Last night a book saved my life

I am 6. I can’t sleep. It’s summer and the sky outside is inky, but not yet dark and I feel as though I am the only child forced to lie in bed, eyes wide, while everyone else still plays. I’m in an in between, neither day nor night and even though I am a happy child, it’s a time of day I dread. I take a torch under my covers and open Brambly Hedge. Winter scenes, ice skating, a grand ball, piles of delicious food, cross sections of houses carved into trees in a landscape far away from my own. I’m soothed by the intricacy of the illustrations and the words I can now read myself. I am no longer dependent on a grownup to allow me to enter a new world.

*

I am 9. I have scoured the Scholastic book catalog for hours. I have my order placed in my hands at school and within pages I am already in love with this group of friends. Girls with American names, who have their own phone, a club and earn money. I have no idea yet how many times I will return to these Babysitters. They will be there for me when my own friendship groups are disrupted and go through ups and downs. They will be a constant in my life for the next few years, whenever I need them.

*

I am 13. I am forced to be very grown up. I have no idea if anyone knows what is going on in our house but I don’t voice it to anyone. Our new home is hidden behind another, behind a high wall and a locked gate. Everything goes unspoken, my mother’s hospital stays, the weeks she spends in her room. Stephen King finds his way into my hands and horror seems a perfect reflection for what’s going on around me.

*

I am 14. While my fellow students moan and complain, I fall in love with Shakespeare. My mother attempts suicide and I read and reread Rome and Juliet.

*

I am 18. I am in a small city in the north of Thailand and I feel desperately alone. I pace my bedroom floor at night unable to see a way out of this feeling of otherness. I spend my days smiling and stumbling through a new language. I am an item on display, a prize that is pulled out at meetings and events. I am an object of curiosity. I find a book about a mother and daughter in the book exchange of the only foreign restaurant in town. I read through the night and weep through their story and in the morning I feel better.

*

I am 22. I am on a plane going to my mothers funeral. I cannot read. I wonder if I will ever read again.

*

I am 23. It is spring and I am in New York City and its vibrating with life. I pick up The Virgin Suicides and I wonder if I am just picking at wounds. But I am enthralled. And I am reading again.

*

I am 23. It is October. I have not been able to read or look at the skyline since a bright Tuesday morning in September. A now familiar adrenaline skitters through my veins that makes it hard to hold a book and follow a sentence. I have a name for this feeling now. It is acute grief. This time, as well as being unable to read, the tv is also out. I’m too afraid to switch it on, incase I see a person falling through the sky, or a building crumbling down. In a large bookshop in Union Square, where just outside missing person posters still flap in the wind, I pick up Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and read just one story. It helps. I keep reading.

*

I am 28. I am in London. My industry has gone digital and where I once dropped rolls of film at labs, I now sit in front of a computer far too much of the time. The only way I can make myself do it is to borrow books on CD from the library. I listen to Dickens and Wilkie Collins while retouching images. The streets both men wrote about a hundred and fifty years earlier, lying just beyond my front door.

*

I am 34. I am a mother for the second time. I’ve barely read for the past two years, I have almost forgotten what it feels like to be swept away in a story. I am doing motherhood all wrong. My son misses all his milestones. He doesn’t speak and they want to know - do I read to him? Our tiny flat cannot contain us and I get rid of books to make some space. I don’t think I will miss them. I am wrong. I download audiobooks on my new smart phone. I listen to C.J Sansom’s Dominion and Arronovitch’s Rivers of London, alternative versions of the city where I live. I wonder if I am living my own alternate version of a life.

*

I am 36. I am trying desperately to understand the world I find myself in. I find the books of non speaking autistic writers Barbara Rentenbach and Naoki Higashida and I begin to see the world a little more through my son’s eyes. It is a revelation.

*

I am 37. I am divorced and now a single parent of two. I travel across the country to a book festival, properly alone for the first time in years. I buy arm fulls of books and lie in bed reading. I cry thinking of all the books I gave away to try and create space in a life that was falling apart.

*

I am 41. I have fallen in love with an Irish reader. We lie side by side and read as often as possible. I give him Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now and he gives me John McGahern’s collection of stories.

*

I am 42. I am locked in my house most of the time, along with almost everyone across the globe. Amongst the noisy stimming, sensory play and meltdowns of my autistic 10 year old I put on headphones and lose myself in O’Farrell’s Hamnet, weeping over a dead child four centuries earlier, as tens of thousands of people around me die of another kind of plague. Reading it hurts. And it also helps.

*

I am 47. The Irish reader and I continue to read side by side. My 15 year old still makes noise constantly, so audiobooks are my frequent companions. Our world can be small, but books keep it wide open. I flip happily between Patchett, Hadley and Atkinson, Hallett, Keyes, Garner, ni Dorchartaigh, Jimenez and Henry. I read anything from romance to literary prize winners, real or imagined (is there any difference?). I have a constant hunger for stories and piles of books lie around the house. There is no rush to get through them, or pressure to fall in love with every one of them.

They are simply part of who I am.

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Not Too Busy To Write Podcast is back for series 10 and my first guest of the season is

Daisy Buchanan

talking with me about her new book Read Yourself Happy. Our conversation got me thinking about all the times in my life that books saved me. You can listen to the episode here.

some piles mid shelf tidy