“The first day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to do that forever.” Has a more lesbian sentence ever been constructed in either tongue or pen?
There’s something so wonderfully anxious and earnest and adolescent about this cover; I think the cover of Annie On My Mind has meant more to me than the book ever did. The lean forward, the forehead touch, the frantic clasping of hands, the ridiculous brick wall, the curtains of hair — I don’t remember where and when I first saw this book, if it was in a library or a bookstore or if I was twelve or thirteen, but I remember exactly how it made me feel. “Oh, that’s me,” my heart and lungs said. “You have to stop walking right now, because you’re on the bookshelf, and you have to take yourself home.”
I knew immediately that I already knew what it was about, that I had to have it, and I knew I couldn’t let anyone know I had it, and that’s exactly what happened. I read it and I reread it and I never talked about it with anyone else.
(“And Annie showed me how ailanthus trees grow under subway and sewer gratings, stretching toward the sun, making shelter in the summer, she said, laughing, for the small dragons that live under the streets.” It really is a wonderful book. And it has a happy ending! How many books about teenaged lesbians published on or before 1982 had happy endings? You should really read this book.)
Here is a place for you to discuss the books that made you catch your breath the first time you saw them. They don’t have to be gay (but I will be very happy if lots of them are) — they don’t even have to be about personal or political identity (but if you want to talk about your social or religious or racial or ethnic or cultural or sexual identity, please feel tremendously free to do so). But the first book you remember seeing or reading where something said helplessly inside your chest “Oh, that’s me. That’s us, that’s us, that’s me, thank God, that’s us.”
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: annie on my mind, books, junior high realizations, lesbians everywhere, that quiet moment of shock followed by recognition
Mallory, I love this book! I was a lowly summer intern at this publishing house and in my prolific free book pilfering snatched this one up on a whim. The copy I have has a different cover though, with snow and a bit too much eye shadow for the character, I thought.
The first book I ever wholly, completely identified with was Jacob Have I Loved. I read it over and over and then I made my younger (beautiful, musically-gifted, favored) sister read it out of sheer passive-aggression. Jokes on me though, because that book is amazing and it was really a gift. I recently saw a 9-year-old girl on the subway reading it and gave her two big thumbs up.
OH MY GOD I need to reread Jacob Have I Loved, because all I know is that I HATED it when I read it in seventh grade, but I can’t remember why. This probably means it was deeply true of my own life at the time.
I think now I’d find Wheeze to be a teeeensy bit self-pitying, but at the time it was TRUE LIFE, you know? Also, my sister turned out to be awesome and not a best-friend-and-attention-stealing jerk in the end.
Reading Prep a few years ago I kept collapsing in tears because LEE! WAS! ME! She was the most Me protagonist I had ever encountered. I barely even remember what happened in the book, just that I loved it and I felt like it loved me.
ELIZABETH hi i know you on the internet. (this is catie)
Anyway, saaaaaaammeeeeeeeeee. Except I didn’t really love it, it just made me very depressed for awhile. I read it for class, actually, as a flyover stater at a fancy east coast college, so it hit very much at my bones. Talking about it in class was super weird. One girl said she didn’t like Lee because she couldn’t understand where she was coming from. “If she had such a great life at home,” she asked, “Why didn’t she just go back? Why go to Ault in the first place?” I answered in this red-faced stream of words — She went to Ault because she didn’t really have any friends at home, didn’t feel like she fit in. If I go to boarding school, she imagined, everyone else would be like me—they would be smart, and thoughtful, and we would all get along splendidly. No one understands me in this small town, she was sure, and at Ault I will fit in, I will be popular, I will be the best me.
Obviously I realized as I was talking that I was just talking about myself.
HI CATIE.
I actually don’t remember if I loved it or if I just remember loving it because I remember FEELING it. It took me longer to read than a book of that length normally would because reading it was EXHAUSTING. But there was also something so wonderful about finding myself on the page for the first time. There had been times in the past where I’d THOUGHT I’d found myself on the page and then I read Prep and I was like, NOPE, NO WAY.
