On Fresh Air in 1986, Maurice Sendak told Terry Gross a story about a little boy who sent him a card and a drawing. Sendak wrote back, including a drawing of his own. Later, the boy’s mother wrote Sendak again, explaining that her son loved the response so much that he ate it. To Sendak, this was the ultimate compliment. “He saw it, he loved it, he ate it,” he chuckled.

Their correspondence stands in contrast to another fan letter many Olympics fans have seen in recent days. During the games, a number of AI ads have been in rotation, but none has raised as many eyebrows as one for Gemini, Google’s AI assistant. In the commercial, a father’s voiceover explains that his daughter, like him, is a runner. And she’s a huge fan of Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. He says he’s “pretty good with words,” but he wants her fan letter to Sydney to be “just right.”

Does he help her? Does he encourage her? Does she enter into the process at all? No. He just asks Gemini to write the letter. The prompt: “Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is. And be sure to mention that my daughter plans on breaking her world record. She says sorry, not sorry.”

Where to begin. Where! To! Begin!

Let us address quality first

I do not like generative AI, but for the sake of research, I fed this prompt – this very prompt! – into Gemini. I am not going to post the result here in full, but I can assure you that if you ranked all the middle managers of your bank from most to least inspiring, went to the one at the bottom, and asked them to write a draft of this letter for you, this is what you would get. The result is obligatory, desultory, boring and obviously machine-made. It contains sentences like, “You’ve shown the world that with determination, anything is achievable,” a toothless flop of a sentence that is, for the record, false.

The only – the only! – spark of personality comes in the machine’s dutiful inclusion of “sorry not sorry,” which Ad Dad put in the prompt. That is not artificial intelligence, it is a program taking the one piece of yourself that you included and spitting it back out, unchanged.

The problem with an AI approach to admiration

Generative AI advocates have sometimes claimed an interest in helping people with disabilities or people with limited English. Their internal business plans may reveal what role those considerations actually play in their planning, and AI could indeed have some of those applications. The bigger issue is that in many cases, including this one, the marketing of generative AI is a broadside against singularity in favor of digestibility, against creativity in favor of drudgery. It’s perfect for anyone who watched the video for Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and rooted for the meat grinder.

What Google is selling in this ad is not an assistive device; it is the promised replacement of your flawed humanity with the immaculate verbiage of Google. Immaculate verbiage like, “Watching you compete is like witnessing magic unfold.” So if you like your letters awkwardly structured and with all the emotion of a birthday card from your eye doctor, Gemini can help.

What a fan letter could be

Ad Dad is going about this all wrong. He says Gemini can get the letter “just right.” But there is no need for a fan letter to be “just right.” There is perhaps no truer example on Earth of “it’s the thought that counts” than a letter to someone you admire, telling them how much their work or their example means to you. Ad Dad’s daughter could have done anything from writing a short note in her own words to drawing a picture, and it would have been fine.

If you do want to help your kid write a fan letter as an exercise, don’t give her a tool designed to extrude the average of all the other letters that have come before it. Sit down with her and help her be specific. When did you first see Sydney compete? What does it look like to you when she goes over a hurdle? How do you feel when you see her perform? Do you like her stance? The way she hits a finish line? Her smile when she wins? What do you love about running? And sure, go over spelling with her if you want, too, or help her with her grammar. It’s a perfect opportunity.

A fan letter is not the beginning of a transaction, or even necessarily an exchange (though it can be that). It is an offering, a gift given in appreciation. Its purpose is not to impress, but to express. That it contains your wild and beautiful self – however imperfect, misspelled, and simple as it may be — is what makes it valuable.

A kid doesn’t need a comms strategy or a marketing department. There is all kinds of time for her to learn how to write a proper business letter, or a complaint letter, or a letter to Congress, or a legal brief or business plan. A kid needs to develop confidence that her voice is valuable and should be used. And over time, of course her writing can improve — but only if she’s given a chance to build skills. If you tell her to hit up Gemini when she wants to produce a letter, how will she ever live without it? Choosing a message of “don’t practice, just hit this button” is strange anywhere, but it feels downright perverse during the Olympics.

All an admirer needs to be is her best self. And who knows? If she genuinely makes a gesture on paper from the bottom of her heart, somebody might become overwhelmed and eat it. It’s been known to happen.

This year’s class of Booker Prize nominees has just been announced. The prestigious prize awards the best English-language fiction published in the UK and/or Ireland. While this is when we’d usually talk about common stylistic threads that bind the longlisted novels, the 13 books each have their unique voice.

“There is no single register here,” wrote Edmund de Waal, the chair of judges, in a statement announcing the list. “We need fiction to do different things – to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us.”

