by Bernie Su
THE SECRET
DIARY OF
LIZZIE BENNET
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Simon and Schuster UK Ltd
A CBS COMPANY
First published in the USA in 2014 by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Pemberley Digital, LLC
Paper background, text bubbles and washi tape © Shutterstock
“Just Dance” and “How to Curl Ribbon” images courtesy of the authors
Interior desing by Akasha Archer
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of Bernie Su and Kate Rorick to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
PB ISBN: 978-1-4711-2322-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4711-2323-8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
www.simonandschuster.co.uk
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To the fans,
and everyone who ever loved a Lizzie and a Darcy.
CONTENTS
SATURDAY, APRIL 7TH
MONDAY, APRIL 9TH
SATURDAY, APRIL 14TH
TUESDAY, APRIL 17TH
FRIDAY, APRIL 20TH
SUNDAY, APRIL 22ND
TUESDAY, APRIL 24TH
SATURDAY, APRIL 28TH
TUESDAY, MAY 1ST
SATURDAY, MAY 5TH
TUESDAY, MAY 8TH
SATURDAY, MAY 12TH
TUESDAY, MAY 15TH
SATURDAY, MAY 19TH
SUNDAY, MAY 20TH
FRIDAY, MAY 25TH
FRIDAY, JUNE 1ST
TUESDAY, JUNE 5TH
SUNDAY, JUNE 10TH
THURSDAY, JUNE 14TH
TUESDAY, JUNE 19TH
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 27TH
SATURDAY, JUNE 30TH
MONDAY, JULY 9TH
FRIDAY, JULY 13TH
WEDNESDAY, JULY 18TH
SATURDAY, JULY 21ST
TUESDAY, JULY 24TH
SATURDAY, JULY 28TH
MONDAY, JULY 30TH
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1ST
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1ST—AGAIN
MONDAY, AUGUST 6TH
FRIDAY, AUGUST 10TH
MONDAY, AUGUST 13TH
SUNDAY, AUGUST 19TH
TUESDAY, AUGUST 21ST
SUNDAY, AUGUST 26TH
TUESDAY, AUGUST 28TH
FRIDAY, AUGUST 31ST
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 4TH
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 9TH
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11TH
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 16TH
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 22ND
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25TH
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28TH
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 29TH
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3RD
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5TH
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9TH
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14TH
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19TH
MONDAY, OCT 22ND
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 25TH
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 28TH
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 30TH
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2ND
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 8TH
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 10TH
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 11TH
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 16TH
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 20TH
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 22ND
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 28TH
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 30TH
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7TH
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 12TH
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14TH
MONDAY, DECEMBER 17TH
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21ST
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 22ND
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 25TH
TUESDAY, JANUARY 1ST
SUNDAY, JANUARY 6TH
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 9TH
TUESDAY, JANUARY 15TH
FRIDAY, JANUARY 18TH
TUESDAY, JANUARY 22ND
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 23RD
SATURDAY, JANUARY 26TH
TUESDAY, JANUARY 29TH
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30TH
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 2ND
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8TH
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11TH
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14TH
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15TH
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23RD
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 26TH
WEDNESDAY, FEB 27TH
SATURDAY, MARCH 2ND
TUESDAY, MARCH 5TH
SATURDAY, MARCH 9TH
MONDAY, MARCH 11TH
TUESDAY, MARCH 12TH
SATURDAY, MARCH 16TH
SUNDAY, MARCH 17TH
MONDAY, MARCH 18TH
TUESDAY, MARCH 19TH
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20TH
THURSDAY, MARCH 21ST
FRIDAY, MARCH 22ND
TUESDAY, MARCH 26TH
FRIDAY, MARCH 29TH
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
READING GROUP GUIDE
FOR DISCUSSION
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
AUTHOR Q&A
SATURDAY, APRIL 7TH
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
My mom gave me that quote on a T-shirt.
That’s really where I got the idea. Well, that and the previous four years of undergrad and two years of grad school, studying Mass Communications with a focus on New Media. Now, almost in my last year of graduate school, in between trying to figure out how I am going to turn my forthcoming degree into a profession and manage to have a life while paying off my mountain of student loans, my mother gave me a T-shirt which, to her mind, will solve all of my (read: her) worries.
Worse yet, she tried to make me wear it. To school.
Curious how my mother would make a 24-year-old who has been dressing herself for technically decades wear a certain article of clothing? Then you don’t know my mother. Or her underhanded nature. I’d managed to keep the shirt buried in a drawer since Christmas, but then there was a hostile laundry takeover. That’s all I’ll say.
