In high school, I read a book that changed my outlook on creative nonfiction-- well, on nonfiction in general. To that point, I hadn't really known that nonfiction could be creative-- I thought that anything nonfiction was sort of a dry piece of work, you'd pick it up and read it and it was full of details and facts that no one in their right mind would ever want to read about.
Obviously, I know now that I was wrong in thinking that.
But what really taught me this was a book-- "Please Don't Kill the Freshman"-- by a girl named Zoe Trope. This wasn't a memoir, it was a diary. And it wasn't full of dates and facts and things I'd feel I would have to memorize for some unknown reason. It was like prose. Flowing and full of metaphor and style and it was something I wanted to read.
So I read it. Or, really, devoured it. Her prose was full of mystery. It made me wonder about her life. It made me, in a way, want to be her. In another way, I was her. I don't feel empathy when I read the words "I feel sad," but I do feel it when I read the swirl of feelings, laid out in some way or another, with brutal honesty and clarity. I tried to understand her. I did understand her.
I was her. All the other books at my high school library were about people that I couldn't identify with at all. They had feelings and lives to which I couldn't relate, so I read them and I felt disappointed and let down by them. But this was one of the few books that I had access to, at a time when my family wouldn't have understood, that was about someone like me. Someone with the same kinds of whirling emotions, someone who was different from the rest of the world around them.
This book made me feel somewhat like I belonged, even if I was a country's width and eight years away. It made me wish I knew more, outside the confines of cover-to-cover and the size of the pages.
I found the writer, online, years after this had been published. She lives a normal life now, away from her rebellious homosexual teen years. I couldn't explain why, then, but I felt a little sad. It's funny how these things work out.
