(7 april 2011)

wednesday: the day biographically-made money hit my bank account.

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER.

as in, no waiting for checks in the mail. no depositing checks in the bank. there was simply an invoice requesting payment and then BAM! as if by magic, there was money in my bank.

granted, this was a reimbursement for 1.3333333333 hours of work, which defrays approximately 1.9% of the expenses i’ve incurred thus far, which is a demoralizing thought so we’re not going to dwell on it.

instead, we’re going to pause here and acknowledge that this was, in some small way, momentous. because for the first time, someone paid me, at a rate that i had set, to do something i absolutely love. i was well paid for 1.33333333 hours of fun and there are few things so lovely as that.

(28 march 2011)

if i were asked to cite the one major side-effect of note in the process of becoming a biographer, i’d have to go with the identity crisis. because, man, is it ever acute.

bear in mind, i’m progressing at a snail’s paces towards a there that is, likely, not there. this is a process into which i’ve barely dipped a toe, and yet, at nearly every turn there seems to arise some monumental ethical question that demands the establishment of a particular truth that will set the tone for the type of biographer i am to be.

this has come up in matters large and small. but most importantly, it has arisen in the matter of my name.

i’ve been on a bit of a lucky streak. you wouldn’t know it because everything i’ve done has been done under different names. my portfolio reads hilariously schizophrenic.

on a saturday morning several weeks ago, during an unexpectedly long walk through blistering winds to an endpoint that was not located at the intersection of state and 47th, a friend grilled me on what i was doing with all these names. why, in my professional pursuits, was i faffing about as faith eaton and faith caroline eaton and f.c. eaton? why on earth wasn’t i just being oline?

i laughed and made excuses. but, when i thought about it later, what she was saying made an enormous lot of sense. because of flannery o’conner.

who could ever, upon hearing it, forget the name flannery o’conner? really, would she have been so well remembered if she’d stuck with mary?

i am trying to be a biographer for, like, for real, and while i actually quite like my name, as the tremendous anxiety it has prompted indicates, it is not working for my purposes here. i’ve been trying to write as faith caroline eaton and i simply cannot.

so i am going to be oline. officially. professionally.

as in, i emailed the people in london and asked them to change my name with enough conviction that they wrote back profusely apologizing that they had initially gotten it wrong.

there is no going back now. it would be unconscionable to make them to change it again.

(23 february 2011)

i am hereby formally pleased to announce that i have found what has a higher chance than anything else i have ever found before of being dame elizabeth taylor’s actual mailing address.

as in, when you google map it and do the street view and turn the little person icon all around, the street the little person icon views looks like a street elizabeth taylor might actually live on.

this is tremendous progress given that all prior addresses have yielded street views that do not look like places where drug dealers would live. much less liz taylor.

and, yes, dear world, this is who i am now. my research practices are dependent upon google street view.

despite the fact that the period of intensive googling i have devoted to the finding of this information could be characterized as stalking if that was a word of which you were excessively fond, i’m actually doing liz taylor a very great kindness. because this is information on which i have been sitting for over a week now.

i have her address. i have not yet written her a letter.

you may or may not have known- since it has gotten shockingly little press attention- that elizabeth taylor was hospitalized last week. the very day, in fact, after i found her address.

you may or may not also remember that the people i write regarding jackie have either died immediately before my finding them or taken to their deathbeds shortly thereafter.

it is a noble thing i’m doing here, in not writing liz taylor. i am, clearly, saving her life.

this is not an act entirely devoid of selfishness. because i’m counting heavily upon the hope that once she is better, liz taylor will see the error of her ways. realizing that her last interview cannot have been one with kim kardashian, she will- surely! obviously! of course!- grant an audience to an unknown. she will- surely! obviously! of course! maybe?- speak to me.

there were forty pound boxes in my closet. they are no longer there.

i awoke on saturday morning convinced that saturday was the day for the boxes to come down and, thus convinced, confronted the holy terror that is my closet.

this was a task not devoid of stupidity.

i’d been awake less than ten minutes.

i hadn’t had coffee.

i was climbing a ladder in bare feet to haul down containers that collectively weighed more than me and i was doing so clad in nothing more than a purple satin slip.

despite my proclivity for sacrificing sense to elegance, the end result was as it should be. the boxes are down. they are unpacked and have been discarded.

in their place sits a tiny kingdom of magazines. a kingdom i know all too well and am more than a little afraid to revisit. because it looks entirely too familiar. it’s like 2004 all over again.

