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This was a joke and also not a joke.
My mother and brother and I were by his side, and I held his hand.
We sat at the table, and I watched him read.
That was his reaction to everything I did.
Pride and amusement in equal measure.
My father had stories about meeting Spielberg.
Spielbergs inscription said, Peter, your imagination is a gift to be envied.
(This is where my father doubled over laughing.
Yes, he said, thats probably how it went all the fact-checking I needed.)
There are no murderous pedophiles; there are no rapists.
It was what I was afraid of, too.
It was both an escape into my fathers voice and an escape out of my daily reality.
Theyll find me, and their Pops, together.
Sometimes, this would make me cry.
Sometimes, it would make other people cry.
I said it every night and meant it every time.
The book was born from the visits with my father.
The protagonist, Alice, is visiting her father, Leonard, in the hospital.
He is a science-fiction writer famous for a 1980s time-travel novel that got turned into a long-running television series.
The characters are not me and my father except when they are.
They live on 95th Street.
Our house, the one with the basement and theETposter, was on 85th Street.
Those are different zip codes.
None of the facts are real, but the feelings all are.
It does happen a lot to writers in my particular position.
To use the parlance of the day, what is a nepo baby at 42?
I didnt publish a novel for another ten years.
Youre making too much noise upstairs.
The scene in which Lucas readsThe Talismanis not a throwaway sight gag, as Id first assumed.
Its in the final scene of the season, so brief spoilers ahead.
I hadnt missed it.
Lucas is reading the book aloud to Max in her hospital bed.
She is alive but comatose, her body broken, and he loves her.
I burst into tears.
If anyone stole that movie poster from the basement, my moneys on them.
I cried for the last 30 minutes ofStranger Things.
Id been in it all along for Steve Harrington, the heartthrob with the incredible hair.
(I married my husband for his hair.)
Is there really such a difference?
I knew the poem because my father had chosen it for my eighth-grade yearbook quote.
Yesterday, all these years later, I chose the poem for him.
I was both the girl and the writer, and my father was, too.
He was in the room when I was born, and I was in the room when he died.
