Whoa...
I want to write. I want to write anything. I want to write a story or a memoir or a novel... I want to leave a mark on the life of a complete stranger. Inspiration seems to come from the most random places. I just finished an incredible memoir by Azar Nafisi called "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and a lot of the novel was rather unhappy... about revolts, demonstrations, tyranny, and death... But the ending was much more cathartic. Each of the people the reader came to know, to empathize with, seemed to have found her niche... but the epilogue made me cry... It was the only happy part of the book...
The narrator, Mrs. Nafisi, was a professor in Iran who made a secret class (because the universities placed limits on her teaching to which she found it impossible to adhere), and her students were hand-selected women who showed a true devotion to literature... It almost felt like our AP English class senior year. Some of us clashed and some of us couldn't live without one another, but in that way it was like a dysfunctional family.
At the end of the book, a majority of the students had moved out of Iran... And when Nafisi wrote the epilogue, there was a particular student about whom she didn't know what to write, and so she asked her, and the student sent her what she believed belonged in the memoir: she wrote a short passage, a mere paragraph in which she directly addressed the reader, and she made herself one of the women the class had read about in "Pride & Prejudice" or "Lolita"... And said that only this book would keep her alive.
Then I realized that this wasn't a novel. It wasn't fiction. It was a real memoir. These were real women. And that because of Nazar Nafisi, they obtained something inconceivable to most: immortality.
I want to write not just so that I never die, but so that the people I love never die, either. Death seems so much more of an optimistic prospect when you can dream that someone out there - maybe a college professor, like Dr. Thorington, my humanities professor - will keep you alive in spirit. And then real people, just like the ones you immortalized in your pages, might do what I'm doing now... and reflect. Maybe as I writer I could inspire someone I never met to want to write, as well.
I wish I could contact Mrs. Nafisi and let her know how I feel about her book. I imagine that it must be the most fulfilling feeling in the world to know that someone entirely unfamiliar knows you intimately enough to care about you, and let you know that you had an impact on his or her life. I wish I could thank her. I think instead... I'll write a book someday, and that will be my thanks to her.
The narrator, Mrs. Nafisi, was a professor in Iran who made a secret class (because the universities placed limits on her teaching to which she found it impossible to adhere), and her students were hand-selected women who showed a true devotion to literature... It almost felt like our AP English class senior year. Some of us clashed and some of us couldn't live without one another, but in that way it was like a dysfunctional family.
At the end of the book, a majority of the students had moved out of Iran... And when Nafisi wrote the epilogue, there was a particular student about whom she didn't know what to write, and so she asked her, and the student sent her what she believed belonged in the memoir: she wrote a short passage, a mere paragraph in which she directly addressed the reader, and she made herself one of the women the class had read about in "Pride & Prejudice" or "Lolita"... And said that only this book would keep her alive.
Then I realized that this wasn't a novel. It wasn't fiction. It was a real memoir. These were real women. And that because of Nazar Nafisi, they obtained something inconceivable to most: immortality.
I want to write not just so that I never die, but so that the people I love never die, either. Death seems so much more of an optimistic prospect when you can dream that someone out there - maybe a college professor, like Dr. Thorington, my humanities professor - will keep you alive in spirit. And then real people, just like the ones you immortalized in your pages, might do what I'm doing now... and reflect. Maybe as I writer I could inspire someone I never met to want to write, as well.
I wish I could contact Mrs. Nafisi and let her know how I feel about her book. I imagine that it must be the most fulfilling feeling in the world to know that someone entirely unfamiliar knows you intimately enough to care about you, and let you know that you had an impact on his or her life. I wish I could thank her. I think instead... I'll write a book someday, and that will be my thanks to her.