The Disappointments of Oz

Or how I attempted to escape from my Kansas by reading WICKED fourteen times...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

The year I turned twelve, I bought the musical tie-in copy of Wicked: The Life and Times of The Wicked Witch of the West. I’d recently started going to a Christian school downtown, not too far from my Granny’s beauty shop, and spent my lunch breaks walking over to The Bookshelf as a form of escape. I’d spent most of my life, at such a tender age, looking for an escape. I hadn’t heard of Wicked before, but just happened to be browsing the bestseller section when I spotted it’s now famous cover. I remember picking it up and flipping through to the middle section, which featured several pages of full-color stills from the musical. While I didn’t have a deep attachment to The Wizard of Oz, the idea of a fantasy book exploring witches in beautiful clothes appealed to me, so I decided to skip lunch for a week and buy the book instead.

Wicked, for the two uncultured people who’ve recently been rescued from a bunker, is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, following Elphaba (the wicked witch) and Glinda in the years leading up to Dorothy’s appearance, then delving into their side of the original source material. It’s a very mature novel, exploring some heavier themes than the original children’s story, and it’s also written in a very particular style that, for those who don’t typically read a lot of fantasy, might be more challenging. At the time I bought the book, I’d been struggling academically. Every time I got an assignment in school or took a test or was forced to read new material, my eyesight blurred and my face went hot and my brain stopped working until the teacher took it away. The Christian Academy I attended then was my ninth school in less than six years, and that wasn’t counting my random stints of homeschooling. While I mostly moved schools due to bullying, I think there was something strategic in my Granny always waiting until she got news of my potentially flunking before moving me to another school. She didn’t want me being held back, worried I’d be a high school drop out like her, and she saw it as a protective measure. The problem was, not only was I suffering from the constant physical assaults of my peers, I was also constantly facing the frustration and disappointment of the educators around me, all of whom were wondering how I’d made it up to them in the first place. When I started Wicked that night, while sitting in the living room of our one bedroom duplex, I found myself experiencing that same welling up of tears, the same redness burning up my face. I’d opened this book looking for an escape, and was instead met with a reminder of everything that was wrong with me.

At some point I found clips of the musical on YouTube. There was a performance of the song ‘Popular’ that Kristen Chenoweth and Idina Menzel performed for Good Morning America, and after watching it, I fell in love with the idea of this book. I also began to see a part of myself in Elphaba—this outcast who was constantly bullied and teased and cast aside—and I hoped for my own Glinda to take me under her wing. In some ways, I saw my mom like that. Momma was a cool girl, Hitchcock blonde with mocha chocolate lip gloss forever staining her Marlboro ultralights, with lots of friends who she partied with at clubs, always in the know about the latest music and always wearing the cutest clothes. Whenever she’d pick me up for weekend visits, she’d ask, “You cool, like me?” and I always lied and said yes. I tried to emulate her, tried to make her my good witch, to make myself into someone as popular as her. Without having read it, I already saw Wicked as a template, some greater guide to my life.

I spent the next few weeks trying to read the book. One day, I brought it with me to the Christian Academy, so I could attempt to read some on my lunch break. One of my friends there, a girl named Tameca, was a voracious reader, and I hoped I could have her help in figuring out what exactly this book was saying. Earlier that day, we’d sculpted miniature Bible characters for a scene that our teacher wanted to display up front, and the kitchen smelled like burnt clay as they all roasted in the oven. As the other kids pulled out their lunch boxes or took off down the street to the China buffet, I set the book next to my steaming cup of Ramen and asked Tameca to help me decipher it. Before she had a chance to look at it, though, our teacher grabbed the book from off the table and demanded to know why I thought it acceptable to bring a book about witches into the Lord’s house. But because this was just a school, and not her husband’s pulpit in the next building over, I responded with, “The Lord’s house is next door.”

The woman confiscated the book from me, and I didn’t get it back until I got kicked out two months later. By that point, I’d forgotten most of what I read and decided to give up on it. I figured I didn’t need to escape that much anyway.

