We grew up rich in books
My husband is assembling writings from friends and family to create a hand-bound chap-book style book. The book will print in a small edition, and accompany a series of counterculture-themed electric guitars he has built and embellished with his magnificent marquetry work. The prompt for his friends and family: If you were you moved, impacted, provoked, widened, blown apart, forever changed when you got your hands on a particular book through unconventional means (not assigned) back in the day, please share your experience. Here’s my response:
We grew up rich in books. There were overstuffed shelves, often sagging under their own weight, in every room of the house including both bathrooms. My dad was the primary collector and The Strand was his place - any excuse for a drive into the City and he always made time for that bookstore. My siblings and I loved The Strand too, probably as much for the anarchist disorder of the place as for its bounty. The Strand and other bygones of late 70s/early 80s West Village and SoHo like the Antique Boutique, (the original) Reminiscence and Pearl Paint were so appealingly urban-nonconformist, and vaguely or overtly punk. Anything from those places was utterly cool.
In my childhood, reading was important and time was made for it - what undeniable fortune and privilege! There was always a sense of great wealth in the abundance of books and book lovers. This extended to the spaces we visited, those maze-like bookstores like The Strand where I believe my dad, who passed away a few years ago, might wander as a spirit, as well as the libraries where we could borrow by the armful. While my dad was bringing home carloads of secondhand biographies and history books, my mom contributed the books I loved most - art monographs, poetry collections, and chapter books from her childhood, including a set of beautifully illustrated Oz books from the 40s. She read aloud to us every night - Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, Madeline L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time series, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, the Boxcar Children, the Oz books and the Chronicles of Narnia, and so many more. We also spent lots of time with my grandmother, who lived next door. She had big hardcover anthologies of New Yorker cartoons that we pored over and treasured as kids. Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg and James Thurber fed my early love for drawing with a fine point pen and ink wash, and warped me in the best sense.
The family in the house on the other side of ours loaned us their seemingly ancient sets of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. Basically there was a lifetime of reading possible around us, and plenty for young readers. I devoured anything in series - Encyclopedia Brown, Little House on the Prairie, Noel Streatfield’s Shoe books, The Boxcar Children series and of course, the beloved Anne books. By the time I started to have required reading in school, I was more than ready to have my mind blown. Suddenly here were writers - Alice Walker, Joan Dideon, John Knowles, Sylvia Plath, Ralph Ellison, Tony Morrison, JD Salinger, Chinua Achebe among others - whose words were worthy of underlining and endless notating in the margins and quoting and debating with friends. For me these were the gods and the greats, the ones who are always with you.
Uniquely apart, in the category of books encountered through less conventional means - meaning not from the library, or the family bookshelves, or the school reading list - were Judy Blume books. Judy Blume books were passed around in our middle school girl cliques, shared at sleepovers and read surreptitiously in the ‘wood between the worlds’ of childhood and adolescence. Her books were not of the delicious sort that transport you into ageless adventures, the ones you read to forget yourself, but the opposite. I read Are You There God It’s Me Margaret when I was 10 or 11 and it seems wild to say this today but I had never encountered myself as a contemporary physical being in a book before.
Today there is a rich genre of books for and about contemporary young adults, but long before YA was such a thing, there was Judy Blume. Predictably, depressingly, she was banned in some places for writing frankly about sex. Maybe that’s why most of us read her in secret or out of view of our parents. We had some sense we weren’t supposed to be reading her, and that was appealing. Margaret was my favorite, but I also loved Blubber and Then Again Maybe I Won’t.
Around the time of reading Judy Blume, I composed my first stories. I wrote in cursive, on my dad’s big yellow legal pads and subjected friends and family to readings. Judy Blume was the first writer whose voice I could directly connect to my own writing efforts - my earliest attempts at channeling another writer by filling my head with their work, and then hoping what came out of me had some of that writer’s spirit. And amazingly, stories did seem to flow out of me more easily with her writing voice in my head! Judy Blume books affirmed that heroes could be ordinary girls with relatable feelings and experience. With that most welcome truth, she opened a world of possibilities for stories!