It boiled down to a few simple facts: Maria Frances Clarke was an actress they hired to play the part of Carey Magnolia Logan. When they wanted to stop—when they had made enough money—they told Maria it was over. But she was not ready to do anything else; she’d never done anything else. They tried to stop her. They couldn’t.

She wanted to be Carey.

She could not live up to it.

It destroyed her.

*  *  *

I walked outside, closed the door behind me, leaned against the wall, and cried. The person that I looked up to most in the world was a lie. The man I thought I was in love with kept his boot on her neck for fifteen years, and lifted it when he was finished, and left her alone by the side of the road.

“These people,” Carey told me, that night on Grand Street, “will make not only your work, but you yourself into a commodity. They’ll buy you and sell you. Let them. But make sure you always do it on your own terms.” She meant Pine City. They bought her, sold her, controlled her. “She was built that way,” Tyler told me, one of those nights on the deck, when I commented on Carey’s success. “She was the center of attention without doing anything,” I’d said to Jack. His careful reply: “That’s the most accurate description of her I’ve ever heard.” Jes and Marlin kept their language in check—but not their work. Jes’s film presented Carey as an imitation, while Marlin refused to change her hand, continuing to make the same hexagons, the same anatomies, the same lines.

The notebooks, the multiple colors, the blocky handwriting disguising actual handwriting. Dagger line, T6 calf—decided to leave it. Tyler, Marlin, Jes, or Jack speaking to each other. A directive, not a notation. There’d been something about spiritual abuse. Someone called her an ungrateful bitch, I remembered, seeing the pointed scratch on the page. “I cried when I hung up…my role requires me to undertake more emotional and spiritual abuse than everyone else.” That was Carey—Maria—documenting how people treated her. “I’m scared he’ll make me demo talent,” she’d written on another page. A real fear. Not an insecurity.

“I want to express myself,” she told the Times, when she “switched” to performance—no—reduced—distilled. She was telling the truth. She wanted to express herself.

I’d misunderstood all along.

I leaned against the wall outside my studio—her studio—their studio—and kept crying. I felt so sad, and so foolish, and so alone. It was the first time I’d cried since my apartment burned down. I thought it would make me feel better.

It didn’t.

*  *  *