Foxfire

One thing I've learned, transcribing these CONFESSIONS has taught me, we all knew a lot more at young ages than we remember knowing, later. Some kind of peculiar amnesia must set in. Some kind of reinvention of ourselves. Maybe because much of what we knew we didn't like knowing and worked to forget so if you haven't been keeping a diary or such (and nobody does, these days) you'll succeed in forgetting what's mysterious, upsetting. -- Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

I cannot remember how old I was the first time I read Foxfire, my grandmother's copy, her shaky cursive on the inside cover: You are never helpless. I know only that I took to it too quickly, too truly. Was able to too wholly identify with Legs and Maddy and their outrage. Their childish, violent anger and their crippling, girlish self-doubt. I know only that I read it over and over, fantasizing about taking my own revenge and feeling immobilized not by my gender, but by my social inadequacy. I know that I read the book through the lens of my own experiences as well as through the lens of my grandmother's experiences, trying to imagine how she might feel as she read. Wondering if she also dreamed of redemption, absolution through pointed violent retaliation.

I remember the summer I first read it, the feeling of near-molten blacktop on my bare feet, the taste of homemade mango sorbet, and the sound of boys playing soccer in the church yard across the street while I lay on my bed, windows open to let in near-night air. I remember writing in my journal, "FOXFIRE BURNS AND BURNS," reminding myself of a fire that cannot be extinguished, of experiences that will never fade entirely from my own memory.

"So FOXFIRE is a code for the other and the other is a code for us.

Sitting in the dining hall, Will says, "Joyce Carol Oates only writes one book," and sometimes I feel that is more or less true. She writes one book. A book about a Smart Girl who is made to suffer Something Terrible. A book about the cognitive dissonance that arrives when you believe you Know Better or Don't Deserve something.

I remember reading We Were the Mulvaneys and I'll Take You There and The Tattooed Girl and Black Girl/White Girl and I remember reading Foxfire and I remember feeling less alone.

"Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we're living now, and the connection must be there? -- like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth simultaneously."

There are times now where i feel very much alone. More than I did in middle or high school, more than I did on long, desperate nights.