ANDREW SEAN GREER THE MUSEUM OF MY BEGINNINGS

I WROTE MY first novel when I was 10 years old. This is not particularly impressive. Writing a novel at 10 is actually a little late to begin things, if you’re going to be a genius child. Mozart, as my parents often pointed out to me during games of Candy Land, had already written an opera, and there I was trying to lick the board. So, when Mrs. Poppy assigned us each to write a “novel,” I took to it immediately. Here was something even Mozart hadn’t done.
       My favorite book at the time was Watership Down, and I admired it fiercely, so when Mrs. Poppy asked us each to write down the plot of our novels, it occurred to me that there was really no better story than animals on a quest. Certainly I hadn’t read one. So, I picked up my pen and wrote about animals on a
quest. Not rabbits—I somehow knew about plagiarism—rather I picked squirrels. Everyone loves a story about squirrels.
       It began like this: “The sun was just setting over the meadows.”
       And ended with genius symmetry: “The sun was just rising over the hills.”
       I painstakingly typed out my novel on my mother’s Selectric, carefully writing around the pencil illustrations I had made of squirrels and secret tunnels and a blissful reconciliation; I don’t mind giving away that ending, since it was the style and not the substance that made my novel such a hit with my fellow students. I remember Allison Roberts admiring the cover I’d worked on. She had written a novel about horses traveling west, and I leaned over to advise her in a whisper that she shouldn’t so obviously rip off Richard Adams’s masterpiece (Watership Down) about small furry animals that lived close to the ground. She stared at me, then at my squirrel novel. It must have been hard for her to be touched by envy so early.

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