aamcnamara

Since a week ago I have known I wanted to post about this, but I didn't quite know what to say. I still don't.

The outpouring of love and affection and remembrances and anecdotes that came after her death has been beautiful--she touched so many lives--but that doesn't make her death hurt any less. And I didn't even know her personally, except through her books.

Those were powerful enough, though. I grew up with them. Like a lot of people, I think, I read my first Diana Wynne Jones book without realizing it (Time of the Ghost). Later I picked up Year of the Griffin and then I was hooked. There's one phrase that's stuck with me particularly from that one: after being up all night reading a book her father recommended, Elda floats into breakfast feeling like her mind has been "opened like an umbrella--or rather a whole stack of umbrellas, some of them inside-out". There are books that do that to me, and Diana Wynne Jones's were some of them.

There's Chrestomanci and his dressing gowns and the way that I adored him, saw him as a role model for how you hold power--and, as I grew up, started to frown at them and say, "Well, why not a female Chrestomanci?" Why not? And then there's Witch Week, which I disliked at first and have now adored for years.

There are the Homeward Bounders, with more bittersweet and melancholy and anger packed in there than I quite know what to do with. There's Deep Secret which I read before I'd ever attended an SF/F convention--and I'm afraid that it colored my expectations for them, rather. ("They come up to me and ask me what it is, and I tell them it's an unidentified flying object and they go away perfectly satisfied!" "Everyone knows what a UFO is," she said.) There's Archer's Goon and the inexplicable explicableness of it all. There's Howl's Moving Castle with its flips and inversions of fairy tales and expectations, with one of the most charming love stories I have read, which I have spent years trying to get people to read after they saw the Miyazaki--"It's even better," I say imploringly, maybe just because I read it before I saw the movie.

And so, so many others--Conrad's Fate, more recently, which rang pitch-perfect off the rest of Chrestomanci for me--and this all became a part of my brain, the way that I think and see the world. Bits of how Diana Wynne Jones described her worlds got into my head, because they just encapsulated these things so well: "All power corrupts, but we need electricity", "Many of the elves have indeed gone into the West, to Minnesota and hence to California, where they are having great fun wearing punk clothes and riding motorcycles"...

Growing up homeschooled, I learned a lot about the world through books. Diana Wynne Jones's gave me a pretty accurate picture of it, I think, and they also gave me plenty of new vocabulary, because she didn't talk down to children or try to pick simple words. She used the right word, and I figured it out from context and kept reading.

She's also an author you keep growing into. I still don't understand Fire and Hemlock; I need to read it again and see if it makes sense now. Just this past Thanksgiving break, Ginger lent me Crown of Dalemark, and I finally got it. (I still like the first three better. Shh, don't tell.)

When I found out that she had died, I couldn't really process the information. I had to get dressed, eat breakfast, do two shows as a cheerful gay man. I got to see Sharyn the next day at ConBust, but not for very long. This week was busy, and I don't have very many of her books here--mostly not the ones I wanted to reread to remember her.

Yesterday evening, though, I went to see a play in the campus center. Afterward, I ended up hanging around with Kate and Anna and Alisa. We sat on uncomfortable chairs and traded stories about relatives. After a while Alisa said out of nowhere: "Once upon a time..." She set up a situation, and then pointed at me and said, "Popcorn!". The story bounced around between all of us, growing complications, twists, and turns. There were turtles basking on copper pans and an old lady with a preposterous name who wore a bustle and a lavender dress with a lace collar. There were vacuum-cleaner salesmen wearing bowties, and there were foreboding omens. There was an inexplicable mountain. Somehow it all wound together at the end, and they mostly all lived happily ever after.

That gleeful invention, that community and warmth, that odd detail that makes sense later, that inexplicable magic that nonetheless makes perfect sense--that's a lot of what I love about Diana Wynne Jones's books. Even though none of us planned it as a memorial for her, and it wasn't, it almost felt like one to me. Inventing things, laughing together, telling stories: maybe that's the best way to keep her memory alive. It's certainly a damned good one.