I

t reminded him of the time a famously irascible novelist had taken a cheap shot at creative nonfiction by proposing to write an essay delimiting the connections between a) the basketball player John Stockton, b) the spectrum of blue made available by the gloaming in the Yorkshire Dales of North England, and c) Neanderthal grieving. The irascible novelist’s number one reply guy had commented that he’d love to read that essay, “in all honesty,” to which a well-liked literary critic responded that every time he read a parodic topic for creative nonfiction, he could count down the actual seconds until someone declared said topic to sound legitimately good, and that this might say something about the state of our relationship to the world, or at the very least mark a turning point in the contemporary essay. The reply guy had then responded to the literary critic in a tone somewhere between defensively sarcastic and obsequious—it was hard to read tone on Twitter—saying “everything is creative nonfiction: the sky, this ant, that one blind llama, the sound of traffic, lawnmowers that won’t stop,” at which point the irascible novelist had deleted her original Tweet.

Spencer finished his muffin while Tracy wandered in and out of the room looking for something. (Yes, their names were Spencer and Tracy.) He waved, half to acknowledge his wife and half to wave her away. Class was about to begin.

This was back in 2021, on a Monday in late July, halfway through the six-week summer course Mid-Valley Community College’s board of trustees just then considering Spencer for a full-time position had strongly encouraged him to teach. The class, on the American essay, was a gen-ed, so at least half of his students were focused elsewhere, typically business or nursing, but this being a summer course his were also students above average, drive-wise. Spencer looked at the lesson plan. He’d be quizzing them on the weekend’s reading assignment, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” then leading a discussion about whether and under what circumstances a subject might be seen most clearly when indirectly approached. If you were to ask Spencer if he honestly thought that a subject could ever actually be seen most clearly when indirectly approached, he’d privately acknowledge that, well, he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but he’d remind you about the discovery in quantum mechanics that observation itself altered the state of that which was being observed, and that consequently, theoretically, one might be able to apprehend one’s subject in a more natural or pure or honest state if it remained kind of peripheral, if that made sense. If you were to further inquire as to whether Spencer had studied quantum mechanics, he’d happily admit that he had not, but suggest that you were being argumentative or condescending or both.

At nine o’clock, Spencer launched the Zoom and watched his students begin logging on. Everything was still virtual then, though there was talk about in-person classes resuming in the fall. It was policy to have your camera on, but not everyone had access to a good or private space in their homes and so the unspoken agreement was to try your best. Mostly, Spencer was watching to see whether Brenda Starling would make an appearance. As one of his students without a good or private space, Brenda was iffy, camera-wise. At least for class. She was not camera shy at all when it came to social media.

Since his father’s long-planned murder by the State of Texas back in May, Spencer had been finding it difficult to concentrate. He’d been estranged from his father for over a decade—ever since his trial—and given the circumstances the man’s death hadn’t plunged Spencer into the kind of despair you read about. His own personal experience of what he supposed technically counted as grief was far less dramatic. It didn’t seem to have a center or emotional engine, it just expanded into the room of Spencer’s life like an amount of gas too small to poison but strong enough to smell. The therapist he and Tracy went to for couples counseling assured Spencer that grief came in all shapes and sizes and encouraged him to feel his way through it without judgement. This therapist was a Buddhist, big on forgiveness and, running completely counter Freud, believed that identity was determined prior to neurosis, not forged by it. He was fairly woo-woo, in other words—in addition to being a nearly inappropriate hugger—but he was ultimately good at his job. He had a thing of “cutting to the chase” instead of waiting forever for Spencer and Tracy to come to an idea he thought they should have.

Anyway, concentration. He couldn’t do it. Movies went unfinished. Books sat open, face-down, draining into his armrest for days. Podcasts were okay, but he didn’t listen to them so much as occasionally eavesdrop while looking out the window or scrolling through Twitter. (It looked like Brenda was a no-show that morning, by the way, so Spencer shot his class the quiz and gave them ten minutes.) Somewhere along the way, he decided to give TikTok a try. It was as though the Internet had until then just been warming up, and had in this platform found a way to fulfil its mission and fully flatten the mind. It was a revelation. It was perfect. Spencer became an addict.

