When I lived in Santiago in my twenties, my roommate and I kept seeing a guy in our neighborhood who looked just like Brad Pitt. OK, maybe just a little bit like Brad Pitt. It was more about his attitude than his eyes. He had a cool leather jacket and slick (kind of greasy) hair and a self-possessed, aloof way of walking. We referred to him as “Chilean Brad Pitt” and reported back to each other every time one of us saw him as if he were the subject of an important research project. Our most up-close sighting was at our local movie theater after a subtitled showing of Bullets Over Broadway. On a lark, we decided to follow him. He didn’t go anywhere particularly interesting; we eventually bored of the pursuit and went home. Neither Gloria nor I ever saw him again.
A few years later I was living in New York City, wondering what ever happened to Chilean Brad Pitt. I still wasn’t sure I was a writer, maybe I was was still a lawyer, when I began writing a story about him. Little did I know then that I would be writing his story for twenty years, that I would change what kind of jacket he was wearing, that I’d make him American, that I’d move him to New York City, that Gloria would become Sharon and Priya. (Don’t worry, we’re still friends IRL.) I followed Brad from Calle Merced in Santiago through thirty rejections, endless rewrites, heartache, and joy into The Journal, Volume 43, No. 1, where he is a fiction called “Love in the Time of Brad Pitt’s First Marriage.” I wrote this story for so long I thought I’d die writing it. I am actually bereft that it is now done. What will I do without Brad to chase anymore?
I first submitted a version of the story to The Journal back in September 2017. They declined it with a lengthy and kind letter from their faculty advisor, Michelle Herman. She loved the story but fucking hated its ending. (Well, she didn’t actually use the word fucking). She also generously offered me the option to rewrite and resubmit, something no editor had ever done for me. I jumped at the opportunity. (Actually I just kind of moseyed. It took me months to figure out how to unfuck my ending and unfucking it meant rewriting some of the beginning and middle too).
I will be eternally grateful to Michelle for this rejection, not only because it ended with The Journal publishing it, but also because she sent me chasing someone new: Elizabeth Robins–writer, actress, suffragist from the turn of the century. I hadn’t even heard of her when The Journal first rejected me. But to rewrite the story, I ended up finding and following her into the Bobst Library at NYU, where I struggled over the tiny, wretched handwriting of her journals, fawned over her glam head shots as Hedda Gabbler, and realized this is a character to write about. Forget Brad Pitt. I want Elizabeth Robins.
You’ll have to read my story to understand how she fits into “Love in the Time of Brad Pitt’s First Marriage.” Or maybe she doesn’t fit at all. Actually, I kind of already know she is too big for my story. I know that I will spend the next twenty years writing her better. Maybe in a novel? Maybe in another story? I don’t know, I just pray I don’t die before I find out. But for now, please do me the great honor of enjoying my Brad Pitt by buying a copy of The Journal or by reading it online or listening to the recording of me here. It might seem like just another rom-com, a funny little piece, but underneath it is actually the story of my long and winding journey to become a writer.
