Driving & Parking - THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS: CITY OF BONES (2013)

"'Licia?" a long moments pause, then, more shrill, "'Licia!"
I turn my head from looking out the window. Mom is gesturing with a giant Starbucks cup. She is doing this while driving.
"So there's this group," she continues, "they're called Shadowhunters, and they're here, in this world, and also in another world and I make them slay demons and vampires."

'Make them' she always says, like she's in control of them. Their boss. An interesting psychological slip. Some people blend with their creations, mom orders them around. Do they resent it? Do they sit and plot her demise, in the times between the trite, stupid things she makes them say and do?

"Okay," I say to mom, because it doesn't really matter what I say.
"and they're, these people are in a group, really old. All kinds of famous people in history were in it," she stops to slurp her coffee, "and they all have this sign, a tattoo, a tribal tattoo? They tattoo themselves with a big uh..."
"Laser pointer," I suggest.
"Right! That's how they know each other."
Mom's mouth beams at me proudly, but her eyes are shrewd, looking for hints that I don't like it, don't think it's a wonderful idea.
"Sounds great, mom," I try to pump as much enthusiasm into this as I can spare at 8am.

Her eyes return briefly to the road. In the other lane, a school bus lurches past us, and I look after it with barely concealed envy.

As a penance for a ride into school, I have to listen to mom doing plot outlines, testing ideas, showing off, making up entire petulant little drama arcs as she drives. Mom is a writer. I mean, a lot of people are, but mom is published.

To mom, all published writers are equal. This sounds quite noble, until you hear her compare herself to Tolkien.

Her esteem of herself, dangerously inflated before, is now like a miasma that surrounds and suffocates anyone within earshot. I open the window slightly, preferring the whine of the wind in one ear, to the torrent of words in the other.
"Do you like it?" she asks again, because one compliment is rarely enough.

I wasn't listening, but know from experience and her intonation that it was a question, and I can guess its asking for further comment.
"Sounds... fun," I try and search my recent memory for key words, "shadow.. hunting.. tattoos, yeah."
She tips her coffee cup to me slightly, "I think it's what w... " a hesitation, "young... people.. like."

I turn my head back to the window, to roll my eyes in private.

I used to take the school bus, but with mom's elevated income I now go to the private school and need a ride there every day. It's okay. Other pupils are fine, except the ones who've read my mom's books, who snigger to themselves as I go past. Once or twice, they've waved them at me, like a sort of taunt. I have friends, and I'm careful not to let mom know about any of them. I'm also careful not to let them know mom has books at Walmart, in case they read them.

Poor Mom. Bloated with coffee, polyester and stretch jeans, with a blonde dye that she's ten years too old to pull off right.
"How's that Torias?" she asks, "I saw him the other day looking at you, he's.. kinda cute.."
I grimace. In part because Torias is a slimy weasel of a human being, and partly because of mom's exhaling sigh at the end of her sentence, the hint of eros in her voice.
"He's not my vibe," I say as finally as I can, wanting desperately to ward off boy talk.
"Huh," mom replies, looking perplexed. That I hold any opinion not aligned with hers causes this, or a sort of peevishness.
I know she wants to talk about my social life, and I do my best, every time, to parry it off. I don't want to end up reading my mom's emulation of it.

At least it's just coffee she's waving at me this morning. Sometimes its sheets of paper, text dense and unformatted.
"Tell me what you think," she'll say, thrusting them into my lap.

I made the mistake of doing this once, returning them with spelling corrections, margin notes asking questions about plot, style tweaks and many, many punctuation additions.

She didn't talk to me for the rest of the day. "Tell me what you think", to my mom means "tell me it's great."

She has a studio, which used to be my room, and holes herself up there all the time. From it, I hear her sometimes laughing at her own wit, or sometimes the shrill piercing noise of her cheap ipod dock, endlessly repeating some roster of 90s boy crushes whose albums she never moved past. In an aura around the room, the hideous chemical smell of a dozen, or more, Yankee candles permeate. Forever unlit, miasma of chemical emulations of fresh laundry and vanilla.

She has a new Macbook. When I'm home, she's watching videos. Sometimes she talks, too loudly, with the hapless presenter of some literary podcast, who is trying to extract some sort of charisma, personality or creative insight out of her. Hearing their tinny voice slowly getting more frustrated, like trying to teach a cat to read.

They're all on a treadmill together, a sort of breezy exploitation by a publishing industry that's out of ideas but still wants more money. Another couple of years and it'll all be done, I guess. They'll find another author, the money will be spent on Yankee candles. Another trend will pass this one.

The thing is, I've read all of mom's books. They're all the same. I've read other YA authors too, and they're the same as well. They're all just dull, flat, lifeless books.

It doesn't matter what mom writes, the subject, the merits of the characters or the plot, or the story mechanisms. It all comes out exactly the same. All her books are just thematic variations.

She has no literary skill. You read her books and you can't immerse yourself in it. There's no emotional depth. Mom's books are like stepping into a very large puddle, a puddle that's maybe ten miles across. You can't see the horizon for it, but you know it's just a puddle.

But she's industrious, she doesn't take no for an answer, and her confidence is like a wall.

She's a book factory, and every six months to a year another book comes out of the studio, smelling of vanilla-as-imagined-by-monsanto extract. They're commodities, with a plot that sounds good on the back. There's nothing else really to them.

People buy them, consume them, and quickly forget about them. In five years they'll all be in a thrift store.

It's not her fault, and I suspect if her books were better, they'd stop buying them. The YA industry has a very low opinion of its target demographic.

Which is not young adults.

People think YA fiction is for young adults, and they're wrong. It's about young adults, and is sold to middle aged moms who want to feel young again. They can read the stilted, basic dialogue and think they're still cool. They can put themselves in the shoes of young people that they still think, or hope, that they are.

It's harmless enough. It's another product line in the industry of fantasies. Mom hasn't grasped this, she's never believed that she writes for anyone other than people my age. I know that in a way, I'm an impediment to her YA writing. Actual young people go against the fantasy.

Unconsciously, I've started to mimick the characters in her books. Bland, neutral, keeping myself inside because I know in some way it unbalances in her mind who young adults are meant to be. It voids the fantasy that she herself is just a young adult. I don't want to stop it, because despite everything, I want her to be happy. So I find myself participating in it, somehow, drawn into mom's wider YA fiction as it distorts the world around her.

She pulls jerkily up to the school gates.
"Have a good day, and say hi to that Torias for me," she says cheerily, forced.
I smile back, practiced, plastic, "good luck with the uh.. shadow hunting,"
She smiles and sips her coffee. Finally, she can go home to her studio, where the real young adults are.