really, Tim: cooze? Sometimes you can be such a prick.
                And for what? I was the one waiting star-struck in the half-hour line, scrambling for something charming and insightful to say. Something to make our twenty-three second encounter—oh, I don’t know—memorable. I even sprang for the book—and you know nothing says love like a hardcover. So would it kill you to be polite? If you think about it, I’m the one who signs your advance. The one responsible for that fat royalty check. The one keeping you, dare I say it, from the day job.

                I get it that I’m supposed to feel bad for Rat Kiley, and not the buffalo, and that you don’t want the subtext wrapped up in a bow and presented to you along with the sales receipt. Do you really think I’m such a goddamn phony, incapable of critical thought? (Careful how you answer that, Mr. Salinger.)

                You’re not the first writer who’s hurt me, you know. Margaret Atwood smirked when I told her it was an honor to meet her. Allan Gurganus backed into the condiments aisle at Whole Foods when I offered him a piece of pecan pie. I once told Sharyn McCrumb that I liked her mystery novels, and you know what she said? “Anyone who refers to my novels as mysteries should have their vertebrae removed one by one and strung up as wind chimes.” True story.

                So you see, Tim, I’m a little over the whole author/fan dynamic. If we are to move forward in this relationship, there needs to be a little more give and take. From now on, how about you promise not to diss me, and I’ll promise not to accost you, fawning, at the book signing or in the grocery store, demanding an autograph, or a photo-op, or five minutes of your precious time. I won’t even let on how much I like your work. Because, you know something, I’m finally figuring out that it’s the work, and not the writer, that I like. And I can just keep that to myself.

Agnieszka Stachura is a writer and part-time graduate student whose work has appeared in Tiny Lights, Funny Times, Swink, and Ghoti Magazine and is forthcoming in Passages North. She writes, reads, and occasionally rants in the piedmont of North Carolina. She has vowed to quit stalking her favorite authors.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #009