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1. You really haven't lived until you've seen a college English class analyze your love life.  The students, in my case, were discussing scenes from a book I'd written, a memoir about growing up fat and dealing with issues of body image, family, and relationships.  A grad student acquaintance had chosen to assign it to her introductory lit course and she invited me to visit the class weblog and observe the discussion for a week.  On the last day, she said, I could respond and answer questions.

I tingled to think about it. A lit class! Maybe they would talk about how I explored the shifting nature of identity or my subtle critique of diet culture. Or maybe they'd discover some other brilliant theme that my subconscious genius had woven into the rich tapestry of narrative!  Instead they picked apart my choice of boyfriends.  One day I checked the blog and found, to my horror, that they'd really gone to town on the breakup scene in chapter 34.

"Jeez, I saw it coming," one girl said. "Why didn't she?"

"She's really in denial," another one wrote. "She should have dropped him like a bad habit."

I suppose it should have bothered me that the class didn't quite understand that this was an artful reconstruction. (You think I didn't see it coming, kid? I wrote it coming!) And it did, to some extent.  Honestly though, what bugged me more about the students' comments was reading them made my life feel like an infinitely regressing series of bad decisions: dating jackass: writing about dating jackass: consenting to watching a class full of 19-year-olds discuss book chapter about doomed-jackass-relationship: eating entire bag of shredded cheese.  Or most of it, anyway, as I sat in front of the computer and read about how pathetic I was. 

I wrote the narrative of that book in the present tense, and sometimes, well, I've wondered if that was really the best idea. This was one of those times. I'd thought it would lend a sense of immediacy to everything.  But I hadn't fully considered the implications of forever appearing in the moment, especially when the moment in question was in 2001 when I sat on the steps of some guy's house at 1:30 in the morning chain-smoking and waiting for him to come home and dump me.

2. When that book came out (the exact day the book came out, actually), I read from my book at a comedy festival event at the Double Door nightclub, went through my free-drink tickets at an alarming rate, and wound up making out with some guy I'd just met. We sucked face for a few minutes and then, like forest animals in a documentary, stumbled off in opposite directions. For awhile I wandered around the bar looking for the guy. I wrote a book, I thought sadly. I was supposed to be rich from the wisdom of my experience (if not from royalties), wasn't I?  But it was last call on a weeknight and the guy had left without saying good-bye.

The guy emailed me the next day, though. Three weeks later I gave him my book.

 "Look, remember you're dating me, not the girl in the book," I told him. "This is not the instruction manual, okay?" I hoped he would get it. 

But when the guy read the book, he kind of freaked out.  He'd read about my relationship with the jackass who dumped me after that night of waiting on his front steps. The guy was okay with that part. But then he read the part where I met some other guy, "Matt," in the book, and I fell for "Matt" and was thinking about spending the rest of my life with "Matt," who seemed, for a while, more than willing to be my Happily Ever After.

"I know it's weird," the guy I was currently dating said. "But I was reading the book, and I started to get really worried that you were going to end up with him."

"With who?" I asked. "'Matt'?" That's not his real name. But I don't ever think of him by his real name, whoever he is now. At some point in my mind, a shaky quotation-mark aura developed around what was left of him. But the guy I was currently dating didn't quite know that yet.

"It felt like it was all happening just now, you know?" he said.

"I'm sorry," I told him. "It's because I wrote in the present tense."

When he'd gotten to the part where "Matt" abruptly breaks it off with me, he said, he felt bad, of course, because then for about twenty pages I was completely miserable. But then he also thought: Yes! I have a chance with her after all!

It was true, he did.  And every day I kept ending up with him. I still do to this day, years later, where the present tense is for real.