books

A shelf in my living room with some well-loved classics

I was an English major in college and I’ve read a lot of books.  I keep a mostly updated list of what I’ve read recently here.  But still, there are so, so many books that I haven’t read and still want to read.  It’s not an overstatement to say that I feel actively anxious that I won’t have time, in my life, to read every book I want to read.  For some reason the classics still daunt me in a major way.  Do you know what I mean?  Are there classics that you still wish you’d read, perhaps, like me, wish you’d read in the context of a class, guided by someone smarter and more accomplished than you?  There’s one that stands above all others for me on this list, and that’s Frankenstein.  I’m fascinated by Mary Shelley, and I know I would love this book.  Maybe I will just finally go ahead and read it.  What’s holding me back?  I’m not sure.

But there are other books, too.  Books I wish I’d read when I regularly sat around a round mahogany table among smart, thoughtful, tired classmates, all of us being prompted to think about what we were reading.  Books I wish I’d had someone motivating me to read.  Books I even wish I had written papers on, even if I had to take a copy of that paper to a basement print lab on a hard disk to print it.  Oh, the 1990s.

The list of books I wish I’d read in college is endless.  But when I think, off the top of my head, of those volumes I most wish I had read, these are what comes to mind:

The Divine Comedy, Dante

Ulysses, Joyce

Moby Dick, Melville

The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit series, Tolkien

I was interested in what books were on the lists of others, and so I asked on Twitter and Facebook.  The answers were super interesting:

Anna Karenina, Tolstoy
Dickens – 4 votes
“all things Faulkner”- 2 votes
Jane Eyre, Bronte
the work of George Eliot
1984, Orwell
“words by Plato and Socrates”
Pride and Prejudice, Austen
Wuthering Heights, Bronte
Chaucer
Jules Verne
To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee
more Shakespeare – 2 votes
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kesey
Moby Dick, Melville
War and Peace, Tolstoy
Last of the Mohicans, Cooper

What books loom like this for you, in some should-have-could-have-wish-I-had land of regret and mystery?

Annie Dillard has been one of my very favorite writers for a long, long time.  A search of this blog’s archives brings up fully 2 pages of posts that reference her.  It is frankly inexplicable, then, that I hadn’t read An American Childhood before.  Perhaps the reason is that I was waiting for the precisely perfect moment to read it, which was last month in the Galapagos.  The universe conspired so that I read this book, which is about a child awakening to the miracle of the world and of how transient it is, about moving into adolescence, about memories that we never forget, right as I watched my own near-adolescent children in open-mouthed wonder at the glorious view in front of them.  I can’t count the number of times I breathlessly underlined a passage about the bittersweet awe of childhood and then looked up to marvel at my own children, willing myself to freeze them, and that experience, that moment, perfectly in my memory.

An American Childhood, Dillard’s loving, lovely memoir of her childhood in Pittsburgh, is about the central theme of my life, about the black hole around which my every thought, emotion, tear, and word revolves: time’s irrevocable, speedy passage.  Pittsburgh is far from the Galapagos, and I am certainly no Annie Dillard, but it speaks to the brilliance and power of her writing that I fell into her story headfirst and related to something on every single page.

Time’s passage is the drumbeat cadence of the book, and fascination with the holiness that exists in the natural world is its soaring descant.  I am familiar with how breathtakingly beautifully Dillard evokes the sacred that is inherent in nature, but this was the first time I’d been moved so by her writing about life’s ephemeral transience.

Who could ever tire of this radiant transition, this surfacing to awareness and this deliberate plunging to oblivion – the theater curtain rising and falling?  Who could tire of it when the sum of those moments at the edge – the conscious life we so dread losing – is all we have, the gift at the moment of opening it?

An American Childhood is suffused with this radiance, tracing one girl’s “surfacing” from young childhood to a more aware, and more complicated adolescence.  At the outset of the book, by recording a “few, floating scenes from early childhood,” Dillard brings a complete world vividly to life: her neighbor skating in the street during an ice storm, her mother addressing a phalanx of nuns, the light of a passing car across a dark wall, her barrel-chested, particular grandmother, Oma.

And then, as Dillard gets older, she describes a change that occurs around the double digit mark.  She begins to understand the world and her place in it.  This transition is a kind of awakening, and it brings both great appreciation for the world and a keen awareness of how short-lived our time here is.  With that awareness, which is intensely familiar to me, comes a fierce, ferocious need to pay attention to the world:

Noticing and remembering everything would trap bright scenes to light and fill the blank and darkening past which was already piling up behind me.  The growing size of that blank and ever-darkening past frightened me; it loomed beside me like a hole in the air and battened on scraps of my life I failed to claim.  If one day I forgot to notice my life, and be damned grateful for it, the blank cave would suck me up entire.

