By Amanda Knox

As I take up the reins of Kyra-lin Hom’s weekly column, I am riding a warm wave of romanticism after reading the story of another columnist of a local paper, albeit a fictional one—the unnamed protagonist of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

It is a credit to Marquez that he could inspire a feminist like myself to feel butterflies when the novella’s premise is so repulsive. The opening words are the protagonist’s: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Standing on the upper landing of the bookstore, pausing in the process of shelving a stack of fiction titles to read this line, my eyebrow rose in the way a cat’s back-fur bristles. “Oh, really…” I thought.

I also couldn’t help but smile. This is not my first Marquez. A few Christmases ago I was the recipient of Love in the Time of Cholera. It is, among other things, the story of inappropriately passionate Florentino Ariza, who in his seventies pursues the love interest who spurned him in his twenties. The magic is that Ariza’s is a case of puppy love that does not extinguish itself, as it normally would (should?), when unrequited. Memories explores the same love, but from the perspective of an old man who experiences it for the first time only in his nineties.

I don’t want to give too much away because Memories is a quick and easy read (only 115 pages) whose rewards far exceed its demands. It is also Marquez’s last work of fiction, published ten years after his penultimate fictional work (Of Love and Other Demons), and after he survived cancer. The half-serious, half-just-for-fun wisdom offered by Memories’ protagonist may have been inspired by those Marquez’s particularly mortal years: “When I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years.”

What I do want to give away is what I learned from Memories, and Kyra-lin Hom, about column-writing.

The protagonist of Memories admits that in the decades prior to his first love, his regular and persistently formulaic column had been relegated to page eleven, and “younger generations launched an attack against them as if they were assaulting a mummy from the past.” Despite the evidence that his words were not reaching the hearts of his readers, and only really appeased the pride within his own, he doggedly trudged through, week by week, sans brilliance.

That all changed with belated puppy love. “Disoriented by the merciless evocation of Delgadina asleep, with no malice at all I changed the spirit of my Sunday columns. Whatever the subject, I wrote them for her, laughed and cried over them for her, and my life poured into every word. Rather than the formula of a traditional personal column that they always had followed, I wrote them as love letters that all people could make their own.”

Kyra-lin Hom is unafflicted and unweathered in comparison. She is certainly more sane, though she does write with a similarly candid spirit. She wrote from 2005-2015, during a decidedly developmental decade of her life. She treated the column like a conversation with a good friend, and discussed everything from Chinese-language summer camp to college applications, long-distance relationships to television. She wrote reviews and responded to reader feedback. Her column was the coming-of-age chronicle of the average West Seattle high-schooler.

The Marquez and Hom models strike me, above all, by the power of their voice. Voice because the columnist is writing in the color of her own speech. Voice because the columnist is writing about subjects that are at the heart of her own subjective experience. If columns are meant to reach people, then I understand that a column of my own should less reflect the formula and more reflect the person and the present, where she is most curious and moved. By describing myself in my own voice, I may access interest and meaning in someone else. It’s not hard news. It’s soft, personal, and simmering.

It is a unique opportunity. I tip my hat to my predecessors and look forward to now sharing my own thoughts and experiences.

I encourage my readership to respond to and correspond with me via amandak@robinsonnews.com.