It felt like she’d deleted her stomach, something vanished in her body—well, that was rash. Too bad. The computer glared at her with its vacant cyclops eye, daring her to try again, to tell a universal story. Michelle wracked her brain for successful books with prominent crack smokers. The A. M. Homes story where the suburban straight couple smokes it after the kids go away. Permanent Midnight, where the guy wrote for ALF but was really a total crackhead the whole time—that one got made into a movie, even. What made those crack stories work? What made them, um, universal? Michelle suspected class. The suburbanites wanted to shake off the strangling yoke of prosperity and good behavior. Michelle imagined if the characters were black or gay the story wouldn’t work as well. The characters wouldn’t be able to risk it, their foothold on suburbia tenuous as it was. The reader was having a hard enough time trying to relate to a black person or a gay person without then having to relate to a crackhead.
