The Unreal World and a couple of Really Good Books
In her memoir-ish book, Life Among The Savages, Shirley Jackson hilariously nails the way the fantasy world of children can, when you are the parent or caretaker, start to take over your life. Once the reader has become acquainted with the dozen or more characters, each with their own ever-changing entourage, that might at any time be performed by Jackson’s daughter, Jannie, the following anecdote makes perfect sense:
There was the uncomfortable incident when my daughter trotted in to me and said, “There’s a lady outside named Mrs. Harper and she wants to know will you give her a dollar?” and I replied absently, “Tell Mrs. Harper she may take the penny off my desk and not bother me anymore.” My daughter told Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Harper went away furious and a little frightened, and I was entered on the PTA books as refusing to pay my dues.
Of course it would not at first have occurred to her that Mrs. Harper might be a Real Woman from the Real World – that being by far the least likely scenario. Likewise, I am forever laying out imaginary lunches, opening the door for dinosaurs and politely inviting them in, or apologizing to invisible characters I have slighted or stepped on, and can approach our closet door only armed and with great trepidation, so convincing is LittleK’s terror of the wolf within. This is a crowded and unpredictable sort of life, but one becomes used to it.
If you find reality tiresome, however, I don’t necessarily recommend raising children. It is a lot of work and complicates travel. Probably the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to remove yourself from your own real life is to read fiction. Or write it. If you are doing all three of those things and little else, then your life probably looks a lot like mine.
A few weeks ago, after putting the boys to bed, cleaning up the wreckage, and taking a load of laundry down to the basement, I opened up The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It was the first book of hers I’d read, and I didn’t know much about it except that it takes place on an island where every autumn, a version of “kelpies” or vicious faery horses come out of the sea, and daring riders hold a water horse race.
I read the first page, getting comfy on the sofa and thinking, yup, this is good, this is good. It happened on the second page. That free-fall into another world. Two pages, and the world(s) I’ve spent my day in are obliterated, forgotten. I read it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then realized I’d left the laundry in the basement without transferring it to the dryer. I went to bed much too late and woke up thinking about the book. I opened it up at breakfast, the inevitable result being that most of LittleK’s breakfast ended up on the floor and (I discovered later) tucked into his pockets. I read it during stolen moments throughout the day while the boys pulled the lights off the Christmas tree and filled That Guy’s sock drawer with pennies (they are really getting the hang of teamwork, I’ll give them that). And I read it after putting them to bed that night, until I finished it.
There are a lot of reasons why I love to read. There are many ways in which a book can entertain, enrich, and interest me. But being swallowed whole by a story, willing to follow its characters anywhere, page after page drawing you in deeper so that if your phone rings and your husband says “Aren’t you going to answer that?” you only hear it in a very distant, background-noise kind of way, because you aren’t really there on the sofa at all, you’re somewhere else, you’re someone else – that is my very favorite kind of reading experience. It is also just the thing on a winter’s evening, if you’ve had a long day and found yourself at some point in the middle of the street while the light changes, holding a wailing Small Toddler made exceedingly slippery by his wet snowsuit and trying to help up a Larger Toddler, who just fell down and is screaming at you to pick up the plastic dinosaurs he dropped, and you think you might just have to leave the sled you dropped to help him up right there in the road because there is no way you are going to be able to get both soggy cold kids and sled and dinosaurs home in the snow and you can’t figure out how you all made it to the park in the first place. In that case, I strongly recommend collapsing on the sofa with The Scorpio Races as soon as you can.
Anyway. I’ve had a bit of time out of its spell now, and at some point I will reread it with an eye to why and how it is so engrossing, but in all likelihood I will just get swept up in it again and go tearing through it without noticing at all how the spell gets cast, too enraptured to pull my analytic eye out of my pocket (which is where I keep it, and usually forget about it, and it gets all lint-covered and scratched up by my keys). I will say that it is very hard to be a brontosaurus or dig pennies out of sock drawers when in fact I’ve got a foot in Thisby island and am so in love with Puck and with Sean and so afraid for them.
That free-fall into not-here, that can’t-hear-the-phone state of total absorption, reminded me of the experience of reading Lena Coakley’s Witchlanders last winter, another book that totally defies my linty, scratched-up analytic eye by seeming so effortlessly to combine all the most delicious elements of a truly great fantasy story. (And she had me at the first line, which, in case you’re wondering, is: “Ryder woke to the sound of clattering bones.”). I remember getting to the end of it and feeling like I’d been shipwrecked on the shore of my own life, bereft, wanting nothing more than to stay in that other world. Which, you know, is maybe not entirely healthy-sounding, but I figure there are worse addictions than story, and I do like my life, really, so it’s OK.
We live here in a storm of stories. The story I am trying to write, the stories we read, the stories we tell, the stories we dinosaur-stomp through from morning ‘til night. I reach for the doorknob of the closet and LittleK’s scream freezes me. “Wolf inside!” he shouts at me like I’m a complete idiot, and I back away from the door. We are chased to the park by relentless T-rexes, saved at last by a noble brachiosaurus. We collapse with relief on a damp bench for a snack. My mind drifts to the book I left on the table at home. LittleJ says, “Tell me a story.” LittleK says, “Story!” I begin: “Once upon a time, there were two little boys, brothers.” LittleJ corrects me, “One big boy, one little boy,” so I say, “Once upon a time, there were two brothers, a big brother and a little brother, and they lived in a land full of dinosaurs.” They sit and stare at me, rapt already, pretzels half-raised to their mouths, waiting for whatever comes next.
