My Life

My earliest literary memory is of me tucked under the covers and Dad sitting on the edge of the bed,
holding open a book of Grimm's fairy tales. He looked at the page, saw the same black marks I saw, but
somehow what he apprehended was not a sequence of inscrutable symbols. He looked at the visual design
and heard sounds. Once upon a time there dwelt near a large wood a poor woodcutter . . . This was
magic for sure. My dad had the power to transform paper and ink into body and blood, and I was mad to
learn this secret that could change print into song, my father into a wizard and my cozy bedroom into a
magnificent kingdom.

I closed my eyes and listened. My father's words transported me out of my bed and into the long ago and
the far away. I knew this was a different kind of listening. This was not the way I listened to my record player
or the way I listened to Mom tell me for the umpteenth time to eat every bite of supper because the children
in China are starving. This was listening as an act of imagination. Me and my dad were making up a world
together. He gave me a castle, and I furnished it, a dark and teeming forest, and I conjured the denizens.

My mother taught me to read before I went to school. She sat me on her lap, held the book before us and
pointed to the words as she read. . . . How can you bring your heart to leave my children all alone in
the wood . . . ? Then it was my turn. I had surface dyslexia, transposed words like was and saw, the way I
now transpose digits in phone numbers. I was in the lowest reading group in first grade, but I loved the
sounds of words and could not be stopped from reading aloud. I still move my lips when I read, and if alone,
I'll say it out loud. Sound is meaning. Every child and wizard knows you can only cast a spell with spoken
words. This, of course, makes me an inefficient and excruciatingly slow reader. The nuns told me it would.
Why should that matter? Would you play Mozart's Violin Sonata in G on fast forward to get through it
quickly?

I took my first trip to the Billings Square Library in Worcester, Mass., when I was 7. I went with my Aunt
Joan, a high-school senior. This was the day I got my salmon-colored library card and checked out my first
book, which Aunt Joan insisted would be Black Beauty. I grew up in a housing project. The only horse that
plodded through our neighborhood was the ragman's swaybacked mare. I was terrified of the ragman
because my grandmother threatened to sell me to him if I didn't go outside and play with the other children. I
hated that book. But I loved that library. It was warm, quiet, well-lighted. It was the repository of my books
for the next decade.

Most people I know who read do so for entertainment. They read to escape the day-to-day. They read in
airplanes and on beaches. Mrs. Sweeney lived on the first floor of our three-decker. She sat in her chair by
the parlor window and read exactly six Harlequin novels every single day and stacked the finished ones like
clumps of peat in the foyer until the landlady hauled them off to the dump. Mrs. Sweeney's withdrawal into a
sentimental world drove Mr. Sweeney out to the front stoop, where he drank a six-pack of Narragansett
every single day and talked to absolutely everyone who walked by.

I never read for entertainment. I seldom want to be amused or distracted, and if I do, I turn on TV or go
to a movie or I talk to my son, who is the wittiest person I know. I do find reading entertaining, but it's not
why I first read or why I continue to read. At first I read for information. The nuns at St. Stephen's were
doing all they could, bless their hearts, to make me hate fiction by forcing us to read sanctimonious tales of
saints and shallow, unrealistic stories of pious and odious children. The sisters didn't get it. Fiction doesn't
preach. Fiction is humble. So I read the sports page instead and the backs of cereal boxes and my fathers
Reader's Digest.

Then, for my eighth birthday, my parents bought me the Universal Standard Encyclopedia, purchased one
volume a week at the A & P. My father told me that that Charles Van Doren guy on the quiz show became a
genius because he read the encyclopedia. My mother told me if I had any questions about anything, why the
sky was blue, why water was wet, why birds could sing and I could not, anything at all, I could look it up in
the encyclopedia. So I started with Volume 1 and read my way

through the middle of Volume 4 before I quit. I continued to read, but not so systematically. I knew all
kinds of things that none of my friends and none of my teachers knew. When I would tell someone that
copper was the main export of the Katanga province of the Belgian Congo or that a sea gull wasn't really a
kind of bird but a generic name for many birds, people began to think of me differently. And I liked that.
And I realized that the more you know about the world, the more you like it.

In high school I began to read for understanding. I read To Kill a Mockingbird and realized that a
simple story about the lives of common folk could say more about injustice and intolerance than a thousand
political speeches or a dozen newspaper reports. News gets old, truth does not.

History tells you about an event, fiction lets you live it. I read Catcher in the Rye and Crime and
Punishment, and what I felt was that old sense of wonder and awe, and what I heard was the sweet voice
at my bedside. I will eat a piece of the roof and you can eat the window. I was reading to learn why, to
understand what it's like to be a human being. I didn't want to be informed but enlightened. I didn't want
answers but questions. Didn't want clarity but mystery. The best stories express what is incomprehensible in
life, what is invisible.

I read because I am curious about people and why they do what they do. And what will happen to them
next. I read because reading great literature will make me a better person. That may be a purpose of any
religion, and fiction is my religion. Its where I go to put my feet on higher ground. I read because I have
only this one brief life, but I want to live a thousand lives. And so I do. And at least one of those lives ends
like this: Then all their sorrows were ended, and they lived together in great happiness. And then I can
sleep.