THE FIRST STORY OF ME was written by my mother when I was four years old.
(Before I had any idea that it was possible to have a story of me, or an agent representing my interests.)
The book is called I Am Little and You Are Big. It is a bestseller. You have probably seen it in some kid’s toy box or in a display of books at your local bookstore. Maybe you read it when you were little and loved it.
In the book, which a reputable reviewer described as an “inventive and compelling retelling of ‘Hansel and Gretel,’” I am the little sister, Molly, lost in the woods with my older brother, Wally, the stand-in for my older brother, Mark.
The whole book is little me asking my big brother what things are. So I’m constantly like, “What is that?” and “Where are we going?”
In the book, Wally aka Mark just answers all my questions.
“What is that?”
“That is the moon.”
“What is THAT?”
“That’s a tree.”
I’m four and I don’t know what a tree is?
At one point in the book, I ask my big brother why he knows all this stuff and he says, “Because you are little and I am big.”
Maybe it’s not shocking that I’m not a fan of this book. Among the many my mother has published and the MULTITUDE that are basically about me, it is my least favorite. Partly because a book where a girl is walking around the woods clueless is not really the most modern retelling of the existing fairy tale (even if in this one the witch turns out to be nice and no one is threatened with getting eaten).
There’s also the fact that I spent a solid year of my life dressed up as the “me” of this book, in a little yellow dress and matching shoes and bonnet, going to bookstores and eating warm snack trays of cantaloupe and crackers and cheese, which does something to a person, if only turn them off cantaloupe forever.
Maybe I don’t like this book because it’s not me and yet somehow it’s me.
It’s like I never got a shot at being anything else.
Sometimes I feel like I’m standing in the woods, all covered in snow, and there’s already a set of footprints, somehow my footprints, that I’ve somehow already stomped into the ground without knowing it, a path I already walked stretching out in front of me.
And, really, most of the time I feel like I am lost, and all I want to do is ask questions.