Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame

by Mara Wilson

I was always in someone else’s world, and I always knew it. This, I’ve learned, is a far more common feeling than I once imagined.

I saw “Like a Virgin” on Pop-Up Video and learned that more than 90 percent of women had premarital sex. They couldn’t all be kept out of Heaven. That just seemed like a waste of otherwise perfectly good souls.

“We don’t like in other people what we don’t like in ourselves,”

But there is a place where people like me live and love while fretting constantly about their own mortality and the fate of the universe. I know who I am now: I am a New Yorker.

Now that I have to worry about things like paying bills on time, feeding my cats, and where I put my Social Security card, I don’t have time to worry about the heat death of the universe.

maybe existential anxieties are for the young.

Puberty is a completely natural phenomenon. So are earthquakes and hurricanes.

Maybe there had been a day at school when they had taught how to accept compliments graciously and how to be confident, rather than constantly vacillating between crushing self-doubt and grandiosity. I must have been out filming that day.

If I didn’t want looks to matter, I would have to stop talking and acting as if they did.

A Doll’s House,

Now I just sigh, block their accounts, and put the comedian Riki Lindhome’s song about being considered plain in Los Angeles, but “Pretty in Buffalo,” on repeat.

It is not my job to be pretty, or cute, or anything that someone else wants me to be.

I am all for self-improvement. When I’m not sleeping or procrastinating, I am trying to become a better person.

But we didn’t use “Little Bitty Pretty One” like in the movie—we used a version of Harry Belafonte’s “Matilda,” which, to me, felt more fitting.

My sister and I have the same roundabout, digressive, all-over-the-place way of talking, jumping from A to B to Z and then back to C and D.

It was the same way that, no matter how often she had told me we didn’t believe in Hell, I was still afraid of going there. Sometimes, when the panic overtook me, I wondered if I was already there.

As we drove home, I felt lighter. Giving what I had a label meant it could be addressed. I was going to get better.