Once the class had turned in their quizzes, Spencer asked what they’d thought of the piece. The start of in-class discussion is always a little awkward, as you know, but he’d learned to give them room to be thoughtful. He gazed broadly at the screen’s Brady Bunch grid of students, looking for subtle motions that might indicate some internal rumination, a tilt of the chin, a frown at the lip, a skyward eye, but everyone was perfectly still; it wasn’t until he jerked into someone’s half-finished sentence that he realized his screen had frozen.

“Sorry, Patterson, can you repeat that please?”

Patterson Nati was a young man from Eritrea, often the first person to speak.

“The story makes it seem like Frank Sinatra is a very lonely man.”

“Interesting. How do you mean?”

“He has all these people around him, right? But he doesn’t seem to be close to them. He’s always joking. I feel very bad for a man who surrounds himself with so many people but has no friends.”

“I definitely think there’s something here about the irony of celebrity. Anyone have any thoughts on Patterson’s observation?”

Again the class was silent. Tracy popped her head in the door of Spencer’s office and pointed at her face and mouthed something incomprehensible containing the letter L, to which Spencer gave a tiny but hopefully noticeable shrug and mouthed are you kidding me.

“I think he seems like an asshole.”

Deidre North was still in high school and taking college courses through Running Start.

“Okay, Deidre. That’s valid, but could you unpack it a bit?”

She rolled her eyes. Everything was obvious to Deidre.

“He treats people like shit. He throws his weight around for no reason. It’s like, leave the boots guy alone! He likes the boots!”

The boots guy was a reference to a scene in which Sinatra picks on a stranger shooting pool for being underdressed, singling out the man’s boots for ridicule. (Sinatra is reported to have asked, like a schoolyard bully, “You expecting a storm?”) The boots guy turns out to be a young Harlan Ellison, hot off the heels of his first big screenplay and en route to becoming an award-winning author of science fiction with a reputation for being combative—Spencer had always assumed that the interaction with Sinatra and subsequent inclusion in the widely read Esquire piece had in fact been partially responsible for not only the reputation, but the man’s actual attitude on some subconscious level.

There were some murmurs of assent, but another student spoke up in defense of Sinatra, saying that his behavior was just because he had so much pressure on him at all times to be perfect, at which yet another student scoffed, and look, the fact is that this story isn’t about classroom dynamics. It shouldn’t surprise you brainiacs that students in an entry level course in a community college are going to have a hard time moving past the judgement phase when considering a piece of nonfiction. Really what we want to do is pan over to where Spencer’s mind was wandering while he was half-listening to his class argue about the character of Frank Sinatra.

The TikTok thing spun out of control almost immediately. Spencer would be, say, waiting for his coffee to brew, just standing in the kitchen, morning light, quiet house, cold feet, and start flicking through, and before he knew it his coffee was not only brewed, it was cold, and it was in the midst of this addiction that Tracy suggested he look up his students. Spencer had been complaining about the fact that he’d never met his kids in person, how the lack of physicality stymied the teacher-student relationship because all those casual exchanges in class constituted an entire economy of indicators that could be spent determining the real opportunities and barriers for learning.

“Not sure it’s a great idea,” she said, “for a teacher to bemoan the lack of physicality.”

“My point is I feel like I can’t get to know them.”

And here she jutted her chin at the phone Spencer was even as they spoke greedily flicking through. “You could stalk them on that stupid app.”

So it was settled.

“What can we say about this essay,” Spencer said presently, interrupting what had devolved into an argument about proper evening attire, “beyond making value judgements about its subject?”

You might be surprised to learn that Spencer had never really set out to become a teacher. He’d never thought much about his future at all, to be honest; it had always seemed sufficiently distant as to require no immediate preparation until, astonishingly, he’d woken up one day living in it. If anything, he’d had routinely negative experiences with teachers—or people in teaching roles, since to describe what they did as teaching often seemed generous—beginning with but not limited to his own father, who had been an elementary school science teacher as well as the vice principal at the school Spencer had attended until the sixth grade.

This time he decided to fill the silence. “Did anyone notice anything peculiar about this profile? Anything missing?”

More silence.

“Aren’t profiles usually based around an interview?”

“He speaks to a lot of people.”

“Yes,” Spencer agreed. “He speaks to a lot of people, but not the man himself. Frank Sinatra refused to be interviewed for the piece. So. What do we lose? Anything? What do we gain?”

Deidre spoke up. “There’s no way Sinatra would have told him the truth anyway.”

“Good. He might be an unreliable source for his own story. Anything else?”