“What does it feel like to be alive?” Dillard asks midway through An American Childhood.  And this felt like a manifesto, a summary of all that she works out in her writing: what it is to be alive in this world.  This question, which is also a preoccupation of mine, throbs through everything I’ve ever read by Dillard.  Then she answers her own question:

It is time pounding at you, time.  Knowing you are alive is watching on every side your generation’s short time falling away as fast as rivers drop through air, and feeling it hit … knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang onto the ring….you feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die?  Do you remember, remember, remember?

Dillard was clearly a hyper-aware child and probably one with a melancholy streak too.  It is books and nature that bring her the most joy; she talks about scanning the shelves at the local library and about her rock collection with the same passionate nostalgia.  As an adult reflecting on her child self, she realizes the fine line she walked, between observing the world and living in it: “How much noticing could I permit myself without driving myself round the bend?  Too much noticing and I was too self-conscious to live … too little noticing, though – I would risk much to avoid this – and I would miss the whole show.”

This tension is one I grapple with all the time  The border between watching my life and experiencing it is both porous and shifting.  I need to do one to do the other, that much is clear to me, but the balance between them that feels right changes daily, if not hourly.

An American Childhood moves forward through Dillard’s adolescence, and we see the entrance of boys, and dances, and the beginning of a new kind of drama.  She talks about deeply loving two men, and she loses grandparents.  She shows us the way that “loss grew as you did, without your consent,” and as the child author grows into a young woman we see her increasing familiarity with the two sides of this world, both beauty and pain.  Indeed, she notes, “time itself bent you and cracked you on its wheel.”

I closed An American Childhood with an ache in my chest, that sensation of having read something so true it hurts.  I looked over at the glow of the Galapagos sunset on the faces of my children and felt the fascination and sorrow of this life running together in my veins.  I cannot recommend highly enough Dillard’s love letter to childhood, to reading, to nature, to this world in all of its myriad, multifaceted beauty.  In the last pages she describes a feeling which sums up what reading An American Childhood is like: “It is the dizzying overreal sensation of noticing that you are here.  You feel life wipe your face like a brush.”

In the Galapagos, life wiped my face.  Reading An American Childhood, it did too.  It is my belief that in those dizzying, overreal sensation, we are truly living.

I love book dedications.  They are always the first thing I read in a book.  One of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me is that I taught that person to always read the dedication in a book.  This was, naturally, written inside the front cover of a book that was a gift (a book of Andre Dubus stories).

Some of my favorite dedications were between Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Of course we know now that their story ended in pain, but the particular texture and intensity of their love affair is reflected in the dedications of their books. For some reason they’ve always really captured my imagination.

From Louise to Michael:
To Michael
U R Lucky 4 Me
(The Bingo Palace – the book from which the quote that names this blog is taken)

To Michael,
Complice in every word,
Essential as air.
(The Beet Queen)

Michael,
The story comes up different every time and has no ending but always begins with you.
(Tracks)

From Michael to Louise:
For Louise,
who found the song and gave me voice.
(Cloud Chamber)

For Louise,
Companion through every page, through every day. Compeer.
(Yellow Raft in Blue Water)

I love other dedications, like Fitzgerald’s simple and ineffably moving “Once again to Zelda” in The Great Gatsby.

Do you read dedications?  Who would you dedicate a book to?

I am a big Kelly Corrigan fan.  Her video, with its tag line we won’t come back here, brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it.  I loved The Middle Place.  I have forced many friends to listen to me read her essay about turning 40, and her sustaining female friendships, which makes me weep.  One review I read of her work called her the “poet laureate of ordinary life.”  We have the same birthday.  I mean … I adore her.

All of this means that I dove into her new book, Glitter and Glue: A Memoir, enthusiastically.  My interest in, curiosity about, and affection for the mother-daughter relationship is extremely well documented here.  I was intrigued to read Kelly’s thoughts on her mother, who figures quite peripherally in The Middle Place.

The book’s title comes from something Kelly’s mother told her when she was a child: “Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue.”  That single line brought tears to my eyes because it reminded me of my own childhood: I’m the child of a glittering mother, who’s been seeking that same kind of dazzle in her friendships for many years.  Myself?  More glue, I think.

