My Literary Family

Note: Don't worry, my friends, I'll be posting about my upcoming book release and book signing schedule soon.  For now, I hope you enjoy this little nugget that's been napping in my "drafts" for a while. :-)

I began to realize I had a literary family when I was in graduate school.  I knew that I had a passion for Victorian novels, and so I signed up for an independent study with two girlfriends, and we sat in the professor's office drinking tea, petting his dog, and discussing Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and, among others, Thomas Hardy.  We read Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and I was enraptured.  I loved the language and the way that Hardy made the place of the novel so essential to the emotional lives of the characters.  The setting was in fact a character all its own. The very next semester I undertook an independent study with the same professor, this time focusing singularly on the novels of Thomas Hardy.  The first book we read was Far From the Madding Crowd, and that was it--I announced that Thomas Hardy was my literary husband.  I wanted to spend my life with him, and I vowed that I would.

But life is complicated, y'all.  Because no sooner had I announced my marriage to Thomas Hardy than I was introduced to my literary boyfriend, William Faulkner.  In a Southern Literature class, a class I had signed up for begrudgingly (because my snooty self couldn't imagine that any American could write as beautifully as the Brits), we read Absalom, Absalom!, and I was hooked from page one.  I began devouring Faulkner, purchasing As I Lay Dying straight away and soon returned to a book I had discarded years before after reading only one page--The Sound and the Fury.  I don't know what was different this time around, but I could not get enough of Faulkner and his run on sentences, disregard for standard punctuation, and unashamed baring of the complexity of the human heart.  I realized that I was a woman with two lovers, and I refused to choose.

From there, my literary family grew: my uncle, Mark Twain (because everyone knows that uncle who teaches the little kids dirty jokes and cuss words at family gatherings); my grandfather, Walt Whitman (because he's watching me all the time anyway, and I'm pretty sure he gives me $5 randomly); my aunt, Flannery O'Connor (an aunt with pet peacocks and a dark sense of humor?  Yes, please!); my best friend, Virginia Woolf (we go to marches together); my other literary uncle, Ernest Hemingway (the one who brings a new lady friend to every family event); my Southern grandmother, Katherine Anne Porter (so damn sassy!); my cousins, ee cummings and Tennessee Williams; not to mention my goddess of a grandmother, Toni Morrison or that aunt who tells me all her best stories, Sandra Cisneros...I'll stop there.  I think you get the idea.

I speak about these writers are part of my "literary family" because they have become such an essential part of what's made me, me.  When I read, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", it affects me in a deep and lasting way.  I can't rid of it (not that I want to).  Their words have become part of me; I live with them every day.

Whitman wrote that as we go through life, every action connects us with every person who has ever done the same.  For example, if I go out and look at the moon tonight (and it is a rather fetching crescent this evening), I am connected beyond the man-made bonds of time with every person who has ever looked at the moon, and every person who ever will.

When I read the words of these writers, I'm connected with everyone who has every read them, but I'm also connected with the writers themselves.  And that's magical, my friends.  Oscar Wilde (another wild uncle-oh, the puns!) wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol"--like, he actually composed those lyrics--so as I read them, I'm experiencing them as he did when he read the poem through the first time, or the second, or the third.

Reading is such a connective experience--it forms bonds we can't even imagine.  I love mentioning a book in passing and someone's ecstatic reply that they read that book as well.  Connected.

We should talk about reading more often.  What are you reading?  What work has most affected you?  What book can you never understand?  What writers are in your literary family?

And you know what?  Now that you've read these words, you're in mine.  Welcome.