The Story That Wasn't There Yet

There's a particular feeling that comes from looking for a book and not finding it. Not the book being checked out, or out of print. The book just not existing. You can describe it to a friend, the exact shape of the thing you want to read, and watch them shrug, because what you're describing is so specific nobody's made it. That feeling is where I started writing.

I want to be careful here, because there's a tidy version of this story I don't buy. The tidy version goes: writer suffers, writer writes, writing heals writer, the end. Redemption with a bow on it. And it's not that none of that's true. It's that it makes the writing sound like medicine, something you take to feel better, and that's not what was happening.

What was happening is that I was looking for a specific kind of intimacy and couldn't find it on a shelf. Tender and unruly at the same time. Romance that took its time and told the truth while it did. Women who loved women without a beat of hesitation, whose wanting was the point and not the problem. I read everything I could get my hands on, late, with a dog asleep against my feet, sometimes till the birds outside the window started up and I did the math on how few hours stood between me and having to be a functional person at work. I wasn't reading to feel better. I was reading to feel found.

And the book kept not being there.

So I wrote it. Not as therapy, though I won't pretend the hours didn't give me something. I wrote it because the absence was specific enough to be an instruction. When you can name exactly what's missing, you've half-described how to make it.

Here's the thing the tidy version gets backwards. People say writing filled the gaps in my life, and for a while I'd have agreed with them. But filling a gap is what you do to make a hole stop bothering you. That's not what this was. The writing didn't fill anything. It changed the shape of the ground, until the place I thought was a gap turned out to be where the foundation went.

What surprised me was the seeing. I sat down thinking I was just putting words on a page, and what I was building was a place where women who love women got to stand at the center of their own story. Where desire was load-bearing. Where a woman's inner life got to be as complicated as it actually is, and nobody apologized for it. Where, at the end, they chose each other. I made the room I'd been looking for, and then I was standing in it.

That's what I mean when I say it isn't only fiction. Lesbian women deserve stories built around them, not stories that bend around somebody else's comfort and let two women exist in the margins as long as they keep quiet about it. Putting them in the middle of the page, with the whole story told and not one part of it filed down for an outside gaze, turns out not to be simple at all. It's the whole job.

People ask why I write love stories between women. The honest answer is I went looking for one and had to build it myself. Sapphic romance gave me language for parts of myself I'd never bothered to name, mostly because I'd never seen them named anywhere else. So I keep writing. Not to fill my own gaps anymore, those got rebuilt a long time ago, but because somewhere right now there's a reader describing a book to a friend who shrugs. A book so exactly hers it doesn't exist yet. I can't write all of them. But I can keep making the room, and leave the door open, in case the story she needed turns out to be one of mine.