Literature As Answer Key/Time Machine/Alternate Reality

A consideration of the ways in which literature transports us...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

At 14, I discovered White Oleander by Janet Fitch. The novel follows a girl named Astrid Magnussen who is separated from her mother, Ingrid, and put into various foster homes. In an early scene from the book, Ingrid goes to meet her lover, a man named Barry, and leaves Astrid alone in the car. While Astrid waits, thinking of the various ways that her mother has chosen this man over her, she looks into the side mirror, trying to channel her mother’s coolness, pretending to tell a man, “You’re not my type.” It was the first time I felt seen by a book so clearly.

Over the next few years of my life, White Oleander became my Bible. I took it with me to school and shared my testimonial with all of my friends, read from it in the brightly lit cafeteria, explaining to people that this was as profound as the word of God; I brought it with me to Momma’s during my weekend visits, re-reading passages as Momma picked up Oxy’s or coke from a man named Buck; I even took it with me to church on Sunday's, watching my Granny squirm in the pew as I gave more attention to Fitch’s wisdom than to the sweaty pastor up front. The people around me grew worried over my dependence on this book, but I didn’t really care. I had spent my whole life wanting my Momma to love me, to choose me over various men or drugs or another life entirely, and it seemed like Fitch was providing me answers about why she never would.

At some point, my Momma disappeared. This happened from time to time, and used to, I would just call and listen to her voicemail as she told me to leave a message, calling again and again, tears sliding down my face and into the canal of my ear, eventually making the phone sticky and wet. But this time, I didn’t have the option; her phone had been disconnected. I kept myself locked in my room on the other side of Granny’s double wide and opened up White Oleander again. This time, I realized that while reading it, it felt like Momma was beside me. There were moments—Astrid shopping with her first foster mother, a born-again ex-stripper named Starr, or admiring jewelry with her overly dependent, depressed third foster mother, an actress named Claire—where the scene felt close enough to my own reality that I could replace these characters with Momma and myself. It felt like, if not going back in time, entering into a sort of alternate reality that conjured up my Momma when I missed her most.

There were so many ways in which White Oleander felt like a mirror to my own life. It’s hard to explain how life saving it was, to feel so seen and understood. While I initially treated it like a holy text, I eventually treated it like a spell book instead, flipping through to various scenes, whispering them like spells to help conjure the past. It worked, mostly, though the differences between my life and Astrid’s began to converge, and there were moments when I couldn’t distinguish the two. I can see the dangers of something like method acting, attempting to utilize your own life and memories to help construct a person you play, how easily the two become intertwined, impossible to separate.

While I saw White Oleander as a sort of Time Machine for me, I saw it as a guide for others. I gave the book to my friend Madison in the hopes that she would finally understand the things I had experienced, that it would offer her some clarity on why I was the way that I was. It mostly left her heartbroken that this was the story that most resonated with me. When Momma eventually came back around, I read passages to her on the way to the methadone clinic in the morning—hoping that it might explain how she made me feel, when choosing everything else over me—only for her to be so offended by the comparison to Ingrid that she tore the book from my hands and flung it into the backseat. It seemed that this book only held its magic for me.

*

At 16, I moved in with my Momma. I’d recently attempted suicide and she didn’t trust me not to do it again while I was at my Granny’s, so she picked me up the day I was done with summer school and I started a new life with her. On my birthday—August 25th—we drove up to Dothan, Alabama and went to the Barnes and Noble, where I bought The Perks of Being A Wallflower. The book is an epistolary novel, a boy writing letters to an unknown friend about his freshman year of high school. I started reading it on the way home and realized the first letter was dated August 25th. It felt meant to be.

When I moved in with my Momma, I abandoned everything from my old life, with the assumption that I would never go back there again. The Perks of Being a Wallflower felt like spending some time in this life I no longer had access to. Much like Charlie, the narrator of this book, I befriended a bunch of upperclassmen my freshman year of high school. I’d joined the school musical—Little Shop of Horrors—and most of the juniors and seniors watched out for me while I struggled with all of things going on in my life. There’s a scene in the book set during a party where Charlie’s friends—slightly older, possibly wiser—hear him talking about the recent suicide of his best friend, and they open up their hearts to him in the hopes of fixing some unfixable thing. It felt so close to my own reality, if a little more perfect than the experience I had.

Sometimes when I look back on this time, I think about Bella Swann in New Moon, and how, once she realizes that doing dangerous things will bring some version of Edward back to her, she becomes a thrill seeker. While I didn’t seek thrills, realizing that books could bring versions of my life back to me made me desperate to read every book I could.

