11
The Readers I Have Been

I feel certain of this: I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I weren’t a reader. I don’t just mean because I enjoy reading or spend so much time with my books. I mean that from an early age, and without consciously intending to, the ideas I got from books formed the interior architecture of my mind. As I read, unbeknownst to me, my brain was busily constructing a framework from the ideas in the pages, a framework I would continue building on and refining for years to come. At this point in my life, I’m mostly moving the mental furniture around and hanging new art on the walls, but every so often I add a new room, or move a support beam; occasionally a load-bearing wall needs to be relocated. But I’m long past the point of starting from scratch; I can work only with what’s already there.

I can’t name every title or author whose words are bricks in my mental house; their words snuck in too long ago or under the radar of my consciousness. But some authors occupy such an outsized place in my mind—their words have been so formative—that I can almost point to the specific bricks their works put in place. One of these is Madeleine L’Engle, who first won me over when I was a kid meeting A Wrinkle in Time, and later when I was a young mother. I began reading her memoirs at the urging of a friend, and when I encountered her phrase “the tired thirties” to describe the decade between thirty and forty, during which she would often literally fall asleep with her head against the typewriter, I knew she could be trusted. L’Engle knew a thing or two about the stages of a woman’s life, and she wrote frequently about the process of growing up and growing older.

L’Engle once wrote, “The great thing about getting older is you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” She writes in The Irrational Season, “I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”

Every adult has arrived there by passing through their childhood, then teens and twentysomethings. But according to Madeleine—and I’m inclined to believe her—not every person can access their inner child, teen, or twentysomething.

Surely you’ve had the experience of meeting someone and thinking, It’s impossible he was ever a child. Is it wrong to hope I’ll never be one of them? I’d like to think I can access my inner four-year-old—curious about the world, skeptical of her little brother, innocently kind, occasionally cruel, always trusting. My inner seven-year-old—full of imagination, turning the creek bed behind my house into a fantasy kingdom ruled by mice. My inner seventeen-year-old—falling in love for the first time, feeling very grown-up making decisions for her future, and at the same time, very young. And now, when I occasionally have moments when I glimpse what I might be like at forty-five, or sixty-eight, or ninety-two, or any of the years to come.

I’d like to add an addendum to Madeleine’s theory. Just as I’m all the ages I have been, I’m all the readers I have been.

It’s taken me decades to figure out what kind of reader I am, and “what kind” is probably inaccurate: I’ve been many kinds of readers over the years, and I remember them fondly. (Sometimes I think I can imagine the readers I might yet be.) I’m the sum of all these bookish memories. My head is so full of musings and insights and ideas from books that I’m not sure who I would be or how I would think if they were all taken away.

I’m still the three-year-old on my father’s knee, begging him to read The Story of the Apple or There’s a Monster at the End of This Book again and again. I’m still the eight-year-old who innocently filled her school reading sheet with over a hundred titles, unaware that the class average would be somewhere around thirty, and that this would bring her unwelcome special attention. (Thankfully, the pleasures of reading outweighed the discomfort.)

I’m still the cautious ten-year-old sitting in the fifth-grade classroom listening to her teacher read aloud, who witnessed A Bridge to Terabithia unravel a classroom of thirty-three kids, leaving half of us sobbing and the other half futilely attempting to hide our tears.

I’m still the eager tween who spent the firstfruits of her babysitting money on the newest installments of The Baby-Sitters Club series, and later, in the inevitable 1980s progression, the Sweet Valley High series, who thought a great book didn’t cost more than four dollars and didn’t take more than an afternoon to read. I’m still the thirteen-year-old middle schooler suffering through a run of competent but uninspiring Language Arts teachers, culminating in an in-depth study of the impenetrable Song of Roland in the spring of eighth grade.

I’m still the earnest high school student writing her first term papers and feeling pleasantly grown up, trekking to the big library downtown for research on a Saturday morning, pulling her first Harold Bloom off the shelves, leaving her contacts behind in favor of her glasses, because wasn’t that what smart college girls did on the weekends? (I probably got that idea from a book.) I’m still the sixteen-year-old diving deep into The Great Gatsby, slightly put off by the strange title, surprising herself by not hating it, beginning to understand what a good writer could do with the written word and the depths of meaning hidden in plain sight behind billboards and lights and water.

I’m still the nineteen-year-old college freshman goggling over her first Annie Dillard, Eudora Welty, and Isabel Allende, and struggling through David Hume and Erik Erikson and Friedrich Nietzsche (in German!), who must have read for fun sometimes but can’t remember what counted as fun back then. (I imagine paperbacks were involved.)

I’m still the twentysomething inhaling spiritual memoirs as though her life depends on it, and maybe it did—churning through Madeleine and Dallas and Underhill and Lewis and Kathleen Norris and Eugene Peterson and Barbara Brown Taylor like they are oxygen.

I’m still the twentysomething who doesn’t know how to vet contemporary fiction, the new releases filling the bookstore shelves that haven’t yet had the opportunity to stand the test of time, who somehow keeps finding her way to one modern lackluster title after another until—burned by too many disappointing modern works—she decides to reacquaint herself with the works that have endured: Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina. (And thereby learning the timeless lesson that would serve me well in the years to come: if you’re looking for a great book, going old is never a terrible idea.)

I’m still the young mother—twenty-five, twenty-six—reading Frog and Toad and Little Bear and Five Little Monkeys aloud on the couch to my firstborn, who, being too young to reliably hold up his own head, neither understands nor cares what I read him. But The Read-Aloud Handbook validates my desire to read to my tiny baby, so I do. I’m still the reader who knew Machines at Work and Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by heart, from repetition. (To this day, I can’t stop myself from announcing mealtimes with, “Now, let’s eat lunch,” because I read those words so many times in Byron Barton’s board book. I am still this reader, even at lunchtime.)

I’m still the thirty-year-old discovering the pleasures of returning over and over again to a good novel, the reader who learned that you don’t have to be a kid to read kid lit, who revisited Anne and Emily and Valancy, who indulged in the pleasures of filling the inexplicable gaps in her book-filled childhood, remedying the situation by speeding through all the Little House books, then the Betsy-Tacy books, and the Shoe series. Who blazed through all the Harry Potters in ten days, because they were that good.

I’m still the thirty-five-year-old who has the house to herself and a zillion things to do and two hours to do it in, but spends the time in an uncomfortable kitchen chair, finishing Eleanor & Park because she has to find out what happens next, and because that discovery feels like enough of an accomplishment for one afternoon.

And what of the reader I am today, now, reading for my own sake, because I love it, because it fuels me, and reading for and with the people I love? Reading books with ridiculous potty jokes because they delight my young children; reading books riddled with teen drama because those stories captivate my older kids. Reading a new-to-me author, falling in love, and binge reading everything she’s ever written in a week, just as I did when I was younger. Visiting the bookstore three times a week and perusing the “new fiction” table every time, even though the titles haven’t changed a whit, because I notice something a little bit different every time, and because a bookstore is full of nothing if not possibility. Still finding it hard to give up on any book with a catchy premise and great narrative drive, because I am still hooked on the story.

As a devoted reader, I know what it means for books to shape you—the person you are, the person you were then. For readers, the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other readers you’ve been. Sometimes you think fondly of the readers you used to be; sometimes looking back makes you cringe a little. But they’re still here. They’re still you.