Among the list are a handful of names familiar to American readers – Pulitzer Prize winner Hisham Matar, Rachel Kushner, Tommy Orange, and more. But three authors made the cut with their debut novel: Colin Barrett, Yael van der Wouden, and Rita Bullwinkel – whose novel, Headshot, follows eight women competing in a boxing competition in Nevada. In the announcement, prize judges said Bullwinkel “elevates the gritty, physical realities of sport to a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics.”

The shortlist will be announced in September. The winner of the prize will be announced in November. The winner will receive 50,000 British pounds (about $64,000), a trophy, and a likely bump in book sales.

Here’s the full list:

• Colin Barrett, Wild Houses
• Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot    
• Percival Everett, James      
• Samantha Harvey, Orbital       
• Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake
• Hisham Matar, My Friends             
• Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History               
• Anne Michaels, Held
• Tommy Orange, Wandering Stars                    
• Sarah Perry, Enlightenment             
• Richard Powers, Playground
• Yael van der Wouden, The Safekeep
• Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional

I’m sitting across from an orthodontist, sipping a lukewarm coffee and gliding through typical first-date banter about L.A. traffic. But as this Hinge experiment with his simp-y Harry Styles hair and $200 sweatpants tries to lock eyes with me, I’m still staring just past his shoulder at a fake eucalyptus plant. I am silently praying this passes for eye contact, because I know what’s coming when my gaze meets his. The flinch.

If this term isn’t in your immediate search history, the flinch is an inverse of the male gaze; a jaw-tightening, ball-shriveling squint usually directed at my face. It is a subtle move that says without question: We are not the same.

Because I’m blind, and he isn’t.

My brain crackles with anxiety. Now I’m thinking about all those nice folks with herpes and how they have medication to help keep everything under wraps for a while. Now, I’m longing to have herpes and a vast collection of Valtrex as I down my drink. I need to order another round. Do it — do it now. Before this man notes with absolute certainty that you do not have anything close to the deep brown eyes he thought he saw in your dating profile, before he excuses himself and that second drink never happens.

Dating, in theory, is fun. Meeting a stranger at a cafe covered in hipsters and Moroccan tile, sitting at a too-small table and pretending to be interested in the Americano-length version of someone else’s life, can be total fire. But if you’re me, dating mostly makes you want to haul it outta there like you were in an episode of “The Last of Us.”

My face is unfortunate. It is lopsided. My eyes are different sizes and colors. My right eye is lazy, shriveled and blind; it moves like an out-of-control marble circling a drain. My left eye suffers hemorrhages that can cause episodes of total blindness. The reason for my Picasso of a face is because of a retinal disease I snag after my mother goes into labor three months early. She looks that Medicaid doctor right in his very symmetrical face and says through grunts and gritted teeth: “My girl doesn’t like to wait.”

Doctors move me to an ICU and crank my oxygen levels to 100% to keep me stable. Later, a nurse with nicotine stains on her fingernails, tells my parents I have developed retinopathy of prematurity, an eye condition caused by all that one-hundo oxygen. The disease will open me up to a revolving door of vision issues for life.

Then there is rushing. More doctors. A surgeon barely salvages the sight in my left eye, but my right eye can’t be saved. They tell my parents I’ll be blind in that eye forever. A teeny tiny Cyclops. I weigh less than a pound. I am so small the surgeon can place my entire hand on his pinkie nail.

And for a moment, everyone is staring.

The first boy I love has a rat-tail. We’re both 8 years old. To win his affection, on a dare, I decide to eat a cockroach off the ground during recess. Kids point and lose their collective 8-year-old mind, but the attention makes me feel electric. Then he makes direct eye contact with me. I look down; my performance upended in an instant. He’s staring at me like someone asked him to find Waldo and he stops on my mismatched marble-y eyes. The baby fat in his jaw tightens. Then it happens. My first flinch.

I stop going to recess.

At dinner, I mention my eye contact problem to my mother. She nurses her third rum and Diet Coke and says: “Look boys in the eye like you want to steal their wallet.”

By the time I reach high school, I can’t address another person unless my eyes are glued to the floor.

In the teenage dating hierarchy, I am a hard pass. Boys in artfully shredded Abercrombie jeans flinch in a chain reaction of disgust as I pass them in the halls. Cheerleaders corner me and demand to know what is wrong with my eyes. The cheer captain shoves me into a locker. I latch onto her perfect French braids and pull down hard until my knuckles go white. Somewhere JV cheerleaders chant “Fight!” like it is a pep rally.

Harrison in a preschool photo.

(Ayla Harrison)

And for a moment, everyone is staring.

I walk home alone with a busted lip and decide teenagers in my small Southern town are just wolves in Adidas track pants.

Years happen. I leave my swampy hometown. Before I go, my childhood eye doctor warns me that I have the eyes of an 80-year-old. I ignore him because I am 22.

