Hi world.

How have you been?

I’ve been floating. These last few weeks of summer are always my favorite. The early excitement of June is long gone. The quiet death of July has said it’s peace. The shock of August, worn off. These last moments are something else. They’re for book buying and class planning and the invariable excitement of fall, of Halloween and Thanksgiving, even if it will still be eighty degrees in California. But anyway. In honor of said book buying, here are some thoughts inspired by them.

FINDING OLD GEMS

When I was sixteen I read Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things for the first time. I remember it feeling like golden wisdom from a woman who surely must have been god. I underlined and tabbed it from cover to cover. I was going through my bookshelves this morning when I saw that cover. I sat on the floor and let it naturally fall open to the passages that I read the most, the ones that I read and reread until they became a part of me. And I got chills. Why? Because I had underlined things back then that could not have made much sense to me at all. Things about dating and love and life that at sixteen, I cannot fathom what I was relating them to. But the lines that spoke to me then, for whatever reason, turned out to be lines that have subconsciously directed my life ever since. I didn’t realize that until reading them again today.

For example, there’s this essay about wanting to leave a relationship, but also not wanting to for whatever lukewarm reasons. It was the essay that I clutched in my hands as I ran across my high school campus during lunch one day and into the art room where my friend, who was in a relationship that she was debating leaving, was painting. I made her read it right there. I didn’t yet know that I would find myself within my own complicated relationship years later and that those same words would be the ones that would come to me in the middle of the night, telling me to go. Telling me that no matter what else, no matter the flowers or road trips or shared books, that I needed to go. In a full circle kind of way, I think that I was able to understand that so clearly because of all the time I spent reading things that could not yet have applied to me. They had no where to go, so I stored them for later. I remember underlining because wanting to leave is enough while sitting in a janky classroom my junior year, but I don’t remember why. I don’t remember what I could have wanted to leave other than fourth period. But those words stuck to me and they have influenced my life and the decisions that I have made ever since. Books.

MY FIRST LITERARY LOVE

Speaking of, I just got my book list for the semester and am drooling. Somehow, I have found myself within an area of study that allows for Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?, to be on the syllabus for one of my classes. But I’m especially thrilled for that class because it focuses on contemporary non-fiction, otherwise known as, if you didn’t know, my first literary love.

Despite how I’ve turned out, growing up, I actually wasn’t a huge book nerd. I never read Harry Potter (I’m reading it now!) or even let my parents read long books to me. That was my older brother. He devoured stories. He would spend the summer rereading epic series that hurt my hands to just to hold open. He could sit still for hours if you were reading to him. But to me, that was torture. I was outside from the moment that the sun rose to the final hours of the golden-lit evening, milking daylight until my mother would open the window and call me inside. I danced on the sidewalks and climbed trees and made mud with my bare hands. I would have rather stared at the sky than the pages of a book.

When I got a little older, I would read Nancy Drew books and John Green love stories and other best sellers, but for fun. It didn’t feel like much else yet. It wasn’t until I started reading people’e life stories that words began to mold my life. One of the first memoirs that I ever read was Misty Copeland’s Life in Motion. I remember falling in love with the way that she told her story and how honest and raw each page was. It wasn’t a pretend story, it was her story. It had something to say, not just about her life, but about her world. That was what I wanted. That was what I loved. So I read Patti Smith’s M-Train and Michelle Obama’s Becoming. I read Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and Sylvia Plath’s journals. Cheryl Strayed, Natalie Goldberg, bell hooks. These were my writers, these were my people. They told me real stories, real things. Things that I could learn about the world from, and that felt important. That felt like everything.

UNDERSTANDING FICTION

But then I got to college and began studying literature, unpacking each page of any given novel like it held the secrets of the universe. And the thing that I found from this, the one, big, irrevocable thing, was that fiction is real too. I had never grasped that before. Fiction, the stories that we read, are often every bit as “real” as memoirs. Authors might say that this isn’t true, but how could it not be? They either reflect how the writer sees the world, or how they wish that they could see it, and both reveal something about the environment that enshrouded their life. That’s what makes books so precious. They are time capsules, documents, evidence of life from times and places that we ourselves may never know. They are true, even when made up. They are the stories that we choose and the stories that choose us. That changed my life.

So in a way, it feels right to be taking this course my last semester. At the end (for now) of my institutionalized literary studies, it feels apropos to be reuniting with the type of book that started this whole love affair in the first place. It’s nostalgic. It’s full circle. It’s like coming home.

Love, m.

JOIN THE FUN

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