When he was a junior in high school, Spencer had taken an elective called Social Ethics taught by a fat man with a kind of cult following. Word was he wouldn’t just teach you the subject matter, he’d teach you how to think, so it was a classroom for nerds and wastoids both, a supposed safe haven for kids who for one reason or another didn’t fit in. But what Spencer learned there was that adults could be every bit as needy and small as he felt, only meaner. The fat man ridiculed his students, ceaselessly pointing out their flaws, and even in a moment of praise, the feeling was, his intent was not to support the kid in question, rather to denigrate the rest of the class by comparison. He singled out Spencer in particular for his acne (which was in fact a problem) repeatedly suggesting that he was taking steroids. This was an insult with layers, because why would he be taking steroids? Was he trying to put muscle on his flimsy, unathletic frame? Why would he care? It impugned not only his body, but his character, and Spencer had long forgotten everything he learned in that class but could remember the teacher vividly, the way his daily chocolate muffin sat sweating on his desk.

Another case in point was a college professor who took special interest in Spencer. He had several classes with her, all philosophy, and it was with her encouragement that he picked up a double major. He would linger at her desk nominally to gut-check his understanding of some idea not covered in class—that a text had no fixed meaning, say—while privately thrilling at the heady mentorship itself, the kind of classic, maybe a little cliché, student-teacher dynamic he’d always sought but which had until that point proven elusive. But after graduation, he’d found himself at a faculty party where, over a glass of wine and a clandestine cigarette on the back porch, she’d made a pass at him, thus shoehorning their relationship into a different kind of cliché altogether. After he’d demurred, humiliated, his mentor had smiled and apologized, and before heading back into the house had said, simply, “Couldn’t hurt to try.” Before leaving, Spencer had watched through the window as she joined a small group at the kitchen counter and laughed, her reentry painless, its meaning fixed. It was the last time he ever saw her.

Those two little vignettes were meant to show you how Spencer’s general impression of teaching had been formed. Basically, his feeling was that the teachers in his life always seemed to want something in return, as though education was some kind of exchange. They gave lessons, and in return they expected to be given youth, or at least to get a hall pass for youthful behavior. And this brings us to Brenda Starling.

When Tracy brought her up in therapy, the therapist seemed . . . amused wasn’t the right word. Satisfied? Smug?

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he said. “That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Tracy was nonplussed.

“Keats?” he added.

Smug. It was definitely smug.

Spencer knew the poem. Ode on a Grecian Urn. But he wasn’t going to bite. “I’m pretty sure Keats wasn’t on TikTok,” he said.

“Spence,” said Tracy.

The therapist raised his hand. “What do you see when you look at Miss Starling?”

“It’s more about what I feel.”

“I’d like to see if we can get at what’s causing those feelings.”

You might be thinking that with all this fuss, we must be talking about pretty racy content where Brenda is concerned. You know, skimpy outfits, suggestive or else flat out sexually explicit, that sort of thing. But it wasn’t that. Yes, Brenda was an attractive young woman. Long dark hair. Green eyes. Thin and shapely. Her videos didn’t so much foreground those qualities as contextualize them in a culture that had somehow found a way to celebrate the soul-crushing impact of modernity. She was herself, but she was everyone. Almost exclusively devoted to memes, her account was a series of lip syncs and short choreographies, of motions that she had not created but merely reproduced. The effect was a kind of stasis, the memes holding her, perhaps even molding her, as if Brenda was becoming the very pattern she reflected. She would stare out from Spencer’s phone, bold and blank, always with the same vague smile that teetered between autonomy and dependence.

“It’s interesting,” noted the therapist smugly, “that you chose the words autonomy and dependence. When else are we caught between those states?”

Tracy’s phone rang.

“Sorry,” she said. “I have to take this.”

Spencer and the therapist watched Tracy mince out of the room.

The nominal reason they were in therapy was an ultimatum Tracy had given Spencer about his habit of clamming up when in a bad mood, which described much of the previous year but especially since his father’s death. Tracy was ready to have kids, but she did not want to pass along unhealthy patterns and the clamming up thing was one that seemed at least potentially addressable and maybe even solvable in therapy. For his part, Spencer was privately using the therapy to summon the courage to tell Tracy that he didn’t want children at all. This would of course be a significant hurdle, relationship-wise, despite the fact that they’d never really agreed on or explicitly planned to have them and it was just something that had slowly become clear to Spencer that Tracy assumed would eventually happen. If not handled delicately, and in the presence of a neutral third party, the disclosure could spell the end of Spencer Tracy—as they affectionally called themselves. Spencer didn’t want that, per se, he just didn’t want kids. He was one hundred percent fine with their cat Bonaventure, Bon-bon for short. Sometimes Bon mot.

