Book #43: Reading Yourself Into a New Life

"She knew she was going to have trouble believing in herself, in the room of her house, and when she glanced over at this new book on her nightstand, stacked atop the one she finished last night, she reached for it automatically, as if reading were the singular and obvious first task of the day, the only viable way to negotiate the transit from sleep to obligation."
                                                                                -Michael Cunningham, The Hours
 
What a week.  I have been run off my feet at my day job.  And at night, I have been stressed - exhilaratingly stressed - finishing off the edits to my book in time for my agent to take it to the London Book Fair.  Now that my book is finished (or finished at least until my friend, Diane, another writer, finishes giving it her final read through, for tweaking), I don't know what to do with myself.  Last night, I indulged in my first cigarette in months and also began reading The Hours, which I've been meaning to read ever since I saw the movie years ago. 

While watching the film, I recall identifying most closely with Clarissa (Meryl Streep), but upon reading the novel, it's a different character, Laura Brown, who pulls at my sympathies most urgently.  The avid reader, the repressed housewife.  She's the one whose story beckons to my imagination and lets me see shades of my own former miserable self and uplifts me in surprising ways.  Laura Brown literally reads her way into another life - gradually, at first, as the simple tasks of caring for her son and baking a cake for her husband's birthday compete with the illicit pleasure of reading Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that she strangely, exquisitely, identifies with, even as it illuminates her own stifled condition.  Although it first seems she's simply reading for escape, just the opposite ends up being true.  Reading Mrs. Dalloway pushes Laura to change her life in frightening, unthinkable ways.  And as I'm reading, I find myself remembering the moment in my own life when reading so transformed me.

It was six years ago, the year I'd moved to Berlin.  I was in the second to last year of my Ph.D., and I was supposed to be immersed in my dissertation, writing five to ten pages at Staatsbibliothek every day.  But the temptation of being a flaneuse in Berlin's graffiti-filled streets - touring the makeshift galleries and experimental music venues and clandestine bookstores - was simply too great.  The grand theoretical intervention that my dissertation was supposed to be making melted away, and I remember the illicit rush of thinking, Screw it, I'm just reading for fun today.  The first book I picked up was Accidents in the House by Tessa Hadley.  I remember its black cover very clearly.  It's a collection of linked short stories about a group of people, primarily women, and by the end of the book their fates have reversed in ironic, inspiring ways.  The story stayed with me and my desire to read for pure pleasure, too.  A dangerous drug.

Although I did eventually plough through my dissertation, I could never truly envision myself as a professor after I'd read that book, after I'd allowed myself that momentary freedom.  And a few years later, I walked away from my life in a small university town, heading for some unforeseeable future. 

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Book #11: Fathers and (Wine) Lovers

Yesterday evening, as I was waiting for Daddy to come over for Fathers Day dinner, I was lying on the sofa reading a lush, full-bodied, all-round delicious book. It's delicious not only if you want to immerse yourself in the world of wine, but also if you're looking to dissect the cryptic, turbulent nature of father-daughter relationships (which I certainly did, especially on this auspicious day). The book is called Corked, by Kathryn Borel. It's a memoir about this young woman's trip through the wine regions of France with her dad - wine aficionado extraordinaire. An eccentric Frenchman whose emotions run the gamut from Tourette's-like outbursts to lyrical reflections, his mind teems with weird, unexpected facts about wine, like the fact that Languedoc is a "big up-and-comer" despite its longstanding reputation for spewing "wine for stoneworkers, who'd sit there breathing in dust and crap all day."

While this memoir yields scads of insight about the history and romance of wine, this isn't its true kernel. At the core of the story is the author's fraught quest to become closer to her dad and the other men in her life, too. (Not to get overly Freudian ... but I couldn't help but think of the adage that a father is a girl's first love object and as such, he sets the tone for subsequent lovers). All too aware of her complex dynamic with dad, Borel also puts under the microscope her conflicted feelings for Matthew, her most recent romance gone awry. Despite everything, she still feels that he is the only one really gets her:

"I described to him my allergy to the present. Matthew nodded patiently when I stomped around, detailing how I could not exist within or enjoy the present (even though he was in mine), and how it had pressurizing and irritating effects on the contents of my skull (which, at the time, included him). He abided this allergy, which was at once an itch and a fear, an itch that could be scratched only by getting on with it, moving onto the next thing, satisfying the curiosity that there is something beyond this place, this annoying purgatory that is holding up my trajectory to the other place - the other place, of course, being much better and more stimulating than this infernal place."

As I was reading, I found myself identifying with Borel's sense of being forever caught in a waiting zone, hovering on the fanciful brink of tomorrow, my life will begin. The small university town where I used to teach American Literature - Antigonish, or "Antigonowhere," as we outsiders liked to call it - left me awash in that horrible, anxious feeling so vividly, so unforgettably. Following my bad breakup with the town planner (more about this later) I was caught in a paralyzing cycle of reminiscing about my first love, Josh. If I were Clarissa Dalloway, then he was my Peter Walsh. The acrobatic sentences of Mrs. Dalloway ran through my head, as I power-walked past the dingy storefronts on Main Street, the wind burning my cheeks.

I'd missed my one chance at happiness. I wanted to press the fast forward button on my life.


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Book #7: Bloomsbury Blues

“For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry as sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?”

I put down Mrs. Dalloway and blew my nose.

My first boyfriend Josh reminded me of Peter Walsh, Mrs. Dalloway’s childhood sweetheart. There's something about the way Mrs. Dalloway never forgets “his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished – how strange it was! – a few sayings” that was all too familiar. Had Josh been a British gentleman, like Peter, he might have headed to India for the empire's last hurrah. They were eccentrics who loved their travels, sword collections and foreign women. Their larger than life personalities splashed into conversations at parties, made outrageous claims, got everyone riled up, started fights, and then, at the height of it all, slipped out the back door.

Years ago, when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway for the first time, I told Josh that he reminded me of Peter. He eagerly began reading it. But the depiction left him incensed. “You're mean. Is this your way of saying we're not going to end up together?”

Although I'd shook his comment off with an ironic toss of the head, the feeling was darker than irony. I had been mean - meanness was a way of controlling that manic mouse scaling the walls of my stomach.

I had wanted him to leave me. At the time, I thought it was so I could be alone with my own thoughts. That fragile, self-contained world of dead authors waxing lyrical on god knows what.

Now I had all the time in the world to read my shelf full of books, but was there any reason to get out of my pajamas in the morning?

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