Clearly there was something disgraceful about the Sweet Dreams series. With titles like P.S. I Love You and The Popularity Plan, they were displayed unforgivingly in a wide-open space where grown-ups could see exactly what you were doing. I would dash up and quickly spin the rack, eyes scanning expertly for heretofore undiscovered volumes. The covers featured photographs of before-they-were-famous teenage actresses gazing soulfully. A gangly sixth grader with a greasy center part, I didn’t look anything like those cover girls, and I certainly didn’t know romance. I had to read every single one.
But I could easily cross the line into places that still felt decidedly off-limits, even to me. Once, at Barnes & Noble, I chose a novel with the naked back of a silhouetted female torso on its cover, decades before such images became the tired trope of “women’s fiction.” It looked daring, but not dangerous; I had no idea what it was about. When I got home and started to read, I quickly realized I’d entered uncharted territory for a ten-year-old kid in 1980s Long Island. What was this word “lesbian”? If I read the book and was found out, it was certain there would be terrible repercussions.
Better to just turn myself in. My mom was sitting in the living room when I approached in a sweat, book upside down as if to mask its incendiary contents.
“I don’t think this is for me,” I said, handing it over with instant relief. My mother took the book away wordlessly, and we never spoke of it again.
“The trouble with books,” Jeanette Winterson’s mother once admonished her, “is that you don’t know what’s in them until it’s too late.” This is precisely right. We might read about things we weren’t supposed to, find out what adults didn’t want us to discover. But this wasn’t altogether bad. Books, I soon realized, were a way to acquire illicit knowledge, a key to adulthood that otherwise remained hidden, whether you were entirely ready or not. I’d been a fool to relinquish that power.
Books are how cautious kids get to experience a kind of secondhand rebellion, a safe way to go off the rails. While for the most part I sought out any book bearing the golden seal of the Newbery Medal, safe and “good” books, perhaps in part to balance that as I got older, I was drawn to the troublemakers—the Edie Sedgwicks and Jim Morrisons and Marilyn Monroes. Soon, I had to get my hands on anything remotely “countercultural,” Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Madame Bovary, and what I thought of as “bad boy” books—the Beats, cult favorites, any title that had somewhere at some point been banned.
Not all these books were as fun as expected. I was bored by Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and hated On the Road, and I hated The Catcher in the Rye even more. Their heroes seemed more like antiheroes; fundamentally eager to please, I wasn’t open to characters who thumbed their noses at the authorities. I felt compelled to read them nonetheless and have felt equally disinclined to return to them since. But the more downtrodden characters, I positively adored. Anyone who was a heroin addict or knew a heroin addict or wrote about another heroin addict was good enough for me. Accounts of dead drug-addicted celebrities constituted their own lush genre, the more sordid the behavior and devastating the downfall, the better. I felt sorry for them, and this emotional largesse made me feel better about me.
This made the forceful removal of the next “inappropriate” book devastating. It was the early eighties. Saturday Night Live was the height of cool. It didn’t matter that I’d never actually stayed up late enough for the TV show because there was a book, Wired, Bob Woodward’s bestselling biography of John Belushi. Wired had been featured on magazine covers, which meant it was important. When my mother caught me with a copy—and only on the opening chapter!—she swiped it. No amount of tears would overturn her decision.
The truth is she had nothing to fear. Reading about bad guys scared the hell out of me, reinforcing the line between us. In real life, nothing about the rebels and willful misfits was remotely appealing. Listening to Holden Caulfield moan and groan, I couldn’t help but think, What a jerk. What did he have to complain about, with his privileged life and his private school and his afternoons wandering unsupervised around Manhattan?
My attraction to the dark side may have been that it allowed me to explore the forbidden from a safe distance, helping me draw distinctions between the kind of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to avoid. When I grim-mindedly chose to read Brave New World, along with 1984 and A Clockwork Orange, for my honors thesis in high school, it was my way of proving I was grown-up enough to make these choices.
In the World State of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, people are not allowed to spend time by themselves; leisure time is to be spent thoughtlessly in benign group activity. Serious literature is banned and children are taught to stay in their place through targeted subconscious messages. Not surprisingly, Brave New World is one of the most frequently banned books in America, due to its “subversive” content. Brave New World was not for children, and that’s partly what made it irresistible.
The title comes from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest:
O wonder!
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t.
This was intended ironically, by Shakespeare and by Huxley, who proposed that, in lieu of beauteous mankind serving the greater interest, the world was full of selfish and nefarious people out to advance themselves. But for me, Brave New World held another, altogether different meaning. Books were my brave new world, my portal into the forbidden adult world, one that I could approach in my own vicarious way, drawing my own conclusions.
What a thrill it was to read beyond your means, asserting yourself through the books you chose, breaking the rules just slightly but in a way that helped define your own rules. As I got older, it began to dawn on me that nobody really knew or cared what I did inside a book, or why I was there. The clerks at the library weren’t actually monitoring my activity. I stopped feeling embarrassed about my selections and became more confident about my ability to choose what I wanted. I even began to feel proud of those choices and, I liked to think, fairly sophisticated in my judgment. (I wasn’t always right about this.) The brave new world outside might have been intimidating, but I could travel there surreptitiously inside a book, and if I played it right I would never get in trouble.
CHAPTER 2
Slaves of New York
The Literary Life
Children are notoriously literal readers, and I was no exception. Books, I believed, contained the entire truth about everything, and if you could just read every book or even a good chunk of the Truly Important Ones, you would know what you needed to know about real life. And you could be a part of it.