I blamed it on a 5′11 Dutch model but to be honest, it was his fault for liking Dutch models in the first place.

She was glossy and gorgeous and every time I saw one of those ads I’d have to deal with it. A billboard sized it with slim hips and thighs and an airbrushed face.

I’d always think the same thing. “Well. She has to be thin. If she gains weight she’ll look like a man.” I’d say it to myself. Maybe to Eliza, who bore the weight of the whole will-he-or-wont-he (fall in love with me) conundrum. My friend would listen and she’d drink more beer. Not because I drove her to it or anything (although a lesser lady would have succumbed) but because that’s what Germans do…listen over lager.

He was leaving the country every few weeks. To go here or there. The stick in stilettos moved around. And he moved with her. Then he’d come home and confide in his friend.

I’d pretend not to love by pretending to care. I’d bite my tongue and flutter my lashes and wonder ‘If I had legs like her, would he still call me mate?‘

I soon learned the whole best friend dynamic was highly overrated. Especially when one wanted to lick the other’s face off. I couldn’t help it.

Continued…..

It was four in the morning when she woke me.

“They’re there. They wont go away. They’re so mournful and sad.”

Turns out two Edwardian chics were standing in the corner of her room. Crying alot. She could feel their pain. It was killing her. I asked if she was on crack and handed her the bottle of scotch I kept under my bed. She drank it and fell asleep in the floor. The next morning she explained.

“Blah blah blah. I see dead people. Blah blah blah. ”

I was late for class and didn’t care. My flatmate was a flake and I knew it. But I still had to ask.

“What? Like that kid in Sixth Sense?”

“I wont have you belittling my kind.” She said it like she was serious.

“Your kind? What are you, a wookie or something?” I was just kidding. “I’m just kidding.”

She didn’t think it was funny and left.

Two nights later, pretty much the same thing. She tore the front door open, half-ran-half-crawled up the stairs, and started tearing her room apart. This time it was a kid from the seventies. Dead as a doornail, just like the girls in her room. Followed her around all day.

“My crystals! I need my crystals! I cant take this anymore. I have to seal my aura!”

I should have ignored her. She was pretty insane that night. But she was making a mess of her room and I cant stand when people do that. It’s like on Sweet Home Alabama, when Dempsey covers Witherspoon’s apartment with rose petals. She’s looking all happy and I’m like ‘You know you have to clean that up, right’. So I couldn’t just stand by without a word.

Here’s me being clever. “You ever think maybe they just need your help. You know. Like in the movie.”

She screamed at me. “Thats not how it works! Don’t you know anything at all!”

“OK.” Here’s me being cleverer. “Maybe they’re just after you. You know. Like to GET you.”

I made a face when I said it. She passed out. Cold.

Her father collected her later that night. Took her home to their 500 year old manor house where the ghosts were more docile. She came back on Saturday to apologise. Off to Tibet. Something about ancient temples and finding her place in the universe. She would see me in a month. In the meantime she was sorry. She didn’t mean to cause upset. I told her it was ok. I didn’t care about her fits or her ghosts. As long as they stayed out of my room.

I really didn’t.

The lunch crowd are lazying around the library. On the steps. Beneath the portico. By the tram. They’re sucking down iced lollies in Exchange Square and £8 cocktails up and down Deansgate. Diners drink and don’t eat under umbrellas and open sky.

I want sun blushed tomatoes. Crusty bread. Balsamic and olive oil to dip it all in. But it’s too hot to eat.

I down cold water and a plum. Plums are runny and sticky like the heat down my back. I don’t like Red Bull, but I have one anyway. Sugar free. To make up for my ‘just a plum’ lunch.

I want to sunbathe by the bit of wet on Bridgewater. Near the P&P. But I don’t like age on the face. Ninety odd degrees is good for that and I’m still young….but not that young.

If I were back home and ten, I’d wait until the sun went down and jump in the pool. The sun sets best this way. I’d float on my back until the sky got black.

But dad doesn’t have a pool anymore. And I’m not ten.

