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Overwritten

Overwritten

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That I’m an Annie Dillard fan will come as no surprise to anyone who glances at the title of this blog with its Dillard quotation below. It’s taken from my favorite of her books, An American Childhood. A more perfect evocation of growing up, of coming to inhabit one’s self, I do not know.

I’ve been less a fan of Dillard’s fiction. But a few days ago I picked up The Maytrees. It has a slightly standoffish quality that keeps me from fully digging in, but, like all Dillard’s works, it has lines that stop me in my tracks. Here’s a passage that did just that:

Often she missed infant Petie now gone … He fit her arms as if they two had invented how to carry a baby. … Later she washed his filthy hair and admired his vertebrae, jiggled his head in toweling that smelled like his steam. She needled splinters and sandspur spines from his insteps as long as he’d let her. Every one of these Peties and Petes was gone. That is who she missed, those boys now overwritten.

How beautifully does she say what parents feel as their children grow up. That as much as you love them, love them more each year though it seems scarcely possible, you miss them, too, miss their younger selves that flit in and out of their smiles and expressions, tantalizing just enough to let us know they’re in there still, somewhere. Thanks to Dillard, I have a new word for where they are. They are “overwritten,” stuck beneath layers like primary code.

Outside the Lines

Outside the Lines

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I won’t say I wrote the first over-parenting book, but I did write an early one. So I pay attention when new volumes come out on the topic.  One of the latest is Parenting Outside the Lines by Meghan Leary, which is excerpted in the Washington Post today.

Leary has her work cut out for her. The little I’ve been learning about the commercial assault on and considerable expectations of parents these days, the more amazed I am. Take the products and gadgets that are supposedly filling needs but are actually inflaming fears.

There’s something called the Owlet Smart Sock, which keeps tabs on baby’s vital signs so you can sleep in peace. Sleep in peace, that is, until baby kicks off the Owlet Smart Sock, at which point you run, heart-pacing, into the nursery to find your sweet babe snoozing in rosy good health. Of course, you’re awake for the night.

One thing I’m sure of — every parent wants the best for her child. The question is, how to achieve it. And the infuriating answer is .. we don’t really know for sure. Accepting that answer, believing in that answer, can take a lifetime.

Anniversary of a Classic

Anniversary of a Classic

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Catching up on email, I learned from the Writer’s Almanac that To Kill a Mockingbird was published 60 years ago yesterday — and that it was not an easy book to write (if any book is). 

Apparently, Harper Lee was so frustrated by her work-in-progress that in 1957 she threw the manuscript out the window. Luckily, she retrieved it and went on to finish the book, which has sold 30 million copies, been translated into 40 languages and won the Pulitzer Prize.


Lee admitted that she didn’t know what to expect when the book was published, and hoped that if it was panned, it would be a “quick and merciful death” at the hands of the critics. She later admitted that she found the success almost as frightening as the “quick and merciful death” would have been.  And in fact, Lee never wrote the next book.

If communication is the point, how our work is perceived by others, then perhaps Lee said everything she needed to say in that classic and her silence was justified. But if the point of writing is the doing of it … then Lee was robbed.

Books, Books and Books

Books, Books and Books

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From a book I’m reading that I may have read once before, I caught an aha moment last night. It’s a passage from Jewelweed by David Rhodes, and it involves a conversation between a man in prison and the minister who comes to visit him.

“Is there anything you’d like me to bring next time?” she asks.

Yes, says the man in prison, whose name is Blake. “Three things … books, books and books.”

When the minister asks what kind of books, Blake says he will read most anything, but what he really wants are … “thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind.”

Sounds good to me.

Reading Double

Reading Double

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What’s a reader to do when she becomes totally engrossed in an Audible book while already reading a page-turner the old-fashioned way? There’s only one answer to that: spend all non-work hours reading or listening.

Beyond that, though, there are some considerations. One can “read” an Audible book while walking or dusting or chopping vegetables, but one cannot read an Audible book before bed. I’ve tried that before, have fallen asleep to a mellifluous voice carrying me sweetly from novel to dreamland only to find myself hopelessly lost and frantically rewinding (using that five-seconds-back key) in the clear light of day.
With eyes on paper, though, the worst that can happen is that you lose your bookmark in the bedcovers. But that, and one’s place in the story, is easily found the next morning. 
So there develops the two-channeled reading mind, which thrills to American Dirt in the evening and revels in The Heart’s Invisible Furies in the morning. And why should it not? After all, it’s the same mind that holds recipes and birthdays, addresses and passwords. It can juggle more than one movie or television show in an evening, so why not two books in a day?
 I say this now, of course, but I’m only a few days into reading double. We’ll see later how it all turns out. 
Re-reading Camus

Re-reading Camus

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Once we went into lockdown in March, the battered old copy I have of Albert Camus’s The Plague was much on my mind. Part of me wanted to re-read it. I’d always liked the book, ever since I read it in college and taught it in high school. I thought it was profound — and that was before we were in a worldwide pandemic. But another part of me wondered, why do I want to read a book about a plague when I’m living through one?

