NYC adventures with Dorothy Parker
I had planned to live in New York. All aspiring writers do, I suppose.
I was 14 when we moved to Arizona. The daughter of a Marine, I was used to moving every two years or so, but I would arrive at each new destination a little out of sorts, faced with starting over. A new school. New friends.
In the closet of my new bedroom on the second floor over the garage, someone had left behind a stack of Bonnie Raitt albums and a copy of “The Portable Dorothy Parker,” both fuel and salve for an angsty teenage girl.
I already knew I’d be a writer. As a kid, I filled composition books with stories I’d illustrate with color-pencil drawings. I signed up for Journalism 1 and Typing 1 at registration for freshman year.
I’d put the “Give It Up” album on, sit cross-legged on my bed and read the collection of Parker’s poems, short stories, magazine articles and theater reviews.
She was clever and confident, two things I wasn’t.
I wanted to write like her, though I’d later read that she had said, “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of “The Elements of Style.” The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
I thought the best place to write would be New York, where Parker grew up on the Upper West Side, where writers like Harper Lee and Truman Capote, F. Scott Fitzgerald and E.B. White traded bon mots in well-appointed salons.
By 16, I had a plan. After I graduated from college, I would travel in Europe, and then live for a year in New York City, where I would write the next great American novel. The answers: Find the solution grid for our Thanksgiving Day giant crossword puzzle on 23A.
It didn’t work out that way of course. I graduated from college and went straight to work at a newspaper here in Arizona.
Almost 30 years later, I still love what I do, though a decade or so into my career, I could understand what Parker meant when she said, “I hate writing. I love having written.”
I still have Parker’s book, next to my copy of “The Elements of Style.”
But I had never made it to New York.