I would bring my laptop on business trips and work on my novel in the hotel at night. I finished that first book and started another, yet still told very few people what I was doing. I started trying to call myself a writer after that conversation with Sara-only in my head, never to anyone else. But how do you know when to call yourself a writer? How did I know? It’s easy to know when to call yourself a lawyer: Did you graduate from law school? Congratulations, you’re a lawyer. Over drinks, she said, “I realized I don’t really know what you do. The more I threw myself into learning how to write, the more I began to wonder whether my novel could actually be published.Ībout a year after I started writing, I met Sara Zarr, a writer I’d been Twitter friends with for years, and whose work I’d read and reread. I read books on writing, and closely reread a number of novels to study how other writers wrote dialogue, quiet moments of connection, fights. Why had I ever thought I could do this? I didn’t go to school for writing I haven’t even taken an English class since my senior year of high school.īut I loved learning about and developing characters, the process of frustration and brainstorming and epiphany. It seemed almost embarrassing for someone like me to go home from her legal job every night, sit on her couch with a laptop, and work on her book. The sort of book I wished I’d been able to find when I was young.Īt first, I told barely anyone what I was doing. After a few tentative conversations with some of my writer friends, I started working on a novel-a young adult book about a smart black girl who lived in a city. I can’t sing, I can’t draw, and while I still love ballet, I didn’t feel an urge to return to dance class. The repetitive, structured, spreadsheet-oriented nature of my work often made me feel stifled. I couldn’t find books like that about black girls.Īfter I’d been a lawyer for about eight years, I found myself longing for some sort of creative outlet. I wanted to read fun books about smart girls who lived in cities and did exciting things with their friends. There were books about little black girls, but they were almost exclusively about little black girls during times of struggle: during slavery, in poverty in the early twentieth-century South, during the civil rights movement. When I turned those childhood favorites over to look at the picture of the author on the back, they almost never looked like me. I saw this pattern in so many of the girls in the books I read and loved as a kid: Anne, Emily, Betsy, Harriet, Claudia, Meg. I wonder, if they had, would I have rejected the idea out of hand? My vision of a writer has always been someone quiet, someone introverted, and-especially-someone white. I now wonder why no one in my life ever suggested writing to me. Many of my closest friendships-from childhood to the present day-started with bonding over a book. When I moved from the West Coast to the East Coast and then back again, I spent a small fortune shipping boxes of books across the country. Family legend says I learned to read at age three, and since then there have probably only been a handful of days when I haven’t read for pleasure. Until about seven years ago, I never had any ambition to become a writer, despite how much I’ve always loved to read. I’ve always been argumentative, so when I told my family I wanted to be a lawyer, their immediate response was: “That sounds right.” I put my foot on that path at age twelve, following my beloved teacher and mentor, and never wavered from it. Law school called to me immediately: I’ve always loved history and politics I watched the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings just a few years earlier with both confusion and anger I grew up in Berkeley, so political protest and activism was part of my life I basically memorized Schoolhouse Rock. Seeing her on that path made me-a young, book-obsessed, chatty black girl-realize that such a path was open to me, too. She was a black woman about ten years older than I was, and looked enough like me to be my older sister. Murray-Gill, left teaching and went on to law school the year after I was in her class. For the twelve years before that, in answer to the junior version of that question-“What do you want to be when you grow up?”-I always said, “A lawyer.” (For a while in childhood, the answer was “a ballerina,” but then I hit puberty and no longer had a ballerina kind of body.) For the three years before that, I was in law school. That’s the way I’ve answered for fifteen years. For most of my life, this has been an easy question to answer. It’s one of the first questions we hear at parties, meeting someone new.
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