Love in the Time of Fiction

When I was eight years old, convinced of the existence of unicorns, and thoroughly touched by the asinine lies of true love and endless possibilities made by one Mr. Walt Disney, my favorite book was Anne of Green Gables. She had bold red hair, a wild imagination, and, to my pathetically girlish delight, the adoration of Gilbert Blythe.

My crush on Gilbert has become a kind of metaphorical placeholder for many things – my first reluctant admission that not all boys have cooties, the first sign of my preference for sharp-tongued, hatred-spawned romances with dark-haired, snarky men – but none quite as ground-breaking as the fact that it began my unhealthy and completely counter-productive infatuation with men who don’t exist. Soon to follow Gilbert in the parade of Jayne’s Impossible Love Affairs were Aladdin, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn {yeah, I went for the best friend, so the hell what?}, Emory Blaine, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Iago {he lured me in with his bad-boy wiles, don’t judge}, Severus Snape {seriously, don’t judge}, and Holden Caulfield. To this day I can’t deny myself the simple pleasure of a crush on a made-up man; how can he screw it up, after all, if he doesn’t exist?

Prior to my birthday recently, I picked up Anne of Green Gables again as a stalling tactic. I was turning twenty-three, the age that grabs you by the most private part of your anatomy and plants you firmly in your twenties; suddenly, you can’t wear heart-shaped berets, fishnet stockings, and street-walker hoop earrings anymore without looking like a maladroit, and you definitely can’t cover your back with tattoos or dye your hair a shade of pink that would put the proudest of flamingos to shame without having it used as evidence of your impending quarter-life crisis. Time had emerged as a gargantuan, unstoppable arch-nemesis whose weapon of choice was incessantly reminding me of how little I had managed to accomplish in my writing career in all this time {I haven’t written a new story in months; what kind of writer am I?}. So, I picked up a book, a classic and a treasure in my collection, and shoved my nose between its binding because, clearly, I wasn’t having it.

Anne and I have always been simpatico. We are melodramatic, fond of hyperbolic words and phrases, impervious to the pleas of adults to think before we open our mouths, quick to dye our hair, keen on books, and liable to let the fantasy worlds in our daydreams engulf us completely. This, I always knew. But what I didn’t realize was how badly I needed to be reminded of this, of the many innocent, childishly optimistic qualities that could remedy fifteen years worth of stubborn jadedness, especially in between my freaking out about the dawning of my spit-fire youth. What Anne does with remarkable empathy and authenticity {and what continues to make it relevant and familiar to this day} is harken back the versions of ourselves that were shameless and expressive, curious and unconditionally hopeful, spontaneous and strange, and show that it’s perfectly possible – and what’s more, perfectly okay – to be that way again, regardless of age, regardless of time. Now more than ever, in an era where literature seems to be bubbling over with unjustifiably disgruntled youth and whining baby-boomers for titular characters, Anne’s offerings are a refreshing change in tune.

So as Anne reenacted scenes from poems in unreliable boats, I began to write again, with a different kind of confidence this time, and an entirely new sense of purpose. As she discovered her passion for language and ideas, so I relearned mine. And as she broke her chalk slate over the head of a dark-haired boy named Gilbert Blythe, so I verbally sparred with a different boy, a Man Friend with tattoos and a whole lot of fearlessness that shakes for no one, not even me and my mildly offensive, man-related disposition.

This time, though, he exists. Holy buttered toast, does he exist. And he could very well screw this whole thing up. But at twenty-three, I am wide-eyed and optimistic. I am ready.

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.