“The 100 Dresses” was the first book that changed me. It was about an impoverished little girl who is teased by her classmates for wearing the same dress every day, and who defends herself by saying, ”I have one hundred dresses lined up in my closet!” When she is forced to move, again, out of poverty, they find one hundred beautiful drawings of dresses lined up in her closet. I cried myself to sleep worrying about poor people and brave little girls, wondering if my imagination might help save me, too.

Discovering my neighbors had the complete set of Nancy Drew books, I was able to “check out” seven or eight books at a time, lasting only a day or two, if I played “horsey,” with their plastic-horse-obsessed daughters, who made me “neigh” and ride them all over their yard. I enjoyed a more sophisticated Barbie doll existence, with great conversation and outfit changes, so I really earned those books. When I stepped into the world of Nancy, George, Ned and even (now UN-PC) “pleasantly plump” Bess, I didn’t hear my parents fighting, and could at least change something somewhere.

When I ran out of Nancy Drew, I found another girl detective series at the grocery store. There weren’t many in the set, but Trixie Beldon was a normal girl who helped her family with their farm, not rich like Nancy with all the time in the world. I realized I was middle class, like Trixie, and that I could still right wrongs in my spare time. Her best friend, Honey, was rich but didn’t know much about real life, and Trixie helped her with that. It was okay that my home life was hard. It made me a better person.

Marion Zimmer Bradley taught me feminism through Arthurian legends, Elena Ferrante validated the intesity of my female relationships, Toni Morrison taught me about lifelong grief, Jeannette Walls and Curtis Sittenfeld mirrored my life, and Colson Whitehead almost convinced me there was a literal Underground Railroad. David Sedaris’ writing has helped me many times, especially when my first cat, Rodney, was dying and needed to be put down. I was laughing and crying as I made the most adult decision of my life.

I have suffered from debilitating depression for too great a portion of my life, and when I’ve most wanted to die, I’ve picked up a book about someone else’s life and been spirited out of my own. Understanding someone else as a way to free us from ourselves. Less escapism than necessity, reading has also freed me from the curiousities of my yet-to-be understood brain.

I have almost nightly stepped into the shoes of people all over the world, experiencing their hopes and hardships, candor and cruelty, hoping to further my understanding of humanity. I believe history classes would be more effective if told through personal stories instead of textbooks. I find it harder to forget suffering and injustice when I know someone through a book.

On long summer afternoons I often laid on my bed, careful not to muss the bedspread. The curtains at the window rustled slightly with a faint breeze, unusual during the daytime but ever present at night. My outfit was usually cotton shorts and some kind of sleeveless blouse or maybe a T-shirt, and I was always barefoot. My hair was in the pixie cut my mother preferred. I knew I could not grow it long until I was old enough to wash it myself and get the tangles out without pouting. I propped both pillows behind my head as I plucked my current book from the top of my bureau.

Outside the window my mother was hanging clean laundry on the line or picking sweet peas or green beans in the garden. I couldn’t hear her except when she spoke to Terrence as he crouched in the grass hunting for moles or field mice. The sound of Mr. Mollison driving his John Deere tractor in the field behind the house created a low rumble. The longer he drove, the more fragrant the air became from the clover he was threshing.

The book I took from my bureau was often a mystery, maybe Nancy Drew or the Happy Hollisters. Sometimes I read a biography of some famous woman we had studied in school that year. Clara Barton was a great favorite, although I knew already, I would never become a nurse – too squeamish and likely to exhibit every symptom of every disease. As the afternoon wore on, the sticky air became more even more dense, making it hard for me to breathe. Sometimes I spent the entire afternoon on my bed, finishing one book and starting another.

Soon enough my mother called from the kitchen, “Kathy, it’s your turn to set the table.” I reluctantly placed my bookmarker inside the book and returned it to the bureau. My other life beckoned, and I was again the youngest daughter, bound to her chores. Torn away from the real life I wanted one day to live.

Carefully stepping into overgrown grass gone to seed, I lifted the leg of my pants. Royalty always elevates a skirt before moving through the thicket by foot. Regardless of whether this act may result in a tidy hemline. It is expected. Navigating around burdock, the car keys shifted in my pocket. I grasped my thigh and pressed the metal into my leg. Hard. I’ve sworn an oath to maintain the safety of these keys. The only ones known to open a portal to another world.

I eyed my destination. The entire frame of the old grey barn shifted more each year. The structure leaned alarmingly to one side. Decades had passed since the last of the dairy cows were sold off and farm equipment auctioned. I pretended to use one of the car keys to open a side door. They clinked softly as I returned them to my pants pocket. I forced the wooden barn door closed behind me. The stillness was sublime. The air thick with the rich sweet scent of hay. I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply.

Where are you, my siblings? I must be released from this prison of an existence. I must find the door to Narnia.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis provided escape from the world I inhabited. The youngest of four children, I did my best to avoid my parent’s proximity and drug fueled violence. I’d roam the rural land for hours searching for the door. Entire days hidden in the woods of the Adirondacks, dense with trees, the ground obscured by plant growth. Miles of shale riverbed hiked and explored. As the season’s heat waned, I’d open milkweed pods and pile downy seeded strands at my feet. Eventually releasing them to the wind.

