In E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, twelve-year-old Claudia Kincaid hatches a plan to run away from her home in Connecticut to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, taking along her money-grubbing younger brother, Jamie.
The children roam the galleries during the day, blending in with crowds. They sleep in the antique beds on display and bathe in the fountain, supplementing their money with the coins they find in it. When an angel sculpture recently acquired by the Met from a Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler begins to attract crowds, Claudia and Jamie become fascinated with the piece. They use their access to the museum to try to prove that it was indeed crafted by Michelangelo. And in their attempt to discover its provenance, they travel to visit Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler herself. (For some reason, I can never think of her as a mere Mrs. Frankweiler—so I’m just going to keep typing out her whole, grand name.)
The story is prefaced by a letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney, Saxonberg, and is narrated by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, complete with trenchant and sometimes cryptic asides.
From the Mixed-up Files was published in 1967. It took the Newberry Award, and Konigsburg became the only writer to have both won and been runner up for the prize in the same year (for her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth). She also illustrated From the Mixed-up Files, modeling Claudia and Jamie on her children.
I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
I read From the Mixed-up Files when I was in fifth or sixth grade. I picked up my copy from the paperback carousel in the library of my suburban Canadian school.
But memory had softened the story into a soulless romp. Over the years, my mind fashioned it into a dreamy urban version of those children’s survival novels that I also liked to read as a kid; instead of weaving reeds and baiting fish hooks, Claudia and Jamie hid in bathrooms and ate at the Automat. I’d forgotten the opening letter from Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler to her attorney. I’d forgotten about Jamie’s cheerful, avaricious practicality, and about how the children wander not just in the Met but over Manhattan. I’d forgotten Claudia’s deep and fundamental dissatisfaction with her life. I’d forgotten about Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler’s files—the entire meaning behind the title, the heart of the book—probably because I didn’t understand what I was reading.
Claudia is a self-assured and earnest twelve-year-old. She has a sense of mission and tries to make her museum stay educational rather than an anarchic escape. Mrs. Frankweiler notes:
Claudia informed Jamie that they should take advantage of the wonderful opportunity they had to learn and study… her ambitions were as enormous and as multidirectional as the museum itself.
Jamie says he prefers an adventure untainted by grown-up regulations—but he lives in thrall to the rule of dollars and cents. When Claudia suggests trying to find the origins of the angel, brother and sister end up researching. In libraries.
Yes, two school-age children at loose in New York City willingly and deliberately go to the library.*
(*Sorry NYPL, I love you.)
Claudia makes increasingly poignant and quixotic attempts to give their trip a shape and a mission without being quite sure what will change it. She wants the difference she feels in herself borne out. She wants to be a heroine but has a muddled sense of how to go about accomplishing it. At one point, she sees a guide at the United Nations dressed in a sari:
When she was grown she could stay the way she was and move to some place like India where no one dressed as she did, or she could dress like someone else—the Indian guide even and still live in an ordinary place like Greenwich.
(Frankly, I see a lot of grown-up white people who are as misguided as young Claudia.)
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself.
She wants to be different. She wants this trip to have significance and change the way people see her—or change how she sees herself. She tells Jamie brokenly that she wanted to prove the provenance of the angel because then she would be a heroine—others would see her as heroic, and she wants to herself: “I feel as if I jumped into a lake to rescue a boy, and what I thought was a boy turned out to be a wet, fat log. Some heroine that makes. All wet for nothing.”
But it is in her conversation with Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that she learns to think of herself as one. Those secret files record her as a heroine.
I re-read this book while watching my daughter’s swim lesson on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—across the park from the Met, across the park from where Claudia and Jamie hid.
Because I now live in New York, the fantastical landscape of my childhood imagination has supposedly become a part of my day-to-day reality. Judy Blume’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Mary Rodgers’ Freaky Friday, and Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, among others, all take place on streets I’ve walked.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it.
I think of these books sometimes—I think of Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing when I’m in posh doorman buildings with mirrored elevators, like the one Peter and Fudge lived in. But most of the time I don’t remember the fact that I share a setting with favorite childhood books. I don’t feel like a heroine.
