Lanie works in stories. She records episodes in her diary from her experiences or from what people tell her, which makes her remember them, which prompts her to tell them again, better, to others, which often results in others telling her theirs.

It isn’t only that people are more disclosive to her. Around Lanie they remember things they are otherwise likely to forget.

The journal entries began when she was six and took off in junior high, but the tendency became marked in tenth grade. That was the year Lanie hated herself and longed to be catatonic. She concluded that nothing could be worse than self-disesteem. After a long bad wallow she started to talk more and then to recraft herself, using as her models book characters, random glances, classical traits. She carried visions around: the fierce independence of Howard Roark, the enduring wisdom of Athena, the serenity implied by the softness of an acquaintance’s palm, the erotic potential in her scarf-clad Barbie doll. Of course the recrafting process required that she face her own demons.

She felt insecure.

She felt like there was some rule book distributed to everyone but her, at birth or sometime.

She felt exposed.

She dreaded embarrassment.

No sooner did she enumerate those evils than she understood that she didn’t have any corner on them. Everyone she knew, everyone she watched, had exactly the same imps flitting around their souls.

That was her tenth grade epiphany. Only to Lanie it seemed more like a penetrating glimpse into the obvious. It was all there, in front of her and everyone else, but most other folks were too busy tending their own tenderness to notice (she carried the image of dogs curled into corners, protectively licking their own trembling limbs).

She talked about it at the time. Of course she did; Lanie always talked, and people always talked back to her. Over and over she witnessed the cascade of surprise as her interlocutor detected a common bond, a fellow traveler, understanding. She began to live the theory: from then on, until refuted by experience, she would assume everyone else was as insecure and imperfect as she was.

Nothing contradicted that assumption in the ensuing decades. But there was a greater charm to it than that. It was as if the theory – her understanding about the insecurity and flaws of all folks – acted as some sort of shield to prevent the veil of narcolepsy that benighted everyone else. Starting when they were in their mid-twenties, Lanie watched her peers stall, forget, and start to proclaim. They began to rewrite their childhoods as happier or sadder than they really had been. Most of them settled on certain opinions, once and for all – put matters to bed as it were – and ever after prevented the entry of any new information by continually projecting a settled stance. Somehow her friends had become people with policies instead of passions.

Meanwhile, some things became as clear to Lanie as if she were wearing night vision goggles on a scouting mission. Like all first daughters she watched her parents, and she saw them seek pity points as if they were carousel rings, competing about how much each labored or suffered (her mother needed roller skates to keep up with the household demands and a genie to fulfill her husband’s micro-instructions about home maintenance and car repair; her father had all of the trials of breadwinning, and also suffered from year-round hay fever). In time, Lanie and her brothers became expert at slightly exaggerating their efforts and their illnesses. And no sooner did she note the Pity Point game in her own family than she started seeing it in everyone else’s.

It didn’t stop when she grew up, either. That’s when she got to discover the myth about quality time vs quantity, the fact that laziness was the true mother of invention, the twist that work produces inspiration.