The Power of the Written Word

Okay. So I haven't been able to blog or anything else in my free time over this holiday because I've been engaged in a reading orgy. I've been reading until the external world almost became less real than the internal one, and I've loved every minute!

Oh my god, it's been so long, with all of that freelance stuff and the gearing up for Christmas, since I've read for pleasure. And I knew I wouldn't have much time once school started up again because I'm teaching an online drama course, and online courses take up TONS of time. So I've read and read and read, and walked around with that slightly comatose, far-away feeling for days now. Every spare second I got, I've had my head in a book.

I finished A.S. Byatt's Little Black Book of Stories (delicious and perfect as always), and Helen Simpson's Getting a Life (gut-wrenching, in a quiet, English kind of a way), Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White (contrived beginning, then good, then lapsing into boring, then suddenly picking up and chugging along fantastically until the UNACCEPTABLE and ANGER-INDUCING finish - grrrr... I'm still mad), and David Sedaris' Naked (fussy and hilarious, as usual), all of which I'd started, but not finished. I completely devoured Indu Sundaresan's The Twentieth Wife, which was well-plotted if obviously a first novel and a little bit ham-handed at times, and fed my inner passion for all things Indian. But the capper was Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

Over the last two and a half days I almost had a heart attack, so much blood, sweat, sleep, laughter and tears did I sacrifice to that book. Seriously? It is pure genius and, I know it's cliche, but I literally could not put it down. I stayed up waaaay too late and fell asleep with it in my hands. In the shower and changing diapers are about the only times I let go of it. I read it while I blew dry my hair, and while fixing dinner. I snapped up snippets at traffic lights. I read whole portions out loud to Andy.

Holy hell, what a book! I can see why my conventional brother and sister-in-law hated it, but DUDE, my family is IN that book. Mostly me and my mother, and partly my dad and the conventional brother, but still. My mother IS Enid, the mother in the novel. And it freaked me out and gave me goosebumps over and over.

Enid is disappointed and embarrassed of her children. They do not fit her view of "nice" and "normal." This was already eerily familiar as I read, but particularly hit home with me when Andy told me last night that when I was pregnant with Charlotte (remember, Charlotte is only one, so this was pretty recently) my mom told his mom (nice choice of audience, mother) that I am a "great disappointment" for all of their (meaning she and my dad) plans for me. This is what my mother is STILL telling people. Since I was 17, this has been going on. Did she stop to think that by announcing this to my MOTHER-IN-LAW she was essentially saying that my life with that woman's SON is disappointing to her?! No. No she did not. She, I know absolutely, expected sympathy and agreement, and a commiserating tsk tsk at me for putting her through such suffering and travails. It would never have occurred to her to think about the ramifications of what she was saying for anyone beyond herself. She just likes to announce the cross she bears to anyone who will listen. She would be completely bewildered to hear that someone perhaps might find her confessions of motherly disappointment to be a tad distasteful, let alone downright appalling.

My dear friends ErinP. and Philbug asked me today, when I shared this with them, what my mother wishes for. She wants to be able to brag to her friends about me. She can't very well brag about her thrice-married, Master's-Degree-abandoning, poor-neighborhood-dwelling, baby-machine daughter of reality, now can she? She wishes for me to be rich and live in a big house, married to some doctor/lawyer type person (he is of marginal importance in my ideal life-path, except to be professional and respectable and wealthy) and be an acclaimed something-or-other: writer, singer, pianist, violinist... one of those things for which I was trained. I have wasted the many opportunities I was given as a child, you see. She often wistfully quotes my preschool teacher, who said in days of yore, "Beth could do anything she wants to do." Because I was brilliant and shining back then, before boyfriends and speeding tickets. What she has never understood, and what I don't think she ever WILL understand, is that all of that stuff at which I shined so brightly way back when was EASY for me, and therefore would bore me in the long run. No challenge. I never practicied EVER except to cram just before concerts, and I would sing or play like a bird. Same thing with school. Cram the night before, ace everything. Yawn. What is a challenge, what I find valuable and rewarding as hell is being a wife and a mother. THIS, I love. It's HARD, and I love it. This is the stuff for which I received absolutely no training, and I have to figure out on my own, and therefore when I do it well, I know I worked for it. She will never get that. My friends pointed out that if I had gone the route she would have preferred, she would have found something else to be disappointed about. My lovely lovely friends said that it sounded to them like my mother is a very unhappy person, and that that has nothing at all to do with me. I love my friends.

Jeebus. That was a tangent I did NOT mean to meander onto. Sorry. Ahem.

So anyway, I've still got one more Christmas book to finish, J.F. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur. Another India/historical-fiction fix, which is sure to be enjoyable. I shall abandon myself to another reality, with much relief.

It feels so good to have rediscovered my reading self. It's, like, utter luxury for me to immerse myself in a book, even if it's painful, as was The Corrections. Books are my opium. And I feel guilty for having taken a minor leave of absence from blogging, but I totally needed a vacation in the opium den. Yes I did.

So Happy New Year to me.

And to all of you. My wish is for all of you to find the perfect book. It's simple, but coming from me, you can be sure of how very much that wish entails.