girl in the hat

(photo courtesy Kay SusanneMC)

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(inspired byAmy Krause Rosenberg and Herman Hesse)

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1899

Kate Chopin publishes The Awakening, an amazing, ahead-of-its-time novel about a woman trying to negotiate the incongruent parts of her personality and live a full, cohesive life. Kate began writing after a period of depression following the deaths of her husband and mother which left her to take care of sixchildren single-handedly.
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1966
Joanna is born in San Francisco, California: Joanna the 4th after her great-grandmother Joanna, her grandmother Joan, and her aunt Johanna. They would call her “Annie.”
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1967
Mother will always claim that Annie learned how to walk without falling.
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1968
Little brother Johnny is born. Annie tears out all the hair on the right side of her head.
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1969
Annie really, really loves chocolate pudding. When her mother sees that the bowl is missing from the fridge, she goes upstairs and discovers Annie painting the walls of her bedroom with chocolate.
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1970
Move to a big old haunted house in Mill Valley. Annie has the same recurring nightmare almost every night.
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1971
Father buys a fancy new camera and wants to take her picture. Annie keeps fooling around, pulling faces when he wants her to look pretty and nice. He puts down his camera in disgust. When the film is developed, she is thrilled with her contortions. She wonders if anyone else will ever appreciate those ugly photos of her.
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1972
Parents divorce. She and her brother live with their mother.
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1973
Sitting on the floor of her father’s bachelor-pad closet with a flashlight and a stack of psychedelic, pornographic comic books, realizing that her childhood is over and that nothing and nobody can protect her from the scary things in life.
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1974
Father and future stepmother become enamored with Werner Erhard, the self-help guru who founded the est training (later called The Forum) and bring or send her to many intense seminars and events. Annie doesn’t know what to think about most of it but she’s just happy to be included in her father’s life.
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1975
Likes to play a game called Running Away From Home. She packs her backpack with everything she could possibly need (blanket, map, food, book, flashlight, compass, duct tape, staple gun, letter opener, etc.), slams the door on her way out, and dawdles in front of the house, pretending to look at the map and wishing her mother would run after her. Finally, she picks a direction and walks until she can’t remember what she was angry about, at which point she turns around and walks home.
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1976
First crush: King Kong. Played “Faye Wray” for hours and hours, always includes the line, “I’m Dwan. D-W-A-N, Dwan. That’s my name. You know, like Dawn, except that I switched two letters to make it more memorable.” Practices screaming—gets quite good.
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1977
Spends an entire summer reading books. Siddhartha, Damien, The Portrait of Doran Grey, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, To Kill a Mockingbird, Asterix and Tintin comics, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Fountainhead. When school starts in the fall, she tries to change her name to Ayn after the author Ayn Rand. It doesn’t stick. No one knows how to pronounce it. (Later, when she becomes aware of the elitist undertone to Rand’s novels, she will feel embarrassed.)
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1978
Twelfth birthday: a sleepover. The girls climbed up to the top of the box hedge and rolled out their sleeping bags. (This detail no longer seems believable, yet it really happened.) They stayed up late singing “When the Lights Go Down in the City” by Journey. Remembers how San Francisco glowed in the west and how vast and magical the world seemed that night and she was infused with the sense that, even if she were homeless, she would always be alright.
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1979
Gets a job at Baskin Robbins. At least twice a day, when she clocks in and after she returns from her break, she must demonstrate her ability to scoop three perfect 3 oz. servings in a row before she can begin serving customers. Fired for giving her friend Kimberly an extra big scoop. Will never be able to enjoy ice cream again: it’s too cold and exact.
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1980
In high school, she and her best friend Jess invent imaginary love lives. They go to the bleachers by the football field every lunch to tell romantic stories about Irene (Jess’s alter ego) and Nathalie (Annie’s) and their respective boyfriends, Thomas and Christopher. The boys dress preppy and drive a Fiat convertible. The stories become quite detailed and elaborate. One day, Annie will catch herself remembering Christopher as if he were a real boy she once dated.
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1981
School takes a small group of students to Death Valley for a Rite of Passage adventure. Spends four days and three nights alone in the desert without food, walking around wearing nothing but shorts and a bra, talking to the desert plants. When it’s over, she doesn’t want to go back; she thinks with just a little food she could last much, much longer. Becomes a vegetarian.
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1982
Loses virginity and kicks off a long series of spectacularly stupid choices in the boyfriend department.
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1983
Changes her name to Anna; this time it sticks.
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1984
College Admissions all say “NO!” Attends the only college that lets her in: San Diego State University. Gets a job at Dunkin’ Donuts because it is the only place within walking distance that is hiring. Her apartment reeks of donut grease and she will never be able to eat a donut again. Gets another job as a hostess at a restaurant. The work schedules clash with her classes. Reads The Awakening by Kate Chopin; doesn’t get it, it just makes her feel angry at her mother. Writes many angry letters to parents and lousy poems to current boyfriend.
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1985
Finally earns enough money to buy a car and experiences total and complete, blissful freedom. Aha! Now she can transfer to a community college where she discovers an interest in school, especially in Logic, Astronomy, Human Psychology, and Literature. For the first time, her teachers seem to appreciate her contributions to the class.
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1986
Poses naked. In the future, she will be puzzled by this decision, but the experience and the money make the next five years (the good and the bad) possible.

