“My name is Lester Burnham. This is my neighborhood. This is my street. This is my life. I’m 42 years old. In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. And in a way, I’m dead already.”
I watched American Beauty years ago when it first came out, rented it from Blockbuster or waited until it was available through HBO. I liked the movie, but it was what my mother said about it that made it even more memorable, for she praised it, then said to me, “I could see you writing something like that.”
I grew up in a household that did not view creative endeavors as careers, only hobbies. I wrote a play in third grade, a Christmas-themed script that my small stuffed animals would perform. Using the backs of old posterboards to draw the setting, as well as the Barbie-sized Christmas tree I found at a craft store (which probably prompted the whole idea of the play), my stage was set. For costumes, I wrapped fabric scraps from my mom’s sewing room around each stuffed animal’s neck to serve as scarves. I worked on that play for weeks.
And then with just opening night a day away, I overheard my parents talking upstairs. My dad said, “I don’t want to have to sit through that.”
My mom sighed. “I don’t either, but she’s worked really hard on it.”
My animals were so upset when I cancelled the performance. I held back my tears so they could cry theirs.
I often wonder what would have happened had I not accidentally heard that conversation. Would I have continued to write? Would I have joined writing clubs at school, submitted articles for the newspaper, or wrote poems for the annual creative writing publication? Other than writing in journals and notebooks the daily disgrace of my life, I only remember writing an essay for a contest about reading in sixth grade. I didn’t win. I wrote in secret, like writing was a clandestine activity, never wanting to share anything I wrote and feeling violated if someone else read it.
When I took creative writing as a junior in high school, I felt viciously proud when the teacher read my movie review first. She read everyone’s anonymously, but she said she was starting with the one that encompassed all the great components of a movie review. I had gone to the theater to see Outbreak, so I wrote about the horrors of hearing people cough in the theater during a movie about an infectious disease and recommended people might be wise to watch it from the safety of their homes (the Pandemic was still over 25 years in the future). At conferences, the teacher gave my parents all my writing, which horrified me, but my mom enjoyed the dialogue I had created of my parents playing video games (my dad not so much as I said my mom was a better player). Yet writing was still to be approached as a hobby, not a career.
I begrudgingly ended up attending a state school to become a teacher. While my heart was in the creative side of teaching—my love of English and creating neat activities and lessons—I never saw myself retiring as a teacher. I don’t know what I saw of myself at that stage of my life.
In college, I took a creative writing class my sophomore year. My submissions were so-so, but my instructor loved my dramatic monologue, which to my horror, we had to read aloud. The entire class laughed during my reading—mine was voted the best. But it wasn’t all my creation. I fashioned my monologue after Charlene from Designing Women, with her naivety and knowledge of pop culture. While I wrote my own content, I used three parts from the show: naming your kid Norman Bates, wondering how a couple consisting of a large man and a tiny woman could “do it”, and the killer bees—the part where our bees must be terrified. I felt guilty for my plagiarism, but mostly just felt like a fraud because it was not totally from my own imagination, which seemed to certify that I could never hack it in the writing world, at least when it came to fiction.
The following year, my Civil War teacher (I was a history minor) tracked me down. He was one of those professors that scared the shit out of you, the kind where you thought you succeeded if you ended up with a C after working your ass off. On my research paper he wrote in black ink, in all caps: This is an outstanding paper. You did a wonderful job of getting in the primary sources and organizing them coherently. For our department’s sake, I hope you are a history major or minor. I had no idea I had made any impression on him whatsoever. And he struggled to find me—after a guy broke into my trailer and tried to rape me, my best friend and I moved into an apartment in the middle of the semester. Apparently the college was only handing out my new address on an as-needed basis. He submitted my research paper about women of the Confederacy for publication, on a website for college students on how to write research papers, to which I was paid $350. The internet was still somewhat of an anomaly in 1997. Email existed but was predominantly used in the workplace. Databases were just forming for research materials, and Napster hadn’t become a sensation. But my mother was so proud of my accomplishment, especially since she fashioned herself a historian, with none other than the Civil War her favorite time period. She encouraged me to write—once I graduated. I dabbled with changing my major, even looking at what I would need to take if I dropped education and majored in English only. My advisor advised against it, considering I had only two semesters left, one of which was student teaching.
And then life happens and I continued on the easy teacher path, the one where I wouldn’t face rejection, the one where I would have a guaranteed income. As a parting gift, I could use my summers off to write.
By 2000, when both my mom and I saw American Beauty, I had graduated from college with a degree in English Education and was almost done with my Masters in Curriculum and Instruction. I was teaching full-time through a program that fostered mentorship while I earned my master’s degree, a position I had almost quit because my mentor teacher was a disgrace, the school I taught at couldn’t control the ninth graders nor their parents, and I really wanted a masters in English, but the English department hated me because I was in education (that’s a long story). I had married the summer of 1999 and we were poor, lived in this tiny box house of a rental, and adult life was not quite what I had imagined. The bright spot was the Pomeranian we bought before we even went on our honeymoon: a sable-colored little dog I named Ginger.
But for my mom, I had everything I needed: I was married to a guy they liked, so they could pass me off onto my husband (although I grew up in the Eighties, my family operated like it was the Fifties. Even though my mom was a borderline bra burner, she didn’t want either of her daughters to live a single life). I could find a teaching job easily (not quite, but that’s another story), and such a job would leave time for me to write.
“I could see you writing something like that.”
A compliment, one I didn’t see coming, nor one I thought I deserved.
American Beauty weaved three stories together: the creepy middle-aged dad who fantasizes about his teenage daughter’s friend, the neurotic mother who has to be the adult yet has an affair, and the daughter who falls in love with the new neighbor who has many secrets of his own. That’s what I liked most about the movie—no one was who they claimed to be. The teenager friend bragged about having sex with multiple guys but was still a virgin, the odd neighbor boy was a drug dealer, and his father was a closet homosexual. Mixed into those storylines were intense symbols of red rose petals and a plastic bag blowing in the wind. The narration of Lester—the creepy dad—at the beginning and the end of the movie was priceless and profound.
The fact that my mother thought I could create and write something of that magnitude was one of the highest compliments she ever gave me.
(Some think American Beauty has not held up well over the last 25 years. I disagree. The characters are real even if the plot may be over-the-top. And just because it is now politically incorrect to sexualize teenage girls in cinema, doesn’t mean it’s not happening every single day through every other medium and experience.)
But I never acted on it. The highlight of my writing career was a research paper assigned to me in college. I wrote here and there, emulating Laura Ingalls Wilder by writing down my own life stories, choppy pieces of crap that I had no idea what I could do with and if they were even appropriate for an audience. Only after my mother died of cancer when she was not quite 57 did I really start to write. And even then, nothing came of it. A self-published memoir that makes me cringe, a poemoir that is even worse, and that’s it. I have over a thousand typed pages saved in Microsoft Word—three full-book memoirs and dozens upon dozens of personal essays. My dad encourages me to write a true crime book about two murders that happened in in his hometown, and while I’ve researched it, I have no idea where to start in terms of writing it. But it is on my to-do list.
So when I rewatched American Beauty this past weekend, I studied it as a writer would, much like when I rewatch episodes of thirtysomething, how the characters are portrayed and developed, how the dialogue moves the story along, and how symbolism adds so much depth to the theme.
Maybe I can do that. But not with fiction, just nonfiction. As Lester reminds us at the beginning of the movie that it is never too late. And he says this at the end of the movie: “…it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world….And then it flows through me like rain and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. You have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m sure. But don’t worry. You will someday.”