Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction

The Girl Is a Fiction

the girl is a fiction 37 SARAH BLACKMAN “Every time you examine yourself you’re someone just slightly new.” The Girl Is a Fiction Once a person has been a girl, it’s hard to write about the subject. The other day, as she walked the long hallway lined with etchings and lithographs, she saw a teenage boy lounging against the dais of the central atrium’s sculpture. She observed him from above and at high speed, often her condition when she is busy, has somewhere else to be, but even from that perspective she could tell many things from his haughty posture. Foremost , he knew he could be seen. She didn’t suppose he knew she, in the actual fact of her body and mind, was hurrying above him down the long hall, nor did he seem to consider the janitor guiding an industrial waxer over the concrete floors behind him an appropriate audience, but it was clear the fact of his visibility, his display, his own body pompously wasted and arranged in broken angles, weighed heavily on his mind. Secondly, he did not appear to believe whatever he had been told about the sculpture that thrust up toward the skylights,throwing a shadow across the top of his head. The sculpture was hewn from a variety of exotic woods (rosewood, spicewood,mahogany,walnut,others besides—more unusual ones) and was carved, polished, and pegged to form nebulous nodes, shapes like pseudopods that rose from their round base to varying ascendancies. It is called “Lust,”or “Envy of the Body,”or “A Human Amongst Others of Its Kind,” something of that nature.Though the sculpture is the centerpiece of her and the teenage boy’s shared institution, and thus highly valued, she has never paid it much specific attention.The janitor dusts the tops of its pegged and polished nodes with a soft rag affixed to the end of a very long stick. What would she have thought as a teenage girl arranging her artfully wasted limbs against the dais of a highly conceptual sculpture? She was fourteen when she had sex for the first time, though she told the boy it was not her first,that she had had sex (phrased in that fashion it 38 sarah blackman sounds even more like consumption—she had a burrito,she had a piece of watermelon candy) many times before with her previous boyfriend, who was older.She didn’t lie this way because she was nervous about the physicality of sex. She was a teenager in the very last gasp of the twentieth century . She was a girl who knew how to analyze the febrile lushness of Gap jean ads and the ripe heft of Calvin Klein underwear models, who was in fact taught something of this nature in school but was still titillated in a vaguely sinful way by the lyrics to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch’s “Make Me Say Ooh.” Which is neither to quantify nor to antiquate her childhood. Rather, look at her: a girl who discovered her father’s Playboy collection in the basement workshop (every issue since the month her sister was born) and found the erect penises entering stage left into the sexy office scene whimsical and rapscallionly.A girl whose mother told her not only to have sex before marriage, to test out the waters, but also about the abortion they, her parents, had decided on when her sister was six months old, a dinner table scene that is for some reason related in her memory to the image of a vast whirling cosmos sparking blue gases against the nimbus of the Milky Way. A girl who once wrote in her journal, “Jesus is reading this over my shoulder,” but whose conception of religious faith was based purely in the superstitious, the wild order, the natural world. A born pagan hedging her bets. She lied about her virginity not because she was scared of sex, but because she knew the boy she was about to have sex with—a scarred,vicious boy,a violent boy,a smart boy sadistic in his emotional intent—and she didn’t want to give him any power over her.Should she stop to think about it, the emotions she associates most clearly with losing her virginity are curiosity and anger. Curious, curious, what does this feel like? What does it feel like to him? His penis so slim and pale it was like nothing very...