Luckily, I managed to avoid this sartorial horror by keeping my gym bag in my study cubicle, letting me change from my offensive yet clean shirt into an inoffensive yet smelly oversized tee. It was really a rock/hard place situation.
The only person who saw me in the offending T-shirt with this random quote (by the way, I have no idea who said this phrase, but whoever did, I hope they were being sarcastic) was my cubicle mate and fellow grad student Charlotte Lu.
“Hostile laundry takeover?” she asked knowingly.
Did I mention that we are also best friends?
I didn’t think anything of the shirt until later in the day, when Charlotte and I were leading the Communications 101 discussion group. Somehow conversation turned from cross promotion on social media platform
s and their relative efficacy to how to reach different generations via mass communications.
As discussion continued, Charlotte said the following:
“Well, the difficulty with reaching different generations via any platform has always been within the message itself.”
“Er . . . care to elaborate?” I said, hoping she had something up her sleeve to steer the discussion back to the curriculum.
“Well, take that T-shirt your mom gave you, for example.” I was very glad at this point that I was not wearing the shirt, as it would have invited thirty 18-year-old freshmen to stare at my boobs. After paraphrasing its message for the class, she continued. “Your mother—and consequently, many of her generation—have an entirely different mindset about what your future should be. And therefore communication with them is hindered by more than just the platform—it’s the message itself.”
In other words, my plan for my future happiness involves a lot of hard work and ingenuity; Mom’s plan for my future happiness includes my marrying a rich guy. And apparently, every rich single guy out there is just dying to take on the job.
Later, I was talking to Dr. Gardiner, and I mentioned the T-shirt to her and what Charlotte had said in class. Dr. Gardiner laughed, and thought it was a deep well of conflict.
Yes, a “deep well of conflict” is an excellent way to describe interactions with my mother.
“Perhaps exploring whether disparate messages and platforms can coexist, in the same way disparate people exist in the same house, should be part of your end-of-term project,” Dr. Gardiner mused.
Ah, yes. The dreaded end-of-term project for Dr. Gardiner’s Hyper-Mediation in New Media class. It was meant to be a large multimedia project, and I’d been having trouble coming up with an idea. On top of that, Dr. Gardiner was also my faculty advisor—meaning she’d been prodding me for weeks to also define what my thesis would be, and what I’d spend all of next year on.
One overwhelmingly large project at a time, I’d begged her. And I went home to ponder the possibilities of the shorter but sooner end-of-term project.
While at home, I listened to my mother harass my long-suffering father because someone bought the big house in Netherfield (a new McMansion community, with the biggest house on the hill taking the name of the whole development as its own) and that someone is supposedly male, rich, and single.
And my mom has called dibs.
Not for herself, of course, but for me or for my sisters, Lydia and Jane. Any one of us would do; she’s not particular. Really, depending on his net worth, she’d probably be willing to do a two-for-one type deal. Or three.
That made my mind up. The fact that my mother had so little concept as to who her daughters were and what society we currently live in that she was ready to doll us up and trot us out like debutantes at our first ball for a stranger just because he was rich . . . The fact that she was so desperate to meet this stranger that she was nagging my father—on those occasions he’s home from the office earlier than dark—to go pay a call on the new neighbors like he’s the local welcoming committee . . . The fact that she has absolutely no clue what it is I do or what I’m studying, just telling people that I “like to talk . . . maybe she’ll end up on morning television!” . . .
Well . . . perhaps there is a way to show the world the disparate “messages” I’ve been forced to listen to for far too long. And use a new media platform to do it.
So, that’s what I decided to do for Dr. Gardiner’s class. I will attempt to explain my mother and my life to the world at large. Via New Media.
After some discussions with Charlotte, I’ve come up with a few rules and stylistic choices that I think will work.
It seems obvious, but I’ve decided to do a video blog. Me, talking to the camera. It’s straightforward. I don’t feel like I will be capable of capturing the moments of veracity necessary for a documentary, given that I have no money to pay a crew and I have to spend half my time in class, anyway. I’m a fan of the Vlogbrothers and other videos of this style, so it can’t be too hard to produce, right?
Of course, consistency is key. We decided to post videos to YouTube twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, without exception. Even when I have nothing to talk about, these videos will go up. Part of the project is mining the “deep well” and becoming a consistent content creator.
“But what will I talk about?” I asked Charlotte, as we broke down the idea.
“You’ve never been short of things to say,” Char reminded me.
“But just me on camera for five minutes?” I said. “Nothing happening? I could recount things that happened, but that’s boring, too.”
“Well, make it not boring,” Charlotte said. “When you’re recounting events—reenact them. With costumes.”
