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The ExplodingPen My mother sent me a couple of new stories of hers to read. The first one, she has already warned me, is about me when I was an adolescent. It's called "The Habit ofLoving," and it's to this one I'm immediately drawn, ofcourse, when I open the manila envelope. There are times in midterm, when I'm swamped with student stories, and I don't even have enough time for my own writing, when my mother sends a story for me to critique. Some of these stories have gone unread, uncommented upon, until my mother calls and complains, "I shouldn't ever send you anything. It's no use. You never read it." At least, I tell her, when friends or acquaintances call to complain about the same thing, I can tell them in all honesty, "Look, I don't even have time to read the stories my mother sends me." Someone who can't find the time to read his mom's stories, now that's low. You don't have to tell me. In the guilt department, I'm a professional. I have vast guilt reserves, untapped Alaskan fields of guilt, that lie in wait for plunder and exploitation. But I started this one because it was about me-admittedly when I was much younger. The story begins: Something in him says he doesn't love me. He is lying alone in his room and has shut me out. I think: It is because I am not young, because my face says: Loss. He is reminded ofthat day when he had to know that his father died. He did not like my tears. (Everyone has to die, he said. Don't cry.) Now he remains in his room with the door closed and the radio on or the small TV, and "does things." He has comics stacked on cast iron shelves (that I used to have for plants)-up to the ceiling. He says he is sick, but the doctor can't find anything wrong. One of Chris's reasons for hating me is that I called the doctor. I knock on his door, but he won't open it. He refuses to go to schooL 47 Nola That's as far as I get for now. Maybe it's fiction, but it seems pretty accurate. My comic-book collection, my father's death, the time I refused to go to school, the way I hid out in my room, even my adolescent cruelty toward my mother. I don't remember telling my mother, "Everyone has to die.... Don't cry." Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. This all happened when we lived in Columbia, Missouri, when all the horrible things were going on with Nola, and then I seemed to catch her problems, mutated to fit my own psyche. But I haven't come to that part yet. My mother has, but I haven't. I'm not ready for that particular pain. For months now, I've been letting my mother know a little bit here and there about my project, this book. I have not shown it to her, and I won't until it's finished, but I've shown bits and pieces to friends, who have given me encouragement. I'm not trying to taunt her, "Ha ha, I'm writing about you," but more to prepare her and also to assuage my own guilt, I suppose. Now, I see that's a little unfair, and she has, in effect , retaliated-preparing me over the phone, "I've written a story about the time you refused to go to school," the same way I've prepared her for writing about her life. "I'm writing about you and Elliot Chess now ... I'm reading his novel ... I'm writing about your time in Mexico now." I leave the story she's written about me and look at her letter: The letter begins by saying she stayed up all night worrying about my memoir. She tells me not to use real names, that even though some events happened in the past, they're still painful. She ends by asking the impossible: "Please ASSURE ME YOU WILL NOT publish anything that I might consider offensive to me oranyone else." She's clearly upset, but even so, she still wants me to read what she's written. "P.S. I am sending the two stories I said I'd send...

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