I should probably reread it.
Lee wasn’t me EXACTLY but so much of that book reflected my prep school experience it actually made me really uncomfortable (I read it shortly after it came out, I was in my early to mid 20s at the time). Like I didn’t enjoy reading it because it was so well done and evoked such strong, clear memories of high school feelings. (I adore Curtis Sittenfeld and remember when she won the Seventeen magazine fiction contest though!)
Don’t we all agree, though, that the Prep cover is like the worst thing to ever happen to books??? It makes the book seem like chick lit — and no disrespect to chick lit, which can be wonderful, but Prep ain’t it. I’ve heard a lot of negative reviews of the book and I honestly believe a lot of them are just because people thought they were getting some fun romp about prep school and instead got depressing interiority about feeling left out!!
Oh absolutely. Awful cover.
But has there ever been an actual “fun romp” about prep school? I loooove prep school books (for some reason that is unclear to me because I didn’t even go to prep school…which is maybe why?), but they’re all, like: “I’m an outcast among my upperclass peers” or Drugs! Sex! Alcohol! Murder! or secret societies and would be Nancy Drews solving blue blooded mysteries.
yessss. that book changed my life.
Megan McCafferty’s Jessica Darling books. The character and I are the same age, and so I kind of got to grow up with her. Our circumstances were very different, but I always felt like we were similar in spirit and would have gotten along.
Oh my god those books. I never finished the second-to-last and didn’t attempt the last (the 4th and 5th? 5th and 6th?) because I started to get really frustrated with her, although for reasons I cannot remember why now. But before that, I had to have read them each multiple times.
The fourth had a very different feel, because Jessica was writing directly to Marcus rather than to the audience. And Jessica’s decisions and reasoning could definitely qualify as frustrating, though I think they were pretty realistic for the character at that age.
OMG Marcus. Marcus!! Kissing Cousins!
Maybe I should reread the first few of these… I’m sure they’re in a box somewhere, I’ll have to look over Thanksgiving at my mom’s.
On a similar note, I was (and still am, no shame) always a big fan of Sarah Dessen protagonists, because they were usually bookish and shy but still had personalities. Particularly This Lullaby, The Truth About Forever, and Just Listen.
I remember feeling like this the first time I saw Speak (and later, Keeping You A Secret.) Speak, because of the tree covering/growing across the face behind it. Reading further, because I felt so strongly with how terrible it was to live inside your head with a sickness and enemy trying to keep you there.
As for Keeping You A Secret, well – the cover is a close up on the faces of two teenage girls (though one seems older. Something about the lips, a rigid lining that suggested age.) I was and still am a sucker for love stories between women and this hit all the right notes. I was still ID’ing as a man back then, but there was something in the pages that sang to me, invited me to join in the chorus if I could.
Keeping You A Secret! Oh, GOD.
I KNOW, right!? Like, their first kiss was so sweet and the buildup had been so much and God, the butterflies in my stomach when I read (and reread it, over and over) were so intense.
Prep. Ughhhh, Prep. I didn’t even enjoy it, I related so strongly to Lee (not the actual prep school aspect, fortunately).
Yesssss Prep. I went from a hippie middle-school to a fancy upper east side Manhattan high school and oh Jesus, that character was me. I even cut other kids’ hair in college. I was like, ‘Whaaaaa….” I enjoyed the book but it was painful.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post made my stomach hurt I related to all the teenage queer feelings so much.
Read this recently. Ended up weeping in public. Cannot imagine what would have happened had it been available when I was a teenager.
Here’s To You, Rachel Robinson by Judy Blume (Oh Judy Blume.) Finally, another character that was just as uptight as me! I also was maybe part of a group of 3 girls that constantly had shifting power-balances.
Now that I think about it, I’ve always been attracted to the serious girls in books: Harriet the Spy –> Jane Eyre.
All the Judy Blume. “Then Again, Maybe I Won’t” made me feel so much better about my anxiety/panic attacks when I was little, since prior to reading it I was just sure I was going to drop dead of a heart attack at any second and couldn’t figure out why I had to puke so much in response to any sort of unexpected situation.
