Reading Is Everything

When I was a child, before I found my tribe, reading was my everything.

Bulwark. Solace. Goad. Delight. Of course, I did not know those words back then. What I did know was that I could trust books. Completely. They would always offer an alternative reality. If not insight, then escape.

Now I have the world’s best partner (no hyperbole!) and the world’s best friends (again, no hyperbole!), so reading is no longer quite my everything.

But it is close.

A few days ago I was reminded that you never know how and when reading will sustain you.

My youngest brother and I took our mom to a nursing home for what we all hope will be a temporary stay as Mom rehabs a lumbar fracture. This time of transition—this midway—is harrowing. Mom is in a lot of physical pain and understandably unhappy about her (temporarily?) lost independence and uncertain future.

Her pain is hard to witness; I found myself struggling to stay present. I felt besieged by childhood memories and by fears about my mom’s future and my own aging. So, not surprisingly, once I was alone, I did what I always do at the end of the day. I turned to the book I was reading solely for myself (instead of for my teaching or writing). It was, again not surprisingly, a mystery.

It was Louise Penny’s 14^th and most recent Armand Gamache novel, Kingdom of the Blind. Any fan of Penny’s knows that she is no ordinary crime-fiction writer. Her novels are also literary, and this particular installment offers up both an urban procedural and a small village murder mystery. Penny has a lot going on.

Still, I was stunned by how a single scene in her novel spoke to me.

The scene occurs early in the novel when Chief Inspector Armand Gamache goes to visit one of his injured officers and protégés, Isabelle LaCoste. Both of these characters have experienced trauma I never have: debilitating physical violence and the accompanying PTSD. Nevertheless, many of their words seemed aimed right at me right in that moment. They were exactly what I needed.

Armand tells Isabelle how he manages to move past all the darkness he has endured: he tries not to dwell on it.

Or worse, dwell in it. Take up residence in the tragedies, the pain. The hurt. To make a home in hell.

But leaving was hard. Especially his agents, men and women whose lives were lost because they’d followed his orders. Followed him. He’d felt, for a long time, that he owed it to them to not leave that place of sorrow. To keep them company there.

His friends and therapists had helped him to see that was doing them a disservice. Their lives could not be defined by their deaths. They belonged not in perpetual pain but in the beauty of their short lives.

His inability to move on would trap them forever…

I am seeking to move on from my mother’s pain—not the recent pain I’ve just described, but an older pain, a pain that I have let “take up residence” in my own heart. A sort of survivor’s guilt.

I don’t feel too many qualms describing some of the pain here since I’ve written about it in the dual memoir that my partner and I hope to soon publish. (The memoir is about his gender transition and its impact on our marriage.) I also know Mom won’t read this because she never goes online. And she herself frequently talks about the events that triggered the pain, so most of what follows will not be news to anyone who has spent much time with her.

When she was 34 and I was two, her mother and two brothers (her only siblings) were killed in a car accident. Then roughly two years later, her son, my oldest brother, started to regress, and a couple years after that, he was diagnosed with severe autism and intellectual disabilities.

My sister (born in between my oldest brother and me) calls it a cluster fuck, and she’s not wrong. Many of my mom’s peers say that she is strong, and they’re not wrong either.

If anyone has persisted, it’s my mom. Doctors told her that my brother would never walk or feed himself, but he does both. She refused to believe those medical authorities, and every night after she placed dinner in the oven or in the skillet, she walked my brother back and forth across our kitchen floor.

Yet my mom’s friends are not exactly right about her strength. Although it saddens me to say, my mom came to be defined by all that loss. It shaped the way she mothered; it shaped me.

But as I encountered Armand’s ruminations, I thought about my mom facing still more loss, the type of loss most of us will face if we live into our late eighties. I considered how I would choose to see this loss—how I would choose to see her. How I would choose to see myself.

I bolstered my resolve. I would see my mom as more than her pain and loss—past and current. And I would not dwell on or in my own old hurt and pain.

Yep, this is way easier said than done. But Penny’s novel—in this same scene—offers more guidance. Armand tells Isabelle that his mentor

had a theory that our lives are like an aboriginal longhouse. Just one huge room.” He swept one arm out to illustrate scope. “He said that if we thought we could compartmentalize things, we were deluding ourselves. Everyone we meet, every word we speak, every action taken or not taken lives in our longhouse. With us. Always. Never to be expelled or locked away.”

“That’s a pretty scary thought,” said Isabelle.

“Absolument. My mentor, my first chief inspector, said to me, ‘Armand, if you don’t want your longhouse to smell like merde, you have to do two things— ….Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ‘you’ll be at perpetual war….And the enemy you’ll be fighting is yourself.’”

How do you keep your “longhouse” habitable? How do you avoid becoming your own enemy?

Armand offers one more tip. The Chief Inspector asks Isabelle what she loves, and then he recites part of “The Great Lover,” a poem by Rupert Brooke:

White plates and cups, clean-gleaming
Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust;
Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong rust
Of friendly bread.

Armand explains that Brooke was a soldier in WWI. “It helped him in the hellhole of the trenches to think of the things he loved.” Armand tells Isabelle that it helped him too. “I made mental lists and followed the things I love, the people I love, back to sanity.” She considers his words: “What he was suggesting wasn’t a magic cure….A huge amount of work, of pain, physical and emotional, lay ahead. But it might as well be done in the sunlight.”

Yes, I thought, whatever we must do might as well be done in the sunlight.

Throughout the novel—I’m not finished yet—Penny demonstrates the power of this idea. As Armand faces crisis after crisis, he summons his “sunlight” lists and prevails.

Just as Brooke’s poem fuels Armand’s resilience, Penny’s novel fuels mine. She shows us what literature can do for us if we let it. If we cultivate a habit of reading. A practice of reading.

I’ll allow myself that quasi-spiritual word ‘practice’ because this experience with Penny’s novel has reminded me how empowering it can be to sometimes approach “secular” texts the way religious people approach officially sacred ones. With confidence, trust, receptivity, and openness. With faith.

If you read often and attentively, literature—even so-called genre fiction—will offer you the timely reminders, insights, company, and courage you need.

You can, of course, seek out books or other writings that specifically address your struggles. (Later, after writing most of this post, I remembered that Penny’s husband had recently died, and I found this lovely essay she wrote about caring for him. He had dementia, and she had tremendous strength and grace during his devastating decline.)

But what I found remarkable about my experience reading Penny’s novel was its serendipity. I was seeking only a bit of escape, yet I got a lot of wisdom and encouragement.

Much of the wisdom wasn’t new to me. Yet to encounter it again in a new way and in a new moment? Transformative.

I made new connections, relating Penny’s words to other texts that have lingered with me. Armand’s sunny lists remind me of a Patronus: Harry Potter triumphs over the Dementors and their despair by summoning the happiness that springs from his friendship with Ron and Hermione. Likewise, Armand’s lists call to mind another Penny novel, her eighth, The Beautiful Mystery (my favorite so far). A monk tells Armand about a native story recorded in another monk’s diary. The story—not original to Penny—provides another way of conceptualizing our “longroom”:

“…when he [the native] was a boy his grandfather came to him one day and said he had two wolves fighting inside him. One was gray, the other black. The gray one wanted his grandfather to be courageous, and patient, and kind. The other, the black one, wanted his grandfather to be fearful and cruel. This upset the boy and he thought about it for a few days then returned to his grandfather. He asked, ‘Grandfather, which of the wolves will win?’….Do you want to know what the grandfather said?…The one I feed.”

I plan to feed my best self with good books.

Along with my partner and friends—and lots of prayers—my reading will help me help my mom through this transition.

What books have recently fed you?