Book Club

I’VE BEEN A READER my whole life and a fan of Oprah for almost as long. I remember when her television show was one not to be missed. It was on at my house every day at 4:00 p.m. EST. My babysitter would be watching when I got off the bus from school, and I would slide down on the couch with a snack in hand and watch with her. Then in 1996, Oprah made us all want to be in a book club.

I have been committed to two book clubs, and I loved them both. One in each city I’ve lived in. One in each decade of my grown life.

The one in my twenties began one fall when the leaves were changing and a group of my girlfriends went to a lake house in North Georgia for the weekend. As we all sat around on squishy couches with cups of coffee on Saturday morning, Nan casually began talking about the books she was reading and I was impressed. Classics. Modern popular novels. Fiction. Nonfiction. The books she listed ran the gamut of literature. When I asked how she picked them and why, she mentioned that she was reading them all for her book club. I didn’t know anyone in a book club (except Oprah). I peppered her with questions. When did they meet, how often, who picked the books, when did it start? And then I sheepishly asked if I could come sometime.

She said yes immediately and told me the book to grab for that month. I got it from my favorite local bookstore as soon as we got back to town and I started to read. I didn’t want to mess this up. It felt like a big deal. I was in my midtwenties; Nan and her friends were in their midthirties. I felt very mature and grown up to be reading along with women who were most definitely adults.

The first meeting was a discussion about a nonfiction faith-based memoir. The second month, we read a novel.

Y’all would have laughed at me if you’d seen me during the second book club night. The gorgeous house we went to belonged to a family of five. Candles were lit throughout the home, coffee was brewing, and rosewater cookies (right out of our novel) were fresh out of the oven. Like, the host had actually found a recipe for the cookies in the book and made them AND I DID NOT KNOW THAT WAS EVEN AN OPTION.

I knew that very night these were the kind of women I wanted to be. Their houses were more grown up, with husbands and rugs and garage doors that opened automatically—all things I wanted. I was different from them, but somehow when we all read the same book, I was one of them.

As the youngest member, I sometimes chose to sit back and observe because I felt I had little good to offer the conversation. Now, as a woman in my thirties who spends a pretty significant amount of time with men and women in their twenties, my gracious, what I would say if I could go back and talk to that Annie in that book club. I’d tell her about her value to a room of women who miss the days when life was grown up but a little simpler. I would tell her that the mere fact that they invited her is enough for her to be confident there. (No one pity invites to a book club.) I would tell her that there is something so refreshing about filling a room with a variety of experiences and ages, and in a room full of late-thirties women, it can feel like we are all just tired, even if we read the whole book. But I couldn’t have known all of that then, and it’s better not to know maybe. These book club women had busy lives, inside their homes and out, but I admired how they would take time to sit together, with a mug of coffee or a glass of water, and discuss the intricacies of literature.

My twentysomething peers and I were meeting up too. But we were meeting at Starbucks on Saturday morning to read and share magazines and make a plan for Saturday night and discuss our Fridays. It was, um, different. Sometimes regrets were shared and sometimes we overslept and sometimes it just felt like a version of college without classes. These book club women didn’t read the latest romance novel on the bestseller list or sit at Starbucks and try to write the ending to the romance novels we thought we were living. These grown-up women wanted to read the classics, the heart-wrenching nonfiction pieces, the fiction novels, and the historical works that I would never pick out for myself.

The women in my book club were so wise too. I was amazed at their knowledge, depth, and insight. They spoke eloquently, they thought deeply, and they related it all back to their love of God and love of family. And that would always do something to my insides.

So as much as I loved the book club itself, I think it was more about being in a room with these women once a month, talking about a book I loved reading, but mostly listening to the ladies who were smarter than me. They gave me that certain type of feeling. You know it too. You can feel it when you hear, read, or see something that so amazes you that your insides tighten up and you feel like you are breathing a new type of air.

I was in that book club for years, until I moved to Nashville. At the last meeting I attended, the women gifted me with books and hugs. It meant so much to me, even though I still knew I was different. I still knew I was young. I still knew I was the one leaving for another city, but they sent me off as one would send off a cousin to a different life. I had learned so much, read so much, and loved every month when I got just a little more grown up and a little more mature and a little more thirtysomething for the three hours we met. I left that last night hoping that someday, like my well-read friends, I’d be a smart book club member too.

I MOVED TO NASHVILLE and met Meg the first Sunday I was in town. She told me she was reading Eat, Pray, Love for a book club, and it almost brought tears to my eyes. The connection I had grown to love at the book club back home made me absolutely salivate at the idea of finding a book club so quickly in Nashville.

