Amy Inspired Read Online Free PDF Page A

Afterward I listened passively to her diatribes against the Americanization of the Christian Church. Occasionally, she got her panties in a twist over one or another of the Baptists’ faults and transferred to the Methodist church on Hyde and Locust. I never worried. Eventually the Methodists would offend her too, and she’d come back to us.
    I didn’t mind her bitterness with the church or her vegetarianism or her moods—all of which were frequently inconvenient. Ironically, the very thing I thought would make us most compatible was the one and only thing I resented her for: her writing. Zoë was prolific. Where it took me hours to produce single paragraphs of decent merit, she could kick out ten, twenty pages a night without getting up from her chair.
    Nothing life threw at her could ruin her routine. She’d spent years on the edge of losing her mother, whose battle with metastatic breast cancer was epic. In fact, it had been a while since anyone considered it a battle. It was more a strategically won détente: Every few months Fay Walker went back to the front line and, against all odds, secured another cease-fire. This constant proximity to death had given Zoë a talent for living on the edge of terror. Anxiety only drove her back to the laptop, where typing calmed her worried thoughts. She was disciplined. Every morning before leaving the house she ran her five miles, ate her organic oatmeal with soy milk, and wrote her two-page minimum.
    When I asked her where she discovered such a daily wealth of ideas, she said things came to her best when she was running. I had only ever used the word marathon to describe the five hours I spent on the couch watching Lost DVDs.
    Zoë was unembarrassed about her work and preferred reading manuscripts aloud to me when they were finished. Her stuff was entertaining and articulate, though rarely as polished as I insisted it would be if revised. But she hated second drafts and rarely managed a third. The writing was good, that was all she wanted, and, above all, it was unfailingly constant . She didn’t believe in writer’s block: There was no excuse not to type.
Things Zoë believes in:
Things Zoë doesn’t believe in:
Jesus
Writer’s block
Global warming
Third drafts
Recycling
Cars
Cycling
Cable television
Ghosts
Standardized testing
Vitamin supplements
Christian romance novels
Birthdays
Door-to-door evangelism
Marriage
Trickle-down economics
    Where Zoë believed in product, I believed in process. This meant she maintained a weekly page quota while I preferred lying in dandelion fields fishing stories out of blue skies.
    This was exactly how I described our differences to Adam.
    “That’s style,” he replied. “I asked you about your respective writing philosophies.”
    “I’m not interested in philosophies of writing. I just want to write.”
    “You’re going to use that line when you’re interviewing for future teaching positions?”
    “I’m not going to teach forever. This is temporary.” I waved my hand at the library to indicate all of academia—its faculty boards, its failing copy machines, its endless grading.
    “Temporary until what? Your big book advance?”
    He winked. I scowled.
    “You know, I did the math,” he said. “I spent two years on my novel. Let’s assume it was a full-time job and let’s assume a full-time employee is due compensation for forty hours of work each week. If you divide my royalties into a standard wage it comes to a little less than forty cents an hour. You need a job, Amy. And this is as good as it gets.”
    I told him I didn’t care to borrow from his disillusionment. He told me that was fine, I would soon be given enough of my own. It was the first time I’d realized maybe I didn’t care so much for his company. That I was tired of growing tired of men and that something was wrong with me if I couldn’t stand to be with one for more than four months at a time.
    Hoping for clues, I forced myself to remember every man