my favourite book
I’m in my mid-twenties - in the thick of grad school - and I am reading for pleasure. For me, a book brings pleasure if it is intense and I lose myself. This was never more the case than with Isabel Allende’s Paula.
Just as I move through the final words of the book, the phone rings. I am dating myself as the phone is a land line. On the other end is a grad school classmate who asks the usual question as to my current activity. “Oh, just finished a book,” I reply, burying large amounts of emotion I would rather not share with this person.
When I get off the phone I am enraged. The tears that mark the end of the book begin to flow, but they are also ones of anger and frustration at having chosen someone else over myself. Life will later show me I am one of those who was taught to do as such - to put other before self, with great regularity - but at twenty-four I am not able to choose my tears and release over the ringing of a phone.
Paula has a powerful - and real life - ending, but I am not just crying for the people in the story. I am crying because the book is over. I do not want the feeling of the words to end. I want to carry this story forever. To this day when asked, I tell people that Paula is my favourite book. And then I silently lament how I wish the moments had run out after I closed the back cover.
I am in my early teens - living in the thick of my parent’s dysfunctional marriage - and have just closed a paperback copy of Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. I am sobbing on the tan leather couch and my mother asks me what is wrong. “The book was so good and it is over!” I wail.
Despite being a prolific reader for the first thirty-five years of my life, the birth of my child shifted that truth. I am not the only parent to experience this shift - parenthood changes priorities and asks tremendously real things of you - but my reasons are different. With a young child in my home, I began to write. I was compelled to output instead of intake. The odd book captured my attention - and social media shifted how society consumed information - but the last seventeen years have been mournful ones as I continued to acquire books without keeping anywhere near the same pace as I once had.
Yesterday I finished an audiobook. I have attempted this format on several occasions over the last few years, in hopes that intake might return. Most of those books sit incomplete on my phone’s library. But this one brought with it an echo. The book was Between Two Kingdoms, by Suleika Jaouad. The author reads the book, and her voice still resonates within me.
The last forty-five minutes of the book were also ones in which my left hand held firmly to one end of a dog bone, assisting my seven month old pup who was recently spayed and could not hold the bone on her own. My whole arm was tense as I offered the strength needed to hold the bone steady. The rest of my body was rolling with Suleika’s words, as she offered these final ones: Wherever I am - wherever we go - home will always be the in-between place, a wilderness I have grown to love.
I flew through the short epilogue and credits, feeling the tears begin to form in the backs of my eyes. I released the bone to the ground - my dog not dissatisfied as I had catered to her for some time - and exclaimed shakily, “It’s over.” “Your book?” my teen looked up from her phone. “Yes, and it was so good. This feels just like Paula.”
Except that this time I knew there was space for me to release and I chose it. And this time the release spoke of something very different. Yet again, I was sad that the book was over. But this time I also felt joy because I had lived in that space with Suleika. Joy in how her life and words had changed me. Joy that I was reading again, even if it looked different.
If someone asks I am sure that I will tell them Paula is my favourite book. I have offered this answer for over half of my life. I suspect I will listen to more audiobooks, and have already checked my phone’s library as to what might be appealing. But if I am ever asked to speak to a book that changed me, it will be Jaouad that I reference, for her words have brought me to this place where I am ready to output in a new way. I am ready to write for my sake alone, not for healing or to grieve, but the simple words of my living.