Pale skin. Grey eyes. Long hair knotting in the wind. Gazing out over the ocean, wistful and longing. This is how I imagined my 11-year old self, elbows resting on the railing, overlooking the private courtyards of downtown Padua. Kit Tyler knew how I felt. What it was like to leave everyone you loved. What it was like to move far away. What it was like to not fit in.

I spent hours on our apartment balcony, slowly working through the injustices of my Dad’s sabbatical. My Mom’s insistence I go to an Italian-only speaking school. The simultaneous romance of the adventure and isolation of being functionally silenced.

I’d brought six books; all required reading to advance to 7th Grade when I got back to Ohio. Our little trio must have read each one a dozen times. The burnt orange cover of Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond marked our attention in fuzzy cream lines, the paperboard cracking through the film.

Although I didn’t want to give my Mom the satisfaction, at school I learned Italian and made friends. Julia and I would walk arm-in-arm for la patatine fritte after class. Sing duets to Paula Abdul. My “boyfriend” Luca looked just like Macaulay Culkin with gold wire-rimmed glasses.

As hard as it was integrating into Italian life - switching sneakers for monk shoes, learning to laugh off the ever-hopeful “Ciao Bella!” - I ended up needing Kit more once I got home. Childhood friends had moved on. New romances and alliances had formed. I had grown, too.

I cried when I returned to Padua a decade later. The city was grittier than I remembered. From the street, our balcony looked smaller, cruddier. Not the windswept cliff I’d envisioned myself standing on so many silent afternoons, hoping a ship and the Captain’s son would save me too.

In the years between, I’d moved six times. Always going, then returning. Five countries. Each time casting new friends, then leaving again for an increasingly foreign home. What would Kit do? Create home in people. Look for the outliers. Belong with the people who don’t belong.

Last week, a friend died from Covid. As I told my husband of his shyness, his kindness, I felt heat wave up my spine. A warmth of homecoming. All these years, I’d wished to fit in. To be part of a community. Now here, unnoticed, in the margins of my greater acts, I’d gathered a heart family, connected to each other by both circumstance and choice. Kit’s final realization became my own: “It was not escape that she had dreamed about, it was love”.

“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.

The book came to me as a gift when I asked myself only one question. Why me?

The seed of that question began in basement library with the daylight window at Dallastown Elementary. If it was still intact I could walk today across the linoleum floors to the exact shelf where I discovered Harold and The Purple Crayon. The only book I checked out my entire first grade year. The librarian smiled, stamped the due date card with my name repeated line after line. Ka-thunk. Back in class, Mrs. Kessler’s frown made the cat part of her cat eyeglasses more pronounced as she instructed, again, that I practice my letters right handed, even though my left hand already knew the alphabet. My mimeographed sheets wreaked of blue ink and futile efforts.

At home, the moon and its gravity lifted toward my favor. My mother had ceased being sad. And she once again delivered crust-less, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the red bucket lowered from the middle branches of our backyard’s lone Sugar Maple. On those limbs I became Neil Armstrong, or Jeannie, of I Dream Of…magic. “Hey, Mom. Now that you’re not catatonic, maybe you could convince Mrs. Kessler to let me use my left hand,” I never said. But something ceased Mrs. Kessler’s right insistence that hopeful spring. Fifty years after the southpaw stand-off, my mother’s best friend will tell me that what had stopped the tears (that time) was electroconvulsive therapy.

Harold arrived in my life and brought me to a place of possibilities when I had few. I am grateful. But it is not the one book (can there ever be?), and the maple is not the one tree. Books, humans, trees, thrive in community. Harold found his way home to rest by the light of his moon, out his window. But what to do when home is on fire and smoke obscures the sky? We are all we have here. The moon moves a fingernail width away from Earth every year and the vastness expands.

The fictional shepherd, in The Man Who Planted Trees, Elezéard Bouffier knew what to do after he lost his only son and then his wife. His question was not why me, but instead…how can I help? His answer was to plant one hundred trees a day in a barren valley…for thirty years. He planted through two world wars, a pandemic, and a bumbling government forest agency. The meaning of the book, its seeds lied dormant in me for a long time. I no longer believe in a purple crayons’ ability to navigate life. Some days I can barely traverse my mind and heart.

I bring my life to stories in hopes those stories bring me beyond my life.

Fire may burn Elzéards trees, may burn the pages that gave him life, but he did what he could to make the days more gentle, less lonely for all beings in his time and his place.

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.

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)

The “women aren’t funny” argument still surfaces online here (Twitter) and there (Reddit), thanks to frustrated young men in basements. I believe this tiresome discourse got rolling with an essay by Christopher Hitchens, whom I’m told was funny. But there was a time when, despite never having read Hitchens, I would have denied his funniness on principle, for I had a separate debate going in my mind: prose isn’t funny. Words on paper can’t elicit a genuine laugh and shouldn't attempt to.

I believed that, while plenty of them are advertised as funny, books can only ever hope to be “humorous.” At most, they can produce a chortle. I hadn’t done much research into this besides a few essays by that one humorist everyone loves, who didn’t do it for me, and books by standup comedians that weren’t really books, but lifeless, word-for-word transcriptions of their acts. But my mind was made up: books were either completely serious, or they sucked, and if you wanted to write comedy, as I wanted to, then you had to write television, film, or standup.

I was twenty-three when I picked up Steve Toltz's lengthy debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole. I liked the cover (it had little holes in it), and the reviews promised a sweeping story. I was surprised, however, to catch myself laughing out loud reading it. I was fascinated by Toltz; how had he pulled off a novel that was moving and narratively sweeping while being funny for 700-plus pages? It changed the way I thought about, and what I sought from, books. Beyond that, it shifted my perception of my future self. Beyond his Australian nationality, there was precious little information about Toltz online, so I invented a life for him. I pictured him as a solitary creature – no wife, no children – shambling from cafe to cafe in Melbourne (he wasn't from there), taking notes on the hilarious stupidity of life. I thought that could possibly be me.

I'm thirty-five now. The comedy career didn't pan out, but it took me to LA and later Brooklyn, where I fell in love, which has brought me all the way across the world to, of all places, Melbourne, Australia, where I still imagine Toltz is from even though I now know he’s from Sydney (last I read, he'd moved his family to Brooklyn). I'm writing a novel of my own now. I hope it's as funny as Toltz's, but maybe about a quarter as long.

I’m sorry this wasn’t funnier.