I first read From the Mixed-up Files when I was around Claudia’s age. I left for New York when I was ten years older than that. At both those times in my life, I was earnest, like Claudia, but more anxious than she was. Much less confident.
To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Filesof Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life.
Twelve is often the age when girls lose what self-assurance they had. And I wish I’d understood this book better at twelve. I wish I’d carried more away from it. To read—and understand—From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler can be vastly and secretly affirming: Claudia learns as long as she knows she’s a heroine, she is the heroine of her life. “Now she wouldn’t have to be a heroine when she returned home… except to herself.”
I re-read that last fierce and tender section of From the Mixed-up Files while watching my kid’s swim lesson, and I tried not to cry. I still don’t know what I felt: grief? mourning? a sense of losing something I wasn’t sure I had? My daughter was learning to float and blow bubbles—she was learning to save herself in the water. I hope these skills last her for a long, long time.
In Owl At Home, Arnold Lobel’s 1975 illustrated early reader, solitary Owl scolds winter for coming into his house. He is frightened by a creature under his covers, which turns out to be his feet. He makes himself cry in order to enjoy a pot of tear-water tea. He runs up and down the stairs in order to be in two places at once. He worries about the moon.
Throughout these five short episodes, Owl never encounters any other animate creatures. He talks to the weather, his legs, objects in the sky. He doesn’t seem perturbed by the fact that they never reply.
“If I am looking at you, moon, then you must be looking back at me. We must be very good friends,” Owl says.
Aha, the reader thinks, the moon isn’t a real friend—it just seems like it’s there for you. The moon begins to follow Owl and Owl shoos it away. He feels sad when he is home safe in bed and cannot see his friend—and relieved when it reappears from behind clouds to shine in his window. Poor, deluded Owl.
At another point, Owl tells himself vignettes of small things and objects, about wasted potential, and isolation, in order to make himself cry:
“Spoons that have fallen behind the stove and are never seen again,” said Owl…. “Books that cannot be read,” said Owl, because some of the pages have been torn out.” … “Mornings nobody saw because everybody was sleeping,” sobbed Owl.
“Soon,” Lobel writes, “the kettle was all filled up with tears.”
And yet, while the episode chronicles small moments of stunning loneliness, the chapter ends on a note of optimism. “Owl felt happy as he filled his cup. ‘It tastes a bit salty,’ he said, ‘but tear water-tea is always very good.’”
After his recitation, Owl’s decision is to be happy—to be nourished by his temporary sadness. He seems to be the master of these sad stories.
And yet…if Owl understands the illusory nature of these stories, does he know that his friendship with the moon is also not real? Does it matter, if it makes him happy? Is Owl in command of the narrative? Are we?
Arnold Lobel is perhaps best known for creating Frog and Toad, who make up one of the funniest, most poignant relationships in children’s literature.
The first book, Frog and Toad Are Friends, came out in 1970. The pair is a classic odd couple: Frog is sunny and energetic; Toad frets about buttons, swimsuits, and about not being able to think of stories. He has moments of deep and deeply real insecurity and melancholy that always find reassurance in Frog’s abiding friendship. Frog and Toad can also be seen as a portrait of male-male love. In total, Lobel wrote four Frog and Toad books. (Another two were discovered more recently and released by Lobel’s daughter, Adrianne.)
It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
When reading the Frog and Toad books, it is difficult not to draw parallels to Lobel’s life. In a May 2016 piece for The New Yorker, Colin Stokes traces Lobel’s origins as a children’s book author and illustrator—sometimes in collaboration with his wife Anita Kempler. Stokes also notes that Lobel was gay. Lobel was one of the early casualties of AIDS and died of complications from the disease in 1987. He had come out to his wife and children in 1974. Owl At Home was published in 1975. It is hard not to read some of Owl’s loneliness—the wasted potential that he cries about in the tear-water tea, the ignored history of objects and creatures—as being about Lobel’s personal, hidden tragedies.
But perhaps we don’t have the right to look at Lobel’s story—his stories—through that lens. Lobel’s books, after all, are ultimately happy. They affirm friendship. They show that people (or owls and amphibians) need and find joy in ties, even while acknowledging that relationships are as ephemeral as life.