I would grieve the loss of summer until she returned.

Harsh winters forced almost all time to be spent indoors. Relying on books for strength, I turned to them more. Borrowed from friends and school libraries. Hidden under pillows. I devoured them during long nights locked in my childhood bedroom. Praying for moonlight sufficient to read by, I hoped to continue hours after the house fell silent.

I recognized characters. The insurmountable obstacles they faced. Beloved protagonists would misstep and at times intentionally hurt others. Individuals capable of selfless and cruel behavior. Motivated by fear and pain. Worthy of forgiveness.

My books gave me a means to briefly elude my reality. To access desperately needed respite. To discover characters resembling those I’d been hurt by. Like those I hurt. To find myself in the pages and grant her grace.

Now with three young children myself, I relish their request, “Tell us a tale Mommy! One we haven’t heard before!”

Completely immersed in story, losing sense of time and place, my boys intently focus on my words. I am filled with gratitude. I lead them to the secret door to another world. Together, we go through.

There are many worlds with many possibilities and history rhymes with the present. I know this because I read it. Repeatedly. Through depression and traumas and financial insecurities, I turned page after page and learned the Wicked Witch is really Elphaba, radical liberationist and scapegoat of the autocratic regime of Oz.

While adjusting to life with a traumatic brain injury, books and stories, often in audio form, helped me create images in my mind again. I learned from the characters in an obscure Stephen King novel, Duma Key, that new doors open when others have been slammed shut.

In 2014 I read Ken Follett’s Century Trilogy. History became now. Recognizable names and famous speeches and events of WWI and then WWII interwoven into stories of fictitious families given so much dimension as to seem real. I wondered what it was like to be there. Going through life. With your desires and fears and plans. When a regime changes and sweeps you into a tide of coming atrocities previously unimaginable.

I wondered what it would be like to live inside a Ken Follett book in 2014, and by 2016 I felt like I knew the answer. But not the last chapter. So I read Hannah Arendt but the truth had already become stranger than fiction so non-fiction was no longer even up for consideration. Maybe Sinclair Lewis had the answer. Or Philip Roth, whose Plot Against America told me clearly what to expect.

But who would listen?

In 2016 I saw Randall Flagg gather up the Harold Lauders of the nation and claim victory. And in 2020, the Plague arrived. Camus taught me years before how a Plague can change people and creep into their minds. The foreknowledge did little to offset this effect. A good story, nonetheless.

Each story a search for answers. A fanciful escape for the faithful, a warning of what could be to the slightly high-strung realist. A lost opportunity for those who lack imagination, who won’t see themselves in the pages, who close the book and say “I never saw January 6th coming.”

I learned how to be a parent from reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.

The novel prepared me to expect the unexpected.

As a parent, you do not know what day your child will come to you and tell you of an incident that will drive you to violent thoughts that you pray do not become actions.

You don’t know if it will happen when they are young, when they are a teenager, or even when they become an adult themselves.

When your child tells you that something happened to them, your thoughts can go to a crazy extreme. For a moment, when you let your mind go still, you recall how Francie’s parents handled a menace lurking around their neighborhood. They were fearful, but they were honest with their children about it. They told their children what the danger was and then they showed up to protect their kids when the danger arrived. When Francie reveals to her parents that she can still feel where her attacker touched her leg, they don’t tell her “Don’t worry about it. It’s all in your head. Just ignore it, it will go away.” Instead, her dad takes action. He pours acid on a cloth and applies it to her skin.

A scar is formed and, for Francie, it eliminates the visceral feeling of unwanted male flesh touching her. Instead of ignoring his daughter and let her ruminate about the incident in her head for years to come every time she looked at her leg, her dad creates a new memory. A memory of strength, not of fear.

As a parent, you sometimes have the ability to overpower the emotional pain that has been inflicted upon your child and add to it a memory of you helping her. Acid is not required. You can use words to help your children find a way forward. The emotional scar that remains can remind them of the help, not the hurt.

I am a better parent from reading and rereading this book, picking up the book at times in my early adult life when I didn’t want to be a parent yet. I realize now I was absorbing the words and holding them in a safe place, the lessons revealing themselves to me when necessary. Francie did not have the best parents in the world, but when they tried, they were the best parents they could be. And that’s the grace I give myself in the hard moments.

Great literature isn’t supposed to make you consider selling your own children. But when I read “The Good Earth,” Pearl S. Buck made me so poor, so ravenous and so desperate I was stunned to find myself feeling for a man contemplating the sale of his daughter into slavery. When I closed that book, I was amazed how I had just lived a different life. A life that made me think more gently of people who bore the grinding weight of hideous choices.

I was that child with really thick rhinestone-studded glasses who secretly pledged in second grade to read every book in the school library. (I started with books in the “A” section and made it through “H” before I had to move to a new school.) So by the time I read “The Good Earth” in my 20s, I had read scores of books I adored. But “The Good Earth” was the first book that knocked me over in that way -- allowing me to live a life so foreign to my own.

