Sometimes the Internet can feel like this – but other times it lets you get through.
I had an interesting little thing happen to me last night, and it got me thinking, so I wanted to tell you about it.
The story actually starts way back in 1990, when nine-year-old me developed an obsession with the horror writer Dean Koontz (whose books my parents probably should not have let me read, but I seem to have turned out okay, if slightly more invested in the Saw series than the average bear). I decided to write Dean Koontz a fan letter telling him that I wanted to be just like him when I grew up, and several months later I received a typed (on a typewriter!) letter in response. It was clearly a sort of standardized fan mail response letter to which he had added a line about how I should “stick with my dream of being a writer” or something to that effect – but when I opened that envelope I died. I could hardly have been more excited had the man himself shown up at my house with an invitation to accompany him to a private screening of another 1990 obsession of mine, the movie Leviathan (it’s a classic; don’t judge).
I don’t know if Dean Koontz actually read my letter (or even wrote the response himself), but the fact that I’d been able to reach across age and distance and notoriety and actually connect with someone who seemed so impossibly far away was transformative. I wouldn’t necessarily say that this connection was *why* I went on to make writing books a big part of my life…but the sudden awareness that all those books I’d read and loved so much that they were practically in tatters had been written by a real live person? A real live person just like me?
It mattered. For me, it transformed a book from a thing that just sort of appeared on a shelf, all fully-realized and ready to be consumed, into a thing that one could actually have a hand in creating.
(On a somewhat related note, later that same year I met Jason Priestley at a mall event and was so awestruck that I couldn’t speak, so instead I took a bracelet off of my own wrist and handed it to him. Also transformative; perhaps, however, less productively so.)
Fast-forward to last night, when I read the last page of the memoir All At Sea, by the British journalist Decca Aitkenhead, and was so floored by it that I was struck by the overwhelming desire to tell her so; to somehow connect with this person whose life and self and well-being I’d become so invested in. So I googled her Twitter handle, and then tweeted at her telling her how much I admired her personally, and especially her bravery in writing the book – All At Sea tells the story of Aitkenhead’s husband’s sudden death by drowning while on a family vacation in Jamaica, and then explores the aftermath with honesty that can really only be described as astonishing. The second I sent the tweet I felt silly, like a teenager waiting around after a concert hoping the singer sees her and notices her I LOVE YOU NICK! t-shirt.
I suppose some part of me is still that nine-year-old girl who wrote to Dean Koontz and never believed in a million years he’d actually get her letter, let alone respond to it – because ten minutes later, when Decca Aitkenhead tweeted me back from her home in England, I went flying out of bed to alert Kendrick to the fact that the writer of the book I’d been reading TWEETED ME BACK. (He was watching the World Series and did not care.)
I find myself irritated with social media more and more frequently these days. Today, for example: I haven’t yet posted anything to Instagram because I simply haven’t felt like it, but the awareness that I “should” to “keep my feed active” is there, buzzing around in my head anyway. I can try to tell myself to stop, to shut it off, but social media (and the daily upkeep it requires when it’s a big part of your job) has taken up an enormous part of my headspace for years now, and rarely an hour goes by when I’m not feeding out a post to Facebook, or updating my Snapchat, or checking to make sure I’ve included the correct hashtag on a tweet.
Social media can be fun and it can be compelling and it can be valuable, but it can also be annoying. And the “annoying” part has been more salient to me lately.
And then, last night, after I spent hours of my life living in the world that Decca Aitkenhead first experienced and then later recreated with her words, I got to say thank you to her – and she heard me. The ease with which this happened – a real-time mini-conversation between a book reader living in California and a book writer living half a world away – seemed so improbable that it startled me for a moment. I’m a writer myself, but I still have a vague idea of “other” writers (you know, “real” ones) lounging on tufted leather couches in grand libraries behind enormous locked doors, having writerly conversations with their leather-couch-owning writer friends.
For all the artifice and noise that social media creates, sometimes it simply does its job: it lets us connect. And that is a gift, whether because it gives you a fleeting moment of companionship in a world that can feel very lonely indeed – or because it gives you the chance to see for yourself that behind creations so beautiful that they that seem like magic are simply people, lovely and flawed…and we, you and me: we can make magic, too.