I avoid discussing my ROP with anyone, and instead, I diligently plaster my bangs to my forehead to hide my blind eye. It’s a trick I learn working as a waitress at a neon-tinged strip club in some blink-of-an-eye Florida town that pushes all-you-can-eat oysters and lap dances until 3 a.m. I mimic the dance moves of the strippers. Just like the girls swaying onstage in G-strings, I want to feel that burn-a-hole-in-your-pocket desire from men. A dancer, this oiled-up pole ballerina, tells me about a weekend trip she took to L.A. “Life there is like a buzzsaw knocked up a glitter bomb,” she says.

A month later, I move to Santa Monica. I slide into the rip current of L.A. men and let myself fall in love in the time it takes to change a channel. But the relationships either fade or split open like cantaloupe dropped on hot pavement. And then, on one random Wednesday, my left eye hemorrhages and fills with blood. And suddenly, I cannot see.

Again, more doctors — specialists this time. Their offices are in tall towers. And like in many niche areas of medicine, there are silence and bright lights and a lot of nodding. There are lasers and emergency surgeries. Eventually I can see again, but not without a lot of help from a perpetual weekly doctor appointment. I make friends with the 89-year-old nana-and-pop-pop set in the lobby. I am there so often my mother asks if this ophthalmologist gives out a rewards card like at Yogurtland.

My eyes bleed while I’m in the shower and during yoga. My sight snaps off like a light while I’m at the supermarket. My episodes of blindness go on for months — and still — my mother asks: “When are you going to meet someone? And can you send artisanal doughnuts through the mail?”

This only reminds me of what’s coming: the flinch.

I need a new plan. Or a therapist. Instead, I call my ophthalmologist, a woman I’ve seen so many times I probably fund a fraction of her vacation house.

In the exam room, my ophthalmologist decides to fit me with therapeutic contact lenses. She explains these fancy lenses will protect my diseased eye and — bonus — they will make my eyes appear to be the same color. She finishes her adjustments, offers me a mirror like I’m in a Marvel movie, and waits for applause. I study my blind eye, tucked in its new costume, and opt for a late-night Google question instead: What if I got another procedure done on my eyes?

I suggest more surgeries — cutting-edge surgeries to fix my bad eye and its marble-y wobbling. My doctor pops a trained, reassuring smile and fires off a lecture on the dangers of continuing to rip open my eyes on the regular. The only thing all of those surgeries will do is make my condition worse, she tells me.

Two weeks later, in a different medical tower, I’m meeting with my retinal specialist this time. I hit him with my question about correcting my mismatched eyes. The response is identical — a list of horrors. He pauses to add, “But you are a single woman now. So maybe think about it,” and moves to a new patient without another word.

Tears hit me in a wet burst as my doctor shouts to an 82-year-old in the next room: “How are you doing today?” The door closes behind him.

Harrison crosses 4th Street in Long Beach. She went on a date at a nearby Peruvian restaurant with a man who surprised her.

I call my mother between sobs. I manage to say, “I can’t wear this lens.” I stammer on about how the lens is just a fancy bandage; a device to hide the fact that my vision loss is a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off. And who’s going to love that? My mom patiently waits out my sobs. Finally she says, “What sight you have left could go before I finish this sentence, but no one needs to be OK with that except you.”

Then she asks me if I’ve seen Reese Witherspoon do that one dance on TikTok yet.

Weeks later, I go on a date with a man. I sit across from him at a too-small table at a Peruvian restaurant on 4th Street in Long Beach. His voice is a mix of Spanish slang and a SoCal surfer lilt. And I swear he never drops eye contact. Normally this would wreck me. But with my new lens, I feel an odd new confidence. So, I commit first-date seppuku and tell him about my lens and my vision loss. As I talk, my anxiety hijacks my thoughts, and I immediately regret opening my mouth. Because I’m waiting for the flinch — for that lightning-fast jolt of expected pain. And then I realize I am too busy future spiraling to notice that my date is ordering a second round of drinks.

I am too busy to notice that our date is still going.

It goes until ice melts into the dark amber whiskey in our sweaty cocktail glasses. It goes until it is the soft yellow of morning sunlight. It goes until he holds my hand on a crowded street, and I know it’s my turn to look him in the eye. At a crosswalk, I turn my head and stare at this man.

And for a solid three seconds, I have an overwhelming urge to steal his wallet. I smile. Somewhere, my mother is right.

Then he asks, “Can I kiss you?” I nod. He leans in and kisses me right on my diseased little eyes, right in the middle of that crowded street.

And for a moment, everyone is staring.

The author is a playwright and screenwriter based in L.A. She’s on Instagram: @outinthestacks