Telling my parents that I was having chronic chest pains and stomachaches at 9 years old would have been interesting, I think. They probably would have just yelled at me for trying to fake sick so I could get out of school.
The View from Saturday. Probably not the first book that struck an intense chord with me but one of the strongest. It’s one that I point to and think, yes, everything in here is me. I felt so understood in the book–both because I identified with the characters and because the language was so lovely (it’s full of wonderful similies and it just sticks with you. it doesn’t talk down to kids).Gifted, odd loners banding together in a quiet, weird, friends-but-not-quite-friends way.
Also one of my favorites! It’s just… perfect. I also really enjoyed The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place
Yes! Outcasts is wonderful. That one gave me a similiar (more painful, actually-maybe because I was more adultish when I read it?) feeling of being known
Oh gosh, that’s the book I was thinking of too. There were lots of books I loved as a kid, but that one stood out for how it drew such a promising, heartening picture of life as it maybe really could be.
1) The View from Saturday totally stuck with me, also, for reasons I was never able to articulate until I read this post.
2) I am getting a PhD in molecular biology and “gifted, odd loners banding together in a quiet, weird, friends-but-not-quite-friends way” is kind of the perfect way to describe my lab. I think I might be living this book.
GIrl by Blake Nelson! Middle-class white girl wants desperately to be different and edgy while trying to find her way through the later grunge scene of the early-mid 90s in Portland. I spent a LOT of high school wanting to bang Todd Sparrow and highlighting the “deep” parts of the text.
I spent so much time with Looking for Alaska, by John Green. I first read it as a sophomore in high school and loved it. But the next year, two of my friends died – one killed herself and one was killed by a drunk driver – within seven or eight months of each other, and that was the book I went back to over and over again. I found myself in its descriptions of grief and looked to it for a description of healing. It was way more comforting and useful and important than pretty much anything else in my life at that time, including support from real humans. I can’t even remotely describe how much it means to me, still.
Maybe darker than what you were looking for? 😡 but it was immediately what I thought of.
My super-Canadian answer: Kit Pearson’s Looking at the Moon. I was not a war guest, obviously, but I was a girl living far away from my family and spending my summers at our Muskoka cottage, wallowing in the depths of extremely unrequited love. I used to draw the version of Norah on the cover over and over and over again because I was sure we were basically the same soul.
In nonfiction, Lauren Sandler’s Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement spoke about a part of my life that I didn’t think anyone else saw or understood; the “coming to Jesus (again) at summer church camp” chapter of Randall Balmer’s Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory gave me similar chills.
I love that book!!!!!
I loved Kit Pearson! I think there was a scene in that book (or The Sky is Falling) when Norah shakes her little brother and his head wobbles like a flower on a stem or similar description and I still remember that/the time I did that to my little brother and the total horror guilt/shame I felt about it. A Handful of Time was also great.
After Rubyfruit Jungle, Annie On My Mind was such an enormous relief–like, maybe being attracted to girls did not automatically consign me to a life throwing grapefruits at naked men! You could just buy African violets and hang out! But Harriet the Spy had me from jump. A life 180 degrees off my own, but she still needed to write to make sense of the people around her. That, to me, was permission to keep living.
Annie–and that cover, though I now have the new, “pretty” one–were astronomically important to me as a fourteen-year-old lesbian with NO gay friends, role models, or idea what lesbian teens should look like. It was also the first book/thing that made me feel like it might actually be okay.
(I believe it’s in the interview in the new edition that Nancy Garden says she married her first sweetheart. Could be misremembering. But, aww.)
Did anyone else read Nancy Garden’s Prisoner of Vampires as a kid? I remember re-reading it a lot–it doesn’t have a queer subplot explicitly (at least that I remember), but there’s something about the melancholy of it that definitely spoke to me as a young gay. But even more important for me was a survey text on American art history we had in in seventh grade. I remember sneaking back into the classroom to look at Thomas Eakins’ “Swimming Hole” and thinking “Oh, SHIT.”
