After handing in my final papers last week, I realized I had a whole summer ahead of me and decided I should use this time constructively to finally read Moll Flanders. I stared at it all last night, but couldn’t bring myself to read more than the first paragraph and the back cover. Instead, I rewrote its back-cover blurb: “After several romantically melancholic years in Paris where the stunningly stylish Moll Flanders dated eighteenth-century equivalents of Jeremy Irons, John Cusack, and Alan Rickman, Moll moved to London where she became a cautiously respected artist, fashionably misunderstood novelist, and discreetly sought-after milliner. After a life-altering disagreement with her eighteenth-century Alan Rickman equivalent (who, while riding in a picturesque landscape in the rain, suffers a tragic fall from a very attractive dapple-grey horse, and utters ‘Moll. Forgive me,’ as his final words. The only one to hear his long-overdue apology was the dapple grey who promptly disregarded these words as inconsequential), Moll set out to make it on her own, possessing only her rapier-like wit and acute sense of style. In due time, she became an Augustan-era It Girl and found almost-true love with an eighteenth-century Noel Gallagher, and then truer love with a John Cusack equivalent.” I wrote twelve more versions of the blurb, all of them involving Alan Rickman, John Cusack, rain in a picturesque landscape, and an attractive horse of varying colours. Some included members of Oasis.
No matter how many times I rewrote the back-cover blurb, I had to come to terms with the fact that this Moll does not live in London, or Paris, nor does she perambulate within a picturesque landscape sodden with melancholic rain. Rather, this Moll lives in Edmonton where the men who love her are imaginary, fictional, or weird, the landscape is flat and snowy eight months of the year, and millinery is confined to the knitting of toques. Maybe instead of reading Moll Flanders this summer, I should write my own fortunes and misfortunes. And so, dear reader, I ask you, as Moll asks her dear reader on the first page, to “give me leave to speak of myself, under that Name till I dare own who I have been, as well as who I am.”