I’d like to think that it was in high school when I read Choose Me by Evelyn Lau, in my last year of high school, but the publication date inside says 1999, so it’s possible I was organized enough and that there was a book review so I learned about it (did The Ottawa Citizen used to do book reviews? I think so) and I put it on hold at the library or maybe it was just on the shelf already, but, at the same time, my last year of high school I was so pulled in all directions that I might have read this book the next year when I was in Ottawa on a co-op term (at which point I vowed never to work for the Government of Canada again, except I broke that promise ten years later only to realize that I should have stuck with my ban on working for the feds forever). But whenever I read it, I read it and wanted to be a writer after reading it.
There’s a story in it, Suburbia, where Belinda has left graduate school, and the first time I read that story I told myself I won’t be like that. I won’t just quit graduate school for dumb reasons, and I didn’t quit graduate school for dumb reasons, even though I probably should have left because I was unhappy (although, can one imagine the angst I would have had over doing that – I have enough angst regarding quitting academia/research). But, reading the story now, I’m sort of Belinda-esque, floating unmoored. So quitting graduate school or not has nothing to do with drift. Drift just comes.
I didn’t like this book as much as I did when I was either 19 or 20, the other time I read it. What I’d been thinking was that some of my stories were, in some way, theft from Lau’s here, but now I don’t see as much of a resemblance as I’ve built up in my head (and not theft as in plagiarism, but some sort of spiritual theft of feeling and emotion). I had a story I wrote much later that I was pretty sure was reworking of a story in Choose Me and when I got to that story, mine wasn’t like that at all other than it had a professor and a student, like so many of my stories because of the years and years I spent in school. Maybe I’ll rewrite my story then. I don’t have a copy of it anywhere, but I know what happened enough to recreate it. Or maybe I’ll just let it go. Drift some more.
I’d remembered these stories so much in my head and then they were different. Things change.