I didn’t read Annie On My Mind until college but I desperately wish I’d found it earlier.
I don’t remember any particular books that struck me this way, except for one series – has anyone read the Falco mysteries by Lindsey Davis? I won two of them as a Latin prize in middle school. Helena Justina was a major factor in shaping my adolescent outlook and character.
Does stunned silence after skipping to the end of Blood Meridian count
and yes the editors and I know how terrible I am, you don’t have to report me.
There’s a part in “Certain Girls” by Jennifer Weiner where the protagonist explains to her estranged fiancé that she can’t marry him because growing up fat with a father who loved her, then hated her, then abandoned her meant that she couldn’t be a good wife (partner) to anyone. And I just cried and cried and cried.
“Dykes to Watch Out For”–the one with the green cover, in which Mo and Harriet have sex for the first time at the end. I bought it in high school, heart racing as I took it to the counter. I loved–still love– everything about it: the stories, the politics, the sex, the armpit hair, Alison Bechdel looking butch as hell in her author photo, and most of all the idea that somewhere outside of my tiny town there were lots and lots of lesbians.
Oh man, I had such a weird relationship with Dykes to Watch Out For. My mom had one of the huge collections on the shelf and I used to flip through it as a kid, looking for the sex scenes. What a neurotic, yet wholesome introduction. That’s the one where Harriet compliments Mo’s breasts and she says “Thanks, I grew them myself”, right? I stole it when I moved out, I should reread it.
on a scale of Cringe to Hide In A Hole Forever, how embarrassed should I be I realized I was gay when I saw the fucking TATU music video in 8th grade?
You should go home because you are TOO YOUNG TO BE ON THE INTERNET (no hi we love you but you’re so small in age!!!)
…25? 🙁
I’ll still go home
oh my god what year did that song come out WHAT YEAR IS IT RIGHT NOW
Not at all! Something about that video! I’m not gay but that video still worked its way into my fantasy life!
I was (and am) a voracious reader. I identified with tons of characters in my childhood, some for obvious reasons, some for less obvious. I remember rereading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn until I practically had it memorized, and to this day I can’t tell you what it was that drew me, only that something in it resonated.
Little Women will always be the book of my heart, though. Jo’s struggles with accepting herself and trying to find out how she fits into the world around her have always hit very close to home.
Annie also rocked my world. I had no idea I was gay at the time (I knew in theory I could be, but I’d never had feelings for a girl, so I didn’t think I was) but I remember reading it and being almost in tears in parts, because I wanted to fall in love like that, I wanted to live a love story like that.
Oh my god Annie on my Mind! I had almost completely forgotten about that book (but I could never actually forget it, let’s be real). I don’t remember where I bought it, I think a library book sale or something of the sort, but I think I was 12 or so as well, and I remember trying to squeeze it between a whole pile of other books and hoping my mom wouldn’t know what it was when it came time to check out — I didn’t even quite know what it was…I just knew I HAD TO READ IT — but come on, THAT COVER! I hated that cover for giving me away to my mom, but also I loved it because it’s sort of hilarious and perfect and soo earnest. Anyway I literally sat INSIDE MY CLOSET while I read it (the irony does not escape me…the closet in question was sort of absurdly large and carpeted, so it made logistical sense and was a good hiding place but STILL) and I devoured it in like an hour and I think I was literally shaking the entire time. And then I hid it behind a bunch of other books on my bookshelf. In retrospect, I think my urgent need to hide the evidence is more telling than the fact that I read it to begin with…
I just chuckled out loud at the image of you reading that in your closet. So sweet!
This is the most cliche, but The Bell Jar felt so, so exact to teenage me. I still think about the fig tree passage all the time.
We had to read it in English class and my teacher kept pointing out passages that had made me gasp in recognition and saying, “Can you see how she’s foreshadowing her suicide attempts??” which was… terrible.
The fig tree passage, yes! I think I copied that in to my journal.