My original book club was full of women I had known up close and from a distance my whole life; this Nashville book club was absolutely swimming with strangers. I had never seen most of the faces before that first night in August when we sat outside on a porch and talked about a book I had devoured. (Everyone had.) I couldn’t believe I was already in some sort of group. I had only lived in Nashville for a few weeks and here was a collection of women making space for me when they gathered around a story—again. Here was a group in which I wasn’t sure I would fit, but they said I did, so I believed them—again.

We read different books from the first book club I was in. There were a few faith selections, but we leaned far more on modern fiction. One woman would pick the book for the next month and host. As that year carried on, the books we read were always choices I would have never found on my own. I loved most of the books. I read most of them all the way through, but I always showed up, even if I hadn’t finished. (When you’re new to town, you show up when invited if you want to make friends. Even if you haven’t read the book.)

As the months and years passed, book club was a constant. I got to host a few times, and the first time I did, I dove back into the book club folder in my mind and knew I needed a recipe from the book. So I called our favorite local bakery and got a cake made, just like the one in the book. It had real flowers as decorations and everything. I wasn’t the guest; I was the host. I wasn’t the new girl; I was welcoming the new girl who had just moved to town. I wasn’t the youngest in the room; I was the thirtysomething woman hosting in my home, candles lit and beautiful plates out on the table. The throw pillows on the couch were fluffed, and I wasn’t rushed before the women all arrived. I had become the women I watched a decade before, in a different city and a different time.

I didn’t know hobbies did that, but this one did. The longer I practiced this hobby, the more I saw myself becoming who I wanted to be. Not only were my hosting skills improving (which I totally think is a skill for men and women, not something just naturally born into all of us) but I was reading so much. I’ve always loved to read, but something is different when you aren’t the only one deciding what book to pick up. I was being stretched and taught by the books and by the women who sat around the dining room table or on the living room couches and talked about what we read.

I was looking in the mirror at the woman I wanted to be a decade ago.

BUT LET ME also tell you the truth about our Nashville book club.

It died.

I don’t know why. I don’t even remember the last meeting or why we never scheduled another one. I just know that at some point in the last few years, we stopped meeting. Even though we had close to twenty women the month we read The Help, it’s all gone now. And I miss it desperately.

I wish I could remember the last book we read or the reason we never met again. I see a few of the women very frequently; they are some of my best friends. At random moments we will say that we miss book club, but no one picks a book or sends an email. We just miss it. I wonder if it all stopped the same way every other hobby stops. The leisure time disappears or the things we do for pleasure get put on the back burner, then suddenly we blink and a highlight of our every month is out of our lives.

So weird.

For something we all loved, for something I had come to consider a tent peg in my Nashville life, for a night I always looked forward to and planned things around, it’s weird to think it is just gone. But it is. And I’m not sure I could resurrect it. And I guess on the other hand, if I really wanted to, I would have. So I guess I need to look at that woman in the mirror too—the one who let book club die and isn’t doing the work to bring it back.

IT’S BEEN YEARS since I’ve had a traditional book club in my life. But that’s because I’ve started something new. It’s very small and sweet, but I’m telling you, it’s just like a book club. It’s only three of us, it’s over lunch, and it’s every other month. The pressure is low and the commitment is even lower, but we really care. We are reading works that are hard to read: things about racial injustice and the mistreatment of our environment. We are reading books by authors who aren’t the same race as we are or in the same phase of life. We are reading fiction and nonfiction, but we’re reading with purpose.

And it’s another level of interesting and intentional and fun. It’s a different thing. I have long passed grown-up status, but I continue to refine and make it better. This book club doesn’t show me grown-ups. It doesn’t make me feel like a grown-up. It’s proof that I am a grown-up and proof that I’m working to be better.

I hope this book club will last. I hope this one has some distance to it. But maybe one of the things I love about book club is it isn’t forever. I never knew it wasn’t, but now I do. And when you learn that, you love it differently. So I’m loving this book club differently.

It’s a hobby that is growing me and maybe, just maybe, reading books and talking about them will put the world back together in some little way. Or, at least, it will give me the words to try to teach myself how to do it.

Maybe hobbies are also moments along your path that tell you who you were and who you are and who you want to be. Maybe you’re like me and they mark growth within yourself and your community and with God.

And I wonder if you’re reading this book in a book club? I sure hope so.