Who Is Maud Dixon?

by Alexandra Andrews

In fact, she wanted nothing more than to be a writer. Didn’t they all? Every one of them probably had half a novel tucked away in some drawer. But you don’t go around calling yourself a writer until it’s out of the drawer.

Florence had never been able to reach the pitch of outrage the times seemed to require, and this immunity to communal indignation often left her on the outside of, well, everything. This outrage seemed to be the glue that held everyone else together:

She wasn’t placid, certainly not, but she reserved her anger for more personal uses. Though what these were she couldn’t say precisely. She could be as surprised as anyone by her flights of rage. They were rare, disorienting experiences that left her feeling weak and confused, almost jet-lagged, as if her body had raced ahead without her and she was just catching up.

All she had to do was become a writer, and her alienation would magically transform into evidence of brilliance rather than a source of shame.

Her sense of self slipped from her as easily as a coat slips off the back of a chair. She’d outgrown the girl she’d been in Florida, but how did one go about building up someone new? She tried on moods and personalities like outfits. One day she was interested in ruthlessness. The next, she wanted to be an object of adoration. She put her faith in the transformative power of new boots, liquid eyeliner, and once—terrifyingly—a beret, as if an identity could seep in from the outside, like nicotine from a patch.

She was so hemmed in all the time by timidity and insecurity that every once in a while some self-destructive impulse in her demanded brash action.

Change is never a smooth curve; it comes in leaps and jolts, plateaus and remissions. And in the periods after an old identity fades away but before a new one is fully installed, there is a certain sense of impunity. As if nothing quite matters. You are not quite yourself. You’re not quite anyone.

This, then, was someplace she could practice a new way of being in the world; a way of relating to people not as a supplicant but as the object of supplication herself.