The classroom conversation had turned to New Journalism, and how that designation might apply to “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” Despite the fact that he’d had them read the Wikipedia entry for it along with the Gay Talese, Spencer could sense that his students were confused by the term.

“In other words,” he said, “are there passages that feel more like fiction?”

Christina Chu used the hand raising feature.

“Yes Christina.”

“‘It was music to make love by,’” she read, “‘and doubtless much love had been made by it all over America at night in cars, while the batteries burned down, in cottages by the lake, on beaches during balmy summer evenings, in secluded parks and exclusive penthouses and furnished rooms.’”

“Good, good. Why did you pick that passage?”

“Because it’s beautiful.”

“I agree that it’s beautiful, but can’t anything be beautiful?”

He didn’t blame them for being befuddled. Wasn’t everything kind a gray area those days? The personal essay had become increasingly personal. Alternative facts were a thing. The irony was that Gay Talese would have had a hemorrhage if he’d been alive to witness the blurring, the degradation of the boundary between fact and fiction. Spencer thought of what the well-liked literary critic had said on Twitter. Was it that creative nonfiction had indeed jumped the shark after having achieved a zenith of cultural relevance, or had it instead achieved a kind of Fukuyama-esque end state and, like late-stage capitalism, was now able to devour its own critique? (We of course know the answer to this now, but Spencer was seeing this play out in real time.)

“It’s speculative,” said Patterson.

“Ah ha! Go on.”

“The author didn’t, you know, see any of that happen. He’s just making it up.”

“It comes down to that one word, doesn’t it. Doubtless.”

The therapist didn’t speak while Tracy was out of the room because this was not Spencer’s personal session, it was for the couple. The therapist’s office was almost offensively bright. It was a place shadows go to die. Outside the large, south-facing window sat a mostly empty parking lot, and beyond that, a water feature, and beyond that, Route 212, and beyond that, a diner that Covid had run out of business. A couple years before, he and Tracy had stopped there on a lark—it wasn’t their kind of place—and they’d laughed at the sad, soggy fries and grilled cheese sandwiches they were served. They’d only picked at the food, but when the waiter had brought out a to-go container with their check, they’d both suddenly felt guilty packed it up.

When Tracy came back in, the therapist glanced quickly at his watch. “Let me cut to the chase,” he said. (See? It’s kind of refreshing, therapy-wise.) “This interest you’ve taken in your student’s TikTok account is almost certainly a way of processing your father’s death.”

The sound Spencer made just then wasn’t quite a guffaw, though that’s how it began. It almost like a bird call. It started somewhere deep in his face and used both his throat and his nose to emerge. It was an ugly, embarrassing sound.

“Sorry,” he said.

Shortly after his father had been put to death, his mother had called him. They’d been divorced for over ten years, but they’d spent decades of their lives together, after all, and she was reasonably distraught even given the circumstances. “You know,” she’d said, “your father loved you very much. He was very proud of you.”

Since his father had always hated teaching, had felt it was beneath him on an almost spiritual level—especially as practiced on an elementary school level—Spencer wasn’t sure, at that moment, which was true: that his mother was lying to him, or that his father had lied to her. He was also not sure whether, were it the former, her lie would have been to reassure her son, or to assuage her own feelings of shame. And if his father had lied to her? It could have been either to insulate her from his true feelings, or to insulate himself. Perhaps, for the sake of argument, the lie had actually been built around some small kernel of truth, a fiction that surrounded fact like a callous, built up over years of worrying, of drawing the curtain back to obsessively marvel at its exaggerated smallness, then forth to shield all parties from its tiny flickering flame, blinking in and out of existence, gasping for breath. Spencer could imagine that. It felt generous, but he could imagine it.

Brenda Starling raised her hand.

Spencer hadn’t even noticed that she’d joined the class, and since she hadn’t turned her camera on she remained a small square framing the initials BS. His pulse quickened.

“Yes, Brenda.”

