“You were dealt a shit hand in the parenting department,” she says. “It’s true. But you’re wrong about something. Parents shouldn’t want you around. Not forever. The good ones don’t. It’s selfish to keep a son or daughter home when what they need most is to find their way in the world.” Mary never does anything quietly, but right now she is, so I lean in, in time to hear her say, “You’re the best kid I could’ve hoped for. And if I’d kept you as my personal assistant, you’d never have had the chance to spread your wings, write your own scripts, and fly. I sent you away because I want the world for you.”

Tears fill my eyes for the second time today.

“Don’t you remember what you told me the day you interviewed for the job? You wanted to be a screenwriter. As for thinking you ‘suck,’ that is ludicrous with a side of bullshit. I value your input, and your ideas were clever, but for a memoir adaptation to be a memoir adaptation, I think it all needs to come from the filly’s mouth, don’t you?”

“Yes, I get it—”

“Good. Now go write your own stuff, willya?”

“I don’t want to,” I grit out. “You think I do, and maybe eight years ago I did, but I’ve changed—it isn’t what I want anymore. I can’t do what you want me to do!”

She waits.

“There are seven basic plotlines in the world,” I tell her. Nothing she doesn’t already know, of course. “Could I write a Boy Meets Girl, or a Man Versus Nature? Yeah, probably. But so could anyone else. It’s not the plot that matters, it’s the way you tell it.

“I always figured revising other people’s work was meant to be practice for creating original stories. But what I realized is I’d rather take someone else’s idea, their one-out-of-seven storyline, and flip, twist, rearrange, and improve upon it so the audience will think they’ve never seen it before. George Orwell said, ‘Good prose is like a windowpane.’ I want to be so good, no one will know I was there; they’ll be so engrossed in the story, they won’t even see the words. I like editing and shaping, not starting from scratch. Actually, I don’t just like editing, I love it. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” she replies. “I thought I was holding you back, forcing you to adopt a voice that wasn’t yours.”

“I want to adopt lots of voices—not just yours, though I like your voice—it taught me so much . . .”

Her eyes sparkle. “This is amazing. Do you know what this means?”

“. . . no?”