Watershed books
Going back to the question of books that have been life-changing in some way, large or small. The research over which we've been arguing asked specifically about fiction. I'm going to ignore that restriction; I hope you don't mind.
1. Six Silver Spoons, by Janette Sebring Lowrey . This was an easy reader chapter book about a little girl living in British-occupied Boston at the beginning of the American Revolution. For reasons that I no longer remember, her family needs to smuggle some table silver made by Paul Revere past a cordon of British soldiers. They do it by wrapping the spoons in fabric and then dressing the fabric up as the little girl's doll. Why this captured my imagination so I do not know, but I spent the rest of my preschool years reading books about the American Revolution. I swear, there is a direct line from my reading of this book to my eventual undergraduate major.
2. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank. I've mentioned this before (and I'll probably go on picking at this scar forever). My mother borrowed this book from the library and gave it to me to read. I was six years old; I wanted to be a writer. Anne Frank was a beautiful writer, and twice my age. I had been reading mostly American history books and mystery series (Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins), so Anne Frank offered the extra thrill that, for the first time, I was reading something by and about someone who was Jewish like me. The hero-worshipping commenced as I read the first page, and intensified as I read through.
Then I finished it. And the happy ending never came. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but the death of my hero, Anne Frank, murdered my faith in God, not to mention my childish (but then, I was a child) belief that good people are some how protected by their goodness. It took also any sense I might have had that life and fate were controllable, that evil was vanquishable.
It was not my first experience with fear. My mother told me bedtime stories about serial killers: I was already an anxious child who lay awake nights afraid of intruders, fire, nuclear war. But the story of Anne Frank was my introduction to anti-Semitism, the idea of being myself singled out as a target for inescapable evil. Much of the rest of my childhood was spent fruitlessly grappling with this idea: nightmares, hidden food stashes for living on when the Nazis came, an obsessive interest with learning how to navigate in the woods. (I was not going to get trapped like Anne Frank; I was going to get out. I'd live in the woods.)
In some ways I feel extremely sheepish about the trauma this dealt me. So many children have learned about hatred and murder and genocide first-hand, not secondhand while eating a box of Saltines on the family couch. Plenty of children were raised by survivors, grew up with personal stories of unfathomable loss. It's such arrogance to imagine that I somehow had the right to be sheltered from the world's more horrifying truths. If my mother had left well enough alone, I certainly would have learned about the Holocaust anyway. My third grade Hebrew school class had a textbook on the Holocaust; my third grade Hebrew school teacher had a number tattooed on her arm. But somehow I persist in thinking that this formal, communal introduction would have been less traumatic than the private one my mother engineered for me. It is still, so many years later, so painful to me that I do not own a copy of the diary.
3. The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh. This is the sequel to Harriet the Spy, but I read it first. Harriet is on the detective trail to hunt down the author of anonymous notes being left all over the rural town where she summers with her parents. Her companion is a minor character from Harriet the Spy -- Beth Ellen, a quiet, mousy, well-behaved girl who lives with her extremely wealthy grandmother while her mother lives the high life in Europe. Then Beth Ellen's mother comes to visit. I won't tell you the whole plot, in case there are any of you out there who haven't read it yet, but at the denouement, Beth Ellen learns that her mother wants to take custody of her again. Beth Ellen's reaction is one of my favorite moments in all literature:
I had no idea. It was a mystery, one that would eventually propel me to ask myself the questions that a family with secrets to keep doesn't want asked. And in that sense, page 260 of The Long Secret was the first page of the rest of my life.
1. Six Silver Spoons, by Janette Sebring Lowrey . This was an easy reader chapter book about a little girl living in British-occupied Boston at the beginning of the American Revolution. For reasons that I no longer remember, her family needs to smuggle some table silver made by Paul Revere past a cordon of British soldiers. They do it by wrapping the spoons in fabric and then dressing the fabric up as the little girl's doll. Why this captured my imagination so I do not know, but I spent the rest of my preschool years reading books about the American Revolution. I swear, there is a direct line from my reading of this book to my eventual undergraduate major.
2. The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank. I've mentioned this before (and I'll probably go on picking at this scar forever). My mother borrowed this book from the library and gave it to me to read. I was six years old; I wanted to be a writer. Anne Frank was a beautiful writer, and twice my age. I had been reading mostly American history books and mystery series (Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins), so Anne Frank offered the extra thrill that, for the first time, I was reading something by and about someone who was Jewish like me. The hero-worshipping commenced as I read the first page, and intensified as I read through.
Then I finished it. And the happy ending never came. I don't mean to be melodramatic, but the death of my hero, Anne Frank, murdered my faith in God, not to mention my childish (but then, I was a child) belief that good people are some how protected by their goodness. It took also any sense I might have had that life and fate were controllable, that evil was vanquishable.
