Reading in the Family
My mother had too many books in her house in Los Angeles. In London, I am the same. I try my best to clear them out regularly, taking them to Oxfam, if only to make space for new books, new acquisitions. It is a kind of a mania, something I discovered we both share with many other people around the world. The Japanese even have a word for people who buy more books than they can read — Tsundoku.
My mother’s parents were from the mountains in Greece; my grandfather at least learned to read and write before he was taken out of school at ten to work. My mother and her brother, Jim, raised in the New York public school system, were both “readers”. Jim, an actor in New York, was subject to our mania to such an extent he spent the last decades of his life as a book trader. Gradually, he replaced all the furniture in his studio apartment with books, so that when you visited him, you sat on boxes of books instead of a sofa, eating off books instead of a table. He’d slept on a platform bed that rose like a raft above a sea of words.
During the Covid pause, I had many conversations with my mother, who was living by herself. I was in London, and often up early; in California, she was still awake. We talked about people we knew, the terrible state of politics, television we watched, books we read. She was the member of more than one book club. She introduced me to Elena Ferrante, Isabel Wilkerson, Julie Otsuka, Maggie O’Farrell. I trusted her recommendations.
Going through some old notes recently, I found a detailed description of a conversation with my mother about reading. It was during a lockdown moment of organising space. I was telling her about how when we’d moved into our house a few years before, I’d instructed my family to put the books on the shelves “willy nilly”. I did not care about how they were ordered — I only want them out of the boxes and off the floor.
Finally I was finding a system. My plan was to fill the space around my desk with beloved women writers : Virginia Woolf, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Grace Paley, Vivian Gornick, Natalia Ginzberg, Ruth Ozeki — writers who seemed to reach out through the ether to say to me, directly: see, here, this is how it is. When I did my own writing, they could give me courage to imagine that I was also trying to find out the secret truths of the world, and to help push the story forward in my own small way.
When she was a girl in Jamaica, New York, my mother told me, the stacks of books around the house drove her mother crazy. She’d run around throwing books, saying “burrrn the books, burrrrn the books!” (I always hear my grandmother’s Greek accent when my mother quotes her and in this way I am intimately familiar with the voice of a dead woman from Thesssaly whom I never met). “Hitler was right!”
“How did that little woman from a mountain in Greece know about Hitler and burning books?” My mother wondered.
Both of my parents were readers, though they rarely shared the same books. My father specialised in thick hardbacks — fiction, but mostly nonfiction. His favourite subjects were the Civil War and the Russian Revolution: violent internicine conflicts, tragedies of competiting narratives. His own Russian Jewish mother did not speak to her sister for forty years, up to their deathbed reconciliation. That grandmother was a reader, and so was her husband, my father’s father.
My Jewish grandfather left school at 12. One day, he refused to sing a hymn to Jesus, and he was kicked out of class. He never went back. But he was famously self-educated. As a young man of 16, he went to work “down south” and boarded with a local doctor, who offered him free access to his library. This grandfather grew up to be the owner and operator of a national moving company, one he built on the back of his father’s horse and buggy peddling business. They had big trucks that travelled the country with the family name emblazoned on the side.
When I was twelve, this grandfather gave me a leather-bound copy of Walt Whitman. I opened the front cover to see the well-known sketch of the poet with his short, salt and pepper beard, piercing blue eyes, white shirt open at the collar. I felt a surge of attraction so physical Whitman himself would have been delighted. From that day on, I pursued poetry. I still can remember the intimacy of those first encounters, like an early lover. Later on, Jim gave me a copy of the complete works of Frank O’Hara. O’Hara gave us a source of shared enthusiasm, and I read “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” when we added his ashes to the family gravesite in Queens.
Not surprisingly, I married a man who reads. Even though he dropped English after his O Levels, he is a great reader — of fiction as well as nonfiction. Our taste in books often diverges, but we also have moments of great intimacy and pleasure in shared reading projects. He started on Trollope first, about ten years ago; he got me hooked on the Palliser books, and then the Barchester Chronicles. Sometimes my children would come across us passionately discussing a character or development in the story, and they would ask who is that? They were truly disgusted when they found out we were talking about a book.
When they were young, they had no choice about reading, and I remember feeling smug they were both so open to books. They let me read them classics from my own childhood, like The Phantom Tollbooth and Anne of Green Gables, and were happy to explore the rich children’s literature of their father’s country, Roald Dahl and Just William, along with the many multi-series fictional universes of their own era.
But as soon as they hit the age when children’s literature seems stale, and adult literature too rich and frightening, they stopped reading. Mobile phones entered their lives, and social media.
I told my mother the story of bursting into tears one day as I was driving my teenagers to a sports event, after they both confessed they had stopped reading. I said I had begged them, crying about what would happen to them if I died and they were not readers:
“If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, I’d know you’d be okay as long as you had books! You wouldn’t be alone in the world. You’d have all those people, living and dead, to guide you.”
They thought it was ridiculous I could get so emotional about reading.
My mother thought I was being ridiculous, too. She reminded me that my Uncle Jim did not read before he was 16. When she was a teenager, she would read constantly — and smoke. That was her rebellion. When her parents appeared, she’d quickly snuff out her cigarette, and bang the covers closed over it.
“They were smokers themselves so they couldn’t smell a thing.” Perhaps that accounted for part of my grandmother’s fury ; she sensed books were leading her children down a path that would take them away from her.
My mother told me she had learned to smoke when she was ten. She had two teenaged cousins who were supposed to look after her ( “the only ones my mother trusted”); They looked like good girls but they were rebels. As soon as they turned the corner, they would whip out their lipsticks and go trawling for attention on the boulevards, flirting with sailors. It was a sailor who taught my mother to smoke, and her cousins who taught her to swear.
“Now they’re both dead. Everybody’s dead.”
“Everybody dies.”
“Yes,” my mother started humming the Sondheim song, “Here’s to the Ladies Who Lunch…everybody dies.”
Now my beautiful, cultured mother is dead, along with her beloved Sondheim. She was right; despite their teenage rebellion, both my children turned out to be readers. They are even willing to talk about books again, and listen to recommendations. I miss my mother — as she herself told me I would. But I am grateful because she left me with so many pathways to find her again, including through our mania for reading: all those stories and people whose lives become ours, all those unknown friends from the world that exists only in our heads. I hope when I am gone, my children will be able to do the same.
