I’m an Idiot
Bex O’Brian
Page of writing by Bex O’Brian
I’m an idiot; that’s my secret. Well kept, I might add. Genius has been thrown my way a couple of times, always by men, and usually to prove how smart they are. But idiot, I am. Now it’s called other things: dyslexic, ADHD. My learning disability, not properly diagnosed until I was well into my forties, included spatial dyslexia—don’t get behind me when I back up a car, I will run you over—inversion of letters and words, trouble writing down numbers, and woeful spelling. However, during my formative years there were no other words for what I suffered. Certainly no other words I could read or write.
As any person with dyslexia knows, you devise strategies. In grade school, a good one was to ask to go to the bathroom when it was getting perilously close to my turn to read aloud. When writing, the un-spellable ‘forest’ became ‘woods’. No stories of mine involved anyone going to the ‘hospital.’ ‘Consciousness,’ higher or lower was ignored. And, thank god, my parents gave me the moniker Bex at birth. The Rebecca I learned to manage, but my middle name, Edith, stumped me. Unfortunately, I am named after my grandmother. My very proper English father, looming over me, demanded I sign my Christmas cards (now Xmas) ‘Your loving Granddaughter, Rebecca Edith’. There was a moment of panic, but cursive is an amazing thing. You can fudge a lot. In fact, to this day, I defy anyone to read my handwriting. My father, who had the most beautiful writing in the world, would sigh heavily before snatching the card out of my hand.
By high school, it was getting harder to hide. But the practice of putting the slow kids in the back of the class and ignoring them helped. As did being a trouble maker. I spent more time in the principal’s office than in the classroom. Not that there weren’t hours of terror. Quebec in the 1970s was careening towards separation, which meant that if we Anglos were going to survive and not get called out for hanging on to our colonial ways, we had to learn to speak the lingo of the masses. Fuck. French class. If only I had a hundred appendices that could burst on cue—no such luck.
Instead, I made a plan. I would drop out of school and, get this, audit classes at Concordia University where my uncle, Michael, lectured on James Joyce and Shakespeare. Now you might be wondering where my parents were as I was making these momentous decisions. Divorce is wonderful at creating enough chaos that if you’re a wily little fucker you can, below the adult mayhem, pretty much do what you want. Besides, over the years, my mother was constantly writing notes to excuse me from class. “I am sorry you think Canadian History is important, but I feel if Bex is bored, she won’t absorb any of the treaties that have shaped this backwater of a country.” Looking back on it now, I suspect my mother was afraid for me (and of me). She didn’t know how to cope with something she didn’t understand; after all, I was verbally dexterous, in fact, too mouthy for my own good.
I attended one lecture, feeling nothing but lost pitched up against a sea of earnest twenty-year-olds. I retreated home and spent the rest of the year waiting for my friends to get out of class so we could get high.
Weirdly, by the time I was twelve, I had become a voracious reader (why is the word voracious usually attached to reading? I guess “I’m a voracious fucker, or “I’m a voracious skier” doesn’t really work). But it wasn’t until nearly thirty years later I understood how I pulled off this magic trick. My husband, Charles, and I were in Spalonga, Italy, part of a trip where we were blowing through the advance of Charles’ next book, when the galleys to his first book, Wickerby, arrived. To say he had laboured over every word would be an understatement. Now, not trusting the typesetter not to have mangled his perfectly constructed sentences, he had me sit opposite with the galleys. I was to read it aloud so he could compare it to his original. Off I went in my best reading voice. Within seconds, Charles looked like he was having a coronary.
“Wait! Wait! Wait! What the fuck!” He snatched the galleys out of my hands, his eyes frantically roaming over the text.
“What the fuck were you reading?”
“Your book?”
“You were changing half the words.”
Later that night, sitting in the town square, the only entertainment to be found in that tiny Italian village, we did a test. He had me read a letter from my mother, a few lines from the International Herald Tribune, and, brave on his part, a bit more of Wickerby. It seems I read by taking a mental picture of a paragraph to get the meaning. But should I be required to read it out loud, I change words at random. In my defense, I am a lover of language. If I see a great sentence, I do slow down and savour it. On the plus side, I can read a shit ton of books.
Why the hell did I become a writer? I didn’t mean to. With pretty much everyone in my family making a living as writers, I knew enough that not being able to spell or transposing letters would be a definite setback. Mother, who had a newspaper column, also had a regular gig reviewing movies and interviewing the stars should they pass through Montreal. At dinner, she would regale us with stories about how often the actors weren’t the sharpest. They probably were smart, just struck dumb by mother’s desperate attempts to prove she was the real star in the room. Bingo, I thought, I’ll be an actress. In due course, off to New York I trotted and enrolled in HB Studios. I quickly realised I didn’t have the makings of an actress. No talent, for one, and a deep discomfort at the communal nature of acting. And then there was the line reading. Out I dropped. But into nothing. Wide-open days of roaming the Village, which in those days, was filled mostly with gay men, who had no interest in befriending an eighteen-year-old girl. Lonely time. Most afternoons, I ended up at the Jefferson Market Library. There I started writing. Badly. But it was solitary, and if I never showed my work to anyone, what the hell did it matter if my sentences were backwards?
Ego is a terrible thing. Unrelenting. Confusing. And, now having met and married not one but two writers, I began to think, I’m as smart as they are but for this one thing. Fool! A lifetime of nerves, of double, triple checking my text and still hearing back that my stories were a mess. I forced Charles to read and edit all my work. Hounding him if he dared to be busy with his own stuff.
Then the world changed. In came the internet, and computers, and with them writing tools. Spell Check. Grammarly, which has a field day pointing out my wanton use of commas and, for some reason, wants me to choose between curly or straight quotation marks. God help me, but curly quotes always make me think of pubic hair. Ghost Reader, where I chose a sweet Indian female voice to read back to me and often get the giggles as her lilting voice breezes through my profanity-laced prose. And on Kindle, there’s a font called Open Dyslexic, where the letters are slightly off-kilter, which, apparently, focuses the eye better. My brain was finally freed! Now I have the pleasure of knowing that it’s not because of my learning disability when I get a rejection; it’s my writing. Like I said, idiot.
Bex O’Brian
Bex, who lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog, is the author of the novel Promiscuous Unbound and the recently-published Radius, excerpted here. Both books are published under the name Bex Brian