Goes on a trip around the world for a year, alone. Brings her dog-eared copy of Siddhartha. Highlights: Spends several days on the shore of the Ganges breathing the smoke of cremated bodies, sitting beside several old people waiting to die, and listening to a bell gong, gong. On safari in the Kenyan Masai Mara, she sleeps in the jeep with a machete just in case the hyenas (attracted to the box of food in back) try to bite their way through the canvas siding.
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1987
Total aimless, fruitless confusion. Can’t seem to stop falling into dead-end relationships. Sleepwalking.

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.” Theodore Roethke.
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1988
Re-applies and is finally accepted to UC Berkeley. Chooses English as a major and feels like a serious person for the first time. Falls in love with Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, the Classics, Roland Barthes, Charles Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Raymond Carver, old movies. Works as a house manager for the performance halls on campus. Drinks too much espresso, wears doc martins, and smokes clove cigarettes.
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1989
Takes a semester off to go to Shanghai to work in the office of her mother’s factory where they make hand-painted silk clothing. Has to leave the country when students start protesting in the streets. Days later, hears the reports of Tiananman Square.
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1990
Meets John. She thinks he’s almost disgustingly good looking and he talks too much. They’re both dating other people but there’s something about him that is different from all the other men she meets: he’s really, really nice. How intriguing.
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1991
Graduates from Cal with a BA in English, with highest honors. Proudly touts her résumé at an employment agency where they ask her take a typing test; she types 44 words per minute and is told she will probably never be hired unless she can bring it up to 70. Begins a series of lousy, dead-end jobs: accounts and receiving for two psychiatrists doing workers compensation evaluations, placing employees for a temp agency, running the personal ad section of a weekly newspaper.