My experience of Owl at Home has always been social. I likely first encountered the book during one of those important early kid’s events: story time.
Between kindergarten and third grade, my class went to the school library at least once a week for a reading with our librarian, Ms Wilkins, and to take out books.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort.
Ms Wilkins was tall and gray-haired. She wore a heavy man’s watch, which I sometimes stared at when she read. She introduced us to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. She read us Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day and paused to explain to us how the author used collage to make up his illustrations. I still remember the care she took to talk to us about each book that she selected, about how pictures and words were put together. She was teaching us how to see, what to look for in narrative—something that I don’t think anyone had ever really done for me before. I remember her as a reserved woman—not the kind of person whom one would peg as someone who wanted to work with kids. But as my reading advanced, she listened to me quietly when I told her I wanted books like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. She didn’t grimace or laugh—and she steered me to Enid Blyton, P. L. Travers, and Dodie Smith.
To this day, the memory of Ms Wilkins—of sitting cross-legged on a low carpet of the library surrounded by other kids, of listening to her read in her low, scratchy voice—brings me immense comfort. It was this same feeling of intimacy and sharing that I tried to bring to my daughter when I read to her about Frog and Toad, and Owl.
In the wake of the US election, I have been thinking a lot about the uses of reading and writing. I dwell on how useless writing—my writing—seems to be. I consider this while taking refuge in stories that conclude happily and unhappily—in narratives that have the courtesy to end while our reality continues rudely and dangerously on.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
We do think of reading and writing as solitary pursuits—perhaps they’re even selfish. But reading can take the form of a parent reading to a child, a story time for a class of eager kids. Or it can be one person and a book.
I tell myself this when I write: that a book may be an inanimate object, but it is also contains the words of a person reaching out. I tell myself that empathy works even when results are not immediately visible. Or I tell myself nothing and just go on.
At the end of Owl at Home, Owl has fallen asleep. The moon is still shining on him. It is there if Owl needs it.
At the beginning of Robin McKinley’s 1982 young adult fantasy novel The Blue Sword, Harry Crewes has been living in a colonial desert outpost after the death of her parents. The Homeland, where Harry is from, is a thinly disguised Victorian England. The lone Homeland city of Istan shares uneasily a border with Damar, a mysterious, magical Afghanistan concealed in the mountains.
War is brewing between Damar and the North, and when King Corlath of Damar comes to negotiate with the Homelanders, his magic—the kelar—demands that he kidnap the young woman to aid his people.
Harry, it turns out, has plenty of kelar in her blood, too. As a result, she has visions of legendary Damarian queen Aerin, she learns the language at a prodigious rate, and she adapts quickly to bridleless horsemanship and battle training. After a brutal six weeks of swashbuckler boot camp, she wins the laprun trials (the Damarian cavalry Olympics), becomes one of the king’s elite Riders, and rides out to war against the demonic Northern army.
While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
But Harry clashes with Corlath on a major point: she wants to warn the Homelanders—or as the Damarians call them, the Outlanders—about the Northern army and to ask them to defend a narrow gap in the mountains through which the Northerners could overrun Harry’s old home and ambush Corlath’s army. Corlath has exhausted his diplomacy with the pseudo-Victorians. “Let them take the Outlander city,” he says of the Northerners. “[I]t will keep them amused.”
Despite the fact that Harry loves Damar—and is falling for Corlath—she cares about the Outlander station: her brother still lives there, she has friends there. It was her world not long ago. She defies the king and risks betraying Damar—and Corlath—in order to go and warn her old countrymen and to guard the pass herself.
The Blue Sword won a Newbery Honor and an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. It was followed by The Hero and the Crown—a prequel, which tells the story of Lady Aerin. While I was re-reading the novel, I told my husband rather helplessly, “I love this book. I loved it when I was a teenager. I love it now.”
That does not mean it’s without problems:
Harry is a white savior. The Damarians are dark haired and dark skinned, and Harry is a towering blonde. Yes, it’s revealed eventually that she has a quarter Damarian blood, so maybe Emma Stone can play her in the movie.
