Making My Case

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

-Carl Sagan

 

This morning I wake alone in our bed, Bob and Tom playing on the radio, our alarm setting since the beginning our of life together. My husband is already up and moving around. My daughter too; she walks into my bedroom.

"Mom, does this look okay?" she asks, turning on the light, so I can assess her second-day-of-school outfit.

"It looks great," I say, still lying in the bed but holding up my head to see.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I'm sure."

My younger daughter is staying home. Yes, this is a record: a sick kid on the second day of school. I don't even bother to rethink that decision. She was in bed by six last night, never woke up to eat dinner, only to swallow two ibuprofen and two sips of blue Gatorade. For me, this means that once I get my early birds off, I can begin my own work.

I am already sitting at the kitchen table when my husband walks in at 7am dressed for work. In front of me are a black binder full of notebook paper, an old typing book with a cover that can be opened to stand the book upright, and my copy of Anna Karenina. While he stands at the counter making his lunch, I rip out the first page of the novel and clip it to the top of the typing manual.

"I should probably use a pen and not a pencil," I say. "She would have used a pen."

"I think you should use a real fountain pen," my husband says. "That would make it authentic."

We have already had a discussion about how painful it is going to be copy out 800 pages by hand. "What about your carpal tunnel? You can't jeopardize your own health to do this?" After I explained that the whole point of this project is to get inside the experience from the perspective of Sophia Tolstoy, he nodded his head.

But now he is taking my idea a little too far.

"If that is what she would have used, you have to also. Otherwise, it won't be historically accurate."

When I disagree, he continues to encourage me to reconsider. Have I mentioned that my husband is a lawyer? And a scientist? He knows how to prove a point. I do too: I don't care. This is my project, and I am going to do what I want.

 

Yes, it is true that I am retyping someone else's novel. And yes, I am trying to get inside the experience of the wife of an artistic genius, a person with her own creative passions and a large family to care for. And yes, I want to actually feel what it felt like to do the work of hand-copying an eight-hundred page novel, which I can already tell you, after copying only the first two pages, will work muscles that been have never been flexed in a Jazzersize class.

But I am not a historian. I am not an academic expert or an authority on Tolstoy or Russian History or Feminism. My goal is not become any one of those. My goal is to read Anna Karenina, because it has been on my reading list for years and I can never find the time to tackle it, and because I am a writer, and I want to be a better writer, and that means reading the works of many different writers. It is true that I write short stories, not epic novels, but it is also true, and I know this too after only the first two pages, that Tolstoy's writing is amazing. And I will be a better writer after this project is complete. I might be a better wife, and mother, and maybe even a better human being. I can see that Tolstoy understood things about human nature and had the ability to put those ideas into words that have lived well beyond his lifetime. As a writer, I can only hope to write something that powerful.

 

And yet, it is still just a novel. Just words on a page, words that I recopy onto loose-leaf paper and place inside my plain black binder. When I am finished, I unclip the pages from my makeshift stand, rip them into pieces and put them in the compost bin outside my back door.

 

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