INTRODUCTION
The Monster at the End of This Book
For a number of years, I was under the impression that my birth was the result of an immaculate conception. Not the Immaculate Conception; a regular immaculate conception of an ordinary variety. I didn’t think I was particularly special or meant to die so that the world might be saved from their sins. (I struggle to get through a CrossFit class, so actual crucifixion might be a bit of a heavy lift.) I understood that some people got pregnant to have babies; I simply thought I’d been opted out of that particular program. It made just as much sense to me that the universe had given a baby to my parents because they were nice people who photographed well.
When my mother would tell me about life before me, she would always say the same thing: “We wanted a child so badly. My arms used to ache for the weight of a baby. We prayed and we prayed and we prayed, and finally, God gave you to us.”
How would you interpret that story? Immaculately, that’s how.
I thought some people just got babies handed to them like party favors at a quinceañera by a creator-type figure. Bob and Judi asked very nicely; cue my entrance, avec jazz hands.
This all checks out. At least as much as the other Immaculate Conception, aka the birth of Jesus. On that I was an expert, having gotten straight A’s in Sunday school for years (there were no grades, but I scored myself). Plus, I was a very good child—obedient, pleasant, an avid reader, an unrepentant snitch—so of course I knew the story backwards and forwards—the angel and the three kings and the sheep and Mariah Carey singing “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” etc. My own sudden appearance on the scene—regular yet also extraordinary, sans animals, no royalty RSVPs—was totally within my conceptual wheelhouse. What I couldn’t figure out, however, was why.
As a child I liked certainty, and order, and clear explanations, even if they tended to involve miracles. But life, of course, can quickly get complicated and human and not at all miraculous. I’d sometimes find myself so lost in a question or a problem that the only solution I could think of was for an older version of myself to walk through a rift in the space-time continuum and let me know what happens. Immaculately. As my concept of self expanded and evolved beyond my extraordinary beginnings, different parts of who I was began to prompt queries that I thought only the future could answer. I had this idea that the challenges I suddenly encountered—my blackness or my gayness or my Christianness or my Americanness and their intersections—would somehow get uncomplicated through the magic of time, like a movie montage.
Spoiler alert: they did not.
But I would think about the supposed perfection of the future constantly. I’d be sitting in my childhood bedroom or my college dorm or my first apartment, just staring at the door like “Any minute now in the future they’re going to invent time travel and some well-dressed old black man with no wrinkles is going to come bursting through and give me the answers to this take-home quiz or whatever.” (Sometimes my questions were existential; sometimes they were AP Statistical.) The basic concern was always the same: am I really here for this?
The big idea, as I saw it, was this: You don’t exist for a long time. Before you arrive, there are ages, eons—an eternity—without you. (Can you imagine? How boring!) And suddenly there you are. Alive. How you doing? How’s it feel? Immaculate? What if it feels bad? Don’t worry; it gets better, right? But what if it doesn’t get better, it just gets. It just keeps getting. What then? You still interested? You still trying to be good, still moisturizing your T-zone, still working through your stack of New Yorkers, still fighting systemic oppression, still speaking truth to power, still attempting to exist? Still? What if I told you, at another point—fixed, supposedly, but totally unknown—you suddenly, mysteriously, immaculately won’t be anymore? Again.
Does that sound like something you want to do?
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I’m a spoiler kween. My favorite part of reading mystery novels is flipping ahead to the last chapter. Of course at that point I’m always like, “Who are all of these people? How did this happen? When did they go to Nova Scotia?” So I have to go back to reread and find out. Ugh, it’s a whole process. My relationship with mystery is fraught. It was the same with Choose Your Own Adventures. I certainly wasn’t about to go flipping through a book willy-nilly letting fate take me on a ride like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I always turned to an option, read it, kept my finger in it, and then flipped back and read the other option. Like a normal American. Some books tried to get slick and give you four or five choices. The joke was on them, though: I had five fingers.
Ten actually, now that I think about it.
This book is not a Choose Your Own Adventure, much as I would have liked the option in real life. It’s the opposite of that, actually, if such a thing is possible. It might be a mystery, though. At the end I gather all the suspects in a room and there are some very bold accusations made. It involves a luxury ocean liner. There’s a caftan. Things escalate!
More than anything, this book is a version of the book where I, as a child, found all my answers and all my questions. You guessed it: the most sacred of tomes, The Monster at the End of This Book, starring Grover (the Muppet, not the U.S. president). Lovable, furry old Grover. Blue. Fuchsia nose. Scatterbrained. Sometimes Super. Here’s the plot: Grover shows up, reads the title, realizes there’s a monster at the end of the book, and then asks you, the reader, not to continue reading, so as not to bring him face-to-face with the thing that he fears.
“Listen, I have an idea,” he says to us on page two, breaking the fourth wall like he’s in a midnight screening of Rocky Horror. “If you do not turn any pages, we will never get to the end of this book. And that is good, because there is a Monster at the end of this book. So please do not turn the page.”
*flip*
“YOU TURNED THE PAGE!” he screams. So much is already happening.
Grover’s horror escalates with every page turn, eventually getting to the point where he is futilely building a wall, putting up caution tape, pleading with you. Pitilessly, you persist. By the end of the book, Grover is in full hysterics.
But then we turn the last page, and Grover realizes that the monster at the end of the book is himself.
Stunning. He is the Keyser Söze of Muppets. And that’s the book.
This book is meta as hell. It’s like Borges for toddlers. Who does this? Also, this book is terrifying. It’s psychological torture. Gone Girl for Muppets.
When I read it as a child, I didn’t want to turn the page. I didn’t want to torture Grover. I wonder if there’s ever been a child who, when asked not to continue, simply closed the book and went on with their life. I want to know that obedient child. But the book’s success is predicated on the assumption that we will not heed his simple request.