All the readers I’ve been, all the readers I’ll be

Sarah McCarry has written a book. She released the cover a few weeks ago. It’s beautiful. On it, Elizabeth Hand compares her to Francesca Lia Block and Neil Gaiman. It was at that point—reading the blurb on that beautiful book—that I started laughing, big and bright and crazy and fortunately alone with my computer.

Sarah McCarry, if you don’t know, is a writer, an essayist, a blogger, whatever you will. She puts words together. She wrote this. A good friend of mine sent me that this summer and I read it and put my hand on my stomach and felt it hollow me out. I sent that friend a day’s worth of frantic messages, selfhood in crisis—because I was there in that piece, because that was me in that piece, because I had the rewritten-in-the-marrow sense of being constructed from without by someone who’d never met me.

(Sarah McCarry is maybe not at all like me. She is cooler, and wiser, and slightly less tightly wound. But she won a little piece of my marrow, on that day, in that essay, forever.)

Sarah McCarry is twenty-eight, which is young. I am twenty, which is younger. You’ve got time, my friend told me, and I breathed. You’ve got time to accrue your own audience, I promised myself. Someday the writer recounting the intricacies of you is going to be—yes—you. You have time. Take comfort that this is what the other side looks like.

But that’s what it is to be a reader: it is to unconsciously look for yourself in every piece of literature you find, to rediscover yourself as written by strangers and shatter with self-discovery again and again. It doesn’t happen on purpose. You fall into it—you collide with a different version of you each time.