We usually think of life-changing events as precipitating actions in the real world, such as a birth or death, marriage or divorce, but to think about how written words (especially the words of a work of fiction) can have such an effect, well, that gives great power to the imagination.
Often these life-changing books are those we read first as children. Anne Lamott says that since her childhood, she must have read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time a dozen times.
“A Wrinkle in Time saved me,” she says, “because it so captured the grief and sense of isolation I felt as a child. I was 8 years old when it came out, in third grade, and I believed in it — in the plot, the people and the emotional truth of their experience. . . . the book greatly diminished my sense of isolation as great books have done ever since.”
John Irving was a little older when he read Great Expectations, the book that he says changed his life:
“I was 15. It made me want to be able to write a novel like that. It was very visual — I saw everything, exactly — and the characters were more vivid than any I had heretofore met on the page. I had only met characters like that onstage, and not just in any play — mainly in Shakespeare. Fully rendered characters, but also mysterious. I loved the secrets in Dickens — the contrasting foreshadowing, but not of everything. You both saw what was coming and you didn’t. Hardy had that effect on me, too, but when I was older. And Melville, but also when I was older.”
Richard Ford says that the book that changed his life and served as the inspiration for his novel The Sportswriter was Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Ford views The Moviegoer as “a renewing experience” and Binx as a hero “headed toward the light” and “trying find a vocabulary for affirmation, trying to find the institutions in life that will let him like life better and be better at it.”
Ira Glass dedicated a This American Life radio show to “The Book That Changed Your Life.” (Click on the highlight to hear the program.) This show (which includes a segment by David Sedaris) is a wonderful illustration of the many ways a book can change a person’s life.
So how did hearing Miss Caine read Les Meserables to our seventh grade class change my life? She and the novel were links to another world–a world radically different and far away from a hot classroom in southeastern North Carolina in the fifties, a world with great conflicts and moral issues, a world that explored the nature of love, compassion, justice, revenge and the effects of poverty. Of course, I didn’t think about these great themes at the time. I was just a kid who loved a good story and was happy to avoid diagramming sentences. But when Miss Caine read to us, I left the classroom behind and saw the people and the story in my mind. I was literally lifted out of myself.
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“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters
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Writing Jumpstart: Do you remember being read to? What are you reading now? What do you want to read? Have you read something that calls you into some sort of action or that inspires you to write in a certain way? Go for ten minutes.
I probably bought Eldridge Cleaver’s “Soul on Ice” 30 years ago, and it sat, unfinished, on one of the 3 shelves of unread books. It had somehow migrated, through many moves and dustings, to the “i’m next” spot. So last week, I began reading at the bookmark and found there an explanation of a problem that had been bothering me for 50 years. Never again will I doubt the power of books.
And I thought I kept unread books around for a long time–always planning to read them eventually. How interesting that the book remained on your shelf waiting to provide an explanation to a 50-year-old problem! I see the ones on my shelf as links to my past; and the longer I keep them, the harder it is to part with them. I wonder what answers lurk within their covers.
loved reading this. your site is gorgeous. love the reference to your wonderful new poem, too!
key books read aloud to me, a typical white girl in the fifties. read by my mom, with her wonderful low voice: Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Little Women, then she told me to read Jane Eyre, when i was ten, and my brothers advised The Stranger, by Camus, when i was twelve, and on i traveled.
Thanks, Deborah! I remember my mother reading Heidi to me too, and then discovering Little Women, but I don’t think I read The Stranger until college.
You must have your mother’s “wonderful low voice” because I love hearing you read poems to us on Monday mornings.
Although I’d heard the title, “A Wrinkle in Time” and goodness knows we all know the “It was a dark and stormy night” line, I’d never read it. So I downloaded it and began reading. I’m hooked.
How in the world with all my reading, including fantasy reading, and science fiction, and and and, did I miss this???
Thank you sooooo much for the post. I needed to read this right now! And there it was: grief and childhood and a misfit. Yep. Guess who’s struggling to write a memoir….. You’re the best Vicky.
Thank you, Janet! YOU are the best. I’m not sure I ever read “A Wrinkle in Time” either, but I must now. Also I’m looking forward to hearing more about your memoir. You made my day with this post!