I would actually be fascinated to hear the perspective of someone who didn’t “write unfinished prose pieces that [they] stuffed into a drawer, believing this was one of those things that everyone secretly did and nobody talked about” (64) on this piece. For me, Harriet’s voice didn’t so much draw me in as give me the disorienting sense that I was reading about my own life. That is, my own life if I had grown up in Queens, gone to public school, and married a woman I met online (and you might be surprised how easy Harriet made it for me to imagine living that version of my life, despite the fact that I have done none of those things). Even her slightly formal and occasionally old-fashioned way of putting things made me feel like I was right at home: defining her unfinished writing as “prose” (64), calling her surprise at finding out that people really read what she wrote on their photo cards “agreeable” (65) (Jane Austen anyone?), and, of course, Jane Eyre’s “reader, I married her” at the end (75)…those were all quirky allusions and turns of phrase that I would use in everyday conversation. At least, I would if I had the presence of mind to do so.
So I feel like my perspective is skewed because her writing suits my eclecticisms so exactly. For instance, the sentence I keep coming back to is: “The urge to write always struck me with the bludgeoning insistence of a biological drive, but this didn’t make me a ‘writer’; it just made me a vaguely strange child” (64). I adore semicolons, so this sentence kind of “had me at ‘hello,’” but I also find the description “a vaguely strange child” captivating. To be “strange” is mundane, even common, but to be “vaguely strange”…how wonderful, how mysterious, how delightfully filled with possibility. I want to be “vaguely strange”!
You see? It’s impossible. I have no perspective. I was seduced early on in the piece and now can’t say anything unbiased about it.