“Costumes?” I asked. Dr. Gardiner had been going over this theory in her class this past week. “You mean, dress up like my mom and dad talking about the rich single guy who moved into Netherfield?”
“Why not?”
Why not indeed? So—I’ve stolen Dad’s bathrobe and an old church hat of Mom’s, and I’m brushing off my Southern accent to impersonate my mother. Any pertinent interactions that have occurred previous to my filming will be reenacted in this way with what I’m calling Costume Theater.
I’ll try to present interactions as fairly as possible, but I know I will also be presenting them from my point of view. However, I will not allow the coloring that comes from my perspective to affect the veracity of the content.
In other words, I’m not making stuff up. Everything I put online will have actually happened. We’re here to tell the truth, after all.
Obviously, I’ll also need to present documentation for the project. A record of my impressions of the act of making a long-form vlog and how the platform services the message. And a venting of my occasional frustration. I guess the fact that I’ve been keeping a diary my entire life will finally result in more than carpal tunnel syndrome!
That’s really it. I’m sure I’ll have more rules as I go along, but for now, it’s time to see if I can make a video. The school has loaned me a camera, I have digital storage chips lined up on my desk, and Charlotte has been roped into—er, I mean, volunteered to assist me with filming and editing.
So, here we go—let’s make a vlog!
MONDAY, APRIL 9TH
“What do you think?” I asked Charlotte, as I leaned over her shoulder watching the playback on her computer.
Even though this is my project for Dr. Gardiner’s class, I am making use of my best friend. Specifically, her editing software and her talent with it. (There’s a reason that she’s the go-to aide for all the underclassmen in the edit bays at school. She knows her stuff.)
“I think it’s good,” she answered. “For the thousandth time. So, let’s do this.”
Her finger hovered over the “upload” button.
“Wait!” I blurted out. “I still think I’m wearing too much makeup. And what about—”
Charlotte gave me the side eye. “Do you want to reshoot the whole thing?”
“God, no.” Filming the first video—which clocked in at three minutes, twenty seconds—was so much harder than I’d anticipated. Figuring out what to say, writing the intro, scrounging for costumes, writing the bit where I dressed up as my mom and strong-armed Charlotte into playing my dad . . . add that to the four hundred times I tripped over my own tongue and we had to reshoot something I said, and a three-minute video took about five hours to make.
“So we’ll pull back on the makeup on the next one.” Char turned an impatient glare on me. “But right now, it’s Monday morning, the day you told Dr. Gardiner you were going to upload your first video, and we have class in thirty minutes. I’m pressing this button.”
“But—”
“Lizzie, part of having a vlog is actually putting it out there.”
I know. I mean, I know communication is an exchange, and for it to actually occur there has to be a beginning. But Char was
about to put my entire life—my room, my parents, my sisters, my bad makeup—on display. With the click of a mouse. It was a little nerve-wracking.
But Charlotte was, as usual, right. We couldn’t just hang out in my room all day, tweaking. Sometimes, you have to actually put it out there. So I took a deep breath and gave Charlotte a quick nod. And a few seconds later, my video was online.
“So, you ready to go?” Char said, closing up her computer.
And that was it.
It’s very strange. I knew that there wouldn’t be comments yet, but all I wanted to do was stare at the screen, waiting for something to happen on the Internet. I don’t have really high expectations. I’d be shocked if anyone outside of my graduate studies program watched it. But when you put your life up for public consumption, you can’t help but worry over the response.
However, the best thing I could do in that moment was go to class and be forced to be offline and not thinking about it for a couple of hours. So I started to pack up my bag.
“OMG YOU ACTUALLY DID IT THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME!”
Exactly three minutes and twenty seconds after posting, my little sister Lydia ran from her room across the hall and burst through my door, tackling me. (And yes, this dialogue is verbatim. I forget nothing.)
“I love it so much—especially the part with me in it—it’s going to be so awesome!”
“You said that already.” I groaned under her weight. “What’s going to be so awesome?”
“Your video blog—duh! Seriously, it might actually make you a fraction less lame. Especially if you keep having me in them.”
“Lydia—how did you know it had posted?”
“Because, duh, I have an alert set on my phone for when you post something.” Lydia looked at us both as if we were stupid. Which, in this instance, I suppose we kind of were.
Of course Lydia would be the first person to see the video. She was the first person to find out about them (other than Charlotte), by barging into my room while I was shooting to tell us that the elusive stranger who bought the house in Netherfield is young and single and named Bing Lee. Which I could care less about, but Lydia shoved herself into my project and onto camera.
That’s really the perfect encapsulation of Lydia. She’s a photogenic, hyperactive steamroller. And as the baby of the family, she always gets her way.
