Thank you so, so much for having me, Bethany, and happy blogiversary! I am so proud of you and so grateful to you for all of your support of my writing career. You are wonderful, and I am most appreciative!!
If any of you watch the Gilmore Girls then you might be able to understand my overwhelming excitement about the new season airing on Netflix! (This does get book related eventually. I promise.) When it first aired, I watched an episode here or there, picked it up in bits and pieces. But, in preparation for the new season, the real finale, I’ve been re-watching it from beginning to end. The other night it occurred to me: My entire life might have been different were it not for Rory Gilmore.
Okay. Well maybe not my entire life. But I never realized during the original airing that we were the exact same age. I graduated from high school in 2003, so did she. She was born in 1984, and I was born in 1985, but we were still in the same grade. And I can’t help but wonder if she was the first person, real or TV character, who ever crossed my path that was a writer.
I know this sounds insane because I watched my parents read the paper every day, and my mom and I both got fat stacks of magazines every month, and I devoured every book I could get my hands on. But I never considered the people who were actually writing this stuff. I didn’t know people who were writers. I’d never really considered until Rory Gilmore came into my life that writing wasn’t just something you were good at in school. A writer was something that you could be.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, probably around the time that Rory Gilmore was writing for her newspaper at Chilton, The Franklin, and I was the editor of the Salisbury High School newspaper, The Hornet, and interning at the Salisbury Post, that I started to think that I, too, might like to go to journalism school.
Rory dreamed of covering wars and putting herself in dangerous situations like Christiane Amanpour. I dreamed of covering shoes for InStyle a la Kate Hudson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Not exactly the same thing. But, you know. Still writing.
I went to journalism school, just like Rory. And, as she was heading off on the campaign trail with Obama, I was heading into graduate school. I was continuing to pursue my love of story, whatever form that took. And, by that time, it had been years since I’d seen an episode of the Gilmore Girls.
I thought I would graduate and work for a newspaper, but life had other plans. I detoured away from the writing I loved and went to work in finance—for a few years.
But, about the time I turned 25, when I started to feel like I was becoming a real grown up, like I needed to get back to my roots and figure out what I wanted to do with my life, I decided to take a big, huge chance. I decided to see if I could write a novel. From that very first manuscript that no one ever read, I was completely hooked. I knew I had found something that I was supposed to do.
Journalism taught me how much I love story. True, made up, realistic, a little over the edge… It didn’t matter. I was fascinated by the ways people’s lives took shape. And journalism will always be one of my great loves, will be something that I continue to pursue for, I hope, the rest of my life. But, my life took me a different way, a way that led me to write fiction, and I feel so very grateful for all of the good things—and even better people—that have come to me in the wake of that choice.
I can’t wait to see what the future holds. For me, for years to come. And, of course, for Rory Gilmore. In December 2016.
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