I am not my right breast.
Uh, okay. I thought in response. I’ll take your word for it.
I was browsing the “For Sale” books at my local library, and that first line was the title, stretched out along the peeling spine of a hardcover. I continued looking over the assorted bundles, sniggering at the Mills & Boon titles (“Sheik For Hire!” and “Baby In The Boardroom!”) and rescuing the dejected pile of knitting magazines from tumbling lemming style off the table – all the while with a chunk of my brain chewing on the original title.
What if I AM my right breast? What would that mean? I like my bosom buddies, so that’s kind of a compliment. What if I’m not my right breast? What would I be best summarised as; my left bicep? My odd little toes? Why them? Why not? That is a clever title for a breast cancer survivor book though… If I was going to write a book about something I know what would I call it? “Can I Please Have a Tazer? A Guide to Surviving Divorce”? Maybe “7000 Reasons to Eat Dessert/First”? Then I realised I was running late (libraries ambush me all the time) and I had to shove the whole discussion into the impossible, universe-deep drawer labelled “Inspiration” and go buy carrots and toilet paper. And that right there is what frustrates and delights me about inspiration – you never know when you’re going to dodge a falling piano, or get smacked upside the head with an insistent alien tentacle.
Last week, I took on the task of unpacking my book boxes and filling the new bookshelves. As I separated the volumes into fiction and non, I flipped through a few of the titles. I opened George Eliot’s Middlemarch and noticed that the first paragraph extends halfway through the second page of text, it suddenly dawned on me why I was three hundred pages into the novel before I finally felt the fog of confusion lifting. In the twenty-first century, we don’t write like that anymore.