Leila Ahmed in her memoir A Border Passage writes of growing up in Alexandria:
Moving daily . . . under the blue skies of Egypt, we lived also in our heads and in the books we lost ourselves in, in a world peopled with children called Tom and Jane and Tim and Ann, and where there were moles and hedgehogs and grey skies and caves on the shore and tides that came in and out. And where houses had red roofs. Red roofs that seemed far better and more interesting and intriguing to me than roofs that were like, say, the terraced roof of our house in Alexandria.
Ahmed moved on, as I did, from children’s books such as The Wind in the Willows to the novels of Dickens and Thackeray. She writes, “I don’t know how I would have survived the loneliness of my teenage years without the companionship of such books.” Thinking of my own lonely teenage years, I don’t know either.
Francine Prose in Reading Like a Writer traces her development from being a child who was “drawn to the work of the great escapist writers . . . , [loving] novels in which children stepped through portals—a garden door, a wardrobe—into an alternative universe,” to a preadolescent “with an interest in how far a book could take me from my own life and how long it could keep me there” to someone who became aware of language, marking up the pages of King Lear and Oedipus “with sweet embarrassing notes-to-self (‘irony?’ ‘recognition of fate?’) written in my rounded heartbreakingly neat schoolgirl print.”
Prose’s brief review of her reading life raises an interesting complication—the fact that we read differently at different stages of life. In her case she moves from being unaware of the power of language to “vaguely aware . . . but only dimly and only as it applied to whatever effect the book was having on [her]” to becoming the author of the text at hand, trained as she was in New Critical textual analysis, sophisticated and astute in her attentiveness to textual nuance—in short, able to read like a writer.
My own path of development is not unlike that of Prose. I learned to read ever more consciously, ever more critically, ever more aware of the components and strategies of literature. But doesn’t this development then skew one’s looking back? Trying, for example, to recover my eleven-year-old experience of David Copperfield, I must somehow uncover that first innocent reading through all the subsequent schooled and scholarly and writerly perspectives that overlie it. Ultimately reading David Copperfield at eleven is a memory, and memory, as we know, is highly unreliable. Nonetheless, I believe the warmth of that memory pervades my response to the book every time I teach it or make it the subject of a paper. And something of my original response to it persists in all rereadings. Something of the power books have in childhood remains at the heart of all our reading experience.
Instead of thinking of fiction as escape, Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran speaks of how she and her students “were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.” As I go back to Rachel Brownstein, I now see her reading of Henry James in Queens less as refuge from the quotidian than as the route to the quotidian’s transformation as well as her own. The person who emerges from the sanctuary of the bathroom grows up to write about reading Henry James in her seemingly banal setting. She “connects,” as E. M. Forster urges us to do in his famous epigram to Howards End, weaving together the different threads of her life. My book is at heart homage to the books that transform us, that shape our understanding of the world around us and lead us to make large and small connections. Through the books I have read you will know me. Without knowing these books, you cannot know me well.
If this volume is intended as an experiment in autobiography, both inner and outer, it’s also envisioned as an exercise in a freer, more personal kind of literary criticism than I was schooled in. As was typical for members of my generation, the first thirty years of my excellent standard education were spent drumming the personal voice out of me. In grade school my classmates and I competed in spelling bees, strove to perfect our penmanship, and threw ourselves into the joys of diagramming sentences. In high school, we honed further the faculty of memory to retain the myriad rules and facts that defined the world. My subjugation to these was so complete that, arriving at college and given an opportunity in a freshman English course to write a free theme, I could think of nothing more imaginative than to compare the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Fortunately, as I progressed, my topics became less stilted. But college and graduate school polish a mode of discourse in which the potentially unruly first-person pronoun is submerged. My writing was smooth. My points were clear. But who was writing? Who was reading? Someone called “One.” Was that “one” I? I acknowledge its serviceability, but to what extent did that depersonalized figure convey an authentic reading experience?
A challenge to my academic writing came when my mother declared (with what, at the time, seemed a hurtful lack of tact) that the opening paragraph of my masters thesis on Virginia Woolf failed to hook the reader. She pronounced it dull and lifeless. On some level I knew I agreed with her, but it was also important to defend myself against her blunt judgment. She was a journalist who liked to proclaim that she “thought in headlines.” Not only that. She had also spent thirty years writing her