The first book I saw myself in was Jane Eyre. She was remarkable. I probably read that at 10 or so. then, toward the end of high school, I read Like The Red Panda and was blown away.
Oh, Like The Red Panda! Blown away, precisely. Love everything that lady writes.
Most short stories by Doris Lessing leave me feeling like this but most notably, “To Room Nineteen”. Something in me connected intensely with the protagonist’s need to just be by herself – possibly because I was suddenly acutely aware of how much I was afraid of that being my situation in 20 years.
Yes. Nothing else to add, only yes. x
Seeing Ivan E Coyote read some of her stories was this moment for me. Does that count? Listening to someone talk about growing up a tomboy was just so, yes, yes this is me, oh thank god other people feel the same way.
Sure. My answer would be Stone Butch Blues (Leslie Feinberg) for the same reasons.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever had such an intense reaction upon discovering a book. There are however several books that I connected with so strongly that I fell into a giant black hole when I’d finished them – I’m talking tired, run-down, listless, pooping out at parties. “No book will ever be as good as the one I just finished. Everything’s so pointless compared to this story.”
Susan’s sense of duty and her struggle to keep her family together while they seem oblivious to the seriousness of their situation in The Children Who Lived in a Barn ring very true to me.
I adore Cold Comfort Farm, but I also kind of hate it. Well maybe I don’t hate it, but sometimes I feel betrayed by it. It makes me laugh time and time again and Flora kicks ass and I want so much to be more like her (although I probably wouldn’t like her in real life), but she always knows what to do and her schemes always go exactly as she plans and THAT’S JUST NOT HOW IT WORKS FOR REAL PEOPLE.
This is not a book, but I feel it qualifies as I’ve never identified with a character as much as I do with Bomb Girls’ Betty McRae. If you read Heather Hogan’s Pretty Little Liars recaps over at AfterEllen, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I feel about Betty McRae the way Heather Hogan feels about Paige McCullers.
When I was ten or so, Bridge to Terabithia. At a book fair I saw the cover with Leslie and Jess sitting at the base of a big tree, flipped through the amazing black-and-white illustrations, and thought, Oh yes, and then proceeded to ruin myself for sad kid fic for the rest of my life.
And, just recently–as in last week–I read Fangirl (by the awesome Rainbow Rowell!) and had to set it down several times to walk away and cry. The main character is superficially not much like me but oh man SHE IS JUST LIKE ME ACTUALLY.
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb. I still cannot comprehend how that man wrote a female protagonist that feels so flawlessly real, but he did, and I’m grateful.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin. I was the only person in my high school English class who actually liked that book. That’s where feminism clicked for me, I think–like, oh shit, no one will let her be the person she wants so she has to drown herself?!
I never had that feeling when I read anything when I was a kid, and I read everything that was in sight. I recall loving Judy Blume’s As Long as We’re Together (which might be cheese? I don’t really know), and I was a huge fan of the books in the A Wrinkle in Time series.
The first book that made me feel real feelings was A Handmaid’s Tale. I was 25 and there was a part about halfway through the book where I seriously cried for hours. It was as if there was some kind of weird feeling floodgate opened by Margaret Atwood and I then cried for all the other stuff that I had read and seen and experienced before. That book did something to me.
Now, I cry at EVERYTHING.
That is because Margaret Atwood is a magical witch who conducts sorcery through her words. This is my professional opinion as an English professor.
This isn’t a book I identified with, but I remember The Giver just blowing me away. It’s such a powerful story. I’ve always appreciated dystopian stories for their warnings about politics/society/etc, and I guess that was the start. See also: The Handmaid’s Tale and Catch-22.
I never read Annie on My Mind, but I read the sequel Lark in the Morning (for some reason my library didn’t have Annie) and I remember being really impressed by how matter of fact Gillian’s queerness was presented in it.
