A Room of My Own

When I was a child, I read books. As soon as I learned to read, I devoured as many books as I could. And even before that, I had opinions about stories. When I was three, my teacher at Central Lutheran Preschool decided to show the class a cartoon of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I turned to her and said, “I hate this one.” (The following year, my parents asked this same teacher if I was ready for kindergarten—they were concerned because I wouldn’t turn five until October. She said that I was.)

I especially loved box sets of books: the Little House books, Narnia, and the Anne of Green Gables series (though really, I preferred Emily of New Moon). This was occasionally hazardous. During one of the frequent Alaskan earthquakes, my box set of the Little House books fell on my head while I was sleeping. My parents got me a bookshelf. I alphabetized it.

My reading was legendary. My best friend Meghan would get so frustrated by me reading instead of playing on our sleepovers that she would say, “I have a book to lend you, but I’m not going to give it to you until you leave in the morning.” When our small school library moved to a different room, a sweet boy in my class showed me where the Value Tales were on the shelf because he knew I loved them. I enjoyed these moral histories of great people (Marie Curie, Sacajawea, Harriet Tubman), with their colorful cartoon art, but I preferred the small print “real” story at the end. I reread The Little Princess and The Secret Garden endlessly. I wanted to be one of the sisters in Ballet Shoes or Little Women or to fly away with Pippi Longstocking.

I was still very young when the Loussac Library opened in Anchorage, and it was my playground. I loved novels the best, but I would read nonfiction as well. My parents were bemused when I brought home books about twins or child actors (I remember a book recounting how Sarah Polley was cast in the Canadian television Ramona series, another set of books I loved).

Once I ran into my friend Inger in the children’s section of the Loussac. When she complained about not finding anything to read, I walked through the shelves, filling her arms with books I enjoyed or titles that sounded good.

When I wanted to learn about something, the library was there. I was interested in theater, so I dragged my friend Monika to the books about acting. It seemed clear to me that the best approach would be to take all of the books about acting to a table and then sort them into categories. Monika did not have the same level of enthusiasm for this research project.

I found a reading room with enormous leather chairs, on the other side of the microfiche machines. I would curl up on them, reading young adult novels about girls who wanted to have a paper route or live with dragons. I learned about orphan trains, and imagined what it would be like to be on one. (I learned later that this was what happened to my maternal great-grandfather, who was sent from England to Canada with three out of eight of his siblings.)

As a teenager, I taught myself entire subjects out of books. My alternative high school allowed us to take seemingly unlimited independent studies to supplement the usual class offerings. As a sophomore, I decided to do an independent study of Advance Placement United States History. I read the textbook and outlined it, and wrote book reports on a couple historical novels. When the long-form essay on the AP test was about the difference between suffragettes and suffragists, I knew I would be fine. I ended up getting a 4.

My English teachers would routinely give me alternative assignments because I had already read the book the rest of the class was studying. I wonder about the wisdom of that now—it seems like I could have done closer readings of the books everyone else was reading—but at the time I was happy to read something new.

I would develop my own curricula and convince my teachers to let me take over for a week or two for an intensive on, say, Lewis Caroll. My classmates were pretty game, though they were not as interested in portmanteaus as I was.

I unintentionally developed my own slash fanfiction, more than a decade before I knew what that was, writing papers arguing that Heathcliff and Edgar were actually in love with each other. (I got a 92% on that paper, which I resented. My teacher shared it with the rest of the English department.)

I found other kids who liked to read as much as I did. We would compare notes on The Fountainhead, Beloved, and Of Human Bondage.

I would read any chance I got, but things really changed when I got my own room. Just after I turned eleven, my family moved across town into a bigger house. I got what was unquestionably the best room: a large late addition far away from the other bedrooms, with soft carpet, its own thermostat and, most importantly, a lock on the door.

I decided then and there that my babysitting days were over. I left my siblings to their own devices and went to my room to read. I would stretch out next to the baseboard heater, drinking enormous mugs of tea, and ignoring the pounding coming from the other side of the door.

In seventh grade, my twenty-one-year-old English teacher lent me a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany. I loved it immediately. Over the next couple years, I read everything John Irving had written to date. It seems strange to me now that, as a middle schooler, I read The Hotel New Hampshire and thought, “That sounds right.” I guess for a child from Alaska, New England seems relatively normal.

