Must Love Books

by Shauna Robinson

It didn’t mean anything, really, that he was Filipino and she was half Black, but publishing was so white that Nora couldn’t help but feel a sense of camaraderie any time a nonwhite person was in the office.

She wouldn’t have to wake up every morning feeling like nothing she did that day would matter.

but help them the way books had helped Nora. Help someone feel connected to something. Help someone feel less alone.

Organizing books by aesthetics was a sin as far as Nora was concerned.

Did she also find it strange when publishers took pains to depict people of all races on their book covers, even though the authors who wrote these books were almost always white?

“I think I have a tendency to accept what I’m given instead of asking for what I want.”

It would be waiting for her when she got tired of fighting. And she was so tired of fighting.

:(

“Well…I mean, if I have food and shelter, who am I to say I’m not a ten?”

Whatever lightness she’d felt from her partial honesty was obfuscated by the ways she’d managed to complicate the truth.

but it was too much to expect her to feel anything when she couldn’t feel at all.

She stopped hearing from him when winter melted into spring, and she supposed he didn’t need a distraction anymore.

If she could just press pause on him and come back when her mind was clear, it would be different.

he would be in her personal inbox, where she received job rejections and newsletters from her favorite bookstores.

Nora found a book with a Black girl on the cover, hair in two pigtail puffs like how she used to wear it as a kid, and Andrew found a book with a boy on the cover who he said bore a remarkable resemblance to his seven-year-old self, and they quietly flipped through them, these books written by and for people like them, these books that weren’t around when they were young.

it was this towel—which said more about his politeness as a host than his feelings for her—that made her realize she could depend on him.

It was clear to her now, after their Saturday together, that she should never have tried to use him this way.

if she weren’t so exhausted by the constant process of trying to make her will to live win out over her will to die, she’d be able to show him what she felt for him.

what a stupid, sentimental concept, to miss someone who was never even hers.

Except he was.

“I said I was glad you found some work too.”

Omg

She wrote that even if his royalty checks dried up, if no one wanted his signature anymore, if he decided to stop writing and set his manuscript on fire, she would still be waiting for the moment he’d let her start paying him back for every kindness he showed her:

But, she wrote, if she were to quantify how happy he made her, it would be a ten. No question.

When it had felt so difficult to make anyone else see the work she’d been doing, Andrew had put it in print for everyone to see.

Might, might, might. But she had to try. This was the only thing she felt certain about.

How much it meant that Nora Hughes, for so long a three on the happiness scale, had found something to be happy about.