The Secret Diary of Lizzie Bennet (2 page)

READING GROUP GUIDE

F
OR
D
ISCUSSION

E
NHANCE
Y
OUR
B
OOK
C
LUB

A
UTHOR
Q&A

My mom gave me that quote on a T-shirt.

That’s really where I got the idea. Well, that and the previous four years of undergrad and two years of grad school, studying Mass Communications with a focus on New Media. Now, almost in
my last year of graduate school, in between trying to figure out how I am going to turn my forthcoming degree into a profession and manage to have a life while paying off my mountain of student
loans, my mother gave me a T-shirt which, to her mind, will solve all of my (read: her) worries.

Worse yet, she tried to make me wear it. To school.

Curious how my mother would
make
a 24-year-old who has been dressing herself for technically decades wear a certain article of clothing? Then you don’t know my mother. Or her
underhanded nature. I’d managed to keep the shirt buried in a drawer since Christmas, but then there was a hostile laundry takeover. That’s all I’ll say.

Luckily, I managed to avoid this sartorial horror by keeping my gym bag in my study cubicle, letting me change from my offensive yet clean shirt into an inoffensive yet smelly oversized tee. It
was really a rock/hard place situation.

The only person who saw me in the offending T-shirt with this random quote (by the way, I have no idea who said this phrase, but whoever did, I hope they were being sarcastic) was my cubicle
mate and fellow grad student Charlotte Lu.

“Hostile laundry takeover?” she asked knowingly.

Did I mention that we are also best friends?

I didn’t think anything of the shirt until later in the day, when Charlotte and I were leading the Communications 101 discussion group. Somehow conversation turned from cross promotion on
social media platforms and their relative efficacy to how to reach different generations via mass communications.

As discussion continued, Charlotte said the following:

“Well, the difficulty with reaching different generations via
any
platform has always been within the message itself.”

“Er . . . care to elaborate?” I said, hoping she had something up her sleeve to steer the discussion back to the curriculum.

“Well, take that T-shirt your mom gave you, for example.” I was very glad at this point that I was not wearing the shirt, as it would have invited thirty 18-year-old freshmen to
stare at my boobs. After paraphrasing its message for the class, she continued. “Your mother—and consequently, many of her generation—have an entirely different mindset about what
your future should be. And therefore communication with them is hindered by more than just the platform—it’s the message itself.”

In other words, my plan for my future happiness involves a lot of hard work and ingenuity; Mom’s plan for my future happiness includes my marrying a rich guy. And apparently, every rich
single guy out there is just
dying
to take on the job.

Later, I was talking to Dr. Gardiner, and I mentioned the T-shirt to her and what Charlotte had said in class. Dr. Gardiner laughed, and thought it was a deep well of conflict.

Yes, a “deep well of conflict” is an excellent way to describe interactions with my mother.

“Perhaps exploring whether disparate messages and platforms can coexist, in the same way disparate people exist in the same house, should be part of your end-of-term project,” Dr.
Gardiner mused.

Ah, yes. The dreaded end-of-term project for Dr. Gardiner’s Hyper-Mediation in New Media class. It was meant to be a large multimedia project, and I’d been having trouble coming up
with an idea. On top of that, Dr. Gardiner was also my faculty advisor—meaning she’d been prodding me for weeks to
also
define what my thesis would be, and what I’d spend
all of next year on.

One overwhelmingly large project at a time, I’d begged her. And I went home to ponder the possibilities of the shorter but sooner end-of-term project.

While at home, I listened to my mother harass my long-suffering father because someone bought the big house in Netherfield (a new McMansion community, with the biggest house on the hill taking
the name of the whole development as its own) and that someone is supposedly male, rich, and single.

And my mom has called dibs.

Not for herself, of course, but for me or for my sisters, Lydia and Jane. Any one of us would do; she’s not particular. Really, depending on his net worth, she’d probably be willing
to do a two-for-one type deal. Or three.