One morning in history class, while sneak reading Impulse by Ellen Hopkins—a book about suicidal teens in a mental health facility—I broke into a fit of tears as one of the characters ends his life. I’d been hospitalized for my own attempts just three months before, and somehow I’d thought this book, which felt so close to my own experience, would give me the hope I needed to carry on. This kid dying—of course it would be a gay boy with a history of abuse—made me feel like this must also be my path. In searching for answers for what would happen to me or maybe just a road map for how to get out of the place I was stranded in, I had come across the exact thing I didn’t want—a seeming inevitability that death was the only answer. My young mind had always sought out fiction for answers, even if just in movies and tv shows, and when I hadn’t found representation of survival, I assumed surviving wasn’t a possibility.

*

People get mad at books like A Little Life or My Absolute Darling—Trauma Porn, the term coined for books that use acts of abuse, I guess, as the engine for the narrative—because they don’t like the way they represent abuse. I always find that silly, because in my experience, a lot of the depictions of these books felt realistic to the experiences and feelings I had had. I can more easily understand the criticism that these books fill the reader with a sense of hopelessness, that books like A Little Life don’t offer a good depiction of what it looks like if one chooses to survive…but I also don’t think that’s every books responsibility. I get why books targeted to younger people need to have that optimism—they’re still figuring their life out and they often turn to fiction as a way to help with that—but adults learn how to distinguish fiction from reality, should know that books aren’t always meant to be an answer key to the problems of their lives, that sometimes they function solely as a work of art. This is the argument I’m often having with other readers in my head.

*

One thing that’s been interesting for me over the years has been when I read a book that feels almost exactly like my life, but where there is some fundamental difference in the character’s identity and my own that completely shifts the way they view or experience their life. It first happened with White Oleander, Astrid’s girlhood creating a small chasm between her experience and mine, how she interacted with men, how the world perceived her. It was these small moments that were specifically tied to a feminine experience, one I wasn’t privy to, that left me confused over why our lives went in such different directions. When I first read Sing Unburied Sing, I was shocked to see so much of my life reflected back at me. The book follows a young boy living with his grandparents while his mother, a woman struggling with substance abuse, chooses to prioritize her man over her kids. (Sound familiar?) This book resonated with me so deeply, and helped me on the journey to understanding my Momma for the first time. But it also helped me see ways in which I hadn’t realized the privilege of my experience. There’s a scene later in the book where Jojo and his parents are pulled over by a cop and things quickly go south. My Momma and I had been pulled over numerous times in my teens, mostly by a guy we called Robocop, who searched Momma and me and our car every few days, but always felt like more of a nuisance than an actual threat. I had a similar experience when reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, which featured a mother who worked in a nail salon (my Granny owned a beauty shop), and featured a tender relationship between the protagonist, Little Dog, and a boy named Trevor. This relationship and Trevor’s trajectory in many ways reminded me of my own relationship with my stepbrother, Zack. So much of the book felt like me, until it came to Little Dog’s experiences as a refugee, and then I was reminded of this additional hurdle that was not my own. I saw myself so clearly, until I didn’t—but this is also the magic of literature, is seeing how two people with such similar circumstances can have such different experiences based on various aspects of identity, region, etc. I might have been reading to find myself, to conjure my past, but in seeing these differences, I began to add much needed context to various moments in my life, to acknowledge the good and the bad with equal measure, to reckon with my trauma but also my privilege.

*

When my stepbrother died—his death, a mystery—I remembered every book I’d read that made me think of him. A few months after he died, I re-read The Goldfinch and my heart swelled over the relationship between Theo and Boris, these young friends figuring out a way to survive together, though one eventually abandons the other. I’d still felt guilty over abandoning Zack, thinking he might have survived everything if only he’d had someone there. I read Edinburgh by Alexander Chee and thought of Fee’s grief over his friend Peter. I thought of The Catcher In The Rye. I also thought of books that had nothing to do with Zack, other than that he’d read them, or pretended to, at least.

At some point, not long after Zack’s death, I stopped looking for myself in the books I read. I stopped looking for fiction as a Time Machine.

*

For most of my twenties, I wrote stories about my life—Memoir as Time Machine. Then, leading into my thirties (I just recently turned thirty-one), I started a novel—Fiction as Alternate Reality. Writing is one level deeper than reading, in this way, because you have nothing to blunt the force of your experience, no otherness that’s filtered through the lens of another person. I’ve learned that literature as a whole cannot provide you answers to everything. It cannot tell you where you are going or where you will go. It cannot give you the specifics of your own experience, because that is only yours to hold. But it can make you feel less alone.

*

I’m always considering my relationship to literature, how it shapes the ways I move through the world. I’m sure plenty of people think about these things, maybe even in the same way that I do, but I don’t often hear people talk about it.

Something I used to ask people was, “If you couldn’t articulate your own life experiences, what books would you offer a person to help them understand you more fully?” Sometimes people had nothing—sometimes people immediately had a list of books in mind.

I’ve grown to find myself less interesting over the years, but I find others endlessly fascinating. Maybe that’s another reason why I’ve stopped looking for answers about myself when I read. I just want to know more about everyone else.

I’d love to know what books have made you feel seen, captured some aspect of your lived experience, if you’d be willing to share.

Until then,

XOXO