This is why I read and why I write: to crawl inside someone else’s skin and feel what they feel, see what they see. And maybe become a little more compassionate, a little more open-hearted when I crawl back out.

I initially read “The Good Earth” because Pearl S. Buck set my mother on a path. As a day-dreamy girl, she read every book by Buck she could and dreamed of living in China. Which is why, when given the choice, my mother urged my father to move our family to Taipei. Sometimes people stumble upon another culture in which they feel more at home than in their own. My mother was like that – somehow more at ease with her Chinese friends than with most Americans. While Buck showed me how stories could allow me to become other selves, Buck’s writing helped my mother find a place where she could be more herself.

And then there is my second daughter. Whose birth mother faced the very dilemma of whether to give up her child. Not to sell her. Not into slavery. But to lay her 1-day-old baby in a bundle on the concrete steps of Fuzhou orphanage, so 10 months later I could adopt her. I cannot pretend to know what terrible force of circumstances propelled that woman to lay this sweet girl on those hard steps. But once I was poor. Once I was famished. Once I knew the press of terrible choices. And sometimes I think of my daughter’s birth mother. And I wish there was a book in China that could transport her and let her know the joy she gave by placing that baby on those concrete steps.

My mother loved to read aloud, and we always read a chapter of a book before my bedtime. My favorite books were Winnie the Pooh and Mary Poppins, followed by Wind In the Willows and Alice In Wonderland. We read the same books so often that I learned to read by following along. I had them memorized but loved having them read to me. I equated reading with love. I still do.

The characters were my best friends and were always available to me. As an only child who frequently moved due to my father’s job, this was important since other children were not still in supply. Books, in contrast, were.

We spent one summer living with my grandmother while my grandfather was seriously ill.

I was not allowed to play with the other children in the neighborhood, and all of the adults’ focus was on my grandfather’s health issues. Books saved me. By that time, I was reading Nancy Drew and solving mysteries.

Both sets of grandparents had homes crammed with books. I was never at a loss for something to do, and once I started reading, I left the real world and traveled to other times and places. I could happily entertain myself for a day. At night, I read under the covers.

By the time I was ten, I was dropped off at the library while my mother shopped. I quickly exhausted the blue biography books Childhoods of Famous Americans and other age-appropriate books. With my parents’ and the librarians’ permission, I read the books in the adult section. I discovered plays and read all of the Best Plays Theatre Yearbooks.

The smell of books was dizzying. Bibliosmia! I was disappointed to learn that that distinctive smell was actually from the chemical breakdown of compounds in the paper. No matter. For me, the scent will forever promise adventure.

Literacy has always been a wonderful gift, and I am proud to be on the board of directors for two libraries and a literary center.

(336 words)

My parents created a slot canyon lined with blankets in the backseat where, tented by picture books, I camped for the nine-hour drive. Dick, Jane, Sally couldn't leave school grounds, but Sam I Am, Little Bear, and Miss Suzy the squirrel -- the entirety of my personal library -- accompanied me.

Previously, the few times my family had driven upstate, we left New York City after rush hour. Sunset burned outside the windshield. Above the illuminated highway stripes, black undulating humps rose lightless, lifeless.

"Mountains," my father said.

Monsters I heard and cowered.

This trip, we'd rise with the sun, drive all day, and get to Niagara Falls by dinnertime. None of us knew it back then, but we would move cross-state a total of five times in my first six years of school: west, east, south, north, center. Me the new kid, again and again and again.

By the second move I grasped that classmates couldn't be counted on. I formed reliable relationships with books, idolizing heroines who worked their way out of scrapes. The orphan who seeded her imagination across the fields and forests of Prince Edward Island. The freckled girl whose composition notebooks filled with peer reviews made her an outcast. The bored little sister whose route to adventure has since become an internet cliche.

If I moved between September and June, I'd look for my storyfriends during library period. In summer, my father would walk me to the town library where I'd sign my name to my own card.

The reunion always began with Anne. I'd search the stacks, M for Montgomery, hoping not just for Green Gables and Avonlea but all six Anne books. Then F for Fitzhugh, Harriet the Spy, maybe even The Long Secret and Sport. The last a classic, C for Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

By the third move I earned adult borrowing privileges. That summer I took The Andromeda Strain on vacation.

"Who's carrying who?" an adult called out, seeing the thick pages propped against my bony knees. "The kid or the book?"

My father joined Book-of-the-Month Club and passed along The Martian Chronicles. I liked S is for Space, but Dandelion Wine shook the welcome mat of small town life. Clinton, NY felt too close to Green Town, Illinois.

Childhood warned me: Don't look back.

I stay present physically but risk time travel through literature, rereading the same 1983 Bantam paperback every two years.

Little, Big by John Crowley is set in a folly house -- a home with multiple facades of varying architectural styles -- where generations of Drinkwaters and Barnables truck with fairies and discover "the further in you go, the bigger it gets." Formerly a rootless child, protagonist Smoky Barnable marries into a house that's both prison and portal.

Similarly, in the slot canyon covid has scoured, I've returned to blankets and books. Hunkered down I'm liberated, joyous inside my head, my imagination the only home I've never, ever left.