(21 january 2011)

writing hurts. not always, but sometimes.

like when you gash yourself shaving and tug on tights before the blood dries and then, when at the end of the day you go to pull them off, the sensation of pulling fabric from flesh smarts so that you can’t help but cry out.

sometimes, writing hurts like that.

i am standing on a precipice. sensei believes i am on the cusp.

those are romantical ways of saying i’m staring down the pile of important papers stored six inches from the litter box and looking for new ways to see old things.

in high school, mrs. reynolds taught us how to write papers.

first, you buy notecards.

next, you fill them with your facts.

then you lay all your cards on the table. every last one.

this was the fun part, the part that i loved. because this was the great coming together. the moment when you realized that in this deck of cards, you held an idea. an idea admittedly derived from whatever ideas of other people were held in the rather limited centennial high school library holdings, but an idea nonetheless. and an idea put together, laid out on that table, in a manner that uniquely belonged to you.

this process was a fundamental part of the way i learned to write and it is one i have never been able to fully escape. even now, when sentences, facts, phrases, opening lines occur, i text them to myself. i put them down on paper. i lay them on the table and i look for where the pieces fit.

jackiebook 1.0 was written this way. in part, because i am secretly exceedingly vain and hold the notion that my rough drafts and notecards and marginalia will one day warrant inspection and be poured over by scholars wearing white gloves and sitting in temperature-controlled, darkened rooms. but also because this is the only way i know how to do this.

a book is a scary thing. a notecard, now that is manageable.

sensei says i am on the cusp. he has asked me to take the ring to mordor. i am staring down a pile of important papers stored six inches from the litter box and facing forty pound boxes.

i am realizing that it is difficult to read the things you once wrote.

because there is a brief moment of separation from one’s work that comes about a month out. a flash in the pan where you can read something you have written and see it as something written by something else.

i had to proof an essay for publication the other day and throughout, i found myself thinking, damn, this is tight. the work did not feel like mine.

i’m going to go out on a limb and say this- the moment when you can see your work as though it weren’t your own- that is the moment writers write for.

sadly, it does not last. and then along comes the time ever after, when you return to the work you had left, the writing you once did, and confront the world of inferiority you find there.

i cannot handle that world right now.

so i go into my closet and, ignoring the forty pound boxes, pull down a very small one from which i pull the pile of notecards for jackiebook 1. i unloose them from the rubberbands by which they’ve been bound since the spring of 2006 and i do the scariest thing i can think of- i shuffle the deck.

i am sitting three feet from the pile of important papers six inches from the cat’s toilet.

i am going back to the beginning.

i have laid all my cards on the table. every last one.

(19 january 2011)

so there was this little while last spring when i was all OMG, i, like, totally don’t have the time to work on jackie in paris, because jackie in paris is going to be soooooooooooo hard and i’ll, like, have to ratchet up the wherewithal to work hard. and that is, like, simply expecting too much.

then, as all times do, that time passed and for a brief shining moment there was a clearly illuminated path of how things were going to go.

i was going to write people letters. people were going to respond to them. and the book that i’d put off all along because it was so difficult was going to be the easiest thing in the world to do.

that clarity lasted about a week. then, as most always happens in cases of clarity, everything was muddled again.

because jackie in paris is, indeed, so hard, in the effort to unmuddle, i have flailed about grasping after anything i can find. essays! blogs! short stories! sex toboggans! huzzah!

i realized today that i am sloppily steering six ships at once.

this isn’t as fool-hearty as it might seem. short stories on sexy dancing provide an effective antidote to the sense of hilarifying fraudulence produced by being an unmarried, childless woman discoursing on the subject of “mothering.” and the amount of reading required to have something to blog about every day gives one a surprisingly odd lot to say outside that context as well.

so there is movement. these are, however, micromovements.

and when every movement is a micro-movement, it’s difficult to gain momentum.

i’m in this writing group. we meet in a bar with paintings of naked famous people on the walls. and so, in the naked lady bar last week, in the midst of what i like to call The Great “Footnotes: Friend or Foe” Smackdown, sensei asked me to take the ring to mordor. to essentially do with jackiebook, ver. 1, what i had originally set out to do, which was to make it a biography about writing biography.

this sounds easy.

it is not.

and yet, as i recently mined through jackiebook 1 looking for topics that would work as stand-alone features, i confronted the reality of how far it still needs to go. and i felt, for the first time, almost ready to pick it up again and push it there.

there is one tiny hindrance.

i have not needed the jackie magazines for the last five years. i was done with them and, accordingly, modified my renters insurance policy so they are a part of it and then stuck them away in the darkest corner of the top of my closet in nine boxes that weigh a solid forty pounds each.

the problem is this: i need those magazines. now.