Kelly’s mother was and is formidable, her rules strict, her love tough, and her authority absolute.  Glitter and Glue starts out with the assertion, so familiar to all daughters, that we only understand our mother’s influence – and brilliance, and love – once we are out of their shadow, and with time.  Most of Glitter and Glue takes place in a family’s home in Australia, because it is there, shortly after her college graduation, that Kelly begins to see her own mother with clarity and affection.  After taking off on a big adventure to see the world, Kelly and her friend run out of money.  They need jobs, and the only ones they can find are as nannies.  Kelly moves into the Tanner house to help shortly after their mother (and wife) has died.  The Tanners are the central characters of the book: Martin and Milly, the children, Evan, the step-brother, Pop, the grandfather, and John the grieving father and recent widower.

During her five months with the Tanners, Kelly develops relationships with each member of the family.  She also hears her mother’s voice all the time – as do we, the reader, in the form of italicized phrases.  “God knows, every day I spend with the Tanners, I feel like I’m opening a tiny flap on one of those advent calendars we used to hang in the kitchen ever December 1, except of revealing Mary and Joseph and baby Jesus, it’s my mother,” Kelly reflects on the unexpected but undeniable way her mother is animate in this foreign house halfway around the world.  Kelly had left home, certain that the grand experiences she sought could not be had at home, but her time with the Tanners teaches her that important, formative things can happen inside the mundane-looking reality of family life.  Towards the end of her time in Australia she reflects that “…I was wrong, things definitely happen in a house – big, hard, beautiful things.”

There are two ways that Kelly’s time with the Tanners brings her mother to mind.  More obviously, she is being the mother, as the only adult female in the family.  But, less visibly but equally importantly, she is keenly aware of the contrast between Martin and Milly’s lack of a mother and her own strong one.  In both these ways, Kelly’s mother looms large over the time at the Tanners’.  Her voice guides Kelly as she takes on a maternal role for the first time.  Simultaneously, as Kelly realizes how interwoven her mother is with her own identity, she keeps tripping over all the painful ways that this won’t be true for Milly and Martin.

It’s not until after I put her to bed that night that I can bring myself to think about my mother and the reams of things she did for me that could and should have softened me.  What is it about a living mother that makes her so hard to see, to feel, to want, to love, to like?  What a colossal waste that we can only fully appreciate certain riches – clean clothes, hot showers, good health, mothers – in their absence.

This blend of omniscence and invisibility defines Kelly’s dawning awareness of her mother’s importance.  This observation is so accurate it made me almost uncomfortable: what did I take for granted about my mother – what do I still take for granted?  It made me want to pick up the phone and call the mother I’m so privileged is still alive, well, and nearby, and say: thank you.  At one point, Kelly chastises Milly with words that ring in her head, even as she says them, as “verbatim Mary Corrigan.”  This, I imagine, is a fairly universal experience: hearing our own parents’ voices as we say things to our children that we recall (and probably disliked) hearing when we ourselves were small.  For me, right now, the main one is “only boring people are bored.”

The narrative moves smoothly back and forth between describing Kelly’s life at the Tanners and recollections of her own childhood.  The memories of growing up illuminate Kelly’s mother beautifully, and I had a powerful sense of her as a wise, smart, practical woman who did not budge after she made up her mind and cared more about doing the right thing by her family than she did about their liking her.  As Kelly says goodbye to the Tanner family at the airport, she finds herself overcome with emotion.  Her powerful reaction surprises her, and as she reflects on all the details about their lives she will remember, she also realizes part of its root: Martin and Milly taught her a lot about her own mother.

I’ll know it was the Tanner kids who pointed me back toward my own mother, hungry to understand her in a way I clearly didn’t yet.  They put her voice in my head.  They changed her from a prosaic given to something not everyone has…

One strand of the book that I found tremendously compelling was Kelly’s clear and incisive ability to understand her parents’ marriage, and the different – but equally crucial – roles each had played in the family.  As she becomes a mother herself, Kelly begins to see the ways in which being the “glue” to her husband’s “glitter” were a choice, and not always an easy one.  A new identification with her mother develops when Kelly has her own children: “I began the transition from my father’s breezy relationship with the world to my mother’s determined navigation of it.”

Glitter and Glue is told in Kelly’s inimitable, funny, wise voice, the one that is now familiar from her other work and which feels like I’m talking to a particularly well-spoken and hilarious friend.  Over and over again I laughed and blinked away tears, often on the same page.  On the last page of the book Kelly says, “I want to tell my mom that I admire her, the quiet hero of 168 Wooded Lane,” and the whole story comes into sharp, bright focus.  This book is a love letter to her mother, just as The Middle Place was one to her father.  Even though the child and adolescent Kelly couldn’t necessarily appreciate her mother in the moment (and isn’t this true for a great many of us?) , the middle-aged one can recognize the ways in which Mary Corrigan contained “the strongest currency [a child] would ever know: maternal love.”