I Wish I Was Like You

S.P. Miskowski

Before Microsoft, Amazon, and Starbucks. Before bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, Seattle was a small northwest city where artists could live and work without being stressed about rent or, you know, dinner.

Lots of flannel shirts, Converse kicks, listening to music, and chasing your dreams.

That’s the Seattle in which our anti-heroine Greta lives. Or, more accurately, dies. When we meet Greta, she has just returned home at the end of a crappy week working at a photocopying center. She’s drenched: After waiting in the rain for a bus that never arrived, she stomped home six blocks. Up three flights of stairs and into her not-so-great apartment, she finds a dead body on the floor. Her dead body. She smokes three cigarettes, drinks a glass of Burgundy, has four tokes of weed, and tries to figure out what the devil is going on.

We join Greta’s ghost as she shows us her previous life and investigates how she ended up shot dead on the orange carpet in her living room. We see her as a student, falling into the desire to be a writer and out of a tragic romance. We watch her writing career sputter in fits and starts and observe as she torches one friendship after another. Our girl nurtures grudges like they’re her pets and is just… lost. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the vast number of unclaimed years that stretched before me. I didn’t know what or who I was, or how I wanted to wear my hair, or whether I wanted to cook or have children or travel.’

Despite her prickliness and messiness, it’s not hard to root for Greta. Like ’90s Seattle, her voice is darkly funny, nihilistic, self-deprecating. In the aftermath of finding her corpse, the thing that upsets her most is that the newspapers report she killed herself. ‘Of course I hated my life, she says, ‘but my fate — to become a composite sketch of a 1994 twenty-something with a terrible job living in a grubby apartment in a city best known for suicide, rain, and serial killers — this was too much.’

The author S.P. Miskowski has vividly recreated grunge-era Seattle on the page. While Greta traipses around town in her spectral form, she takes us on a tour of the must-see Seattle landmarks. Her story is populated with people — characters with a capital C — trying to make a go with their art. They’re creative and inspiring, yet also feel like they’re about two seconds from couch-surfing at a friend’s house.

Part detective novel and part workplace drama, this is an inside look at the creative life and a meditation on what we make of our finite time on earth. The story is suspenseful and grimy; it’s always unclear what might happen next. A delightfully weird read.

What a long, miserable bus ride across Washington State. Long stretches of emptiness except for railroad tracks and freeway signs. Ranches with paint peeling off the barns and houses, apple orchards, a few scattered towns where boarded up hotels stared out, ruined and vacant. The nauseating combination of gasoline fumes and the egg salad sandwich eaten by a grizzled hag next to me, the chattering tourists, the hiss and sigh of pistons. Coming into view at last, the city was a series of muddy streaks, blue ones and gray ones, Elliott Bay providing a cold backdrop to a handful of skyscrapers and a cluster of historical buildings. Old and new sat on top of one another in no particular order. The rat-tat-tat of jackhammers provided a cruel rhythm. Outlying in all directions were brick three- and four-story apartments. The morning air buffeted seagulls and pigeons. Sleepy artists with day jobs and hung-over receptionists, crazed bicycle couriers and shabby law interns crowded the downtown corridor, all slurping coffee and wandering through their workday, when I arrived by Greyhound. — S.P. Miskowski

Strong Sense of Place is a listener-supported podcast. If you like the work we do, you can help make it happen by joining our Patreon! That'll unlock bonus content for you, too — including Mel's secret book reviews and Dave's behind-the-scenes notes for the latest Two Truths and a Lie.

no spoilers. ever.

We'll share enough detail to help you decide if a book is for you, but we'll never ruin plot twists or give away the ending.