It can be seen as colonial apologia. The authorities and military stationed at Istan seem to love the desert and respect the people. The colonizers are excised of brutality; they are bumbling and well-intentioned.
Then, there is also the fact that Corlath kidnaps Harry—or rather, his kelar forces him to do it. The abduction of women is a charged act—sexually and politically—and the characters know it. But the way McKinley rewrites kidnapping is interesting. First of all, Corlath feels pretty terrible about it:
She was smiling a little in her sleep, but it was a sad smile, and it made him unhappy… He knew only too well that by stealing her from her people he had done a thing to be ashamed of, even if he had no alternative.
McKinley takes pains to make sure that Corlath’s intention isn’t rape. Indeed, out of Corlath’s sympathy for her grows respect, and love.
On Harry’s end, instead of the abduction being an instrument of a sexual awakening that leaves her in thrall to love, she is bestowed with power. Corlath gives her swords, a horse—a means to leave. Her magic asserts itself. She has the kind of freedom she didn’t enjoy while trying to be a lady at the colonial outpost—and more. An early signal of her autonomy is her clarity and humor about the situation:
Corlath didn’t look at her the way a man looks at a woman he plans to share his bed… He looked at her rather as a man looks at a problem that he would very much prefer to do without. She supposed it was a distinction of a sort to be a harassment to a king.
Throughout the episode, Harry retains her ability to think. The book is full of these dry asides—the characters are aware that the situation is epic, but their reactions are not grandiose. They’re very funny and human, and I found that—still find it—appealing.
The Blue Sword combines feminist power and magic—and that is and was seductive. But the book’s flipping of one script does not make it perfect on all other issues—although the seductiveness remains in place.
Another thing I loved about the book when I was younger was the idea of a foreigner coming into another culture and, despite many struggles, thriving in it.
She was a figure in some story other than her own—an embroidered shape in a Hill tapestry, a representation of something that did not exist in her Homeland.
Harry feels that she has no history in the place she is living—but it is making history out of her. At another point, Harry tells the Oracle, Luthe:
Oh, I know—one never sees ahead of behind. But I see even less. It is like being blindfolded when everyone else in the room is not. No one can see outside the room—but everyone else can see the room. I would like to take my blindfold off.
It explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
In a way, the book captures the helplessness and the vitality of adolescence—the feeling of being perched on the cusp of something huge, but of not knowing what that will be. But more important to me when I first read it, it explicitly talks about being caught between two cultures. And it interweaves this all with mystical powers and Fate, leading young me to wonder if maybe there was a point to all of this terrible uncertainty. Maybe this alienation, this uncertainty, was exactly what would make me powerful.
As I said, it’s very seductive.
The Blue Sword informs who I am. I can see its fingerprints all over me. Here is where I learned what “bohemian” meant and that swords and sorcery could be interspersed with wit. Here is where I learned to mine a book for offpage sex. Here is where I learned about bridges.
Luthe, the mage whom Corlath consults before battle, tells Harry:
Friends you will have need of, for in you two worlds meet. There is no one on both sides with you, so you must learn to take your own counsel…It is not an enviable position, being a bridge, especially a bridge with visions.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling.
I bought in wholeheartedly to the idea of being the bridge—even though it meant I bought into the idea that I would always be struggling. No—it meant I would always see myself as struggling and that that struggle was for a noble and perhaps magical cause.
But the truth is that I was never in a foreign land. I have always lived here in North America. And it isn’t always struggle. The idea of being this bridge has lost its luster. I think of my daughter who is biracial—a classic born of two worlds child—and I think that she should not have to follow that template unless she wants it. She was born here, too, and the dominant narrative of her life doesn’t have to be one of never feeling quite at home.
It is okay to feel out of place or foreign. But it doesn’t have to be the only way she can see herself in books.
I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully.
I love The Blue Sword. It is a part of who I am. But I can also give my daughter other books and dreams and characters to follow and identify with—characters who are not necessarily white, people who inhabit their worlds fully. When she’s older, I can give her Zen Cho’s Sorceror to the Crown, or Saladin Ahmed’s stories. If she likes The Blue Sword, great—we’ll have plenty to talk about.
