BORROWING MAGIC

Borrowing  -  I not only use all the brains that I have, but all that I can borrow. ~ Woodrow T. Wilson

My first book incident occurred when I was eight. My mother discovered me hiding under the covers late at night with a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and a flashlight. She ordered me to turn it off and get to sleep. She did not see the tears streaming down my cheeks – you can tell where I was in the story – so did not perceive that there would be no going to sleep until I finished it. Despite my generally compliant nature, I waited about ten seconds after she left before I flipped the light on and plunged back in. Any reader would understand.

When I was 41, I moved to a new town that left me with a 40 minute commute five days a week. Looking for a way to make the most of the time, I borrowed my first book on tape. At the time I’d been too wrapped up in child-raising and business-running and personal exhaustion to fit in anything so self-indulgent as reading fiction. I worried a little that I might drive into a ditch as the story took off, but a new channel seemed to open in my brain to allow me to keep track of both listening and driving. With the first words of Maeve Binchey’s Glass Lake, I was transported to midcentury Ireland by the lilting narration. I grabbed the case expecting to see a good old Irish name – O’Connell, Murphy, Duffy, but no, the narrator with the perfect brogue was named – Barbara Rosenblatt? I was hooked – this was some new world. Ever since, like any addict, I monitor my supply of audio books, and carry two or three backups in case I finish the current one far from the library.

This summer I had another book moment. I was caught up in The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s story of a young Southern woman with progressive leanings who tries to fit back into her traditional hometown after college, set at the dawn of the civil rights movement. The author depicts the intersection of her character’s privileged life and the lives of the black servants employed by her family and all the other white families of means. Stockett took chances, in the use of black dialect that could offend, for instance, and her failure to include any white characters with a conscience beyond her heroine. But you could tell where her heart lay.

I reached that familiar stage of sadness that the book is almost over and urgency to find out how it ends. When I shut the book for the last time, I began my conversation with the author: why did you have to wrap it up so neatly and so quickly? When didn’t you spend more time on the central mystery – what happened to Constantine, the main character’s nanny? I was disgruntled. I was disappointed. I was mad.

But I knew better. Where do I get off telling someone else how to tell her tale? I guess I get off because I just invested hours of my time in her story. I had formed a relationship with this book and felt it let me down at the very end.

What makes up this relationship? It begins with the author’s impulse to write, in this case about an era she witnessed and had some unfinished business with. There are plenty of other reasons to write. Some of us get through life by scratching out journal entries that put our thoughts and feelings in order. And we write, well, email, to keep our relationships current. And we write to make ourselves clear, in business and in life. And sometimes, we write because someone asks us to, about things we would rather forget.

Looking to understand the effect of writing things down, researcher James Pennebaker (Opening Up, 1990) asked subjects to write for 15 minutes 4 days in a row about the worst trauma they’d ever experienced. Control subjects were told to write about trivial nonemotional topics for the same amount of time. Afterwards, the trauma-writing group had fewer doctor visits, greater success at work, and long term mood changes for the good. This powerful effect held up even if no one ever read the words.

Which brings us to the other half of the equation – the reader. Beyond our private diaries, if we bother to write things down, most of us want to be read, and we make decisions about how to best tell our story so that other people will want to keep going. In nonfiction, we sort through the facts we can recall using our imperfect and selective memories to pick out the juiciest ones; in fiction, we imagine the most vivid “facts” that could be true for our characters.

Even though new writers are told to write what they know, there must be questions to answer and discoveries to make or both writer and reader will nod off. One of my favorite quotes (attributed to various authors, Patricia Hampl and Margaret Atwood among them) is “I write to find out what I know.” Exactly.

Knowing the lengths that authors go to to engage in this process, I used to feel compelled to finish every book I started. Now, I am comfortable setting one aside, knowing that there is an audience out there for what the author has to say, it’s just not me. Besides, I already am going to have to stay alive until I’m 105 just to finish the books stacked up in the giant basket in my office where they collect dust and watch me disapprovingly if I’m goofing off instead of reading them. Given that pressure, I don’t have time to read a book that was meant for someone else.

Thoreau said, “It takes two to speak the truth – one to speak, and another to listen.” We each read for our own reasons – for pleasure, to soothe loneliness, to visit other places, to escape the drudgery or uncertainty of daily life, to learn, to fire our own imaginations. But how does that hold up in the age of texting and Tweeting and whatever is next?

At an Iowa writing event this summer, writing teacher and author Kyle Beachy explored whether literature is dying, as many predict. Relax, he said; it will never go away because it is irreplaceable. Its purpose is empathy – to allow us to feel what another feels, to put ourselves in another’s place to see what it would look like from there. At the end, we know something we didn’t know before.

When we read, we temporarily borrow another’s place on earth, hear their thoughts, see their challenges, feel their feelings. We get to time travel and see the past, consider the present and imagine the future. We go there to discover meaning beyond the obvious. There we see that what seems like a low point become the entryway into a whole unimagined new direction? Point of view is more than a literary device. It is the point.

Sure, the methods of distribution of what we read are changing. I’m reading, well, listening to on CD, A Moveable Feast by Hemingway about his Paris days in the 1920’s. He and his pal F. Scott Fitzgerald are described waiting for the check in the mail from each magazine story or even better, book advance, to buy their wine and pay their rent. There were no blogs, no social media, no viral posts, no shortcuts back then. It was write, sell, wait.

So we can rest easy. Nothing is dying. There will always be little girls sneaking a book after bedtime, and magical narrators to transport listeners to foreign places, and snapshots of life in a world that we missed. And if an author wants to write her ending in a way that disturbs me, I’ll have to get over it. I have all those other books waiting for me, and some to write as well.

CBH 08/10