People laugh today at Roald Dahl’s idea that Matilda’s father would scream at his daughter to watch TV rather than slink off with a book, but there is a tiny sliver of truth to the satire, where, on the dark side of seventies benign neglect, parents didn’t run around boasting “She’s such a reader!” or try to bribe their kids into summer reading. You were supposed to be well rounded, not bookish. Reading too much hurt your eyes and made you need glasses. So did reading by poor light. My own bedside lamp, my mother pointed out, got especially hot and was a fire hazard. Reading in cars made you throw up. Squinting at too-small letters left you blind.
There was a shiftiness to kids who secreted themselves in a corner to read God knows what instead of what they should have been doing. Reading when you were supposed to be raking the leaves, reading when you were supposed to be sleeping, reading when you were supposed to be making the bed, not lying in it. I did everything I could to read my way out of doing anything else. It was the one thing I was good at.
Social skills were not my forte. I was shy as a child, and if my nose was in a book, nobody had to know about this failing. Anything to have fewer adults declare loudly right in front of me, “Oh, she’s shy! Look at her hiding—that’s okay. I didn’t realize she was shy,” as if they’d found out I lacked a key mental faculty. At school, I walked around in a state of perpetual embarrassment, certain others could sniff out something different about me. Any second I might trip and fall in front of everyone or find a peanut butter smear on my pants that had been there since lunch period. Or I might accidentally sit at the wrong table, setting off some kind of social distress signal that every other kid but me could hear.
Afraid of being left out or singled out, I turned myself into an independent agent, only lightly associated with others. I read alone, I biked alone, I fed the ducks across the street alone, and I played with my cat alone. I was the only girl among seven brothers, and for the most part our interests did not align. “You must have been so spoiled, so cared for!” people say when they learn about my solitary femaleness; nothing could have been further from reality. Anytime I exhibited the merest sign of girlishness it was mocked into oblivion; I grew resentful of any “privilege” that marked me apart. Whenever my brothers were paired off into bedrooms, I felt exiled; I could hear them whispering among themselves through thin walls. At any moment, one of them might wrestle me to the ground, pin me down, and let a gob of saliva dangle threateningly over my face.
My parents divorced when I was three or four (nobody seems to remember exactly), and my father had moved to a series of small rentals on the Upper West Side and then into his girlfriend’s rent-stabilized middle-income apartment on Columbus Avenue with her two sons. My mother remarried when I was seven, and we moved to an ancient house in a new town with her new husband and his three much older sons. Though her new husband was retired, my mother worked long hours juggling multiple jobs, commuting into the city, where she was an advertising copywriter; then she worked into the night freelance editing a series of trade magazines. My brothers and I largely fended for ourselves, walking to school and returning home on our own. Arguments were to be “worked out” among ourselves. This usually meant threats, slammed doors, and occasional outbursts of violence. I tended to miss when I kicked.
Families seemed better inside books; in All-of-a-Kind Family and Little Women, there were sisters. (All I had was my cousin Kirsten, three years younger and always living somewhere far away—Florida, Germany, Colorado Springs.) Families in books were large and friendly; siblings hugged one another spontaneously and ate scrumptious holiday meals around a table. Nobody sat stonily through servings of boiled spinach and baked potatoes. One day, I resolved, I would have a family like that.
I had the misfortune of being an exceptionally healthy child, never having an infection or vomiting, with only one or two fevers to show for my entire school career. How I longed to be ill so I could stay home and read. No such luck. My mom could spot a faker and had little patience for anything that wasn’t a sky-high fever. It was a blow to discover that the trick that worked in books—putting a thermometer by the lightbulb—didn’t work in real life.
Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules. Nobody else needed to know when you snuck off with your Sweet Valley Highs whether you were a Jessica who wished she were an Elizabeth or vice versa. What you read revealed what you cared about and feared, what you hoped for because you didn’t have it, what questions you wanted answered without publicly unmasking your ignorance. I guarded this information fiercely.
Like W. H. Auden, who once wrote, “Occasionally, I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only,” I considered certain books mine, and the idea that other people liked them and thought of them as theirs felt like an intrusion. (“Like a jealous lover, I don’t want anybody else to hear of it”—Auden, again.) I wanted to be the only one who knew about a book or at least to be the first one there.
In fourth grade, reading Forever felt like breaking the law with every turn of the page. Just acknowledging Judy Blume’s existence, with her frank acknowledgment of tweenish emotions, filled me with shame. That the procuring of such intimate books had to be public was horrifying especially because I cared enormously what the library staff thought of me. I liked to imagine the clerk surveying my outgoing stack with admiration and approval. Look at that wise little girl, he was meant to think. She’s one of us. When I checked out the Blumes, I’d wait until the coast was clear, staring resolutely away from the clerk like a thirteen-year-old buying Tampax, hoping he wouldn’t connect me with that other sage girl who read Louisa May Alcott.
I was certain I’d lose their respect entirely if they caught me when, following the gateway drug of Judy Blume, I progressed to Paula Danziger and Norma Klein, explicit and positively dirty. That there were books I knew were inappropriate, and that I wanted to read them anyway, was obviously a personality flaw. The climax of exploitative teenage lit was, of course, V. C. Andrews’s scintillating incest series that began with Flowers in the Attic, but those I got at Barnes & Noble. I wasn’t prepared to risk everything.
Eventually, having worn out the children’s floor, I ventured upstairs toward the grown-up library. On a kind of purgatorial mezzanine stood three rotating racks filled with what then passed as young adult fiction. Most were romances, including Sweet Dreams.