How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight. A sentence like that can put you someplace other than the shithole where you happen to be reading it. Or it’s an ambush that puts you exactly in the shithole where you happen to be reading it.

Dawna-Lynn deciding that Franny had a breakdown only because she could afford one. These left-field opinions pleased and surprised her: Harriet had never thought of existential crisis as a luxury, but now she did.

Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.

“Books won’t solve my problems, Harriet.” “No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”

People set their husbands afire, they nurse their dying mothers, they rob demented old men, they sing songs that bring listeners to tears, they kill a woman while drunk on love and 86-proof. The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

“That is so romantic,” Marielle agreed, followed by a muted ripple of affirmation. Brittie heaved another gurgling sigh. “I’d do that guy in a hot second.” “It’s poetry,” Jenny Big growled. “Don’t talk like a whore.” “It’s not like I’d make him pay,” Brittie said.

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

“Apologies require acceptance, so I thank you,” he says, nudging the bookends back into my lap. “But as I understand it, forgiveness flows in one direction only.”

Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”