All of this is of course from Spencer’s best-selling memoir, A Teacher’s Teacher, in which he goes on to describe how Tracy ultimately couldn’t forgive him for the kid thing, and to frankly defend his subsequent decision to pursue (unsuccessfully) a relationship with his student in order to fully explore the issues he had with his late father, who as you all probably know was put to death for entering his school the day after retirement and killing five colleagues, including the principle, in the faculty lounge. But some information has recently come to light that casts the veracity of Spencer’s memoir—at least some aspects of it—into question. Namely, it appears that there may never have been a Brenda Starling.

For those of us who’ve read and admired the memoir—it won several prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer, so, you know, we’re not talking about pulp here—this has come as quite a shock, in part because of the palpable nature of the author’s depiction. We never did have the TikTok videos themselves, because the account was said to have been deleted at the time of the book’s publication, but we had his lovingly rendered, highly detailed descriptions of them. Like the one—I won’t do it justice here, I’m afraid, but just to give you an idea—in which she was wearing a fuzzy kind of hairband with little white cat ears and long soft flaps that cascaded down the side of her face and over her bare shoulders and down her chest. She stares directly into the camera (she did this in most of her videos) and uses a filter to give her skin cute little freckles and her eyes a large, watery, glowing effect. She looks curious, alert, head tilting to one side and then the next as she apparently speaks to someone off-camera.

“Rowr,” she says.

“Rowr?” responds the voice, male. “What are you?”

“A dinosaur,” she says, though her pronunciation is adorably wrong. At this point it becomes clear even to someone who hasn’t seen the meme that she’s just lip-syncing to some exchange between a parent and child.

“A dina-what?” asks the father.

“A dinosaur?” she asks, again with the adorable pronunciation but now unsure of herself. It’s more like dianasowar, maybe, because there’s two syllables too many.

But at this point the father understands. “Oh!” he says. “You mean like from Jurassississic Park?”

She nods, again, adorably, not understanding that the father, who is never seen, is making fun of her.

Fin.

You can probably find productions of this meme even today. In fact, the success of A Teacher’s Teacher caused a handful of memes to enter back into circulation long after their natural cycle had been exhausted. The point is, she was a person (a character, it turns out) who’d left an indelible mark on us, and it will be for each of us alone to come to terms with what that means.

Many consider it a betrayal.

Many, but not all.

Some are pointing to the fact that because the practice of fiction was on the decline during those years, all but collapsing as an enterprise a year later with the open letter, published in the New York Times and signed by some two dozen of the world’s leading novelists, decrying fiction to be a “dead, irrelevant, even dangerous” artform in which its authors would never again engage, Spencer’s insertion of a fictional character—and the way in which that character touched our lives, indeed altered our lives—was a brilliant bit of guerilla warfare, a time-release poison in the belly of the beast, and could in fact herald the imminent return of the novel as a viable medium. I suppose we’ll see.

Are there any other questions?

Ah yes, the Keats. Now, in the memoir, Spencer actually comes to an understanding about this, which is that the therapist was suggesting that by embracing beauty he might learn to live with all the tragedy of life, including his father’s grisly crime and the way that robbed him of any ability to reconcile with the man. But this depends largely on a straight reading of the poem’s final line, which I’m not so sure about. If you read the line as ironic, Keats is actually saying that all the beauty in the world pales in comparison to our messy, painful, inherently finite time on earth. I guess our reading would also depend on how we think the therapist interpreted the poem, but the point is, well, I’ll just cut to the chase and admit that I’m in the camp of Spencer got it wrong. But don’t let that sway your own personal interpretation! The beauty of creative nonfiction is that we’re working with a world of both facts and truth. So there’s a lot of wiggle room.

So! That seems like a decent enough segue back to the work at hand, right? We’ve already discussed its suggestion that Neanderthals were far more sophisticated than we normally assume, and that their grieving practices were not unlike our own, which is to say: elaborate and often confounding. We’ve also talked about how the author demonstrates that although some elements of the practice are universal, others are highly individual. She of course famously compares it to the evening light in Northern England, and to John Stockton’s game-winning three-pointer in Game Six of the 1997 Conference Finals, concluding that grief is destined to remain a mystery forever. Your homework assignment for the weekend is to write about your own personal experiences with grief. The point is not to come to a conclusion, okay? The point is to explore the topic. This is not about finding answers. This is about asking good questions. And for the love of god, please keep it under two pages.