The Testament of (the Other) Emily Barton

One of these days, I’m going to have to read one of this Emily Barton’s books. In the meantime, I want everyone to know she and I are not the same person. I explained in one of my earliest posts why I am Emily Barton for the purposes of this blog. However, I realize no one ever has time to read entire blogs from the day they were created, so I’m beginning to think I ought to just every so often log on and write, “I’m not the Emily Barton you are seeking.”

Meanwhile, here is some evidence I’m hoping will convince you that you need to take that little “blogspot” out of your URL to get the Emily Barton you’ve just seen on The Today Show (or wherever).

1. The first dead giveaway is that I haven’t written a complete novel since I was in sixth grade (and that one was just an E. Nesbit/Elizabeth Enright knockoff), much less had two novels published, the very first of which was a New York Times Notable Book.

2. I did not graduate summa cum laude Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. I’m lucky to have graduated at all from college. However, I was raised in the South, so even if I had, there would be no way I’d let that information show up on any biographical profile related to me, lest I set entire cemeteries in motion, my ancestors (many of whom were Bartons) rolling in their graves over such a blatant act of drawing attention to my achievements (of course, they’d be climbing up out of their graves to tell people of my success at Harvard, as well as the fact that I have my name on two books, but I wouldn’t be allowed to do so). Mine would have to say something like, “Emily Barton went to college in Massachusetts. When not writing and cooking wholesome meals, she enjoys a good game of cribbage.”

3. My phone is not ringing off the hook with requests from the editors at The New York Times Book Review to write reviews for new books by authors such as Francine Prose. It should be, though. I could write a damn good book review, if only someone would give me the chance. Nobody would have to know it was Emily Barton, the cribbage-player, and not Emily Barton, the summa-cum-laude writer of notable books.

4. When she wins literary prizes, she gets to go be a writer in residence at Bard College. I’m sure her prize-winning efforts have never appeared in high school literary magazines with typos that devastate her, because they change the whole meaning of the brilliant poem she wrote, proving that nobody “got it,” as did the little piece I composed that won me the $1.00 fourth-place creative writing prize when I was in twelfth grade.

5. I don’t pose for pictures wearing my glasses and glamorous black dresses. Ever.

I hope you now understand that we are two completely different people. Nonetheless, please don’t make the mistake of referring to her as the “real” Emily Barton. I’m older than she; thus I was Emily Barton long before her little hand was grabbing a pencil and forming letters. (All right, so Barton was my middle name, it still counts.) You can just start referring to me as Emily Barton #1.