Copycat Raccoon Girl

Recently I read that a new version of the film “Single White Female” was coming out, starring one of the Gossip Girl actresses (the dark-haired one) and someone who sort of looks like Megan Fox but is not Megan Fox. I remember seeing the first film when a twenty-something grad student, and the whole point of it seemed to be to make people enjoy watching Jennifer Jason Leigh, who played a young woman obsessed with imitating and then taking over the life of her roommate, get her comeuppance for being a solitary loser and she-stalker.

There are lots of movie plots like this: lonely misfit wants the life of seemingly successful and perfect woman. Yet there is something particularly troubling about those films with the “copycat” angle. In much of popular culture, the copycat is bland, impotent, and weak—we think of copycat killers this way, even if their crimes are as brutal as the ones committed by murderers they imitate. Yet the urge to imitate someone one perceives as more powerful, more successful, more liked, is a powerful one in the life of a young girl—and it doesn’t mean she’s bound to end up chasing her roommate in the basement of a New York apartment with an ice pick.

When I was in fifth grade, I spent nearly a year as a copycat. I didn’t just copy one person, though, at first. One day a girl named Stephanie got a great feathered haircut, and when I went to get my own hair cut, I asked for the same style. Someone in my class got new blue and white Nikes, and I got blue and white ones, too. All small things. Then I made a new friend named Kimber. Kimber was part of a group of six or so girls who were really involved in school—Kimber’s friend Kristen was the lead in the school’s production of Annie, and Allison was in gymnastics, and Suzanne played soccer. Kimber had straight brown hair and braces and wasn’t especially pretty or outgoing, but she always seemed quietly confident and was good at everything she tried. But what made Kimber stand out was her absolute love of raccoons. She knew everything about them: that they didn’t make saliva, that they were nocturnal, that they had sharp claws. She did every science project or report for English about raccoons and had a bedful of raccoon stuffed animals and a bookcase filled with raccoon stories. Whenever we talked about animals in science class, the teacher would say, “And Kimber, what kind of habitat do raccoons live in?” or “Kimber, are raccoons and possums related?”

This expertise on raccoons gave Kimber a place, an identity. I wanted that, too. Maybe I felt at the time that it was somehow the raccoon itself that gave Kimber her power, but it never occurred to me to choose horses, or dogs, or Gila monsters. It had to be raccoons. I became the copycat raccoon girl. I wrote an English report on raccoons and a children’s book called “Kim’s Raccoon,” about a brunette fifth grader named Kim who had a pet raccoon that she raised from a baby, that I sent to Harper and Row publishers (because they had published Little House in the Prairie, I thought they liked books about girls and nature. They sent me a personal letter instead of the usual rejection, which I still have.) My school friends must have thought this odd, but no one said anything until the science fair incident.

The fifth grade science fair in Andover was one of those events where parental involvement was both expected and intense. The problem was that my parents did not believe that parents should do these projects for their children, and here I was competing against kids whose parents not only helped them, but purchased expensive electrical equipment and terrariums and special fluorescent lights in the effort to produce a winning entry. I had no chance. My contribution was a poster of the life cycle of the raccoon, a poor, crudely drawn shadow of Kimber’s project about raccoon habitats, which contained her own wildlife photography and a den made of mud and sticks. When my friends, including Kimber, saw my poster, the looks on their faces were a mixture of discomfort and pity, and somehow even I knew that this had to stop.

Through it all, I never wanted Kimber out of the picture, and I never wanted to have her life. I wanted the sense of purpose that her raccoon love gave her, that air of expertise and confidence of knowing more than others about one subject. I still fight the urge to copy others: I want to write with the sophistication and intelligence of my friend Elizabeth, or to know as much about music as my husband, or to be as physically fit as my friend Debbie, but I can be inspired by them without feeling compelled to imitate. What I want to see is a movie where the copycat somehow moves beyond it and ends up even better off than the person she copied in the first place.