I read in a recent Suleika post about her concept of “energy multipliers” — the small things we can do when recovering, or warding off gloominesses or desperations of various kinds. I was immediately intrigued by her inclusion of Frank Conroy’s prologue to Stop-Time in her short-list, and I searched for it online, and could not find it, so I ordered the book, along with four others that were languishing in my Amazon cart. I rarely order hard copy books anymore, finding it much easier physically — and in some ways semiotically — to read my Kindle in the little slivers of spare time I have available to me. But on that particular gray afternoon, I was craving the kind of tactile comfort only a physical book can offer. (I added this, then, to my own growing “energy multiplier” list: a paperbound book.)

As I was hunting for the prologue, I found this excerpt from Conroy’s memoir:

“Night after night I’d lie in bed, with a glass of milk and a package of oatmeal cookies beside me, and read one paperback after another until two or three in the morning. I read everything, without selection, buying all the fiction on the racks of the local drugstore….I read very fast, uncritically, and without retention, seeking only to escape from my own life through the imaginative plunge into another.”

The words jabbed like an unexpected thorn. For a long stretch in my teens and twenties, I was embarrassed by how little I read. I was, in fact, reading a lot for school, but not for pleasure. I don’t think I read more than one or two books per year outside the curricula between the years of 2000 and 2009. This disturbed me because it seemed to me that every smart and bookish person I knew had a voracious appetite for reading, well-formed opinions on the latest crop of fictional masterworks, and a childhood defined by reading inexhaustible piles of whatever she could get her hands on. I was industrious crafting this persona of the legitimate scholar and measuring the delta between her and myself. I now see this for what it was: bald insecurity peppered with a little bit of earnest self-measurement. Once, somebody said “if you think Jen’s smart, wait until you meet her sister.” And perhaps that echoed a bit deeper in the well than I’d like to admit. And then there was the devastation of not getting into the Ivy League school I wanted, and watching four of my best friends matriculate to the Ivies instead. And, even as early as the sixth or seventh grade, I had come to the clear-eyed understanding that I was good at test-taking, and probably not much else, and that that skill had unfairly enabled me — and would continue to unfairly enable me — to vault to the top of the dean’s list every single year from first grade on. This always makes me think about how we assess students, and how there is probably no universally good, or fair, way to do it. Because yes, I could ace a test, and regurgitate dozens of pages of notes, and this measured for discipline and the kind of social intelligence required of figuring out a teacher and learning to give her what she wanted in the blue book, but this was frankly no match for the uncannily quick mathematical mind of Alexander Savedra in third grade (I hope you are well, Alex), or the sheer brilliance of my friends Molly and Ellen in high school.

But I digress on the assessments. Mainly, I think about all of this, especially my severe self-evaluations, and I find it such a waste of energy — now. But at the time I felt that I’d been socialized my entire life as a book girl, and that I was failing at this one identity. I was not a numbers girl, not a sports girl, not a music girl, definitely not a party girl–I was a book girl, and I was secretly bad at it. This view of myself bled into other habits and beliefs that took a long time to recognize as pernicious.

I think for this reason any time I come across the narrative of the child prodigy who pickled in his/her own book brine, I wince. It’s strange, how this happens: no matter how much time you have spent unlearning, or working through, these illusions of youth, certain resistances to logic remain. Or perhaps certain subterranean emotions override the rational.

But as I read Conroy’s words, and I felt the tip of the thorn, I also thought, and for the first time in relation to my own readership, of something I used to tell the undergraduate students in the writing courses I T.A.’d at Georgetown University: good readers are slow readers. I’d pocketed this from an Approaches to Pedagogy course I’d taken, and I liked its generousness, especially for students who found the reading load heavy, and as a shorthand for the close reading and textualist lenses I favored.

But now it occurs to me that maybe all those years of reading in small quantities was how I learned to read deeply, and thoughtfully. And not to say one is better than the other — I bristle at the word “good readers” now — says who, exactly? the reading police? — but to say that maybe I was a different kind of reader, and that was OK. And that for every destination, there are many legitimate paths.

As recently as this year, I have had people imply or straight-out tell me that you must do x to write well, or you must do y in order to be a true creative, or you can’t do a or b in long-form fiction without c or d. I trust these are well-intentioned, and I often find them interesting, but ultimately, I must remind myself that they are arrows in a corn maze. They are likely to point me nowhere, or far into a horizon-dissolving matrix. I think true creative conviction asks us to be Theseus, forging our ways out of the rule labyrinth.

So, I suppose Conroy and I are on tenuous footing — or perhaps I needed the wall of those words to hurl myself against. Sometimes I find the writing of others fills the exact shape of a wound in my heart, and sometimes I find it a convenient whetstone. And both, by the way, are correct, as are hundreds of other ways and reasons to read.

Well, Magpies, as we say —

Onward —

Post-Scripts.

+Bonus coffee, and other ways to focus on the positive.

+There is something hallowed and holy about the friendships of girlhood.

+On choosing English as a major.

Shopping Break.

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+The four books I ordered: Bright Poems for Dark Days, a poem anthology edited by Julie Sutherland, Edith Hamilton’s Mythology tome, Frank Conroy’s Stop Time memoir, and Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation. The paperback version of the Nolan has a racy cover (warning!), but I discovered it via a perfect Reddit thread about what to read when you’re depressed you’ve already read all of Sally Rooney’s books. This was the number one upvoted response. Has anyone read? And what are you reading, anyway?

+Love the way this oversized $45 scarf is styled with a blazer! I have and own the VB Miller and want to copycat this look exactly.

+Julia Amory has released ball skirts, and they are stunning. She talked recently about the fact that her parents prohibited TV in their house, permitting only old movies, and that this film diet profoundly shaped her sartorial sensibilities. You can see it!

+Alice Walk released a gorgeous new cashmere crewneck. I absolutely love and live in their pieces. They’re what you want to put on when you open your closet. I specifically love this cotton weekender over a plain or pointelle tee with Agolde jeans when I want to be comfortable at my desk.

+Another casual, just-what-I-want-to-wear piece: my AYR Early Mornings Tee. Perfect mid weight, somewhere between a sweatshirt and a tee.

+Trust me, you’ll live in these. Sorry; it’s just a fact.

+I find this silhouette of dress very flattering – love the way it spotlights the collarbone.

+Huge fan of Pistola Denim — designer quality but almost always under $200 / around $150. Love their new barrel shape.

+Show-stopping velvet number one and show-stopping velvet number two.

+La Ligne launched a gorgeous brushed striped cardigan — wowza! If you’ve never ordered from them before, they just emailed me to let me know first time customers can get 15% off with MAGPIE15.

+A few really pretty finds at Dillard’s: this brocade top, this chiccc waistcoat, this lace caftan.