Page 1 of The Austen Affair
Some of my earliest memories involve snuggling up next to her on the couch, a big bowl of popcorn in her lap, so that we could watch Elizabeth Bennet tear Mr. Darcy a new one after his laughably incompetent first proposal.
Mom once pointed her remote at the screen, pausing the BBC adaptation long enough to tell me, “See how bad that was? Trust me when I say, your father’s proposal to me was even worse. ”
My dad was never really in the picture. After Mom told him she was pregnant, he half-heartedly suggested making her an honest woman, but she knew if he was going to put that little enthusiasm into the idea of marriage, she’d be better off without him.
Sometimes in Jane Austen books the heroine will turn down an offer of marriage, inspiring her prospective suitor to come back and try even harder for the “yes.”
But honestly? I don’t think she wanted that. Mom always knew fiction from reality.
Still, that didn’t mean she wasn’t in love with fiction.
Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey.
Those are the six little books that make up the vast majority of Jane Austen’s body of work, cementing her forever as one of the great geniuses of English literature.
They were also the six things my mom loved best in the world—apart from me.
I never doubted I was her number one, but I also never doubted that Jane Austen wasn’t far behind.
I was born and raised in SoCal, but by the time I was seven, I could do a British accent as convincingly as if I’d grown up in Surrey.
It was as natural as breathing, the obvious consequence of living in an apartment where an Austen adaptation was always playing on a loop, almost like white noise.
Often there wasn’t even anyone watching the TV.
I’d be in the kitchen chopping lettuce for dinner, and I’d hear the distant thunk thunk thunk sound of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma shooting arrows alongside Mr. Knightley in the next room.
In hindsight, it shouldn’t have been surprising that I became an actress.
The TV was considered sacred in our home: constantly on, adding a warm hum of background noise to an already cozy space.
And even though our apartment was always a messy cacophony of comfort and color, we kept the sight line to the TV screen clear.
It was, in fact, the only clear thing in our otherwise disastrous two-bedroom.
Knit blankets were strewn over every chair.
Every flat surface was cluttered with lipstick-stained coffee mugs.
More than twice a month in my childhood, Mom and I would order Chinese food for dinner because it came with its own utensils, and that meant we could put off washing the dishes for one more night.
I think the first time I saw the floor of our living room was when I was twenty-three, on the day we started packing to move out.
Season One of Chuck Brown had just wrapped, and I had real money for the first time in my life.
Not Hollywood-superstar money, but I was main cast in a surprise hit, with raises likely coming in future seasons.
I cashed out, used every posttax cent from the first twenty-two episodes to buy Mom a little two-bedroom in Thousand Oaks.
It was perfect. White stucco with a red front door.
My show shot mostly in Vancouver, but I knew I’d be traveling back and forth from LA a lot, and we’d find the time and energy to make that house a home.
I figured Mom would live in Thousand Oaks for the next forty years. That she’d host Christmas and Thanksgiving there for me and my kids one day. But she got the diagnosis six months after we moved in.
In a year, she was gone.