Dear Reader,
Kyle McCarthy, today's guest author has a new release, Everyone Knows How Much I Love You. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, American Short Fiction, and the Harvard Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kyle would love to hear from you! You can reach her at [email protected].
Most of us have done it before: painted a room the wrong color. A bad color. Well, last September, I painted my front hall pink. Not pale rose, not a shy girl's blush, but Pepto-Bismol pink. Right away I knew it was a mistake, but I was too stubborn to stop. After all, I had vowed to stop treating my apartment, where I had lived for seven years, like a temporary spot. I wanted to make it a home, and fill it with the bright colors I loved.
But I did not love this color. This color was childish and cheap. My mom, after seeing a photograph, was politely appalled. She reminded me that I could always repaint. I said I would, but knew, deep down, that I lacked the energy.
Then a funny thing happened: friends, over for dinner, complimented the color. They said it was like being wrapped in a sunset, or warm embrace. Under the shadowy light, it glowed. I thought about how many years I had spent thinking pink was frivolous, girly, babyish. That it was unserious. Or worse: in bad taste. For shouldn't a woman, above all, be discrete and well-mannered? Shouldn't vulgarity be avoided at all costs? No, of course not! How silly of me. I decided I liked my outlandish walls. Maybe I was even proud of them.
Fast forward three months, and I'm choosing the cover for my book. My editor likes one version, my agent another. I find myself, against my better judgement, gravitating again and again to the one of a woman looking away, the title exposed in trompe l'oeil gashes, the whole scene lit in a hallucinatory savage salmon. That one, I finally decide.
Not until last week, unwrapping my carton of author copies, did it hit me. My bright pink hall; my bright pink book. Unwittingly, I had chosen the same color twice. Or maybe not unwittingly: maybe learning to love the boldness of my walls helped me learn to love the boldness of my book. It helped me choose a fierce, unsettling color to house its fierce unsettling heroine.
All those months ago, when I was picking out a paint color, I was indeed making a home--just not the home I thought. Painting the front hall was a kind of practice for "painting" my book. It helped me see that outlandish is okay, even fun. And so there, between two bright pink covers, my outlandish heroine--who I somehow had the foresight to name Rose--will live.
-- Kyle McCarthy
Drop Kyle an email at: [email protected].
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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