Naturally, I got a lot of things wrong. When I was eleven, I told my mother quite adamantly that Norma Klein wrote the classic 1939 folk song “You Are My Sunshine,” because it had appeared in one of her teen-weepy novels, the song a husband lovingly sang to his dying wife. “I really don’t think so,” my mother replied, but what did she know? I’d read it that way so it had to be true.
All books, to my mind, were essentially guidebooks. I sucked them up the way Martha the dog slurps alphabet soup in Martha Speaks and learns how to talk. I was precisely what Hermann Hesse once called a “na?ve reader,” consuming books as one consumes food, swallowing them whole. “This kind of reader is not related to a book as one person is to another but rather as a horse to his manager or perhaps as a horse to his driver: the book leads, the reader follows,” Hesse explained. “The substance is taken objectively, accepted as reality.” Exactly. And what was wrong with that?
Reading could instruct you on how to live, and not only that—it could teach you how to live the smartest, coolest, most urbane life imaginable, which meant nobody would ever be able to tell how silly and ignorant and suburban you once were. Books about older, wiser, and all-around better people would prepare you for anything that happened outside of books. They would make it clear how to act and how to react.
I didn’t question, I didn’t ponder, I didn’t criticize. I merely absorbed, down to the word. Books were where I picked up my vocabulary, extracting the words I needed to get around. Germaine Greer recalls how she would adopt a word from a given book, using it “for a whole day until I got the feel of it, ‘fetch’ or ‘directly’ or ‘capital’ or ‘coaxing’ or ‘melancholy.’” I made lists of aspirational words. Like Greer, I wanted to think and speak the way writing did. This, alas, had the unfortunate effect of making me sound awkward and pretentious, precisely like the poorly socialized kid I was.
Having learned how to speak more from what I read than from what I heard, I excelled at mispronunciation. Mildred became “Mild Red,” like a soft shade of scarlet, which seemed rather pretty. I was always horrified to be corrected, and occasionally insisted my way was the right one even in the face of decisive evidence to the contrary. I did not, like many other readers I know, take to saying “mih-zled” in place of misled, but I nonetheless repeatedly embarrassed myself, feeling exposed as a fraud when someone pointed out that “vogue” was not, in fact, pronounced “voe-goo.” (Years later, the literary critic Liesl Schillinger would dub these “mumblenyms”—words mispronounced by heavy readers who’d encountered them only on the page.)
It was important to me to feel book smart, because my future depended on it. Once I’d gleaned the right information, I could decide which books were part of my desired world and will myself into them. I could imagine leaving behind where I was physically (grayish-pink bedroom, cat wallpaper, Long Island), stepping through a hardcover door, and venturing “out there.”
Out there, in stories, was the City I knew from Divorced Dad weekends at my father’s apartment on the Upper West Side, a place that felt like a parallel Almost Existence, a place where I might have lived had the divorce played out differently, a place where I may have felt more at home. As it was, I was a part-time and therefore inauthentic resident, which made any book that smelled at all of Manhattan deeply alluring. Mine but not mine. Tell-alls about downtown bohemians, books by theater types, gritty street stories—this was the life I wanted, full of sophisticated people, arty events, sparkling conversation that was all about words, spoken by people who knew.
Andy Warhol was my literary guide. Any book about or endorsed by Andy Warhol, still alive and ineffably cool, roaming coolly around midtown, I had to get my hands on. One afternoon in the city, I was thunderstruck to spot Warhol himself, oohing over a shelf of impulse buys in the extremely hip and expensive store Fiorucci. Here was a veritable City Celebrity and obvious literary authority, in real life, in my life. I shadowed him for forty-five minutes, prolonging the moment of Art Become Real. He picked up trinket after trinket. He didn’t buy anything.
My best friend, Ericka, and I may have been the only teenagers in America who appointment-viewed Warhol’s short-lived MTV program, Andy Warhol’s 15 Minutes, which we religiously recorded on the VCR, practically taking notes. As far as we were concerned, Warhol and his circle had the ultimate say, perhaps along with Spy magazine, on what we construed as literature of the moment. Anyone who appeared on Warhol’s TV show and had a book, I read it. Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero. Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City. Sandra Bernhard’s Confessions of a Pretty Lady, with its scandalous line in which Bernhard casually confessed to picking her nose while walking down the street. For someone who felt self-conscious walking down the street just trying to appear normal, Bernhard’s audacity dazzled.
Ever since Ericka and I had met in Girl Scouts in second grade, we’d shared a propensity for fantasy. In fourth grade, we constructed an elaborate world called Oopleepia; this planet was located in the tree house outside my father’s rental house upstate and ruled by the great god Oopleep. Ericka was an alien named Eep and I was Oop. Years later, I confessed that I’d always been jealous that she’d had the cuter name. “You had the cuter name,” she replied. We were always slightly competitive.
Naturally, our fantasies evolved as we got older, ditched Girl Scouts, and ran with and then away from a bad crowd, making our way through the gross injustice of junior high school, remaining best friends all the while. By the time we graduated from eighth grade, most of our imaginary life revolved around downtown lit and the New Wave music we deemed forward-thinking, a mix tape of one-hit wonders that also made room for perennial heartthrobs Sting and Duran Duran. Ericka’s mother worked at Billboard, her uncle was the lead singer of a seventies rock group, my stepbrother played in a band—all this translated into assorted brushes with fame: backstage passes to teenybop concerts like ’Til Tuesday at the old Ritz, INXS at the Meadowlands, Simple Minds at the Beacon Theatre. We snuck into the Limelight and Nell’s, me covering my braces with one hand. We even managed to speak to Simon Le Bon on the phone, a conversation during which one of us—name redacted—blurted out, “Is John Taylor getting married?” The apotheosis was snagging a bit part dancing in the background of a Nile Rodgers video, my colossal hair threatening to blot out all else on-screen.