It was not my first experience with fear. My mother told me bedtime stories about serial killers: I was already an anxious child who lay awake nights afraid of intruders, fire, nuclear war. But the story of Anne Frank was my introduction to anti-Semitism, the idea of being myself singled out as a target for inescapable evil. Much of the rest of my childhood was spent fruitlessly grappling with this idea: nightmares, hidden food stashes for living on when the Nazis came, an obsessive interest with learning how to navigate in the woods. (I was not going to get trapped like Anne Frank; I was going to get out. I'd live in the woods.)
In some ways I feel extremely sheepish about the trauma this dealt me. So many children have learned about hatred and murder and genocide first-hand, not secondhand while eating a box of Saltines on the family couch. Plenty of children were raised by survivors, grew up with personal stories of unfathomable loss. It's such arrogance to imagine that I somehow had the right to be sheltered from the world's more horrifying truths. If my mother had left well enough alone, I certainly would have learned about the Holocaust anyway. My third grade Hebrew school class had a textbook on the Holocaust; my third grade Hebrew school teacher had a number tattooed on her arm. But somehow I persist in thinking that this formal, communal introduction would have been less traumatic than the private one my mother engineered for me. It is still, so many years later, so painful to me that I do not own a copy of the diary.
3. The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh. This is the sequel to Harriet the Spy, but I read it first. Harriet is on the detective trail to hunt down the author of anonymous notes being left all over the rural town where she summers with her parents. Her companion is a minor character from Harriet the Spy -- Beth Ellen, a quiet, mousy, well-behaved girl who lives with her extremely wealthy grandmother while her mother lives the high life in Europe. Then Beth Ellen's mother comes to visit. I won't tell you the whole plot, in case there are any of you out there who haven't read it yet, but at the denouement, Beth Ellen learns that her mother wants to take custody of her again. Beth Ellen's reaction is one of my favorite moments in all literature:
She ran into her room and slammed the door as hard as she could. She ran into her bathroom and slammed the door as hard as she could. As she slammed the bathroom door she thought, That is the third door I have ever slammed in my life. I don't care. I don't care anymore. I will slam every door I run into for the rest of my life. She ran up and down the bathroom. She couldn't stop.I was eight years old when I first read that. It would be years before I understood the first thing about why I loved this scene about making a scene. But what grabbed me immediately and left me open-mouthed and amazed were these lines of dialogue that followed:
It isn't fair, it isn't fair, it isn't fair, ran through her head. I'm not a child, she thought with a wild scream in her head. I never was a child and now I'm really not. I'm going from a troll to an old woman. It isn't fair.
It isn't fair, it isn't fair. Before she knew it, before she even heard her own voice, she was screaming at the top of her lungs and throwing everything in sight. She started with the towels, which she tried to tear up and couldn't. She broke the glass sitting on the sink. She threw her toothbrush on the floor and stepped on it, grinding her heel in. She tried to pick up the scale and throw it through the window, but it was too heavy, and she dropped it on the tiles where it made a satisfying, resounding, thundering crash.
Then she opened the door and slammed it. She opened it again and slammed it again. She didn't even know what she was doing. It's not fair. It's not fair. It's not fair. She heard only that. Over and over and over. The slamming door rang out like punctuation -- a big, bang period at the end of each phrase.
She stopped that and ran over and turned on the shower. Then she turned the nozzle of the shower so the spray hit the floor.
Through the water she ran into her room. She threw everything on the dresser across the room. Then she opened the door to her room and slammed it. THe water was now pouring out of the bathroom into her room. She slammed the door again. She slammed it three times and the fourth time she opened it there were Zeeney [her mother], Wallace [her mother's boyfriend], and the maid. She only got a glimpse of their three startled faces before she slammed it again, plunged through the cascading water into the bathroom, and locked the door.
"I suppose you're timid because you've had to grow up here with an old lady. You haven't had any real life. But there's something I want to tell you about timidity, about shyness."Shy people are angry people. I was a shy child, but until I read that sentence, I had never realized that I was an extraordinarily angry child as well. For the first time I felt my anger. And, for the first time, I wondered why on earth I was so angry. What did I have to be so angry about?
Beth Ellen searched her grandmother's face to see if she were angry, but the face looked impassive. I'm going to be told I'm bad, she thought.
"Shy people are angry people," said Mrs. Hansen.(...)
I had no idea. It was a mystery, one that would eventually propel me to ask myself the questions that a family with secrets to keep doesn't want asked. And in that sense, page 260 of The Long Secret was the first page of the rest of my life.
Labels: Ruined by reading, Where I'm calling from
posted by Phantom Scribbler at 11:46 PM 
<< Home