I stayed up til 3, maybe 3:30 Saturday night reading the first 380 pages of Fear of Flying. Sunday I got stoned with Bryan, listened to Kat’s friend talk nonsense (the subtext of which was, “I’m the world’s most radical dyke! Anyone who’s got a tattoo and never heard of Sailor Jerry should die! I’m too old to teach girls how to eat pussy! [She's a year older than me.] I’m not going to stop talking for more than five consecutive seconds all night because nothing you can say could possibly be as compelling as my anarchist commune stories!”)

Totally killed my high. I excused myself when they went on a beer run, finished FoF, passed out.

The whole time I’m thinking, “This is my Fan’s Notes.” I’m thinking how Scott was nearly obsessed with the book, how I hated it so much, how my reading the book and him loving it and me hating it and his baggage all rolled into one is why I broke up with him when I did. Do I feel guilty about that? What I really feel is I wish I could send him Fear of Flying. I wish I could send him a note with it, saying, “This is what I meant, partly. This is my Fan’s Notes. I’m sorry. Do you understand??”

And he would love it, I know it, because he reads two kinds of books: Books about punk and no wave, and novels that are unlike any other novel he’s read up to that point. I love him because he sees books as a way to educate himself. But I’m not speaking to him, because I’m stubborn and because my first responsibility is to myself, and he makes me forget that. So it goes.

It was the last book I bought before I quit Strand, one of the only books I brought with me on the plane because I didn’t really know anything about it except I’d need it when I got here. It’s been compared to The Awakening, I know, but in terms of ‘works by women’ to me it’s more like “The Yellow Wallpaper.” This woman being driven crazy by the expectations of men, with nowhere to turn for help except a bunch of male psychiatrists telling her what her problem is.

It’s a woman’s A Fan’s Notes at the core, though. The paranoia, the constant references to classical literature, the fact that most of the straight plot is entirely focused on men. Even the writing scenes are similar, except her isolation comes from outside circumstances, and her spouse’s support is more understated. I was annoyed with Isadora for some of the same reasons I hated Fred Exley. She’s spoiled and foolish and naive. But wouldn’t she have to be? And so wouldn’t Fred have to be?

But Isadora spoke to me in a way Fred never could. In a way it’s situational, I’m running away too; I have my own (less intense) fear of flying, which is now going to be a bigger part of my life than it ever was before. I am terrified of the isolation of, say, my unmarried aunt, who lives alone in a large apartment and is past childbearing age and has plenty of close friends. But I crave temporary isolation almost constantly. The ‘go in my room, close the door, do some goddamn writing for once’ isolation. The reason I got a typewriter, why I’m glad I don’t have internet or TV in my bedroom: I can be totally alone, concentrate, with no distractions. But I can also leave, talk to my roommate, go down the block to a bar, or just go online. It’s only a false, tenuous isolation I’m comfortable with. My first night in this apartment, Kat had family shit to take care of, I was here alone and so freaked out that I didn’t go to sleep until four.

Fear of Flying isn’t going to change my life, I don’t think, but it’s definitely something I’m going to keep and reread as a means of support. Reinforcing the things I already knew, I’m already trying to teach myself. I’m also trying to teach myself how to play guitar, when I get some money saved up to buy an acoustic. Every boy (or, eventually, man) I’ve ever seriously dated has played guitar (if not guitar, bass, and piano; or guitar, drums, ukulele, harmonica. . .) I’ve lost track of how many of them offered to teach me. I only said yes to one, and there was only one lesson. I’ve forgotten the chords he showed me, but I’ll remember the lesson itself for as long as I remember him. Sitting on his bed, facing him, each of us holding one of his acoustics. Me a little buzzed. He would demonstrate and I would imitate once, twice, then fall into just noodling around, playing ridiculous, nonsensical little solos. And I’d look up suddenly, remembering that he was trying to teach me the right way to do this, this thing that he’d dedicated over ten years of his life to learning. He’d be smiling with his whole face, watching my hands, enjoying my silliness as much as I was. Knowing it would never be something serious for me and not thinking it needed to be, or should be. Looking through this lens it makes sense that our intense, heart-attack serious relationship couldn’t hold. We fucked epically, we tried sincerely to understand each other. But we needed fun. This was one of the rare times we’d been able to give that to each other.

And what can this, and FoF teach me? Aside from, ‘Don’t call him. Go to that jazz club. Meet people but be yours.’ That may be all, or I may still have more to learn.