The Movie Version of My Life
Jen Michalski

In the movie version of my life, I will play myself. If I'm not available, I'll be played by Scarlett Johansson or Christina Ricci. Or Kate Hudson, if we're targeting the finicky Midwestern markets.

The movie version of my life will tell my all-American story, in which an ordinary Polish girl from a blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood decides to become a writer. Or perhaps a Native American girl... No, wait—a daughter of Indian immigrants, from Philadelphia, the city of liberty and brotherly love. On the back of take-out menus from her father's restaurant, she scribbles heartfelt stories about adolescence and identity and love that runneth over, between CHICKEN VINDALOO $10.95 and CHICKEN TIKKA MASALA $9.95 and TEN-DOLLAR DELIVERY MINIMUM.

In the movie version of my life, I attend a mid-Atlantic second-tier liberal arts college—or perhaps Brown, or Columbia, or Harvard, for audience-recognition purposes. My studies are funded by a combination of Pell grants and student loans. Or, even better, a full scholarship, earned by my entrance essay, written on a take-out menu, about the trials of an Indian growing up in a North Philadelphia ghetto. I get a fake ID, experiment with drugs, declare myself a lesbian, a bisexual, and finally an anything-sexual, am on academic probation, but only once, though I change my major three times, from English Lit to Russian Studies and back to English Lit. The script may focus on the fact that while, during college, I have multiple partners of both sexes, I eventually fall in love with, then marry a wholly unconfused, faithful Midwestern economics major, which allows me to become a safely edgy Diane Keaton-type housewife. I pop out a few well-rounded children (read: no artists or Goths).

The script will definitely focus on the fact that I didn't inhale.

In the movie version of my life, I graduate with a BA, then spend a few years meandering around the service sector, working with characters straight out of Clerks and Reality Bites. Eventually, I settle into a job as a community-events reporter for a mid-circulation local newspaper; my salary is in the upper twenties.

Though to add a dose of realism, perhaps the script makes me a New York magazine columnist, a job that pays in the upper seventies. Or eighties. My editor, a striking Ben Affleck type, discovers the first draft of the novel version of my life in my desk drawer, while searching for a takeout menu from the Indian place on West 45th. The novel version of my life takes the publishing industry by storm. Editors salivate: She's edgy! She's eclectic! She's ethnic!

In the movie version of my life, my big fat Indian book advance allows me to leave said cushy New York magazine job to work on my follow-up novel at a retreat somewhere in the liberal Northeast. The pivotal scene follows: Do I stay with the ever-faithful Midwestern economics major? Or do I choose a life of lunchtime samosas with the ruggedly handsome editor, who stares wistfully at me from the window of his Manhattan office, three hundred miles away, opening his desk drawer, during a heart-wrenching instrumental, and gazing, with soft, sad, puppy-dog eyes, at the takeout menu that simultaneously created and destroyed us?

The movie version of my life is coming to a stadium-seating multiplex near you. Take your book club, which has undoubtedly read my Oprah-recommended bestseller. Or watch me on "The View" next Tuesday. I'm also doing a tie-in with McDonald's, which is set to launch the McChutney, a delicious all-beef patty adorned with pickled mango—and, hopefully, accompanied by a Mattel figurine who wears a sari and carries a painstakingly reproduced menu. But only if we can get the facial features right. After all, I'm a stickler for realism.

© 2005 Jen Michalski