How to Save Your Own Life Read Free Page A

Wong (with her wise-ass manner, her outspokenness about sex, and her determined bookishness), I was convinced that she was either unfit for print or else so precious that no one but a few other wise-ass Jewish girls from the Upper West Side could relate to her. But I was wrong. As Candida felt, so felt the nation. And no one could have been more surprised than her creator.
    Millions of copies later, I began to wonder whether I had created Candida or whether she had, in fact, created me.
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    My mask completed, I ventured out into the teeming lobby again.
    That night I was to attend a cocktail party for an aging stripper who had written an autobiography, another cocktail party for a chimpanzee TV star for whom a human had ghost-written an autobiography, and a dinner for a convicted felon who had just been paid a million dollars to write a memoir about his adventures as a high government official in the Nixon administration. Of the three authors, I found the chimpanzee the most honest and engaging—yet all evening I seemed to be conversing with animals and humans alike across a black hole in space.
    Oh, I was on when I had to be: chatting everyone up, being delightful to book salesmen, embracing the public-relations game with what might have appeared to be my whole heart. I’m a born performer and I play the smiling celebrity while anxiety pumps away in my gut. But inside I felt that I might as well have sent a wind-up doll to the party as to have gone myself. Instead of bringing me closer to people, those millions of books had separated me from everyone-even, it seemed, from myself.
    Inevitably, I drank too much, talked too much, smiled too hard, swallowed back too much bile.
    A vicious woman columnist waltzed up to me, told me that she wrote poetry too, but unlike me did not write “commercial poetry,” and then confided that she had only read the first three pages of Candida before throwing it against the wall-because she couldn’t stand “pornography.”
    Though Candida would have had an immediate snappy comeback, I was tongue-tied. I stood there dumbly for a minute or two reeling from all I’d had to drink, and then said “Excuse me” and headed in the direction of the ladies’ room, where I collapsed on the can and dozed a little with my cheek against the cool ceramic-tile wall.
    Eventually, I forced myself to get up and go back to my double-double-bedded room with six gin and tonics in my blood and at least a half-bottle of wine pulsing through my temples.
    I was even lonelier and sadder than I’d been when I’d left the room before dinner. Men I didn’t want to sleep with had propositioned me, and I got into bed alone, mourning the waste of both those mattresses, masturbating over and over again in the hopes of putting myself to sleep.
    Alcohol has a strange effect on me: wide-eyed insomnia. The feeling that my heart will fly out of my chest on its own wings. My mouth felt like the inside of a sand trap, my headache was monumental, and I realized that, short of three Valiums (which I didn’t have), I was doomed to consciousness for the duration of the night.
    What was I going to do? I knew I had a standing invitation to press my psychic wounds against the fleshly bandages of an aging editor who had repeatedly made his affectionate lust for me plain, but that was hardly what I wanted. Perhaps Candida would have done it, but I wasn’t about to. If anything, I knew it would only depress me more.
    I revolved in the bed like a chicken on a spit, hoping to discover one more side to my torso than the mere four I’d already tried to span the abyss with. My back seemed camel-humped. My right side teetered over the edge of the hideous chartreuse-carpeted chasm between the two hotel beds. My left side was suddenly riddled with cramps, pins and needles, ancient aches. My beloved belly, usually so comfortable for sleeping on sleepless nights, also betrayed me. It