I tried to hold still and focused on remembering to scribble my notes. This was before the internet; my reviews were built on whatever I walked out of the theater with. The fact was, I had to tank up on quite a bit of coffee to do my job. Though I had what is pretty much the textbook definition of a fun job, I sometimes grew weary of film, I’ll be honest. I got sleepy. The film critic life was not the life for me. My co-critics said things like: “If you sit here long enough, all of life will pass before your eyes.” I wondered what the point was of sitting in the dark and waiting for life. Why not just go out and, you know, live it. Cut out the middleman. I grew tired of having my days filled with night. But then something would happen—a movie would give me something that was not life exactly, but life with extra lightbulbs turned on.

In any case, I somehow never was able to transcend the sense that I was an audience member, rather than a professional.

I was young—young enough to stumble out of the darkened theater on glittery platform heels, to live on popcorn, to worry what the boys might think. Seattle, then, was still a boys’ club. This was the mid-nineties, when the city was in a growth spurt, like an awkward teenager—suddenly famous. Even so, it was the same old town where I’d grown up, a town where boys did things and girls watched. I dimly intuited that my authority was undermined by my very girl-ness. And maybe it was true. Or maybe my authority was undermined by my stubborn sense of myself as an audience member.

I felt stuck in my own subjectivity, unable to ascend to empyrean heights of critical authority.

I didn’t see it at the time, but this “I” was a reaching for an authentic, maybe even heartfelt, response to the work. A desire to reflect on the page the emotions wrought in me by the work, with an understanding that my emotions, my experience, are not yours, and yours are not mine.