Remember this kid?
Yep, that’s Matilda. (Or as I would HOPE you know, actress Mara Wilson in her younger years.) Sometimes it feels like my sister and I grew up with Mara — Matilda was (and still is) one of our favourites, Mrs. Doubtfire is a classic and if you tell me you didn’t like it I have doubts about our long-term viability as friends (just kidding, kind of), and the remake of Miracle on 34th Street is my favourite Christmas movie.
Because I’m a huge geek with too much time on my hands (ha), I have this obsession with looking up “where are they now” types of things involving my fave childhood actors. (If I passed one of the kids from The Little Rascals on the streets today, I would absolutely know who they are.) So naturally when my bi-monthly viewing of Matilda came around, I Google’d Mara’s name while the movie ran in the background. And I found this woman.
Side note: Does anyone else think she looks a bit like Jena Malone? Anyways.
That’s Mara, all grown up. Despite what she says about herself on her blog, I think she’s just beautiful.
Being such a fan of her childhood work, I was curious not only about what she looks like now, but what she’s up to lately. I hadn’t seen her in any movies since Matilda (though she did do 2 others I haven’t seen), and it turns out there’s a good reason for that.
So as I’m reading through some of her blog entries (quietly crying inside that I probably won’t see her on the big screen anytime soon), my mind slowly started to focus on the entries I was reading. And something awesome happened.
I discovered an amazing writer. My mind goes through quite the process when I find an author I like. It’s pretty hard to impress me, so initially, no matter what I’m reading, it’s like “Catch me if you can … I dare you to give me a reason not to shut this book” (or in this case, close the tab). A lot of times, the author falls short. I give someone two pages to snag me, and if they can’t, the book is back on the shelf. (Maybe that’s not enough, but it’s usually a good test.)
If an author is good though, those two pages turn into four. Then the four becomes the entire first chapter. At that point, I start to notice I’ve been standing stock-still for a bit longer than is appropriate, and I usually end up buying the book.
It’s similar when I find Internet writers I love. I have what I call Mouse ADD — I literally can’t keep my computer mouse still for longer than 30 seconds. So usually it results in me navigating away from whatever I’m looking at. But reading Mara’s blog, the mouse only moved to scroll down the page. After literally two hours of reading, I had to stop only because I felt like I was going blind from staring at the screen for so long. And as I sat back to contemplate what I had read, I was struck by this intense urge to come over to my own blog and write something.
So Mara did a few things here:
1. She grabbed my attention, and kept it.
2. She kept me entertained for quite the lengthy period of time.
3. She gave me some things to sit back and contemplate.
4. She inspired me to write stuff of my own.
And when I think back to other authors I’ve come to love, they have all done those first three things, with varying degrees of the fourth thing. Which makes Mara Wilson another name to add to my faves.
It’s amazing that I went looking for her simply to see how adulthood has changed her appearance from the little 6-year-old I loved to watch in movies, and I found a beautiful young woman who is still so talented, but now it’s at more crafts than acting alone. I look at her blog and it doesn’t feel anymore like I’m reading Matilda’s blog. I’ve spent enough time on there now that I associate her writing with her — not a character she played a million years ago.
So here’s my little personal note to Mara — You’ve obviously made a big effort to focus your creativity on something that you love to do, and I just thought you would want to know that I came to your writing as a fan of your movies, and you’ve now made me into a fan of your writing as well. Good job — keep up the good work. 🙂
Alright, all of you — go write something. 😉
The Story of Us 