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.
The evolving view of oneself is so interesting. I was the athletic one, the smart one, the well-behaved one through sixth grade. In seventh grade (junior high), there were suddenly people who were smart in different ways or better at a particular subject and my whole self-identity was in question. If I wasn’t the best at nearly everything, who was I? Was it enough to be “one of the smartest” kids? “One of the best athletes” among several hundred? How did I go about ensuring all of this entirely new set of adults knew I was the trustworthy kid when I had only short interactions each day? Even earlier, I remember reading “Matilda” in 3rd grade and feeling woefully behind because I had not, as the character had, read all of the children’s books in the library and moved on to Great Expectations yet. Thank goodness I had to face these questions before I arrived at an Ivy so that by then I could step out of the river of competition and watch from a comfortable bank that was a good landing spot for me, if not everyone else. Frankly, I was underwhelmed by the Rhodes Scholars I knew, and was content not having joined their ranks, something my twelve- or fifteen-year-old self, internally competitive and striving, would not have been able to contemplate. And I am perfectly comfortable admitting I just can’t get into Walt Whitman and don’t give a fig about Catcher in the Rye, no matter how important they’re supposed to be!
Love these musings — such profound questions to grapple with at a young age: “Was it enough to be “one of the smartest” kids? “One of the best athletes” among several hundred? How did I go about ensuring all of this entirely new set of adults knew I was the trustworthy kid when I had only short interactions each day?” So interesting to think about how we learn to measure, mark, and present ourselves along these rubrics. And, like, which ones matter at which time? Academics were so important in my childhood and teenage years but then college felt much more socially oriented for me. I had the academics on lock, and no one really seemed to care as much either? Interesting to think about the fluidity of that axis.
Thanks so much for writing – great food for thought.
xx
Currently reading We Solve Murders by Richard Osman. A funny, wry, and very British whodunnit. Before that, Long Bright River by Liz Moore. I preferred God of The Woods, but still enjoyed this earlier work. I felt that the “mystery” part was secondary to the story of two sisters and the generational trauma of poverty and drug addiction on the streets of Philadelphia.
Lined up next are This is Happiness by Niall Williams and Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor.
I read Acts of Desperation shortly after it was published, so my recollections are a bit fuzzy, but it was a real slog to finish it. I found the self-loathing expressed by the protagonist to be unrelenting and quite disheartening. The fact that she remained unnamed throughout spoke to the general feeling of unworthiness. I’m usually not someone who needs a story to be tied up with a neat bow at the end, but if there was any meaningful resolution, I failed to pick up on it (which is also possible – my critical reading skills may not be as finely honed as other Magpies), and this was deeply unsatisfying. My opinion may be a lone voice in the wilderness, given the positive Reddit reviews, so I will be very interested to hear your review!
Thanks for sharing your current reads – love the way you’ve described them all. Interesting note on Acts of Desperation – and don’t sell your own critical reading skills short! Have you read Rooney? Curious to hear your take on her. There are also characters who engage with self-abasing and self-destructive behaviors that disturb, but there is something hopeful about them…
xx
I have read a couple of Rooney’s earlier works, and enjoyed them. I agree that while her characters can engage in self-destructive behavior, I believe their underlying struggles and motivations are also understood, thanks to Rooney’s skill as a writer. This is what makes her books a thoughtful read, and an opportunity to reflect on the human condition versus misery-porn.
Yes – 100% agree with this description. They really are an opportunity to reflect on the human condition, and especially the way this is lived out through relationships. Thanks for writing!!
xx
From one bad book girl to another—long, long ago before the literary canon had expanded, during a time when I never had a woman professor (or a person of color) a woman I worked with noticed the two books I was carrying for lunch time reading. They were Edith Wharton’s House of Mirtb and Alix Schulman’s Memories of an Ex Prom Queen. My colleague-who had my respect because she had attended an Ivy-mocked my choices. Pot boilers she said, tripe, and although I was very young and didn’t know what this meant I knew it was bad. I took to hiding the covers of books and wondered about what my trashy literary choices said about me.
In all the hard moments of my life reading though has sustained me. Nancy Drew in the hot summers of my childhood, the coolness of the town library on adolescent days when I felt socially shaky. When I was in my early 20s and trapped in a bad marriage I went nearly every other day to the little book stand near our apartment. I read mostly alphabetically—Alcott to Wolff. Occasionally I’d fall in love with an author and read everything I could find. I read badly must would say—without context or critical observations. During the early months of Covid I returned to my youth and read mysteries for the first time in my adult life.
