Library Love

Nothing is as healing as a book.

When I was a child, I was convinced that something miraculous was about to happen. I lived a very ordinary and very unhappy life -- my parents had divorced when I was eight, and my father all but disappeared. Times were different then -- I didn't meet anyone else whose parents were divorced until I went to college. My mother worked to make ends meet, the only working mother I knew in our neighborhood. And so I knew early on that families broke apart, just as I knew that when your mother kissed you goodnight and told you to sleep tight she herself might be up till all hours worrying about the sort of problems that plague grown-ups, food and laundry, dollars and sense, love and sorrow.

No matter what grown ups say, children know there are monsters in the world. They may not be in the closet, or under the bed, but they're there all the same. Monster are, were and always will be. But it seemed only fair that there would be magic as well.

In school, I felt alone and the place I felt most comfortable was the school library. I went there as often as possible, and our school librarian, Mrs. Inken -- who she had the perfect name --- and I began to think she was somewhat magical herself -- allowed me to break the rules and take out not three or four books, but as many books as I liked. This was our secret, and it made me feel, in some deep way, that Mrs. Inken and I shared something major: we both loved books. I always learned, early on, that librarians are rebels.

As an early reader I was a huge fan of magic -- anything by Edward Eager, and later Ray Bradbury -- both of whom I feel are my literary godfathers. I was also fanatical about the Borrowers series and Mary Poppins. I suppose I was looking for magic in the real world because my world was filled with sadness. I still clung to the belief that a miracle would occur and change my mundane, ordinary life. Birthdays came and went, but I wasn't worried. I never wavered in my belief that there was more to life than the one that I knew. Sooner or later, I'd meet up with my destiny.

Summers might have been a problem for me, with school closed and Mrs. Inken gone. Other kids were thrilled school was over, for me I mourned the loss of the school library. As it turned out there was library in the next town, and I began to go there to read every day. The route I took was a green leafy path so overgrown with weeds it was almost possible to forget that I was walking along a chain link fence, and that the rushing sound I heard wasn't a stream or a brook, but the echo of cars on the Southern State Parkway. When I run into the girls I grew up with and ask what they remember about me, since I don't remember much, they always say they remembered me going to the library. But we weren't residents, or members of the library. I just keep going. I was amazed when one of the librarians suggested I take out some books. Like Mrs. Inken, she didn't mind if I took out as many books as I wanted. Without a library card!!! Another wonderful life-saving rebel. For this I will always be grateful to the Malverne Library on Long Island. When I think of heaven I think of the Malverne Library. It opened the door that lead me into the rest of my life, and I am certain that without that library I would never have become a writer. It was there I found Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, all of the authors I still love best. I found shelves of fantasy and science fiction, as much magic as I wanted. And I found Ann Frank, my first hero.

My miracle happened, in Malverne. It wasn't an amulet that I needed, or a lamp that could grant wishes, or a rose that would never die. It was the best sort of miracle, the kind that happens when the heat outside is blistering, or when a storm is brewing and you can hear thunder in the distance. It was there I learned what London was like, was the rain felt like in Paris, what true love was. I had a very small life, but the world opened to me through my readings.

I often write about characters who are changed by books, as I was. My mother was the only mother I knew who had a library of books and who put up some shaky modern bookshelves in our living room and it was there I found Shirley Jackson -- whose fiction and nonfiction I loved and JD Salinger who I felt was writing directly to me. I felt my mind open with every page I turned --

Clearly when a child walks begins to read she has freedom, maybe for the first time in her life. In a library you can make your own choices. No one can tell you what to read or what to believe. Best of all, no one can tell you what you can and cannot imagine.

In my neighborhood, many of my friends did not make it out. They were waylaid by crime and by drugs. Beautiful smart girls were lost, boys who were artists or musicians went to jail. It was a tough neighborhood and some people couldn't see outside of the boundaries of our town. But I could look over the wall. It was as if I pied up all of those books I had read and climbed to the top to peer over that wall, and into the world beyond ours. I think now I would not have survived my childhood, and that I certainly would not have survived my adolescence, had I not become a reader. Books were the true miracle in my life. Nothing is as intimate, as healing, or as private as a book.

Often the people who succeed in spite of the difficulties they face have one thing in common. They read. They are the people who can escape into a book, who know there are other worlds to be found. They are the one who carry books with them to movie theaters and street corners, who lock themselves in the bathroom or sit out on the porch under a yellow light bulb when everyone in the house is too noisy, they're the one who open a new chapter when the world outside their window is too horrible or disappointing or simply moving too fast. They have hope and faith in the future because they know that once upon a time there was a boy or a girl, a woman or a man, who managed to survive. Somewhere among the pages and the print, on the shelves of a library, in Malverne or Hempstead or some other town, there was someone who found solace or justice or truth, or maybe just a change to tell her own story.