*

While I picked up the book at random intervals, I didn’t fully commit to trying to read it again until the summer I turned sixteen. I’d just moved in with Momma after a suicide attempt, and was, once again, looking for an escape. The attempt was my initial plan for escape, an attempt made because my Granny was constantly preaching the gospel against homosexuality (something she’s since grown out of), I was still getting bullied all the time, and I had just been told I needed summer school or else I was going to have to repeat the tenth grade. Moving in with Momma was my back up. I figured that being with her would finally help me be cool enough to not get bullied, that she was smart enough to help me with my school work, that she loved me enough to accept me, no matter who I desired.

I didn’t think that things could be any worse at Momma’s than they were at Granny’s, but it was really just a different kind of bad. Her and my stepdad were broke, no money for food, no TV, just them randomly getting high in their bedroom most nights and my stepdad sometimes hiding behind the fridge while naked, convinced there were cops waiting for him in the back yard. Even my hopes of Momma infusing me with her coolness faded as I realized that she was no longer the smoldering, heavily lip-glossed person she used to be. I’d brought all of my books with my from Granny’s, and wondered if I was finally smart enough to escape my own Kansas and enter into the fantastic world of Oz.

While Momma was folding clothes one day, I started Wicked again. I made it to page thirty-two before we realized a tornado was forming just across the lake. There was a change in the pressure, the sunlight now hidden behind ominous gray clouds, and then the power went out and we were swallowed up in darkness. It was lost on me at the time how ironic this was, to be reading a book about Oz while a tornado charged towards our little log cabin. Momma took my little brother to the bathtub for safety, hollering for me to join them. But even though the glass of the windows bowed in and the swirl outside was visible to me, I stayed on the bed near the barely remaining daylight, so I’d be able to keep reading.

The tornado didn’t hurt us that day, though other things eventually would. Momma was furious with me for not listening to her warnings, for putting myself in danger, but I didn’t care. I’d gotten four chapters into this book and was convinced that I finally had an idea of what was going on. She’d asked me, the next day, why I was so wrapped up in that book, and I told her it was just nice to have somewhere to try to escape. I meant escape my own anxieties, my stepdad, the boredom creeping in from having nothing else to do, but she only heard it as an escape from her. I later found the book hidden under her bed, an attempt to keep it from me.

*

In adulthood, I stopped looking to books for an escape. It was no longer about trying to get out of the life I was living, but to learn, to grow. I used Wicked as one of my measurements for growth as a reader. Every few years I would pick it back up and try it again. Still, I struggled. I think it became less about me being incapable of understanding, less an issue of comprehension, and more that I had just turned to this book for escape during some of the more challenging times in my life, and now I was unable to separate the book from those anxieties.

I also think there’s something to be said for entering into adulthood, of the autonomy you gain, where it becomes less necessary to run away to other worlds when you can actually leave your current world behind.

The film adaptation of the musical comes out next month, and I plan on seeing it with my husband and friends. I keep thinking about how much my life has felt like The Wizard of Oz in recent months—moving to Philadelphia, all of the promises that came with this move, of being in a more queer friendly area, of having more opportunity for the things I wanted, this feeling of running away from the small town life I’d felt stifled in and entering into a much more glamorous world on the other side. But this move also came with the devastating realization that, no matter where you go, you’re always going to discover that the wizard isn’t really a wizard, that everything isn’t as different as you thought it would be. I don’t regret moving, but being in a new place has pushed me to ask myself some hard questions about my life and the things I want, what makes me happy. I’ve had to face a lot of discomfort and anxiety, for the first time in a while. As I looked at my bookshelves earlier this week, deciding what to read, for the first time in a long time, I considered picking up Wicked, in an attempt to escape.

I like the idea of getting away, but I don’t think we’re all meant to escape to the same worlds. Maybe there’s a reason some people escape to Oz, while others escape to Wonderland. There’s also a reason why some people prefer waking up back in Kansas. I think it’s less about running away, and more about finding the place that feels safe, a place that actually feels like home.