I think the first books I remember reading that rang all my bells inside were Weetzie Bat and Lynda Barry’s Come Over Come Over. I found them at around the same time when I was 12 and realized that I’d been drawn to their covers since long before I was old enough to have business in the YA section of my library (my library had a YA-specific section in the 80 and 90s!). They both spoke to me so strongly in such different ways. And when I got to the part where Weetzie makes Cherokee with Dirk and Duck, I was like, whoaaaaaa, somewhere there are adults who think this is okay and it’s okay to tell stories about this to children! SO AWESOME. I still re-read the original 5 Weetzie books when I feel sad (A Necklace of Kisses was kind of disappointing I thought but I loved Pink Smog).
I felt that way about Polgara the Sorceress by David and Leigh Eddings. I just saw it on a shelf somewhere in middle school maybe and was really weirdly drawn to it–I think I loved that she was a woman with this punky white streak in her hair and she’s sort of in a power stance on the front. As it turns out it was the final book in the series but I fell in love with it and read all the other ones and my copy of Polgara is falling to pieces.
As an adult, I hear people talk shit on the series sometimes, and I get it. It’s basically just all the fantasy tropes jumbled together. But I still love it/her.
Don’t ever apologize for loving those books, or Polgara. I absolutely love that entire series. When my now ex-husband moved out, he took my copies (that he had bought for me in high school) of the Belgariad, The Mallorean, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. I just bought them again and am working my way through them.
Polgara book club!! I want to reread them too!
Amazon has The Belgariad in 2 volumes and and The Mallorean in 2 volumes!! They’re NOT available for Kindle, woe!
This post is making me realize that basically all of the books I read until adulthood involved some combination of dragons, Belgian detectives, robots, or robotic Belgian dragon detectives. Not so much coverage on the “relatable characters you can grow with” front. Although, Taran Wanderer, so.
Paula Danziger’s The Pistachio Prescription, for Cassie’s not being, well, perfect (I was binging on Sweet Valley at the time); it’s still a book I reread twenty years later.
AOMM was, I think, the first gay book I read. But not until college. Somehow I totally missed it as an avid reader growing up. It’s one I also go back to.
A related question: a teenager I know from church just came out to me, and I want to get her a congratulatory book (she shares a love of reading), but all the ones I know seem so hopelessly of my generation, not hers. Any newer lesbian coming of age books for the newly out? Or will a classic still suffice?
Two great new books about girls who are queer:
Ask the Passengers by A.S. King (main character makes out with a girl but doesn’t want to identify as GAY but also needs to come out to her parents)
The Difference Between You and Me by Madeleine George (tomboy weirdo girl! preppy popular girl! secret library makeouts! they end up on opposite sides of a battle over a Wal-Mart surrogate!)
Empress of the World by Sara Ryan is older (early 2000s), but I still think it’s lovely.
I also really liked a collection called The Letter Q, which is letters from queer-identified authors to their younger selves.
Thanks!
I can’t believe someone else has read Annie On My Mind…I mean, of course other people have read it, but I only talked about it with one person ever. My first girlfriend! I met her via Internet (and this was in…’96? so I think we met in an AOL chat room or some such thing!), we never met in person – she lived in England and I lived in the States, so we chatted online and sent packages by post. And once, I sent her a copy of Annie On My Mind (because I had already read and loved it; because I read ALL THE GAY BOOKS, nothing saved me more when I was first realizing I wasn’t straight), and she loved it, too, and we would call each other on the phone and read passages of it aloud to each other. Awww, I wonder whatever happened to her? Like I said, we never met in person, but I later had two IRL girlfriends with the same name. Anyway…
Gosh, I was such a bookworm as a kid and teen (and still am), and I related as a little girl to Anne of Green Gables and Harriet The Spy, and then as a teen my favorite books were about troubled youth, punk rockers, gay/lesbian/bi characters, or some combination thereof, but I have to say, the first book that really made me feel like someone was writing about me was…Girl Goddess #9, by Francesca Lia Block. I had already read (and adored) many of her books prior to that, but Girl Goddess #9, particularly the title story – because it was about two zine-writing alterna-girls, and it was so me and my friends, obsessed with music and fashion and literature and just being alterna-girls, y’know. And especially that paragraph toward the end: “on the way home, lady ivory and alabaster duchess hold each other and sob. they are crying because nick agate not only is taken, but taken by the most supernaturally gorgeous thing that ever came from the moon to visit planet earth. they are crying because they are not anything like her. they are crying because they want to touch her hair and skin and toenails more than they have even wanted to touch the thin, hard, pale, greek-statue body of nick agate.”
