THE PLAGIARIST

1 0 8 Y T H E P L A G I A R I S T G R E G J O H N S O N My mother was a writer. In the early 1970s, in college, she took creative writing seminars – they didn’t call them workshops at her school – and cranked out three or four short stories each semester. Senior year she even wrote a novella, ‘‘A House of Diamonds,’’ which, although set in Atlanta, was a pretty transparent knocko√ of ‘‘Breakfast at Ti√any’s,’’ with an outdoor barbecue replacing the wild Manhattan party. Though the novella earned her a solid A, the manuscript, by the time I saw it, had a line scrawled across the title page in my mother’s shaky, middle-aged handwriting: ‘‘Pure, derivative crapola!’’ And so it was. The short stories, though, were surprisingly good, and several of them were breathtaking. Unlike the novella, they had a lucid, direct, ‘‘nonliterary’’ style to which I responded viscerally as I sat cross-legged in the stifling-hot attic (it was June) reading while my mother lay downstairs in her room. She was dying, slowly. She had a form of inoperable brain cancer that was almost wholly painless, so there was that to be thankful for, at least. She was fiftynine and probably would not live out the year. I was thirty-one and, as my father liked to say, not quite truthfully, had ‘‘my whole life ahead of me.’’ The subtext of this was, Please, dear God please, 1 0 9 R get a job, but I considered that my job was taking care of my mother. Unable to bear the sight of her dying, he had absconded (a word my mother liked to use) and moved out of the house in April, and now lived in a northeast Atlanta neighborhood called Brookhaven , about five miles from the area where I had grown up, Morningside. My father had bought our ranch house in 1982 for sixty-five thousand dollars – it was painted gray, with black shutters and a two-car garage – and it was now worth ‘‘somewhere north of a million,’’ according to a real estate agent, a golfing buddy of my father’s. As soon as my mother died, though my father had not said this to me directly, he planned to sell the house, which would mean I would lack not only a job but a place to live. At that point, I supposed, my real life would begin, and I didn’t think it was going to be pretty. Though my mother su√ered little pain, her impending death did cause her enormous anxiety, so every afternoon after lunch she took one of the peach-colored Xanax and was out for the rest of the afternoon. It was during these hours that I liked to drift up to the attic and sift through her memorabilia – high school and college yearbooks, diaries from those same years, old photographs. Though I’d always known she’d had the ambition to be a writer (this was before she got married and, six months later, got busy raising me), I hadn’t realized the sheer amount of work she had done, nor had I suspected that she’d saved it all, in a brown accordion file bearing the label ‘‘Literary Stu√’’ in her youthful handwriting, all curlicues and t’s crossed above the stem. I knew from my brief interest in handwriting analysis that this was a sign of optimism. By contrast , the t in ‘‘derivative’’ (Pure, derivative crapola!) was crossed about two-thirds down the stem, which was a sign of depression. I did not believe in handwriting analysis any longer but felt these signs were true enough. I’m not sure I believed in anything. When I was growing up, we were nominally Catholic (we never took the sacrament) and attended mass at Christ the King Cathedral on Peachtree Street. By the time I was old enough to have a car, I would tell my mother (who dragged my father to ten a.m. mass) that I was going to the five p.m. service, and then I’d...