"Can I read you the first three chapters of my new novel?" asks Stefi. Aged ten. I hope my sigh is not too evident. It's that moment after dinner you would like for yourself.
No sooner has she begun, than our own relative calm in the kitchen camp is disturbed- by the crashing of the piano from the sitting rooom. Michele has launched into Simon and Garfunkel's 'I am a Rock'.
As I close the door to the sound of my thirteen year old son singing that if he'd never loved he never would have cried, I am intensely aware that the two of them are competing for my attention. At the same time they are trying to grow up.
They are trying to become significant by copying others who they feel are successful and significant. Which is a way of demonstrating, I suppose, that one has doubts about one's own significance.
So much of life is imitation. Perhaps one learns to feel through aping the rhetoric of feelings. Only later will experience bring emotions so strong that what seemed a hollow formula is suddenly filled to bursting point and even insufficient. For the moment, though the kids are more convincing when they fly into a rage because mum wants them to eat spinach, or grow ecstatic because I bought them a video.
"Very good," I tell Stefi. "And don't worry about it sounding like Jack London, I learned to write myself by copying." "I wasn't copying!" she objects. "Later," I tell my daughter, "you'll begin to feel the person you're copying isn't quite you. And that's when you start to become yourself."
