Kayfabe Theory
by Rax King
Recently, I gave a chapter from my novel-in-progress to my husband’s friend Dave, hoping he’d give me notes. The narrator of my novel is a straight man, and Dave is one of the few straight guys I know who’s a big reader of fiction without being a writer himself, so I figured he’d have an ear for the voice that I’m trying to perfect. In our circles, men tend to be fluent in Marxist theory and conversational in at least one obscure branch of history, but interest in novels is rare. I’ll go ahead and admit the other reason I wanted Dave’s notes is that I am hell-bent on making him my friend, not just my husband’s, and this felt like an opportunity to perform a little friendship espionage on top of the professional benefits to me. Dave, if you’re a Flaming Hydra subscriber, do me a favor and never reference this paragraph in real life.
When we next saw each other, Dave said he’d torn through the excerpt, couldn’t put it down. (I might be paraphrasing something that was phrased less enthusiastically, but I obviously blacked out the moment he started complimenting me and must now reconstruct the gist.) The sections where my narrator described his job and workplace felt spot on, he told me, but there was a problem with the way he described the women he saw.
“This might be reductive,” he said. “But I don’t know a lot of straight guys who look at a woman and the first thing they notice is her hairstyle or whether her clothes match.”
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