But my daughter doesn’t have to see herself as a bridge in order to reconcile her place. Because the thing about bridges is that people walk all over them to get to other, more fantastical lands.
Beverly Cleary, author of many funny, wise classics of children’s literature, turned one hundred years old on April 12. She is known for having created such characters as Ralph, the motorcycle mouse, Henry Huggins, and Ramona and Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby.
I went through piles of Cleary’s books as a kid, but Ramona and Her Mother, I only needed to read once.
Ramona and Her Mother opens with the Quimbys celebrating Mr. Quimby’s new job at the checkout counter of the Shop Rite. Mr. Quimby’s bout with unemployment has left the family with bills, though, and Mrs. Quimby stays at her job as a medical receptionist. The family has a disastrous brunch. Ramona dyes her legs with bluing when she and her friend Howie try to make an ocean. After a long, difficult day, Ramona’s parents fight and then make up. Beezus gets a terrible haircut. Ramona wears her comfortable new pajamas to school underneath her clothes and accidentally leaves them there and tries to hide it.
Throughout, we find Ramona trying to be good and dependable—although this also often means suppressing her curiosity and imagination. She wants to be seen as responsible, like Beezus. She overhears people saying that Beezus is her mother’s girl, and she wishes she could be the same.
One episode, in particular, I have always remembered.
The Quimbys have had a terrible day. When they come home, they discover that no one has plugged in the Crock Pot, and there is no dinner waiting. Mr. Quimby and Mrs. Quimby argue about who was responsible.
“I suppose you think turning on a Crock-Pot is woman’s work.”
The edge in her voice matched the edge in his.
“Not exactly,” said Mr. Quimby, “but now that you mention it—”
Even in just that short exchange, the book manages to touch on women’s changing roles in the household in that era and the tensions they sometimes brought. Cleary has been lauded for the groundbreaking realism of her work, and this sequence shows how beautifully and skillfully she does it. Ramona and Her Mother was published in 1979, and this entire episode—with the hungry kids, tired parents, the simmering tension over Mrs. Quimby going to work and the worries about money—it’s remarkable.
Ramona frets about Beezus, who is grating carrots—she’s worried that Beezus will scrape her fingers and bleed into the salad.But the blood is in the growing argument between the parents.
The parents continue to quietly pick at each other while putting together a dinner of pancakes from of the meager contents of their pantry. Meanwhile, Ramona frets about Beezus, who is grating carrots—she’s worried that Beezus will scrape her fingers and bleed into the salad.
But the blood is in the growing argument between the parents—and all the tensions about who was supposed to provide, who was supposed to work—not just in this moment but in life—slowly come to the surface until finally Mr. Quimby tells Mrs. Quimby the pancakes aren’t cooked through. When she disagrees, he reaches over and slashes them.
They ooze.
I never read Ramona and Her Mother after the first time—not until I was an adult. Not until I became a parent.
Mrs. Quimby swats Mr. Quimby with a spatula and stalks out of the room. The summaries I glanced at all seem to go with some variation of Mrs. Quimby hitting Ramona’s dad with a spatula, with no mention of the pancakes. But for me, the scene turns on Mr. Quimby’s almost comic aggression toward dinner—comic, but also somehow not funny.
Mr. Quimby finishes making the meal. Later, Ramona sneaks into Beezus’s room, and the two comfort each other.
I talk a lot in this column about how I read and re-read books.
I never read Ramona and Her Mother after the first time—not until I was an adult. Not until I became a parent.
Like Mr. Quimby, my dad was unemployed on and off. He had been a psychiatric social worker. He later worked as a freelance translator. We operated a diner for a while, and then he started selling and putting together computers.
After my father’s first bout with unemployment, my mother, who had been a nurse-midwife in Taiwan, went to work as a seamstress in a factory. She worked steadily from the time I was four or five. She didn’t try to certify for nursing in Canada because she never felt her English was good enough. She resented my father greatly for what she perceived as his failure to support the family. And, of course, they fought.
At some point, my mom started telling me things. She’d stop by my room before bedtime and launch into long monologues about how hard she had to work and how much she hated her life.
