Hey there! I’ve been thinking about reading and writing… Why I Read, Why I Write - an exploration

All summer long on Cayuga Street a raggedy sheet hung over the clothesline that connected the garage to our tiny house, making our backyard private enough for topless sunbathing. Most Saturday afternoons my mother lounged on a chair, skin slicked with coconut oil, drinking tequila and orange juice. At thirteen I still enjoyed being in her company. If I wasn’t at the beach with my friends, I might drag out a tall backed dining room chair and sit beside her. Our yard was just a patch of cracked cement bordered with aphid covered weeds whose leaves I pinched, staining my fingers green.

My mom liked me to read aloud to her while she balanced a foil reflector on her stomach, bouncing the sun back onto her face. She handed me her novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Tom Robbins. I remember pretty much nothing from the book. Someone had a giant thumb and was hitchhiking somewhere. The novel was saucy. I felt like a grown-up, reading to my mom, something we’d been doing together since I was a child and she read me Winnie the Pooh.

On this day she was happy. Her good mood infected me. My mom didn’t make a person feel good because you felt seen or understood or appreciated and recognized for your sparkle. My mom made you feel good by choosing to scatter her sparkle around you. “Read it again,” she would say about a funny line, trilling her laugh, like expensive desert spoons rattling in a silverware drawer.

“Read it again,” she would say about a funny line, trilling her laugh, like expensive desert spoons rattling in a silverware drawer.

I came upon the word, chihuahua. I had no idea how to say it or what it was. I am not certain how I missed the context, but what I read aloud was: Chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah. My mom opened her eyes, cocked her head like an interested puppy.

“What?”

“Chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah?”

“Spell it.”

We howled. It felt so good to laugh together. There was so much pleasure in my mistake.

The joy of reading together connected us deeply. For a long time after, one of us would simply say “chi-hoo-ah-hoo-ah” and we’d feel it again. I don’t remember when we stopped.

…

Years later, the Saturday ritual with my children was to go back to bed after waffles and read a chapter book while we waited for the fog to burn off. Still in pajamas, they tucked close to me in the bottom bunk. One blond head burrowed beneath my chin, a bony shoulder in my armpit. Hot syrupy breath on my skin. Our book resting on my stomach. We’d read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Stuart Little, Ramona.

One morning, their father came home from a bike ride, still in his spandex costume, cheeks flush, his damp jersey stuck to his skin. He click-clacked in his cycling shoes into our son’s bedroom to find the three of us huddled under a quilt, weeping. Not softly. Crying great sucking gasps and clinging to each other.

He knelt next to the bed, his face went pale.  

“What happened?”

None of us could speak.

“He died,” our daughter said.

“Who? Who died?”

We looked at him. I rubbed two small backs, kissed the tops of their heads. Finally someone said, “Old Yeller.” We all felt the loss of the dog, and I also felt a deep and private joy that these children were my own. In this moment their humanity and capacity for love was palpable.

“Why are you reading that book?”

He was irritated. With me. I had made the children cry!

We all felt the loss of the dog, and I also felt a deep and private joy that these children were my own. In this moment their humanity and capacity for love was palpable.

Was it unnecessary? Snug together, safe in the bed, the sun dropped geometries of light across the toy strewn floor. In a few minutes we would walk to the beach with the boogie boards, perhaps take a bike ride. We could do anything we wanted, it was just right now that we were crying together, learning about loss and survival.

My choice to read the book wasn’t calculated at all, but it was a good choice. The world is hard. We have to survive. We have to learn our resilience. Old Yeller dying was practice. Old Yeller dying fired up our mirror neurons, the brain cells that are activated when we perform an action, or when we watch someone else perform the action. Mirror neurons are why, when we watch someone brush their hair, our scalp might tingle. Or, if a knife blade comes close to a finger chopping onions on the television, we might grab our own hand. Good writing causes mirror neurons to fire in the reader, so she actually feels the emotions the writer gets on the page. Good writing is a way to understand our humanity.

My husband thought feeling the feelings, crying over Old Yeller, was unnecessary. My husband also thinks I shouldn’t write about hard things, sad things, cringey things from my own life. “You can’t change them. Why relive the events?” Sometimes my husband is right. Being a writer is like carrying around a mirror that hates you. I don’t know what to do about it.

In our pages, we writers share our weaknesses, our arrogance, our pain about a struggling child, a mean thing we said to our mother, a bad break-up. We give our cruelties and joys to our characters, or we reveal them in a memoir. And then, in addition to looking so closely at ourselves, we’re not even certain if our writing is any good! Does it fire up the mirror neurons in the reader? Does the reader cringe? Remember their own bad actions? The pain they’ve endured, the struggles in their families? Do they feel less alone?

My husband wants to laugh. My husband wants to live in the present. He throws a lot of bad joke spaghetti at the wall. I want to laugh too. But won’t I laugh more freely if I’ve processed all the stuff? When I put my stuff down, literally and figuratively, I give readers the opportunity to put their stuff down too.

When Old Yeller died he was our dog that was gone. If we only focus on the loss, the crying, we’ve forgotten the part of the book that made us fall in love with Old Yeller. We LOVED that dog. And we survived. That is a service. That is why I read. That is why I cannot not write. If not for my readers, then for myself. For the one person in the world whose life I know I will impact.

Sometimes, when it is growing dark, I feel like I am the loneliest person in the world. Then I meet another lonely person in a book, and I know, I will be okay.

Tell me, why do you read? Why do you write?