So I’ll go back to my apartment with no air conditioning, because 200 year old buildings aren’t made that way, and I’ll sweat.

Klein writes in ‘girlfriends around the table’ relatable. Natural narration that makes the reader forget the New York native’s not sitting in front of them, sharing mother-in-law horror stories and mouth watering metaphors. (She’s all about ‘emotion as food’ …because isn’t it just?)

Readers will laugh and cry. Love and hate. They’ll connect with Klein; and they’ll connect with her life.

Cosmopolitan, but not in your face. Not chick lit. But chick litters will love it. I found “Straight Up and Dirty” in the Self Help Section. By the end of it, I understood why.

Straight Up is about relationships; but it’s about more than that. It’s a reassessment. It’s a wake up call. It’s a ’stop relying on other people for happiness’…and Do today. Because you can.

Stephanie Klein’s memoir reminded me of all the things I want to accomplish, and why. It’s poetic motivation and I loved it.

“I am thin. Like a piece of string.”

Chris would say the words and I’d nod like a madwoman and look at others to agree. Sometimes they would – because she was smart and hot and the homecoming queen. Sometimes they’d just shake their heads and not understand.

We wrote SNL skits in our spare time. Chris and I. It was better than boys and we liked to laugh. I did a one legged, blind ballerina. Chris did The String Chick. It was her Spartan Cheerleader. Her Mary Katherine Gallagher. Her Night at the Roxbury.

I had no props. Chris had one. An old shoe lace. She’d hold it vertical in front of her. Pull the ends tight. And tuck herself in behind it. *Hidden* “I am thin. Like a piece of string. Watch me disappear.” She’d strike a pose and say “Oh yeah!”

One day a befuddled cheerleader called her on it: “Crystal. I can see you. People are just saying they can’t to be nice.”

Chris peeked out from behind the shoe lace. Slow. Deliberate. Dazed. She looked at me and I looked back. We knew what she had to do.

She carried that shoe lace for years. Whenever she was around boring or annoying, or when she just felt like disappearing because she couldn’t be bothered being there…she’d whip out the lace, hold it in front of her, and hide behind it.

“I am thin. Like a piece of string.”

She’d smile and she’d disappear.

According to the American Library Association every year hundreds of attempts are made to remove literary classics from schools and libraries.

See: Banned Books and Why Censorship Makes Me Laugh

The following novels have been challenged or banned.

“To Kill a Mockingbird” — Harper Lee
“Lolita” — Vladmir Nabokov
“The Great Gatsby” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
“1984″ — George Orwell
“The Sun Also Rises” — Ernest Hemingway
“The Grapes of Wrath” — John Steinbeck

“Beloved” — Toni Morrison
“Ulysses” — James Joyce
“Catcher in the Rye” — J.D. Salinger
“Catch-22″ — Joseph Heller

“As I Lay Dying” — William Faulkner
“Song of Solomon” — Toni Morrison

“Their Eyes were Watching God” — Zora Neale Hurston
“Gone with the Wind” — Margaret Mitchell
“A Clockwork Orange” — Anthony Burgess
“A Farewell to Arms” — Ernest Hemingway
“Heart of Darkness” — Joseph Conrad
“Go Tell it on the Mountain” — James Baldwin
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — Ken Kesey

“For Whom the Bell Tolls” — Ernest Hemingway
“The Call of the Wild” — Jack London
“Lady Chatterley’s Lover” — DH Lawrence
“All the King’s Men” — Robert Penn Warren
“The Jungle” — Upton Sinclair

“Satanic Verses” — Salman Rushdie
“Invisible Man” — Ralph Ellison
“In Cold Blood” — Truman Capote
“Sons and Lovers” — DH Lawrence

“Naked Lunch” — William S. Burroughs
“A Separate Peace” — John Knowles
“Cat’s Cradle” — Kurt Vonnegut
“Women in Love” — DH Lawrence
“The Naked and the Dead” – Norman Mailer

“An American Tragedy” — Theodore Dreiser
“Rabbit, Run” — John Updike
“Tropic of Cancer” — Henry Miller
“Native Son” — Richard Wright

My advice: start reading.

