No 750 for this one. Instead, I’ll just ask you to carefully annotate the story and bring it to class. In class, we’ll do the “passing notes” exercise in which you write on some prompts, then pass your paper to a classmate, who will respond to your comments. So it’s like we’ll be doing the 750 in class, except in an interactive fashion.
Here’s a preview of the “passing notes” prompts, in case you’re interested:
What’s this story ultimately about? Under the bawdy humor, what’s the seriousness or sadness? What does the main character really want (besides Cameron Diaz) Point to evidence in the text.
Aja Gabel wrote a review of this story for Short Story Month 2011. In the review, she points to the passage where “Cameron Diaz tells a story of Marilyn Monroe hiding her celebrity in plain sight, and then, simply by changing the way she walks, reveals herself. Cameron says, ‘See, she changed who she was inside.’” Later in the review, Gabel claims that “Cameron Diaz and I are in Love” is “either the story of a man changing who he is inside or not changing who he is inside, (but) at least the imaginary landscape of his attempt to try.”
Does the main character change who he is inside? In what ways is he successful (or unsuccesful)?
In her review, Gabel calls the story “sexy exciting but earnest, clever and funny but meaningful, brave and bawdy but universal.”
In what ways is this story universal? What does it suggest about the human condition—or—How is the main character like any of us?