That made my mind up. The fact that my mother had so little concept as to who her daughters were and what society we currently live in that she was ready to doll us up and trot us out like
debutantes at our first ball for a stranger just because he was rich . . . The fact that she was so desperate to meet this stranger that she was nagging my father—on those occasions
he’s home from the office earlier than dark—to go pay a call on the new neighbors like he’s the local welcoming committee . . . The fact that she has absolutely no clue what it is
I do or what I’m studying, just telling people that I “like to talk . . . maybe she’ll end up on morning television!” . . .

Well . . . perhaps there
is
a way to show the world the disparate “messages” I’ve been forced to listen to for far too long. And use a new media platform to do it.

So, that’s what I decided to do for Dr. Gardiner’s class. I will attempt to explain my mother and my life to the world at large. Via New Media.

After some discussions with Charlotte, I’ve come up with a few rules and stylistic choices that I think will work.

It seems obvious, but I’ve decided to do a video blog. Me, talking to the camera. It’s straightforward. I don’t feel like I will be capable of capturing the moments of veracity
necessary for a documentary, given that I have no money to pay a crew and I have to spend half my time in class, anyway. I’m a fan of the Vlogbrothers and other videos of this style, so it
can’t be too hard to produce, right?

Of course, consistency is key. We decided to post videos to YouTube twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, without exception. Even when I have nothing to talk about, these videos will go up. Part
of the project is mining the “deep well” and becoming a consistent content creator.

“But what
will
I talk about?” I asked Charlotte, as we broke down the idea.

“You’ve never been short of things to say,” Char reminded me.

“But just me on camera for five minutes?” I said. “Nothing happening? I could recount things that happened, but that’s boring, too.”

“Well, make it
not
boring,” Charlotte said. “When you’re recounting events—reenact them. With costumes.”

“Costumes?” I asked. Dr. Gardiner had been going over this theory in her class this past week. “You mean, dress up like my mom and dad talking about the rich single guy who
moved into Netherfield?”

“Why not?”

Why not indeed? So—I’ve stolen Dad’s bathrobe and an old church hat of Mom’s, and I’m brushing off my Southern accent to impersonate my mother. Any pertinent
interactions that have occurred previous to my filming will be reenacted in this way with what I’m calling Costume Theater.

I’ll try to present interactions as fairly as possible, but I know I will also be presenting them from my point of view. However, I will not allow the coloring that comes from my
perspective to affect the veracity of the content.

In other words, I’m not making stuff up. Everything I put online will have actually happened. We’re here to tell the truth, after all.

Obviously, I’ll also need to present documentation for the project. A record of my impressions of the act of making a long-form vlog and how the platform services the message. And a
venting of my occasional frustration. I guess the fact that I’ve been keeping a diary my entire life will finally result in more than carpal tunnel syndrome!

That’s really it. I’m sure I’ll have more rules as I go along, but for now, it’s time to see if I can make a video. The school has loaned me a camera, I have digital
storage chips lined up on my desk, and Charlotte has been roped into—er, I mean,
volunteered
to assist me with filming and editing.

So, here we go—let’s make a vlog!

“What do you think?” I asked Charlotte, as I leaned over her shoulder watching the playback on her computer.

Even though this is my project for Dr. Gardiner’s class, I am making use of my best friend. Specifically, her editing software and her talent with it. (There’s a reason that
she’s the go-to aide for all the underclassmen in the edit bays at school. She knows her stuff.)

“I think it’s good,” she answered. “For the thousandth time. So, let’s do this.”

Her finger hovered over the “upload” button.

“Wait!” I blurted out. “I still think I’m wearing too much makeup. And what about—”

Charlotte gave me the side eye. “Do you want to reshoot the whole thing?”

