{"id":34084,"date":"2012-06-21T11:44:53","date_gmt":"2012-06-21T15:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=34084"},"modified":"2013-01-29T10:45:04","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T15:45:04","slug":"the-difference-between-me-and-ann-beattie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/06\/21\/the-difference-between-me-and-ann-beattie\/","title":{"rendered":"The Difference Between Me and Ann Beattie"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

\u00a9 Bob Adelman.<\/p><\/div>\n

I remember reading my first Ann Beattie story. I was sitting in my dorm room on a loft bed with a hard mattress. This was in North Carolina, at night. The dorm was a big stone structure with crenelated battlements that made me dream of castles. My room overlooked the main quad, and I often heard boozy students in the background, college kids stumbling from the buses as they made their way across the lawn and back to their rooms. I was reading from a paperback copy of Park City<\/em>. I don\u2019t recall much else. I was probably in sweats and an old tee that smelled like pot, lying on my bed, legs crossed with Beattie\u2019s book upright on my chest. Since it was late, I had likely already eaten dinner\u2014gluey pasta and mozzarella sticks delivered in foil pans. Maybe the door was locked. But what I do remember is this: the soft shiver that gathered at the back of my neck as I flipped through the final pages of \u201cThe Burning House\u201d and, in the end, chilled me to my core.<\/p>\n

After that first story, I kept reading. Aside from admiring her effortless, cool prose, I was drawn to Beattie\u2019s gay characters. They were everywhere<\/em>\u2014\u201cThe Burning House,\u201d \u201cThe Cinderella Waltz,\u201d \u201cGravity\u201d\u2014and they were so different from the kinds of gay characters I was used to reading about. None of them were dying of AIDS or getting beat up or coming out to their parents. Instead, they drank Galliano by the bottle and ashed their joints in unusual places\u2014a boiling pot of sauce, for instance. The same could be said for the other characters who populated Beattie\u2019s fiction. Their problems were so \u2026 ordinary.<\/p>\n

But if you lined me and Beattie\u2019s characters up, I\u2019d stick out like a sore thumb. Here\u2019s the difference: Beattie\u2019s boys and girls are <\/em>Greenwich, Connecticut; I\u2019m just a kid from Columbus, Ohio. They\u2019re post-Woodstock; I\u2019m post-Britney. Even though I\u2019ve traveled with parents as far as Rome and the Red Sea, we don\u2019t have a mountain home in Vermont. We don\u2019t have friends who own an art gallery in SoHo.<\/p>\n

My parents came to the United States in their late teens, abandoning Eritrea during the war for independence in order to go to school. At the time, my uncle on my mother\u2019s side was a student at Ohio State University, so that\u2019s where they went and that\u2019s where we stayed. In old pictures they\u2019re dressed up in the fashion of the time\u2014or not the time, but a<\/em> time, because it was always the wrong one. There\u2019s a faded photo from the seventies where they\u2019re standing side by side and clinging to each other, brown kids grinning at the camera, dressed like Sandy Olsson and Danny Zuko\u2014a big frilly skirt and a leather jacket. When they first started out, old stuff was all they could afford; cheap hand-me-downs from the bottom of thrift-store bargain bins.<\/p>\n

People look at me and expect big things from my writing. They see a black gay guy with immigrant parents and think, Here\u2019s someone with something to say. For a long time, before I discovered Beattie, I thought so, too. I tried to write about gay hospital visitation and the Eritrean-Ethiopian war\u2014admittedly, in the right hands, possibly great things to read about, but in my hands they were wrong. The characters fell flat\u2014oh, they fell real<\/em> hard\u2014because they were merely vehicles for an agenda that wasn\u2019t mine. Still, I knew I had something<\/em> to say, but whenever I tried to locate that inner voice, I heard only silence.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when I read \u201cThe Burning House.\u201d In it, Amy is making dinner for her husband and friends. She tells secrets to her gay brother-in-law who\u2019s also her best friend, but she knows, in the end, his loyalty belongs to his brother. As the story unfolds, we discover the many other unspoken secrets that keep the house together. Her husband\u2019s having an affair, but so is she. Her friend, a gallery owner in SoHo, \u201cis obsessed with homosexuals,\u201d but nobody would ever dare say that to his face. Her brother-in-law is always stoned and too afraid not to be. Still, the secrets don\u2019t add up to intimacy. Amy says, \u201cI\u2019ve known these people for years \u2026 But all those moments, and all they meant was that I was fooled into thinking I knew these people because I knew the small things, the personal things.\u201d She\u2019s completely alone. That\u2019s it. With neat, tidy brushstrokes, Beattie shows us Amy\u2019s pain. And it\u2019s absolutely\u00a0ordinary.<\/p>\n

In her stories, not going on a date can be just as heartbreaking as losing one\u2019s mom; two lovers walking through the city can be as extraordinary as fleeing a country\u2014which is what gave me the nerve to write. Despite my cultural upbringing, despite my coming out of the closet, my life feels too ordinary. My day starts and ends the same. I\u2019ll eat a bowl of Kashi while watching a Real Housewives<\/em> marathon on Bravo. Sometimes, I\u2019ll go for a run. It\u2019s not to say stolen kisses with drag queens don\u2019t make their way into my fiction\u2014or trips to the sandy shores of the Red Sea, for that matter\u2014but those components are only as integral to the story as Fairfield County is to Beattie\u2019s. It\u2019s the quiet, domestic aches and pains that take center stage and soak up the light.<\/p>\n

I used to obsessively search online for pictures of Ann Beattie, scouring them for clues on writing, on living, on the art of being cool. <\/em>There\u2019s a black-and-white picture of a young Ann Beattie that\u2019s my favorite. On first glance you simply see a bored twenty-something holding a cigarette. She\u2019s wearing a short-sleeve sweater and her hair looks as though it hasn\u2019t been washed in days. Her eyes say it all: I could be writing. But look again. Beattie isn\u2019t smoking. Her fingers are curled, but they\u2019re curled around nothing. There should be a cigarette. Maybe she\u2019s flicking her fingers. Maybe it\u2019s a nervous habit of hers. But a cigarette would just make so much more sense. In recent photographs, the woman is warmer. She smiles. Her stories have shifted, too; that laconic, icy prose is gone, replaced by an even more sophisticated style I dream of emulating. Still, I can\u2019t help returning to \u201cThe Burning House\u201d\u2014it\u2019s the Beattie I feel in love with, the one that got to me first.<\/p>\n

The spine on my copy of her collected stories is now broken, the pages bent at the edges and yellowed from too much sun\u2014whenever I gently flip through it, it opens up to page 206, even when I don\u2019t want it to. I read this story again and again when I\u2019m writing and even when I\u2019m not.<\/p>\n

Thomas Gebremedhin studies fiction at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. His favorite Real Housewife is Nene Leakes<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Want more? Check out Ann Beattie\u2019s short story \u201cThe Astonished Woodchopper<\/a>\u201d in our Summer issue, which is available online<\/a> and\u00a0in bookstores now<\/a>. Or read her Art of Fiction interview<\/a><\/em> from our Spring 2011 issue. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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