Page 43 of No Words

“I think we’re getting a little off topic here,” he said. “Aren’t we supposed to be discussing female empowerment in YA novels?”

Whiskers.

“Right,” I said, leaning back as well and reaching for the bottled water on the end table closest to me. “Yes, of course. Let’s move on.”

But my mind was a blank. I’d done this talk a thousand times with Bernadette as well as other authors, and even on my own, and suddenly I couldn’t remember a single thing on the topic. It had nothing to do with the raw masculinity being exuded from the person in the chair opposite me. Nothing at all.

And I didn’t need the water because I was feeling hot all of a sudden.

“What about you?” Will prompted. “What was your favorite children’s book growing up—one that contained a strong female lead character?”

“Uh...” I hated this question, because the truth was, I didn’t have one: I had a hundred. I’d read voraciously as a kid, using the library to escape my mother’s illness and my dad’s inability to cope with it. The names of dozens of books and authors raced through my head as I twisted the cap off the water bottle. Ouch. Why was this always so hard? I needed to remember to pick one and write it down on my hand before these things began.

“Wait,” Will said, lowering his foot and leaning forward again. “Don’t tell me. I think I know. Would you happen to have been named after its main character?”

I stared at him, startled. “What? No. Who?”

“Really?” He was smiling mysteriously again, like he’d got hold of some secret information about me. “You’re not named after one of children’s literature’s greatest female characters of all time, Josephine March fromLittle Women?”

Chapter Thirteen

Wow.

I took a long pull from the water bottle, then said, “No, I’m not named after Jo March, as a matter of fact. My parents were huge fans of the musician Joe Cocker, so they named me after him, only they left off theeat the end because they thought that made it feminine. But since you brought her up, let’s get this out of the way right now, since it’s one of the most important questions in all of feminist literature. Who should Jo inLittle Womenhave ended up with, Laurie or Professor Bhaer?”

Will’s grin went from enigmatic to genuinely warm. “That’s a trick question. The answer is obviously neither of them, since Louisa May Alcott herself remained single all her life, and was famously quoted saying that she never wanted Jo to end up married. She only did it because so many of her young female readers wrote to her asking her whom Jo was going to marry, assuming that marriage was the only conceivable happy ending for a woman. And economically, it was for most women at the time Alcott was writing.”

I frowned, impressed. Bonus points for Mr. Price. Hehaddone some reading. Or perhaps watched the latest film based onLittle Women, possibly with his sister or because he’d been trapped with nothing else to do on a plane.

“But my personal feeling is Laurie,” he went on. “Bhaer didn’t respect the thing that mattered most to Jo, her writing, and Laurie did.”

I was appalled.

“That is completely untrue,” I said. “Professor Bhaerdidrespect Jo’s work. He simply felt that her writing would be better if she wrote from the heart about the things that truly mattered to her, women’s issues and family life, as opposed to the tales of mystery and horror she was writing under a pen name. And, strictly from a financial point of view, he turned out to be right, since her books on those subjects became her most successful.”

“Which brings me to a question I’ve been wanting to ask you.” Will’s gaze was very dark and intent on mine—well, on the lenses of my sunglasses. “Have you ever felt that advice might apply to you?”

What was going on here? “What advice?”

“That instead of writing the stories you write—about talking cats—you might want to try writing from the heart about things that truly matter to you.”

I was so stunned by this that for a moment I couldn’t reply. I think the audience was stunned, too. I couldn’t hear a sound from them—not so much as the rustle of plastic peeled back from a cookie purchased from a Snappette. At the very least, I’d have expected to hear a bark of outragefrom Frannie, whose husband, Saul, had been writing quite successfully about gory vampire and ghost attacks for nearly forty years.

But... nothing.

Of course, it was possible they’d all left, bored to tears by our bickering. I still couldn’t see a thing beyond the edge of the stage.

“I’m sorry,” I said, when I could finally find my voice. “Are you implying that mybestsellingchildren’s books about a talking cat who helps the young kittens she babysits through major life difficulties like their parents getting divorced, and moving, and friendship troubles, and bullying, and sibling rivalry, and crushes, and going away to summer camp—just to name a few—aren’t written frommy heartanddon’t really matter?”

I could feel my body temperature rising, and the spotlights weren’t helping the situation. The lenses of my sunglasses were beginning to fog up so that I couldn’t even see Will anymore. I had to whip them off.

“That isn’t what I—” Will began, but I was so annoyed, I forgot my promise to myself to be gracious to him in front of his adopted hometown audience, and interrupted.

“They may not matter much toyou, but I can assure you that those subjects matter quite a lot to kids.”

“I’m sure they do. I just wondered if—” Will appeared to be turning as pale beneath the spotlights as I was turning red.

“And when the tips on how to navigate them are delivered by a cute talking cat and her friends as opposed to printed out on some crappy pamphlet from the school counselor’s office,they become a lot more palatable and accessible to those kids, especially for reluctant readers, which a lot of kids are.”