Eventually I went to graduate school and studied English and became a professor. That—and literary theory—sort of gave me permission to read as I liked. And so I do.
I think I too am a bad reader—for how and what I read, for my escapism, for my late nights with my kindle while my sweet husband sleeps next to me (definitely not the husband referred to earlier)..But bad reading is one of the defining tropes of my life.
So I say, give yourself grace in this too and also in how you approach writing. Follow that self constructed maze as you like. It’s your life’s work and as a fellow bad reader-and bad gurl, really—I know you’re doing it right.
Now I’m going to look for one of those lovely knit sweaters.
OMG. I might print this and frame it – “from one bad book girl to another–” Doesn’t this need to be the chapter of a book, or a post? With your permission, can I riff on this?! I loved this sentiment, and the idea of being “a bad book girl” in so many ways — in what we read, in how we read, in why we read. It has seemed to me for a long time that “good readers” read voraciously, in hardcopy, in order to challenge themselves intellectually. But I am the opposite across all of those categories. I read slowly, or in fits and starts; almost exclusively on Kindle; and usually for pleasure. I wonder why I even care about the ballast against these preferences? And how I formed them. Anyway — thanks for such a stirring and camaraderie-filled response! I am totally charmed. And — I am irritated on your behalf! “Pot boilers, tripe” — !!! How dare! I’m sorry that happened to you; I can imagine the inward crawling that would have followed had I faced that feedback!
Thanks for writing in —
xx
Love the look of the scarf draped over the wool blazer, but caution you to make sure the scarf doesn’t shed! I ruined a beautiful wool coat one time doing so. Despite the use of different lint rollers and a trip to the dry cleaners it was impossible to remove and sadly I had to discard the coat.
Such a good point – I did something similar last year 🙁
xx
I love the ball skirt!! I have forever loved the look of a ball skirt paired with a simple blouse or shirt. It has always seemed to me the very epitome of a grown up, in-charge, self-possessed, gracious woman. When I was younger, I looked forward to when I would be ‘grown-up’ enough to wear a ball skirt and shirt. I am now in my mid forties managing both the wonderful times and challenging times of this season (watching my children grow into themselves and being a part of it, but also losing parents). I feel that I am now ‘grown-up’ enough for the ball skirt!, It’s funny how a simple article of clothing can hold so much. I think I shall look for one for myself for the holidays and step into my grown up, self possessed, gracious self.
Wow, I love this note on using how we dress to mark the passage of time, our leveling up, etc! Chic!! Enjoy your ball skirt!
xx
Nodding along, per usual, in reading this vulnerable introspection – as a fellow “book girl” (my parents had to create a firm “no books at the dinner table” boundary during middle school years, ha) I still find myself in the throes of taking measure of my reading as some sort of metric for my ongoing… what? Intellectualism in the midst of chaotic early years of child rearing + full time job + dozens of plates in the air all day? Search for companionship in those who have read the same novel recently? Attempted superiority in this realm, while I falter in others? Your line: “bald insecurity peppered with a little bit of earnest self-measurement” veryyyy much hit home.
But then again – I LOVE reading for what it is: pure escapism, a welcome disconnection from the ever-present mental ticker of to-dos, new information, transportive cultural exposure, immersive history, newly exposed viewpoints, voyeuristic “what if” scenarios, the piercing uniqueness of reading a line of shared perspective, etc. etc.
Lighter side note: do you have a Kindle cover of any sort? I tried one out ages ago, didn’t love it, but see so many Kindle readers swear by this or that one. Any recs?
Wow – thanks for this earnest and vulnerable reflection in return. I also nodded along to so many of your insights about why and how you read. I think “attempted superiority in this realm, while I falter in others” stung my heart most, because it’s assuredly not “attempted” but “earned” — I know from your comments what a thoughtful and introspective reader you are — and yet I know exactly what you meant. I have so many times in my life drawn the small things I am passably good at around myself to make myself feel…worthy? A lot to think about there.
Thank you for the stirring comment —
On the lighter side note, I am a brute and use no Kindle cover, which means my screen is constantly dinged up and turning on and off at annoying moments. I don’t know why, but this chaoticness doesn’t bother me and just means the Kindle is lightweight and easier to “get to.” BUT. I think Katie at Beach Reads and Bubbly probably has a good rec for this — and I love her. I’d check there!
xx
Appreciate the kinship and the kind words 🙂
Glad to know I’m not the only one raw dogging Kindle life over here! I see so many people proselytizing about covers/contraptions but maybe if it ain’t broke…?