Today's prompt comes from memoirist and essayist Melissa Febos.
Prompt: Make a short list of texts from your past, even better if you can select particular passages or moments that meant something to you. Without necessarily revisiting the book (you can do that later), start writing about your relationship to it, in narrative terms. When did you read it? What was your life at the time? Write a scene of your reading it, replete with all the ways it made you feel. Then, consider why you needed it at that particular time. Follow it from there—feeling free to depart from the text.
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I sometimes wish I had a list of every book I've ever read, perhaps printed on one long scroll or even register tape, just to unfurl it and see how far it stretches.
Our house was always full of books, some new, many old. Piles of library books. I wasn't a picky or particularly discerning reader in my early years. My choices were based on availability, proximity. I read compulsively, voraciously. I'd read the back of the shampoo bottle if there was nothing more compelling in the bathroom.
At first, my tastes skewed towards the pedestrian and the binge-able. A series completist, I devoured The Baby-Sitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and Goosebumps, but classics such as Little Women or the Little House series, or heavier books like Number the Stars, were just as important.
My mom was very sheltering and overprotective. There were plenty of things I wasn't allowed to do, shows I wasn't supposed to watch. The one place she gave me absolute freedom was reading. When I turned up reading her copy of V.C. Andrews' Flowers in the Attic the summer I was eleven, she didn't bat an eye. Good on her.
Despite all its literary deficiencies, that book was a turning point in my reading life. In my whole life, really. It blew my mind wide open. Up to that point, I had been reading books that were more or less intended for children or young people. Even when they were scary or sad, things turned out ok in the end, or there was a valuable lesson to be learned, at least.
But Flowers in the Attic was just one steaming hot, licentious mess from beginning to end. It's the first book I remember making me feel things other than say, mild suspense, amusement, or affinity for a character. I felt disgust, rage, shame, fear, disgust, sympathy, revulsion, more disgust. I couldn't get enough. It was my train wreck. I could not look away, and thank god my mom also had several of the books that followed. That was one hell of a summer.
And look, I know the book is trash, but it opened my mind to the possibility that a book can make you feel things deeply. A book can take you to dark places, characters can be complex, and endings aren't always neatly wrapped in a happy little bow. Not all problems can be solved with an emergency meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club.
And look, I'm an elementary school librarian and I would never, ever, EVER give Flowers in the Attic to an 11-year-old on purpose. But I hold my experience with that book in the back of my mind when I see kids checking out books that I (snobbishly) think are trashy, or when I see a kid choosing a book that I fear could be too mature. You never know what a kid is ready for, or what they might get out of a book. Let them explore and figure it out for themselves. And if that exploration puts them front and center for a multi-generational incestuous Gothic horror show, well, I turned out fine, didn't I?
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