It Explains the Webbed Feet

"Mom, are you an otter?"

My four-year-old has a delightful speech impediment (it used to be called speaking like a four-year-old) that makes him sound like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. Shortly after he started preschool in the fall, he started asking me about my marine mammalian secret identity. It took me a few weeks to figure it out.

"An author!"

We were both elated, like Helen Keller and her tutor, having at last spelled water.

"Yes! An OTTER! Are you an OTTER?"

I realized then that I had told his teacher I was writer. "Yes, I guess, kind of," I said. I didn't feel like it. "Author" is a word I associate with literary festival program bios, library posters, and my father. I hadn't called him that in years, but I suddenly remembered that was the word I used whenever we were asked in class to say what it was our fathers were.

Not that everyone didn't already know. "Kyran's father is an author," teachers and classmates were quick to point out to anyone new on the scene. Depending on my age, I reacted with varying parts self-consciousness and pride. Dad's books were what made my family special, at least in the esteem of the outside world.

Special is nice when you are eight, less so when you are thirteen. But even in the trench of my eye-rolling-est, cringey-est, adolescent self-loathing, I knew I wouldn't trade it in for anything. I loved to pick up one of my father's books and see something from our life written there, in a poem or a dedication. It taught me how common and close is beauty, art and meaning. To see it everywhere, and anywhere. What is heaven like? I'll tell you. It is very near.

I remember the first time I put "writer" on a form with any degree of certainty. I remember when I began to answer "I'm a writer" at cocktail parties and parent-teacher conferences without feeling six years old and playing make-believe with my Daddy's typewriter. I am a writer. But an author? That seemed like a stretch.

I guess I am going to have to start believing it. Because according to this, I'm going to be one.

(The original publicity blurb, flattering though it was, has been the source of much family merriment since it said I had a "gimlet eye." Neither of us knew what that meant, but Patrick thought "giblet" worked much better.)

To make a long story short, my agent sent out a few chapters of the memoir I'd started work on in the fall, and had put on hold while a magazine article took over my life from November to January. It went out on a Wednesday afternoon. That Friday morning, I was trying to decide whether or not it would be appropriate to change out of my pajamas before taking a potentially life-altering phone call (I decided it was).

I haven't been sure how to tell people, or how much people want to hear. A message on Facebook and a couple of phone calls covered my close friends and 500 of my nearest relatives. There has been so much happening lately, so fast, I can barely keep up. And I'm a little worried that the OMG!!!s are getting tiresome for some of you, no matter how deeply you've sympathized with our struggles along the way.

So, here I stand before you, with Daddy's horn-rimmed glasses slipping off my face and his corduroy jacket hanging down to my ankles, shyly trying on the words:

I'm an otter.

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If you would like to know a little more, Geoff has very kindly helped me break the news back home, and asked a lot of the nitty gritty questions in this very sweet piece. As you were.