Here for It Or, How to Save Your Soul in America; Essays - R. Eric Thomas Page 0,1
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.
That is terrible. And I think that’s why I like this book so much. I am Grover. I walk with him every step of the way on his journey. The Monster at the End of This Book is a lighthearted book about anxiety—anxiety about being confronted with the kind of person you really are (LOL!), anxiety about the inevitable passage of time (LOL), anxiety about being trapped by forces beyond your control (lol), anxiety about a deep, dreadful uncertainty (…meep). Even when I read it for the first time at age three, I got that.
I was an anxious, though immaculately conceived, child. And an anxious, square, pious preteen. And an anxious half-zealot/half-gay teen. And an anxious, aimless young adult careening toward this moment. I’m anxious right now, actually, come to think of it. I’ll definitely be an anxious dad. I’m sure I’ll be an anxious old man, and I’ll probably end up lying in my grave going, “Ugh, I feel like there’s something I should be doing right now. I wonder if everyone is angry at me. Oh my God, how long is this going to take? And what happens next?”
Grover, too, is struggling. He is using every tool at his disposal to keep the thing that he fears the most at bay, and that thing is himself. He is almost crippled by his own fear. But he is still trying. Grover is the Willy Loman of Sesame Street.