Yours, far from any reality that is really a real one,
Catherine
There was the uncomfortable incident when my daughter trotted in to me and said, “There’s a lady outside named Mrs. Harper and she wants to know will you give her a dollar?” and I replied absently, “Tell Mrs. Harper she may take the penny off my desk and not bother me anymore.” My daughter told Mrs. Harper and Mrs. Harper went away furious and a little frightened, and I was entered on the PTA books as refusing to pay my dues.
Of course it would not at first have occurred to her that Mrs. Harper might be a Real Woman from the Real World – that being by far the least likely scenario. Likewise, I am forever laying out imaginary lunches, opening the door for dinosaurs and politely inviting them in, or apologizing to invisible characters I have slighted or stepped on, and can approach our closet door only armed and with great trepidation, so convincing is LittleK’s terror of the wolf within. This is a crowded and unpredictable sort of life, but one becomes used to it.
If you find reality tiresome, however, I don’t necessarily recommend raising children. It is a lot of work and complicates travel. Probably the easiest, cheapest, and safest way to remove yourself from your own real life is to read fiction. Or write it. If you are doing all three of those things and little else, then your life probably looks a lot like mine.
A few weeks ago, after putting the boys to bed, cleaning up the wreckage, and taking a load of laundry down to the basement, I opened up The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It was the first book of hers I’d read, and I didn’t know much about it except that it takes place on an island where every autumn, a version of “kelpies” or vicious faery horses come out of the sea, and daring riders hold a water horse race.
I read the first page, getting comfy on the sofa and thinking, yup, this is good, this is good. It happened on the second page. That free-fall into another world. Two pages, and the world(s) I’ve spent my day in are obliterated, forgotten. I read it until I couldn’t keep my eyes open, then realized I’d left the laundry in the basement without transferring it to the dryer. I went to bed much too late and woke up thinking about the book. I opened it up at breakfast, the inevitable result being that most of LittleK’s breakfast ended up on the floor and (I discovered later) tucked into his pockets. I read it during stolen moments throughout the day while the boys pulled the lights off the Christmas tree and filled That Guy’s sock drawer with pennies (they are really getting the hang of teamwork, I’ll give them that). And I read it after putting them to bed that night, until I finished it.
There are a lot of reasons why I love to read. There are many ways in which a book can entertain, enrich, and interest me. But being swallowed whole by a story, willing to follow its characters anywhere, page after page drawing you in deeper so that if your phone rings and your husband says “Aren’t you going to answer that?” you only hear it in a very distant, background-noise kind of way, because you aren’t really there on the sofa at all, you’re somewhere else, you’re someone else – that is my very favorite kind of reading experience. It is also just the thing on a winter’s evening, if you’ve had a long day and found yourself at some point in the middle of the street while the light changes, holding a wailing Small Toddler made exceedingly slippery by his wet snowsuit and trying to help up a Larger Toddler, who just fell down and is screaming at you to pick up the plastic dinosaurs he dropped, and you think you might just have to leave the sled you dropped to help him up right there in the road because there is no way you are going to be able to get both soggy cold kids and sled and dinosaurs home in the snow and you can’t figure out how you all made it to the park in the first place. In that case, I strongly recommend collapsing on the sofa with The Scorpio Races as soon as you can.
Anyway. I’ve had a bit of time out of its spell now, and at some point I will reread it with an eye to why and how it is so engrossing, but in all likelihood I will just get swept up in it again and go tearing through it without noticing at all how the spell gets cast, too enraptured to pull my analytic eye out of my pocket (which is where I keep it, and usually forget about it, and it gets all lint-covered and scratched up by my keys). I will say that it is very hard to be a brontosaurus or dig pennies out of sock drawers when in fact I’ve got a foot in Thisby island and am so in love with Puck and with Sean and so afraid for them.
That free-fall into not-here, that can’t-hear-the-phone state of total absorption, reminded me of the experience of reading Lena Coakley’s Witchlanders last winter, another book that totally defies my linty, scratched-up analytic eye by seeming so effortlessly to combine all the most delicious elements of a truly great fantasy story. (And she had me at the first line, which, in case you’re wondering, is: “Ryder woke to the sound of clattering bones.”). I remember getting to the end of it and feeling like I’d been shipwrecked on the shore of my own life, bereft, wanting nothing more than to stay in that other world. Which, you know, is maybe not entirely healthy-sounding, but I figure there are worse addictions than story, and I do like my life, really, so it’s OK.
We live here in a storm of stories. The story I am trying to write, the stories we read, the stories we tell, the stories we dinosaur-stomp through from morning ‘til night. I reach for the doorknob of the closet and LittleK’s scream freezes me. “Wolf inside!” he shouts at me like I’m a complete idiot, and I back away from the door. We are chased to the park by relentless T-rexes, saved at last by a noble brachiosaurus. We collapse with relief on a damp bench for a snack. My mind drifts to the book I left on the table at home. LittleJ says, “Tell me a story.” LittleK says, “Story!” I begin: “Once upon a time, there were two little boys, brothers.” LittleJ corrects me, “One big boy, one little boy,” so I say, “Once upon a time, there were two brothers, a big brother and a little brother, and they lived in a land full of dinosaurs.” They sit and stare at me, rapt already, pretzels half-raised to their mouths, waiting for whatever comes next.
Yours, far from any reality that is really a real one,
Catherine
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