I mean, YES.
I’m not sure if I ever had a book that elicited that exact reaction from me. I do think that the books by LM Montgomery were a lifeline, though. I read all the Anne books, and then moved on to the Emily books, and finally landed at the Pat books. I think I always wanted to be like Anne, but I knew I was more like Pat. I was envious of her rock-solid home and family.
1) The View from Saturday totally stuck with me, also, for reasons I was never able to articulate until I read this post.
2) I am getting a PhD in molecular biology and "gifted, odd loners banding together in a quiet, weird, friends-but-not-quite-friends way" is kind of the perfect way to describe my lab. I think I might be living this book.
I felt this way about the protagonist in I Capture The Castle – I think I first read it when I was about 14 or 15 years old?
I definitely was Cassandra.
But then, I always tend to project myself into any female fictional protagonist – I always was Hermione while reading Harry Potter, etc.
I felt this way when I read “Tales of the City” for the first time, because I was newly 18 and had just moved to the Bay area, from Iowa, to intern at an HIV non-profit in San Francisco. I crashed on the couch of an online friend in Oakland for a few months, and he forced the book on me, telling me that I WAS Mary Anne and must read it immediately. When I finally did, I was completely overwhelmed – “I’m not the only one.”
I had a similar reaction to “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker a couple years later, in college. The narrator’s explanation of using your ancestors’ things is a much more real way to honor and connect with your heritage than enshrining them made me think, “FINALLY, someone gets it!” As someone who sits at her great-grandmother’s vanity and looks in the same mirror, using light from the same lamps that sat on it when she was alive, this story deeply resonated with me. It still does, perhaps even more now that I have a young child and my mother is gone. We cook in her kitchen with her items together, and sit at her tables, and put up her holiday decorations, and cuddle under her blankets, and I think, “Surely this is the way to remember her.”
An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden. I must have read that book a dozen times. The year of Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet, my 7th grade English class had to write to a famous person and all the other girls were writing to Romeo/Leonard Whiting or some rock star or another and I wrote to Ms. Godden. She wrote me back! All the way from England. Anyway, it’s about an abandoned child pretty much misunderstood by all the adults — it broke my heart and was just exactly how I felt — completely misunderstood by the adults in my life.
It wasn’t the cover that did it, it was the first page though. The Hitchhiker’s Guide To the Galaxy. I know it’s not poignant or brilliant or super-biographical in any way, but I’m not any of those things. I’m a scatter-brained nerd. I really don’t know what the book says about me, or rather what my reaction to the book says. I only know that it’s effected me the way that only it can, I’m constantly quoting and re-reading and forcing my friends to read it. All the while hoping that there’s something in there that I can keep for myself. Somehow this book “Is Me,” and I want nothing more than to be able to tell someone that the answer to all their problems, hopes and dreams is 42.
TL:DR This book means way more to me than it probably should.
The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place. It was the first book that didn’t talk down to me, or above me,. but rather to me. I’ve worn the pages thin.
Nine years too late… My secret-don’t-tell-anyone book was called Hey, Dollface. It was actually a pretty terrible book, but ohmygod, the GIRL touched her friend’s BOOB and it was NICE. I first read it during a random reading binge in the school library, aged about twelve, having picked it off the shelf for no reason other than that it happened to be under my hand in the fiction department. When I noticed what I was reading, I started having a panic attack – especially because we had to write our names in the tickets in the front of the books when we checked them out, and anyone who found my name in a lesbian book would be able to figure things out about me. So I crossed out my name very very hard and read it over and over again in the corner of the library, and then years later as an Out and Proud Grownup decided to buy it for nostalgia’s sake. God, it’s a really bad book.