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Among Other Things, I’ve
Taken Up Smoking
By Aoibheann Sweeney
Sasha was a voluptuous, five-foot
tall whirling dervish who brayed like a foul-mouthed truck driver. She
backed up her sassiness with carefully manicured two-inch fingernails that
she zigzagged in front of the faces of those who dared to question her. I
quickly butted heads with the newly-minted 11th grader last year, but
somehow throughout the year, our relationship shifted. I always left her
in charge when I had to leave the room for a minute, and I think she liked
these moments of authority. It wasn’t that I trusted her to do the right
thing herself, but I figured (correctly) that I could distract her by
giving her power over others. She ran a tight ship—everyone else was
scared of her. By the end of the year, she became one of the success
stories. Her suspensions for poor behavior decreased, and her performance
in class increased. She began to share poetry with me, and together we
made a plan for her to create a book of poems to present her senior year
for a graduation project.
So early this fall, when Sasha
marched into my classroom clutching a fistful of handwritten poems, we sat
down to discuss them. She had selected poems from throughout her childhood
and she sat quietly as I reviewed the inner thoughts of the former tyrant.
To my surprise, she was burdened with a sense of loneliness I could have
never predicted. In eighth grade, she was a cutter, in ninth, she slept
around. Tenth and eleventh grade (as I well recalled) found her fighting.
This year, a more mature Sasha was dealing with a very different set of
challenges. The tears flowed as we discussed her new estrangement from her
former best friend. Sasha had just come out of the closet the week before,
much to the surprise of her drama class and drama teacher, whom she was
fiercely and vocally defending when she dropped her own bombshell.
Suddenly, the lonely poems made a lot more sense.
As I comforted Sasha, I recognized
many parallels between her story and that of Aoibheann Sweeney’s main
character, Miranda. As a young girl, Miranda and her parents moved from
Manhattan where her father worked in a classical studies center to a small
island in Maine. Largely isolated there, Miranda’s future lonely
existence increased with the mysterious drowning death of her mother soon
after their move. Her father’s early friendship with the practical Mr.
Blackwell faded during Miranda’s teenage years, leaving the girl alone
with her withdrawn father and his work. Alone, that is, until the end of
her senior year.
Aoibheann Sweeney is a graduate of
Harvard and the University of Virginia. Among Other Things, I’ve Taken
Up Smoking is her first novel, but she has spent her career analyzing
literature. According to one interview online, her work with Smoking
represents a desire to return to earlier writing styles and experiences
for women. Instead of finding a mentor in Kerouac-esque writing the way
she sees many young lesbian writers doing, Sweeney finds the language and
isolation of writers like Willa Cather more compelling. Miranda, her
character, also grows up buried in language.
Miranda’s father inherited his
island home from his former business partner, Arthur. Miranda knows
nothing of his former life in Manhattan. Instead, she spends her time
learning to care for herself and her father while he is dealing with his
obsessive work translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses. At first, Mr. Blackwell
cares for her. He fishes the daydreaming and surprisingly bold Miranda out
of the icy channel one afternoon, and he teaches her to drive the small
boat whose service is required for her to attend school. Mr. Blackwell and
Miranda’s father have a complicated relationship that Miranda doesn’t
quite understand, but she feels his absence when their friendship
dissolves in the bottom of the whisky glass her father fills each night.
Sweeney’s theme of loneliness
plagues her young character as she and her father operate on separate
planes. Miranda is surprised when her father suddenly offers her a
post-high school summer position in Manhattan at the Center for Classical
Studies he founded with Arthur. For some reason, Miranda takes him up on
it, and the smart, underachieving rural loner finds herself in the midst
of a double mystery. First, she must figure out her father’s connection
to the two men who now share his former apartment at the center. Next, she
must sort out her own growing feelings for a young man who works at the
center and a young woman who runs a coffee stand down the street.
Sweeney’s character is especially
interesting because she is such a paradox for the reader. In her life on
the island, she is self-sufficient and plain, but once in New York, she
draws the attention of many admirers. Her introspective and self-isolating
behavior does follow her from Maine, though, and ultimately becomes a
barrier she must conquer in order to solve the mysteries she faces. Like
the first few lines of the novel imply, she is torn between the good girl
and the bad girl inside.
Sasha’s last batch of poems just
came in today, and her lonely cloud has lifted somewhat. The best friend
came around, thank goodness, and she’s just about ready to go for her
graduation project. Her story, like that of Miranda’s, is that of a
period of growth and may ultimately require a shift in geography to
completely sort out good girl from bad.
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