The glutton-for-punishment part of me won out. I re-read the book — and am glad I did, even though cracking the volume open and turning pages guaranteed its destruction. When I began reading, my copy was hanging together not by a thread but by some errant glue that had not yet dried and flaked away. After I finished, the book was essentially a sheaf of loose-leaf pages. But that was okay; killing a book by reading it seems an outcome that an existentialist like Camus would have appreciated.
But beyond the mechanics of reading — the gentle way I had to handle the paperback, as if holding the hand of a dying victim — there was the content, which was both comforting and illuminating. Yes, we are suffering from a devastating coronavirus. But it’s at least not the bubonic plague. There are no buboes to lance, no dying rats to herald the crisis. 
There were passages that could have been written yesterday, so clearly did they plumb the human heart in a time of mass contagion and illness. “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars take people equally by surprise,” Camus wrote, at the beginning of the novel. And, toward the end, he said this: “Whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and … exacerbated the sense of injustice.” 
And then, there is this passage at the end, which I noted a few months ago and will always give me shivers: “He [Dr. Rieux] knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedroom cellars, trunks and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
Reading in Circles

Reading in Circles

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I still remember what I said when I opened the Kindle I received for Christmas some years ago. It was “get back from me, Satan,” or some such line, punctuated with a laugh and accompanied by lots of thank-you’s. Because it was a lovely gift and I appreciated it, even though I’d always said I’d never use one of the things.

The Kindle has been used often since then, and it has especially been pressed into service the last few months. I’ve found free classics to consume on it, purchased a novel my book group was reading, and it’s now on top of my bedside table book pile.
A digital e-reader is perfect for these digital times, but, more to the point, the Kindle is just one of several book delivery platforms. I can listen to a book, courtesy of another generous gift (this one for Audible), I can read one on my computer through the library’s lending service, I can use my Kindle or … I can read a good, old-fashioned book.  I was saving the best for last.  
An Old-Fashioned Girl

An Old-Fashioned Girl

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First, I re-read Eight Cousins, because I could find it in an old bookcase. Little Women I felt no need to re-plumb, having just enjoyed the movie a few months ago. But there was one Louisa May Alcott book that I’d been dying to read again. It was An Old-Fashioned Girl, one of my favorites.

It’s not in the house — I believe one old-fashioned girl I know is keeping it on her bookshelf now — but I was able to find a free copy for my ancient Kindle, and am now happily ensconced in the joys and sorrows of one Polly Milton, a bright, kind girl who lives alone with a bird and a cat, who fights disappointment by reaching out to help others, and who makes life pleasant for all who know her.

Is it saccharine? Is it treacly? Yes, ma’am, it is. But it’s wonderful to be a part of Polly’s world again!

Book Maps

Book Maps

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I’ve loved maps since I was a child. I grew up with a mother who would eat her lunchtime sandwich and pickle while looking at a map, feeding her body and her soul at the same time. I’ve done the same off and on through the years (minus the pickle).

If I were to write another book, I’ve long hoped it would be the kind of book that would have a map in its frontispiece. I had no idea that so many others felt the same way. Enough to fill an entire book, The Writer’s Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands, edited by Huw Lewis-Jones.

I found this book on my last trip to the library March 15, and since I’ve not yet had to return any of those books, I’ve had plenty of time to savor this one. In it, authors from Philip Pullman to Robert McFarlane wax lyrical about the book maps that inspired them and the books they’ve written because of them.

“A map helps to make an imaginary place real. The more detail you put into your beautiful lie, and the more you base it on things that are true, the more it comes alive: for you and for your readers,” says Cressida Crowell in one of the book’s essays called “First Steps: Our Neverland.”

Crowell sees maps as story starters. “When I draw the map of my imaginary world, it will tell me the direction I want to be going in, even when I don’t yet know it myself.”

I’m starting my own map soon.


(Photo: The Land of Make Believe from The Writer’s Map by Huw Lewis-Jones.)

Contented with Containment

Contented with Containment

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The more I read of Niall Williams’s This is Happiness (more about this wonderful book in a later post), the more I realize that, although I grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, I also grew up in an Irish storytelling culture. Although on the surface my dad seemed to be the chief yarn-spinner, Mom was no slouch in the storytelling department, and her mother, my nana, could tell tall tales with the best of them.

One of Mom’s stories, which may have come in part from her mother — or at least happened when Mom was a little girl — involved a man whose name was Mangione, I think, or maybe Mahoney. This man lived on High or Maxwell or one of the tree-lined streets around the University of Kentucky.  And one fine day he went into his house, climbed up into an attic room, and — Mom always said this part dramatically — never came out again.

As a child I was always fascinated with the mechanics of this arrangement. Was there a bathroom up there? Did he receive his food on a tray? As an adult I realize that this man must have have had agoraphobia or some other anxiety that kept him from leaving the house. But whatever the reason, I’ve often thought of his as a cautionary tale, what happens to people who don’t get out enough — they simply stop wanting to leave.

Is our sheltering-in-place creating an epidemic of agoraphobia, a generation of hermits? Will the quarantines be relaxed, the doors thrown open, and people just yawn and say, that’s fine, but I’ll stay inside, thank you very much.

I feel it in myself, this lessening of desire to be out and about in the world, this contentment with containment. I wonder if others feel the same way.