My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
Pamela Paul
To my family of readers, and in memory of my father
Introduction
Why Keep Track?
Like anyone else with a marriage and a home and children and family and work, and more work, I always have something to worry about. And if for some inexplicable reason, I don’t have anything to fret over, I will easily find it. Should it be resolved at 4:16 a.m. one sleepless night, it will swiftly be replaced with something new. I am, alas, a worrier.
Through practice, I’ve become pretty good at it. I can toggle efficiently among a range of potential threats, even as I blanch or shudder at various imagined catastrophes: the satanic undertow out of nowhere. The chairlift that inexplicably derails. The child who tumbles down the stairs, me careening just a moment too late after. We won’t even mention air travel.
And of course there’s the old standby, something most of us have pictured at one point or another: The house on fire. Everything bursting into flames. Only moments to decide what to save beyond children, spouse, small animals. Do I grab the birth certificates, the tax backup, the passports—if only to spare myself the paperwork? Do I go with the valuable or with the irreplaceable? My grandmother’s ring, my poorly collected letters, the computer in case the cloud evaporates?
I wouldn’t bother with any of those things. In my heart, I know that were everything burning to ashes at my feet, I’d leave behind the laptop and the photo albums and even, forgive me, my children’s artwork, because there is one object I’d need to rescue above all else—my true precious, Bob.
Bob isn’t a pet or a teddy bear, though he does hold sentimental value and has been with me since my school days. Unimaginatively abbreviated, BOB is my Book of Books, a bound record of everything I’ve read or didn’t quite finish reading since the summer of 1988, my junior year in high school. It’s my way of keeping track. Because if I didn’t write it all down, I worry (naturally), I would forget it.
He’s nothing fancy, this Book of Books of mine. He isn’t hand woven by artisanal craftsmen from a Himalayan village or decoratively embossed. No, he is factory-made, gray and plain, with a charcoal binding and white unlined paper, an inelegant relic from the days before bookstores stocked Moleskine notebooks, before blogging and scrapbooking and “journaling” as a verb. Within his covers lies a running account of authors and titles, which I dutifully enter upon the completion of every book I read. After around twenty books or so, when I remember to put it there, a vague date breaks up the catalog.
I first wrote about Bob, with no small amount of trepidation, in an essay for the New York Times Book Review in 2012. Further exposing myself, I allowed the text to be accompanied by a photograph of Bob’s first page, displaying to millions of strangers my early stabs at depth and intellectualism, fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations, and all. I had revealed my inner life in a very public way, but at least, I reasoned, I’d done so in a safe place, among fellow readers. As soon as the Book Review’s art director scanned in the appropriate page, I recovered Bob from the seventh-floor art department and spirited him safely back home. He hasn’t left since.
My Book of Books is still a private place. It’s not a traditional diary, to be sure. It’s about me, and yet it isn’t about me. It’s impersonal and yet deeply personal. And in my case, it has worked better than a “real” diary, that basic prerequisite for anyone who fancies herself a future writer. Bob has lasted a lot longer than any of my abandoned teenage journals—I write in it still—and here’s why: diaries contained all kinds of things I wanted to forget—unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends and angsting over college admissions. Bob contains things I wanted to remember: what I was reading when all that happened.
Now in his middle age, Bob offers immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and geographically, at any given moment in my life. How I decided on a certain book. What I’d read previously that had either put me in the mood for more of the same or driven me toward something different. Was I in a Civil War stage or up for a good spy novel? Had I read the author previously and, if so, when? Why had I left him and what drew me back? Bob may not always seal into memory the identities of individual characters—much of that is still lost in the cavern—but he does tell me more about my character.
Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten lost or blurred with time. Opening Bob, I remember lying in a dormitory in Mauriac, an unspectacular hamlet in central France where I was installed on an American Field Service program, when I wrote my first entry: The Trial, fittingly, an unfinished work. This summons a flood of attendant recollections: seeing Baryshnikov perform in Metamorphosis, on Broadway, which led me to the paperback Kafka I packed with me that summer—an entire swath of Sturm und Drang adolescence reemerges from the fog of those other things I’d rather forget.
The immediacy of these recollections often startles me. Whereas old diaries later read like transcribed dreams—Who wrote that? Was it really me who got so worked up/wanted that guy/obsessed about X?—book titles easily and accurately manage to evoke an earlier state of mind. Yes, I think, reading over the entries: I remember that. I remember that book jacket, that edition, the feel of those pages. For a girl who often felt like she lived more in the cozy world of books than in the unforgiving world of the playground, a book of books was the richest journal imaginable; it showed a version of myself I recognized and felt represented me.