I remind myself of the point, publicly

I just finished another Alice Munro paperback, Moons of Jupiter. I bought it in a sleepy bookstore in Manzanita, when we were down at the Oregon coast for the last week of holidays. My children were in the store with me, and they were not using inside voices. They begged me to buy toys from the children's section, jumping up and down while holding various packages of brightly-colored things. Genevieve was bouncing directly under my nose in order to compete with the height advantage her brother was using to lobby for a set of dinosaur books he held (without bouncing) in my face. It was over their whining heads that I spied Munro on the shelves. I felt the book and I shared a secret, as if the scene with my children was something we were both observing: my exasperation, their insistence, my longing for a quiet book to hide myself with. I bought the book and not the toys.

Sometimes I think about how I'd be described if I was a character in an Alice Munro story—makeupless in print dresses and boots, long messy hair with gray roots, direct conversation, practical second marriage, extra baby weight, a longing to escape social gatherings, a vague unease and pride about how my life's turned out. It's not terribly flattering, but comforting all the same. But I would want to leave it there—no sifting through the contents of my mind to reveal the weaknesses and unsolvable entanglements. The whimpering and prejudice.

One of my dear friends has given up writing her blog, and so doing made me ponder why I still post here. Why do I write this blog? I suppose the answer is simple. I want—need—to write, and I prefer writing here to writing in a private journal. I've kept a journal since I was eleven. Five years ago my journals were damaged in a flood, and as I flipped through their water stained pages I felt I needed to stop. It is easy to be lazy, repetitive and pathetic in a private journal. Writing online pushes me to avoid complaining, to find a solution to a problem, or make sense of chaotic lived experience. That is to say, I write here for myself. I know there are a select few people who do read my blog, and I am pleased with a little readership. I am not writing for a general audience, even if the site is available to anybody (or any bot) with an internet connection. Thankfully, I am not popular and so can pretty much write as I please.

Writing connects me to myself, and it also connects me to others in the same way I connected to the Munro book at the sea shore bookstore. The part of me that began writing journals at eleven was borne of reading. Books were my childhood friends. Authors and titles I read in the years before I went to high school—most of which I haven't seen in over thirty years—appear without effort:

Elizabeth George Spear's The Witch of Blackbird Pond, The Bronze Bow, The Sign of the Beaver; Marguerite De Angeli's Thee Hannah, The Door in the Wall; Elizabeth Enright's Four-Story Mistake, Return to Gone Away; L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon, Anne of Green Gables; E. B White's Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, The Trumpeter Swans; A. A. Milne's The World of Pooh; Daniel Pinkwater's Lizard Music, The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death; C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia; Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 

These books, and many others, provided me with a way to make the world sane. They gave me templates for feelings and experiences I had not yet had. They directed me to what was important: honesty, friendship, laughter, curiosity, loyalty, endurance, love. They reassured and inspired me. And it follows that my writing does some of this same work now. I remind myself of the point, publicly. 

Photo credit: Azrasta, Flickr

living without fiction

I don't read novels anymore. Or at least only rarely. For years now it's been biographies, autobiographies, essays, personal histories, journals, ethical reflections and the like. But I used to live on fiction. As a little girl I would stay up late into the night reading--a word or two at a time--by the lit control dial on my electric blanket. Sometimes a shaft of moonlight from the window would help--needless to say, I now wear glasses.

I read anything that began well enough to get me through the first ten pages--Moby Dick, the Book of Revelation, Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death. I even made a good attempt at Plato's Republic. We didn't have a television at home so the weekly trip to the public library was well anticipated. We were allowed five books a week, and in my opinion far too few to get me through until next Saturday.

My parents, perhaps troubled by my unabashed reading of such "grown-up" fiction as Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, imposed the rule that library books had to come from the "juvenile" section of the library. In fifth or sixth grade I began to venture out of juvenile section and creep around the "adult" stacks, careful to avoid my father, who was more likely than not perusing a boring book on woodworking or wildflowers. Lucky for me his no-nonsense books were shelved at a safe distance from the juicy fiction aisles I was interested in. I would carefully select one or two books from the "adult" section and hide them under my other books. This was how I read Gone with the Wind, the rather trashy North and South trilogy, as well as glossy history books documenting the Roman Empire--on which I was nursing a girlish crush.

My mother made it known that I was too young to read certain books we had on the shelves at home, such as Brontë's Wuthering Heights. Which of course only ensured it was read in the dead of night by electric blanket light. And, as you can imagine, the wailing sobs of Catherine's ghost were only more bone-chilling in my darkened childhood bedroom.

Sooner or later my parents gave up on controlling my reading. Our little home-schooled, wood-burning, vegetable-growing Christian family was beginning to betray signs of disillusion, and what I read became less important. In fact, as family life became tense, I dug further down into my books. And I passed the reading bug onto my younger brother. One my fondest childhood memories is of us under layers of quilts in our cold, wood-heated home, reading Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

But as I sit here, writing on my laptop in well-lit bed far from my childhood home, my novels pile up unread. I crave stories of the real. For example, Luke's amusing Oedipal misbehavior, Jenny's attempts to free grieving balloons from trees, or (my current book) an interpretive history entitled Lincoln's Melancholy. I want to read the mass of lives considered, suffered, hammered-out, well lived: I'm just plumb fictioned out.