Page 36

Rose

Dear Diary,

I just got my first rejection letter. From Harvard.

I must assume that more are on the way.

I feel like a fool to have gotten my hopes up, to have relied on this little kernel of possibility to nourish me.

Now what?

I just finished rereading Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening .

It’s hard to believe it was published in 1899.

So revolutionary. I read it for the first time in a literature course as an undergraduate.

At the time, I didn’t relate to the main character, twenty-eight-year-old wife and mother Edna Pontellier. I do now.

Edna is in a stifling marriage and aches for a fate different from that of other wives, who, as she puts it, “idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves.” She believes firmly that “she has a position in the universe as a human being.” Like I said, revolutionary.

Edna bucks social conventions by wandering alone in public unescorted, then embarking on an adulterous affair without remorse. She tells her lover she is the possession of no man.

Reminds me of what Audre Lorde said about how we begin to grow weary of self-sacrifice and suffering once we get to know ourselves and our desires intimately.

The book is thrilling until the end, when she commits suicide, convinced this is preferable to living less than a fully human existence.

The book created quite the scandal when it was published. It was condemned universally, banned in Chopin’s hometown of Baltimore and elsewhere. The criticism ended Chopin’s career and then her life. She committed suicide in 1904, and her work remained in obscurity for more than half a century.

Now it is taught in college literature courses.

Life is stupefying.

Edna drowns herself, which sounds horrifying.

If I were to commit suicide (and it does occasionally pass through my mind as a last-resort kind of option), I would drive my car off a bridge.

Rob could tell Nicole that it was a car accident, which is probably what it would appear to be anyway.

Lost control of the wheel, the newspaper article would say.

As should be obvious, I am feeling despondent.

Nicole is calling for me. Just a twenty-minute nap today, a twenty-minute reprieve for me. Considering my thoughts of driving my car off a bridge, it would have been nice to have a bit longer.

Must go.