Filed away under ‘Princeton’ and ‘Pink Shag Carpet’ are the following:

Chris, Earl and me. A two story brick and a gas main.

Random annoyances, foreign athletes, and the odd mom ….or two. ICQ, academia and romantic pursuits.

Wine by the gallon, midnight sausage runs and Victoria’s Secret. Shared wardrobes, spats, and fourth year finals.

Diets of no nutritional value, indoor tracks and shady photographers. (Oh yes he was!)

European cars, European boys, tennis players and servicemen. Korean cigarettes, close shaves and convenient stores.

Upset drivers, emergency services and near explosions.

It wasn’t orderly. But it was my life.

Man. Wife. Boy. The Jenkins family lived on top of Toler Mountain. Eight miles by road. We managed it in two by climbing straight up and over.

Mr Jenkins was a Holy Roller who brought the message, and a good bit more, every Sunday down at a little church in Buttermilk Junction. Mrs Jenkins made cherry cobbler and nothing else when she wasn’t sitting in the front row of her husband’s church listening to him tell the congregation what they’d done wrong and what he’d done right.

Preacher Jenkins was just he right amount of odd for a man named Ennis. His clothes were tighter than they should have been and he spit shined and coiffed his hair just enough. At the altar he paired excited eyes with thin, strained lips and came off looking like a possessed race horse. Ennis Jenkins could look a man to death. If you didn’t fall out in a dead faint from the heat or the spirit or ’cause it was just what you were suppose to do, you fell out when he eyeballed you long enough.

The man did his job well.

I’m drawing characters at the moment. Another little procrastination trick I’ve learned. I have several hundred to choose from.

For years I’ve been in the habit of people watching. I carry my notebook everywhere. Sketch what I see. With words instead of lines.

The man who wears the dirty Octoberfest t-shirt, to let everyone know he went to Germany 13 years ago. He never did anything else. Not in his whole life. But he went to Germany. And he drank beer. Once. I drew him.

I drew a man with heavy jowls. Blue suit. Red tie. Explosives expert in the 2nd War. Before he became a preacher. His voice was soft. It rolled like thunder. The slow kind that lets you know something’s coming…but not yet.

I drew a woman with six children. Her husband left her. Her boyfriend didn’t want her but he let her support him. He was hungry and she was fat. She loved her children. They hung from her. The weight of them made her short.

I draw people at a glance. If their lives are anything like I imagine I never know. It’s better that way. They are my peoples. They are who and what I want them to be for my fiction. I have books and books full of people. Ready to come to life. When I need them.

I draw with words. Sometimes I’m a bit long winded.

“But you do it every night.” He’s trying to defend himself. A certain little habit. “I can’t help it. It’s your fault.” By turning the tables on me. “I can set my clock by you. It’s funny.”

It may be. I haven’t decided yet.

“Whatever, it’s weird. You know this. Right?” He doesn’t answer. Instead he laughs a holds-his-stomach-and-falls-over-like-a-school-boy laugh. I hide a grin and finish with, “Wait ’til I tell my sister.”

“Please do. Tell your sister that every night you wake up 30 minutes after going to bed jumping and screaming like a mad woman.”

He’s exaggerating. It’s not a scream. It’s more like a worried moan.

“And that you,” I poke him in the belly, “are standing over me in bear-claw pose, arms raised, growling like a beast.” It’s true. He even bought a pair of plastic monster hands. For effect.

“Those are fantastic.” He always brings up the rubber mitts. “And I know you’ve hid them.” He does the eyebrow stare. “Besides, you were acting banshee-like long before I came up with the bear idea.”

“Oh that’s right. Make fun of my issues.”

“Issues? An irrational fear of a bear attack is not an issue.” He starts to laugh again. “Bears in the city!” He’s doubled over in a gut-bust now. “Because it’s a jungle out there.”

I roll my eyes. The best I can come up with. The best I can ever come up with, is: “Bears don’t live in the jungle, goof ball.”

Seriously ladies. I know we put up with a lot in the name of love. But can anyone beat this?