Please welcome Meg Wolitzer
I grew up on Long Island in the town of Syosset which some of you may know by
its Native American name Exit 43. But the summer I turned 15, which also happened
to be the summer that Richard Nixon resigned, I was sent to a camp in the
Berkshires and it changed my life. I'd been to summer camp before but at those
other camps we made lanyards and we had really aggressive color war and we sang
those corny camp songs: "Make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the
other gold." Sound advice. But at this camp we had Mozart Requiems is in the morning
and we did a lot of batik. Now there's a word you don't get a chance to use in a
sentence very often, batik. And we also acted an experimental plays in which
invariably someone was supposed to go mad on stage and go running out through
the audience. I loved it there. I wanted to act more than anything that summer
and I'd been studying my favorite actresses all year. I've been looking
really closely at their style. I've been looking at Elizabeth Montgomery and her
stirring portrayal of Samantha Stephens.
Karen Valentine in Room 222, and perhaps the most moving of all Susan day as
Laurie Partridge. But here's the thing, when I got to camp and I stood up on
stage I this little Jewish girl from Long Island talked in a voice that I can
only describe as my Katharine Hepburn voice. Mother where are you? Where are you
mother? I don't know where it came from. It's sort of the acting equivalent of
the poetry voice, you know what I'm talking about.
I am a woman who lives in Red Hook, here are the keys to my apartment.
Yes, but there was one girl at camp who was really really good. Her name was
Martha and she had long brown hair with little wildflowers sprinkled in it and
she wore long summer dresses and whenever she spoke little woodland
animals gathered her feet and songbirds came down and sat on her shoulders and
tilted their heads to listen. At the end of the summer we were given yearbooks
and all these boys wrote in Martha's yearbook, "I never told you this but I was
in love with you all summer" and those same boys wrote in my yearbook "you're so
funny."
Now the campers weren't the only ones to love Martha. Our acting teacher did too.
She was this really distinguished woman who taught theatre in Greenwich Village
and had taught some of the great legends and she sort of looked like Isak Dinesen's
stunt double and when Martha got up to do a monologue Cora, that was her name,
Cora would say "Oh Martha, that was so wonderful the way you did that Edward
Albee monologue. In fact I'm gonna call Edie tonight and tell him how good you
were." Martha would say "Thank you Cora" and the
little birds would say "Thank you Cora."
But when I got up to act no matter what I did I could not please this woman. I
think she tried to help me but I was all over the place and she would say "Meg
Wolitzer, discipline yourself. Pipe down, be still," all these things I couldn't do
any of them. And one day in class we were doing an improv and I think we were
supposed to be shell-shocked World War I soldiers,
and I was laughing and laughing and she looked at me and she said "Meg Wolitzer,
you are being ridiculous." Ridiculous, this was not the same as being funny. I was so
ashamed, the heat rose to my face, and all I could do was keep laughing. It was
horrible, and she said "Go, just go." And she sent me off and I staggered out onto the
lawn really kind of like a shell-shocked World War I soldier, and I sat down on
the hill and I kept laughing. What was wrong with me? I was such a freak that I
could not stop laughing. None of the other kids would have done that. I loved
these kids. They were so interesting, we talked about music and French films and
art and we even talked about sex. Now Martha who had become my really good
friend she and I had been sitting on that hill just the day before and I was
talking to her sort of about our boyfriend's back at home. Now I had a
boyfriend who I don't know our relationship was a little bit stormy. He
sort of looked like, he was going for a Cat Stephens look but it doesn't really
work when you have a retainer. He also had a tendency to refer to me as "Milady."
But Martha and her boyfriend, I pictured them being so sophisticated wearing
matching berets and sort of passing a gawah cigarette back and forth and I
wanted to know how they did it and what the relationship was like and I said to
her "Like when you're with your boyfriend how far do you go?" I realize I
sound like one of the little rascals. And she said "What do you mean?" and I said
"Well like do you give him a blowjob?" and she looked at me and she said "Oh Meg,
dear Meg, we call it making love." And I realized
that that was my problem in acting class. I was giving blowjobs and everyone else
was making love. But I wasn't the only one asked to leave the class. Sometimes
Cora would look at Martha and say "You look a little piqued, it a little tired,
that improv exercise wore you out a little bit. Would you like to go rest?" And
Martha would say "Well I am a little tired Cora." And Cora said "Why don't you
go lie down in my bed?" Now Cora had a bed in the mansion at the summer camp and it
was one of those huge four-poster beds that look like the kind of bed that
Norma Desmond would have slept in and Sunset Boulevard. And had crusty velvet
blankets. I wanted more than anything for an acting teacher to say "You look tired,
go lie down in my bed." I wanted to lie in that bed and make love with a boy in my
acting class and turn to each other and recite I don't know Samuel Beckett lines.
"I can't go on, I'll go on."
But one day one day I'd been banished from class and told to go think about
being serious and Martha had been sent off to go lie down in Cora's bed and
there I was wandering despondently around the camp and it was totally quiet.
AlI could hear in the distance was a little bit of oboe, I knew kids were
doing interpretive dance or doing jazz hands, and something brought me to the
mansion. I wanted to talk to Martha, she was my friend I wanted to see her and I
went up the stairs. It was totally silent and there in Cora's gigantic bed
Martha was sleeping. She was fast asleep. And I stood over her and I looked down
and I thought about you know, here is this girl, she's so different from me, I
was never gonna be that girl, I was never gonna be the girl who was asked to lie
in this bed. That wasn't me. And I realized that the reason I'd been
laughing so much in class was because I was having an incredible time this
summer. I was free and I was expressive. It was the first time I think it ever
felt that way. And I looked at Martha and I said "Get up." And she sort of rose up
from a deep sleep like a little mermaid kind of coming up from a warm pocket of
amniotic seawater and she said "What what?" And I said "Come on let's go outside." And
she said okay and together we went outside and we went
and we sat on our hill and we talked. I was good at that, there was a lot that I
wanted to say. In fact I'd begun keeping a diary that summer and at first I wrote
so much in it because everything was happening but after a while I was so
busy that I had no time to write in the diary but I felt a little worried
because what if I became really famous one day and they wanted to publish my
diaries, I'd be sort of like a lesser-known member of the Bloomsbury
circle. The Syosset set. So I went back to my diary and on all the empty pages, I
wrote "Nothing happened. Nothing happened."
But a lot a lot was happening that summer and not just in me but in the
world. On August 9th we were all called in to the Charles Ives room where a
television set was wheeled in and we watched as Richard Nixon was lifted like
a rotting piece of lawn furniture. Everything was changing. This took place
40 years ago exactly this summer. Cora the acting teacher is long dead, Richard
Nixon is long dead, I still miss the guy. Martha and I
actually remain best friends to this day, and we're totally different from each
other. She's still chic and lovely and I'm still funny
or maybe ridiculous like tonight I don't know. And I really think about you know
the thing is it's really so that what happened that summer, the world is always
trying to tell you what you're not. And it's really up to you to say what you
are. All the things, every single thing that Cora disliked about me, my rubbishness,
my silliness, the way I put myself out there again and again turned
out to be the things that I feel most tender about in myself. Thank you.
Meg Wolitzer