After devouring all of Irving, I moved on to Margaret Atwood. And Tom Robbins. And Kurt Vonnegut. And Isabelle Allende. I loved finding authors with a large back catalogue, because I knew I would have books to read for a while.

It was obvious to everyone that I would major in literature. I decided to go to U.C. Santa Cruz because they were one of the few programs in the country that had a literature department instead of an English department. I wanted to study Latin American literature in Chile, so I decided to major in modern literature with a Spanish concentration.

At least when I was there, the UCSC literature department was like a banquet where the faculty said, “Sure, eat dessert first!” I think I took a seminar on the Fairie Queene and a class on postmodern literature in the same quarter. The only real requirements were an introduction to literature course (I breezed through yet another Shakespeare class) and a class on theory, where they filled our heads with Hegel, Gramsci, and Benjamin and then sent us back out to play. I made sure to fit the Traditional Cannon class in, because that seemed important, but it was not required. I wrote papers about the misogyny in Blood Meridian and The Plague and thought about literary representations of the Reconstructionist period after the Civil War. Sometimes Angela Davis would show up to give a guest lecture.

When I went to study at the University of Chile, I learned that they had moved on from the magical realism I fell in love with, and instead were focusing on the grotesque and hyper-realism. I took classes about the portrayal of Jews in medieval Spanish literature and the symbolism of Mary. I visited Neruda’s houses. One of my professors scolded me for reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in English. I protested that he originally wrote in French anyway.

In a very real sense, reading saved my life. Although I had good friends and a loving family, I was a depressed and anxious child, without the language to understand what that meant. Books were my saving grace and my escape, a way to find other worlds and ways of being in the world.

In her essay, “When I Was a Child,” Marilynne Robinson writes, “I find the hardest work in the world—it may be impossible—is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling. On learning that I am from Idaho, people have not infrequently asked, ‘Then how were you able to write a book?’”[1] I know the feeling. When people find out that I am from Alaska, they recalibrate, surprised by my intelligence. I have even had this reaction when I tell people I went to U.C. Santa Cruz, which is puzzling for me. (A law school professor I admired said, “You went to Santa Cruz? But you seem so normal!”)

I can feel my Alaskan reticence creeping in as I write this. I was raised to be excellent, but never show off. Talking about my accomplishments makes me feel uncomfortable. Standing out in Alaska can get you killed, so I learned at an early age to do well and blend in.

But really, my point is not my own intelligence. It is that I was not especially unusual. At least for that time and place, my intellectual curiosity was pretty common. Like Robinson, I found friends who read more than I did. The long winters and the cold, dark nights created a space where reading was the obvious way to spend one’s time. And the vastness of the landscape made anything seem possible. My friends and I grew up thinking this was typical—then we left for college and learned that it was not.

In fact, Alaskans can be indifferent to the incredible beauty surrounding them. I once went to the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, where most of the instructors were from Outside and most of the participants were Alaskans. The instructors kept urging us to describe the natural beauty of the bay and the mountains. “Why would you want to write about anything else?” they asked. The Alaskans shrugged and kept working on their short stories about a girl from a small town going to the big city.

I never stopped reading novels, though I did slow down at certain points. When I started law school, I was terrified that I would stop reading for pleasure and lose that entirely. After briefing cases until my eyes crossed, I would sit on my deck and read the Harry Potter series. Later, as a church intern, I dove into romance novels. I have opinions about those, too.

I struggle to find the language to describe how reading is not something that I do, it’s who I am. I recently joked to my partner Troy that the worst “would you rather” for us is: “Would you rather give up books or each other?” We both paused for a moment, thinking that through. Fortunately, we don’t have to make the choice.

People sometimes ask me how to get their kids to read, knowing what a voracious reader I was as a child. My best advice is to let kids read anything they want. If a child enjoys what they are reading, they will want to read more. Don’t worry about whether it is age appropriate or too sexy or scary. Kids like to be scared and they are curious about sex. Comics are fun and The Babysitters Club is actually really good. My parents rarely knew what I was reading, and the one book they forbade me to read, I found and read it in secret (Like Water for Chocolate).

If kids say they hate reading or books, ask them why. Their answers might surprise you. Or not. Not every child has to be a reader. I hear that a childhood spent outside or playing on a sports team is pretty good, too. Not that I would know—I was too busy reading.

[1] Marilynne Robinson, “When I Was a Child,” in When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 85.