My Sister Reads Everything I Write First
Before any editor, my toughest and truest desk is her kitchen table.
My sister has rejected more of my writing than every editor in this country combined, and she has never once used the word "unfortunately."
Editors say unfortunately. Editors say not the right fit at this time. My sister says, "Page three is a lie," and slides the pages back across her kitchen table, and picks up her coffee... and waits.
She is a pharmacist. She has no literary training unless you count a childhood spent reading whatever the lending library had left on a Friday. She could not tell you what enjambment is, and if you told her, she would say it sounds like something you should see a doctor about. And for eleven years, nothing I have written has gone anywhere, not to a magazine, not to a contest, not into the world at all, until it has survived that table.
The ritual is fixed and slightly ridiculous. I print the pages, because she says screens let you skim and skimming is how liars get away with it. I take the 214 bus to her flat on a Sunday morning. She makes two coffees, hers in the brown mug with the chipped rim that she refuses to throw out, mine in whichever cup is clean.
Then she reads, and I sit across from her and pretend to look out the window while actually monitoring her face like an air traffic controller.
Her face is the review.
The mouth-twitch is good. The flat blink is bad. The worst is a small exhale through the nose, barely audible, which means I have written something to sound smart, and she has caught it, again.
"You wrote this bit for the judges," she said once, tapping a paragraph I had spent two days polishing. "There are no judges. There's just people. Write it for the woman on the bus."
I have received editorial letters from professionals that ran four pages and taught me less.
Here is the thing about first readers that took me a decade to understand: what you need first is not craft. Craft you can get from books, from classes, from the whole apparatus of learning to write, and I have used all of it gratefully. What you cannot get anywhere except from a person who has known you since before you had handwriting is the lie detector.
My sister was there for the actual events. She knows what our house sounded like. When I bend the truth to make myself braver on the page, she does not detect it as a technical flaw. She detects it the way you detect a wrong note in a song you have heard a thousand times, with the whole body, instantly.
Every writer needs one reader who loves them too much to lie, and knows them too well to be lied to.
The proof came four years ago, and it is not a story I enjoy telling, which is exactly why she would tell me to tell it.
I wrote an essay about our mother. Our mother is a complicated season of a woman, and the essay was sharp and funny and cruel in the way that gets applause, and I knew it was good. I also knew, in the specific basement of myself where I keep such knowledge, what my sister would say about it.
So I skipped the table.
For the first time in eleven years, I sent a piece out without the bus ride, without the coffee, without the face. A magazine took it in nine days. Fastest acceptance of my life.
She read it after it was published, because of course she did, she has an alert set for my name, which she set up herself and denies.
She did not call for a week.
When she finally did, she was not angry, which was worse. She said, "It's very well written." Pause... "You made her funny so you wouldn't have to make her real. And you sent it out without me because you knew."
Then she said the sentence I have carried since, the one I would get tattooed if I were a different sort of person: "You're allowed to be angry at her. You're not allowed to be angry at her in public and call it art. Not yet. You're still in it."
She was right down to the ground. The essay got shared around, and every share felt like a small coin paid to me for selling something that was not entirely mine to sell. Two years later, when the anger had composted into something with more oxygen in it, I rewrote the whole thing from zero at her kitchen table, both of us older, our mother older too. It became a piece about forgiveness, not the greeting-card kind, the kind you do with gritted teeth because the alternative is carrying the crate forever. My sister read the last page, and I watched the face, and the face did something it had never done in eleven years of Sundays.
She got up and washed her mug so I could not see her, and from the sink, with her back to me, she said...
"Send that one."
It was also her, I should record for the ledger, who made me start submitting at all. Year one, when I was writing into a drawer and calling it patience, she found a monthly poetry contest online, printed the page, and put it under my coffee cup like a summons. "You have until Sunday," she said. "Not entering is also a decision, it's just the cowardly one." I entered... I lost. She made me enter the next month too. Losing in front of my sister turned out to be excellent training for losing in front of strangers, which is most of a writing life.
Sometimes I send her things other people have written, essays about the work, and she reads them with suspicion, like a customs officer. There was an essay on why safe poems lose that I forwarded her last year, expecting her to shrug. She replied in nine minutes... "This is what I've been telling you for free."
People ask, when they find out about our arrangement, whether it strains things. Whether family and honest criticism can share a table without one of them leaving. I understand the question. I have heard the horror stories: siblings who stopped speaking over a memoir, mothers who read a poem and heard only the accusation. All I can say is that we decided, without ever saying it out loud, that the writing would be a thing we did on the same side of. She is not my critic. She is my co-conspirator against my own worst habits.
What does she get out of it? I asked her once, directly, on a Sunday when the piece was bad and her patience had been heroic. She looked at me like I had asked why she waters her plants.
"I get to read you first," she said. "Everyone else gets you edited."
I do not have a tidy way to end this, and she would say a tidy ending is a lie anyway, so here is just the true image. Two coffee cups on a small table, one chipped, one borrowed. Pages between them, face down, which means she is finished and I am about to learn something. Outside, the 214 going past. Her hand flat on the pages, holding them still a moment longer, the way you hold something that is about to be let go into the world.
"Okay," she says. "Read it to me. Slowly. Like I'm the woman on the bus."
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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