“God, no.” Filming the first video—which clocked in at three minutes, twenty seconds—was so much harder than I’d anticipated. Figuring out what to say, writing the
intro, scrounging for costumes, writing the bit where I dressed up as my mom and strong-armed Charlotte into playing my dad . . . add that to the four hundred times I tripped over my own tongue and
we had to reshoot something I said, and a three-minute video took about five hours to make.

“So we’ll pull back on the makeup on the next one.” Char turned an impatient glare on me. “But right now, it’s Monday morning, the day you told Dr. Gardiner you
were going to upload your first video, and we have class in thirty minutes. I’m pressing this button.”

“But—”

“Lizzie, part of having a vlog is actually
putting it out there
.”

I know. I mean, I
know
communication is an exchange, and for it to actually occur there has to be a beginning. But Char was about to put my entire life—my room, my parents, my
sisters, my bad makeup—on display. With the click of a mouse. It was a little nerve-wracking.

But Charlotte was, as usual, right. We couldn’t just hang out in my room all day, tweaking. Sometimes, you have to actually put it out there. So I took a deep breath and gave Charlotte a
quick nod. And a few seconds later, my video was online.

“So, you ready to go?” Char said, closing up her computer.

And that was it.

It’s very strange. I knew that there wouldn’t be comments yet, but all I wanted to do was stare at the screen, waiting for something to happen on the Internet. I don’t have
really high expectations. I’d be shocked if anyone outside of my graduate studies program watched it. But when you put your life up for public consumption, you can’t help but worry over
the response.

However, the best thing I could do in that moment was go to class and be forced to be offline and not thinking about it for a couple of hours. So I started to pack up my bag.

“OMG YOU ACTUALLY DID IT THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME!”

Exactly three minutes and twenty seconds after posting, my little sister Lydia ran from her room across the hall and burst through my door, tackling me. (And yes, this dialogue is verbatim. I
forget nothing.)

“I love it so much—especially the part with me in it—it’s going to be so awesome!”

“You said that already.” I groaned under her weight. “What’s going to be so awesome?”

“Your video blog—
duh
! Seriously, it might actually make you a fraction less lame. Especially if you keep having me in them.”

“Lydia—how did you know it had posted?”

“Because,
duh
, I have an alert set on my phone for when you post something.” Lydia looked at us both as if we were stupid. Which, in this instance, I suppose we kind of
were.

Of course
Lydia would be the first person to see the video. She was the first person to find out about them (other than Charlotte), by barging into my room while I was shooting to tell
us that the elusive stranger who bought the house in Netherfield is young and single and named Bing Lee. Which I could care less about, but Lydia shoved herself into my project and onto camera.

That’s really the perfect encapsulation of Lydia. She’s a photogenic, hyperactive steamroller. And as the baby of the family, she always gets her way.

“Mom is going to
fuh-reak
when she finds out. Also, you should totes lay off the makeup counter, sis—or at least leave it to people who have been outside of a library and
know what looks good on, like, humans.”

“Uh, about Mom,” I said, trying to get my sister’s attention away from her phone, where she was I can only assume emailing or texting or tweeting someone about my slight
overuse of the lip liner. “I would rather not tell them. Mom and Dad, I mean.”

“Oh, really?” Lydia got this look on her face, one I know all too well. “What’s in it for me?”

“Lydia, we have to get going if you want me to drop you off at school before I go to work . . . Oh, hi, Charlotte, it’s so good to see you!”

And now my older sister, Jane, entered. Really, my tiny bedroom was too small for this many people.

“Hi, Jane,” Charlotte replied. “How’s it going?”

“Good!” Jane smiled brightly. “I love Mondays, don’t you? You get to see everyone back at the office and share what you did that weekend. How was your weekend?”

“Well,” Charlotte said, “I was here, helping Lizzie . . .”

There is not a kinder, more solicitous soul than my sister Jane. She knows very well what Charlotte was doing this weekend. She spent most of it in this very room. But Jane was still going to be
polite and genuinely interested in what Charlotte would say.