Issue 44 / May 2012
My Funny Valentine
By David Levithan, author of The Lover's Dictionary
It all started in physics class.
I was sixteen, in advanced-placement physics, bored out of my wits. I decided to spend my time thumbing through the textbook, finding romantic puns. You know, opposites attracting, the power of magnetism, and so forth. As February approached, I decided to turn these romantic references into a short story about two students in physics class glances at each other and using physics to determine their chances together. Even though (or maybe because) they decide the relationship's a no-go, I decided to print out the story and give it to a few friends for Valentine's Day.
This was back in 1989, when printing something out meant tearing the tracker-dots off the sides of the paper and tearing the pages apart one by one.
This should have been the end of the story; it was never meant to be a tradition. But when Valentine's Day came around the next year, my friends started asking when they'd get their story. So I wrote one. And from then on, I had an annual deadline. It's been twenty-two years now. And my friends have gotten a Valentine's Day story ever since.
Many of my novels have started as a Valentine's Day story; my latest novel, The Lover's Dictionary, is no exception.
It started on February 1, 2009, just two weeks short of the big deadline. It was the twentieth anniversary of the Valentine Story. Some of my friends were already asking what this year's would be, even though I never tell.
In truth, I hadn't written a single word yet.
This panicked me to no end.
I have long made a distinction between love stories and stories about love. In my mind, love stories always end up with the couple together. Adversity can be there, but ultimately it's conquered, tra la. There's a happily, there's an ever after. Meanwhile, stories about love are more complicated. They better reflect what the experience of love is: messy, challenging, rhapsodic, devastating, invigorating, fragile. Sometimes I set out to write a love story, but most of the time I try to write a story about love.
That morning was no exception. I went to my desk, hoping to find some inspiration there. Usually, for me, inspiration comes from the ether; I sit down to write and - lo and behold! - some words decide to check into the blank page hotel. That day, though, inspiration was sitting by my elbow. It took the form of a book I had recently liberated from my parents' basement - a book of Words You Need To Know. It had been a graduation present - I couldn't tell you which graduation, high school or college. I thought to myself it might be interesting to use some of the words in the book (chosen alphabetically) to chart out the pieces of a relationship. It would be a story about love, told in dictionary form.
I opened to A, and saw all the words on the first page-spread. I only allowed myself to choose one. For whatever reason, my eye stuck on aberrant. I wrote:
aberrant, adj
"I don't normally do this kind of thing," you said.
"Neither do I," I assured you.
Later it turned out we had both met people online before, and we had both slept with people on first dates before, and we had both found ourselves falling too fast before. But we comforted ourselves with what we really meant to say, which was: "I don't normally feel this good about what I'm doing."
Measure the hope of that moment, that feeling.
Everything else will be measured against it.
And I was off.
For two weekends, I went through the book, choosing words and using them to discover what was going on between these two lovers. Sometimes the entries were light...
antsy, adj.
I swore I would never take you to the opera again.
...and sometimes it was more serious.
corrode, v.
I spent all this time building a relationship. Then one night I left the window open, and it started to rust.
I wasn't writing about any relationship I had been in. I was writing about every relationship I'd been in, or observed, or imagined. It was a fascinating word-association exercise, to use the words as catalysts, to see how much easier it was to portray a relationship when it's conveyed in pieces. Because isn't that how we remember any relationship? Not as a long, continuous narrative, but as a collection of moments - some important, some random, some that should be forgotten but hang in there nonetheless.
I finished the day before Valentine's Day and sent out the story to my friends the next morning. It was about two-thirds the length of the published novel.
I wasn't thinking of sharing the story with anyone beyond my friends. But once again, my friends came through with the pressure, and told me to work on it some more, to expand it into a book. It was surprisingly easy to do.
detachment, n.
I still don't know if this is a good quality or a bad one, to be able to be in the moment and then step out of it. Not just during sex, or while talking, or kissing. I don't deliberately pull away - I don't think I do - but I find myself suddenly there on the outside, unable to lose myself in where I am. You catch me sometimes. You'll say I'm drifting off, and I'll apologize, trying to snap back to the present.
But I should say this:
Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.
I write, in part, to discover truths I don't know that I know, to recount observations that I don't realize I've made. Lo and behold. I write for my friends because they are my ideal audience. I feel the pressure for it to be good, but that's the only pressure I feel.
Except, of course, the pressure of a deadline.
February's just starting.
I have a story to write.
The Lover's Dictionary, by David Levithan, is published by Fourth Estate
Wednesday, 9 February, 2011
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