Where You Belong

creative nonfiction
by Mary Ann McGuigan

My sleeveless, floor-length sequin dress is black and shimmery and attracts the light from every direction in this huge room set aside at the Marriott Marquis for the crowded cocktail hour preceding the prestigious ceremony for the National Book Awards. Like all the finalists—there are five for each of the four categories—I wear a weighty round medal, engraved with the image of an open book, at the end of a long, wide, gold and black ribbon draped around my neck. Literary luminaries come in and out of view like June bugs among the guests—Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, Katherine Paterson—bestowing smiles and handshakes. We chat with Mr. Vonnegut briefly and in my strappy pumps I barely touch the carpet, lifted by the exquisite excitement and anticipation that fill the place—and me. I need the weight of the medal and the caress of the sequins to anchor me.

I’ve had more than my share of close encounters with New York’s lions this week. In the days leading up to the awards ceremony, the finalists were invited to read from their work at places throughout Manhattan, including the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. The event came complete with a cocktail hour attended by New York’s literary in-crowd, none of whom would know or likely remember me. In truth, I was convinced I didn’t belong at such a gathering. Spending too much time hungry as a kid can do that.

But Patience and Fortitude, whom I’d greeted countless times in my visits to the city, seemed unsurprised at my arrival. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia named them to remind New Yorkers what it would take to get through the hard times of the Great Depression. Given what they’d witnessed from their solid perches, maybe they’d long since put aside any easy assumptions about poverty getting in the way of achievement.

But writing had never been about achievement for me. It was quite simply my secret way to right wrongs, a means of creating a world unlike my own, a place where injustice didn’t have the last word. I looked at the lions and thought of the stately Tremont Library on Washington Ave. at 176th Street in the Bronx, how I would carry home ten books at a time, the maximum allowed, and what it felt like to be that girl, walking along Tremont Avenue, eager for the relief those books would bring. I paused on the steps, let myself savor this grand, new escape, this honor, and told myself this is where you belong, at least for now.

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Mary Ann McGuigan’s work appears in SmokeLong, Brevity, The Rumpus, The Sun, Massachusetts Review and elsewhere. Her second collection of short stories reaches bookstores in September. Her novels, one a National Book Award finalist, are top ranked by the Junior Library Guild and the NY Public Library. WEBSITE HERE