At some point, my mom started telling me things. She’d stop by my room before bedtime and launch into long monologues about how hard she had to work and how much she hated her life. She blamed my dad. She said he was irresponsible and that I had to help support the family by being good and quiet and never wanting things.
She also made me feel like there was no one else she could talk to—and maybe that was true. Her parents, who had come to live with us, didn’t like my dad and would blame her for marrying him. My mom’s limited English meant she didn’t feel comfortable with our Anglophone neighbors, and the friends who did speak her language were terrible gossips.
So she talked to me.
I defended my dad to her—he and I had always been close—but I also felt grown up to be trusted with family burdens. In a lot of ways, I wanted, as Ramona did, to be seen as a good helper to my mother. But sometimes that wish isn’t healthy, and now I see it cost me too much. I was ten or eleven, maybe. And I ended up worrying not about the welfare of our family—I ended up feeling responsible for my mother’s happiness and, worse, her deep, deep unhappiness.
When I told my dad that my mom sometimes unburdened herself to me—and that I defended him valiantly—he looked sad and angry. He told me I was a kid and that he was sorry that I had to deal with it. I was outraged at the time. I was mature. I was sure I could be helpful.
Near the end of the episode in Ramona and Her Mother, when Ramona sneaks into Beezus’s room and the two snuggle under the covers, Beezus says she’ll be there for Ramona if their parents divorce. She adds:
I read a book about girl who took care of her brothers and sisters when their father died, but that was off in the mountains someplace where they all picked herbs and things. It wouldn’t work in the city.
Beezus mulling over “herbs and things” is funny. But it occurs to me that that’s what I did with many of the books I read—then and now. I, like Beezus, was sifting through what I knew and what I’d learned from stories to come up with a way to solve my problems.
By day, I’m sure I was a plucky and cheerful kid. But through the long, anxious night of my childhood, Beezus and Ramona’s attempt to find answers about what to do and how to be mirrored mine in all its imperfections. Beezus didn’t find a perfect solution from reading a book. Neither did I. But I guess maybe I didn’t—couldn’t—recognize the issues I had.
I, like Beezus, was sifting through what I knew and what I’d learned from stories to come up with a way to solve my problems.
We read for different reasons. We read to educate ourselves, to explore. We read for comfort and escape and connection. Stories that do all of those things and more are the ones that I end up loving and remembering.
The pancake slashing and its aftermath have always stayed with me. I don’t know if I can say that I loved Ramona and Her Mother when I was a child. It may have overwhelmed me. At the time, I lacked the emotional maturity to dissect why I remembered Cleary’s words so perfectly while my feelings around the book stayed numb.
I do remember dwelling on the differences between us: Ramona and Beezus had each other. And overnight, their parents overcame their resentments, where mine couldn’t seem to. My parents weren’t white. English wasn’t their first language. My feelings and my world were different.
I do remember dwelling on the differences between us: Ramona and Beezus had each other. And overnight, their parents overcame their resentments, where mine couldn’t seem to.
There are people who expect perfect analogs to their lives in the books they read; they dismiss work with which they can’t identify. I couldn’t really afford to do that—and to a great extent, still can’t. A lot of this column has been about finding myself in books. But I know that I can still love a book if I don’t see me—and that sometimes, I can find something good where I think I won’t.
Yes, sometimes we will not recognize ourselves in what we read. But what we can gain is the breadth of experience and feeling and wisdom and, yes, diversity of viewpoints that books offer—the knowledge outside one’s experience. Those “herbs and things” that may have seemed irrelevant or extraneous at the time—the things that kept books from being a perfect fit—can sometimes fit in the future. And even if they don’t—well, that’s okay, too.
I see now that Ramona and Her Mother did connect to me and that, in a way, it waited for me while I grew.
I see now that Ramona and Her Mother did connect to me and that, in a way, it waited for me while I grew.
We read for different reasons, and maybe at that point in my life, I was reading to escape. Maybe I didn’t want to feel too much for what was happening on the page. I can embrace the feeling now. The book stayed with me all of these years. It stayed until I learned some sympathy for the child I was.
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