Starts dating John. If they’re going to hang out together, she’ll have to eat bacon.
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1992
Moves to a houseboat on an illegal dock in Sausalito, California. It’s the best place she’s ever lived. Falls in love with Vladimir Nabokov, Philip K Dick, the Sandman comics. Begins wondering if she’ll ever get serious with a real man or a real job. Toys with the idea of teaching and tries to write a novel but both ideas are scary.
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1993
Anna and John decide to apply for grad school. He follows through but she doesn’t, maybe because she’s lazy or because she likes the houseboat too much or perhaps she’s playing a game of chicken, forcing a decision about the future of the relationship. They break up.
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1994
Move into graduate student housing in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where John will attend school. Anna applies to and is rejected by Harvard School of Ed. Work in sales at a weekly newspaper in downtown Boston where she has a long debate with her boss about the difference between ‘it’s’ and ‘its.’ He doesn’t believe her. Re-applies to Harvard.
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1995
John graduates and goes back to California for a job; Anna moves into the Harvard graduate student dorm, the first dorm she’s ever been inside. Her room is 8’ by 10’. In a graduate seminar on Black Women Writers with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Anna is having her first panic attack. She looks around the large table, at her professor, one of the smartest and most interesting people she’ll ever meet, and those twenty other scarysmart people all performing verbal acrobatics in an attempt to catch his eye, and she knows that if she opens her mouth, she’ll barf.
Asks John to marry her. He says maybe.
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1996
Living in Santa Cruz, California with her fiancé John, teaching English at a local high school.
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1997
Married. Drops her surname altogether. The name Fonté is very satisfying: A font of knowledge, a fountain of refreshment, overflowing with happiness. Rhymes with Saturday, enchanté, ricochet, pas de bourrée: “Ah, monsieur, no no no, I am not French, I am married to a Frenchified Italian.” Tickled by the idea she will never be able to name her kids Dante or Ella. Can never remember how to get the accent aigu over the e so she cheats by typing “cliché” (which always gets one automatically through spell check) and then just backs the é up to the font, erasing the cliché but keeping the flourish: voila!
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1998
Gets dream job at Berkeley High School: Things Fall Apart, Sula, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, The Catcher In the Rye, The Canterbury Tales, Othello, Oedipus, Maus I and II, Beowulf, Candide, Blindness, The Sound and the Fury, A Clockwork Orange, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Great Gatsby, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Bluest Eye, The Metamorphosis, etcetera. Pure bliss.
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1999
Happy.
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2000
At a millennial New Year ’s Eve party on a giant yacht in the San Francisco bay wearing a sexy cocktail dress and drinking way too many martinis, oblivious to the two-week-old embryo growing inside her.

Begins writing first novel. Welcomes wondrous daughter Kenyon into the world.
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2001
Returns to classroom.
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2002
Toddler learns to talk without her. Novel waiting on the shelf. But students are wonderful and that helps her forget.
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2003
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2004
Paranoid epiphany while sitting in a café before first period: If I keep this up, I’m going to get cancer. Quits job without discussing with John. He is very nice about it.
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2005
Finishes novel and sends it off to the slushpiles. Withstands a chilly flood of rejection.
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2006
Long-awaited second daughter born: Gwyneth, which means happiness. The name fits her perfectly, so why is Anna depressed? On a friend’s advice, re-reads Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and gets it this time. Wakes up in the middle of the night with the idea for What Would Water Do, a story about a woman who adapts The Awakening for the screen.
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2007
Notices her feet have worn the finish off the floor where she stands doing dishes at the kitchen sink.
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2008
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Worn spot deepens and expands.
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2009
Buys a rug to cover it.
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2010
Finishes What Would Water Do, releases it into the universe, and endures a stinging spray of rejection. What should she do now: Prozac? Scream therapy? Frontal lobotomy? Remembers how, at the end of The Awakening, Kate Chopin’s protagonist drowns herself, then remembers a favorite poem by a favorite poet, Dorothy Parker:

Résumé
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

On the advice of friend Alice, starts a blog.
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2011
This is Anna’s 27th post, in which she becomes aware of certain themes in her life:

With effort and time, even loud and emphatic rejection (in education, career, and romance) can sometimes be turned around. Think jaws of a pitbull. Think tsunami.

For her, babies and books seem to coincide. Maybe it was the same for Kate Chopin, whom can be imagined writing amidst a tumbling throng of bickering, chattering kids, simultaneously annoyed and motivated by their needs.
By writing, I attempt to explore and unify the incongruent and contradictory parts of my personality.
The world is a vast and magical place full of life thriving beneath a glowing horizon and things always seem to end up all right.
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Thank you, dear reader, for seeing this thing through!

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If you haven’t read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life you really should.
Additional inspiration:
Bruce Lee:

Her Morning Elegance by Oren Lavie:

88 lines about 44 Women by the Nails: