But we don’t really know anything at all, except how the story should go, and we make believe it’s our story, hoping everything will turn out okay. The difference is that onstage, or in a film, we acknowledge the artifice, we accept that we’ve made a world that excludes what we ignore. Like gods, we invent a world that makes sense.
IN THE FILM of Cassie’s life, she recovers from her grief (because everything she went through can be summarized as grief), and Bev is restored to her as Cassie once and for a long time believed Bev to be—the plump, geeky, intensely loving mother who is her staunch ally in a lonely world. In the film, Cassie begins again, in a high school in Stamford, Connecticut, or in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Portland, Oregon, a new chapter, in which she can be anyone she wants to be, popular and successful and undamaged and free, heading to her immaculate future.
In this new life, where the darkness of the Bonnybrook is forever forgotten, she swims, glides perfectly through long golden afternoons in crystalline water, like the water at the quarry. The bottom is never murky, or treacherous, and she knows she will never drown. And when we see that film—if they ever make it, if it’s ever released—we’ll say: Yes, of course. This is what it means to be a young woman; this is the true story, this beautiful vision: Cassie’s calm strokes and their gentle ripples; her ribboning white-blond hair; the smooth, dappled green water overhung, along the shore, with branches; the boulders of tawny stone; immense, above, the blue, blue sky. This is what we will never forget.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY HEARTFELT GRATITUDE to my wise and generous editor, Jill Bialosky, and to the amazing team at W. W. Norton; and also to Ursula Doyle, Charlie King, and everyone at Fleet/Little, Brown UK. Infinite thanks to Sarah Chalfant and Andrew Wylie, my agents, extraordinary champions and stellar human beings.
My loving thanks, too, to dear family and friends for support through thick and thin: to James, my love and first reader; to Lucian, for keeping us laughing; and to Livia, my second reader, whose perspective and suggestions were invaluable.
Thanks also to Louise Glück for her poem “Midsummer,” an inspiration.
ALSO BY CLAIRE MESSUD
The Woman Upstairs
The Emperor’s Children
The Hunters
The Last Life
When the World Was Steady
Copyright © 2017 by Claire Messud
All rights reserved
First Edition
Excerpts from “Casabianca” from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2011 by
The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Messud, Claire, 1966– author.
Title: The burning girl : a novel / Claire Messud.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017017334 | ISBN 9780393635027 (hardcover)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PS3563.E8134 B87 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017334
ISBN 978-0-393-63503-4 (e-book)
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