Literacy Narrative

This short paper is a story of my history as a reader.  To begin with, I brainstormed all of the books that had been meaningful to me as a child.  Included were The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall; that was the book that really changed my life, as you’ll see in the story.  Other important books to me were There’s A Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom byLouis Sachar.  It’s the story of a boy who is an outcast at school, and he finds solace in his school counselor.  I was a very lonely child, and clung to this book like a life raft.  Anyway, this is my story: how I came to books, and how reading became so important to me.

Inclusion and Diversity in Books: A Reading History

   I loved reading more than anything else back then.  My mother said that the happiest day of her life was the day I learned to read silently.  The strictly conforming genders of Sally and Jack of On Cherry Street were, even then, not entirely to my preference, but the formula of words on paper was astonishing to me.  I transformed from a clinging, whinging, smudgy creature to a militantly independent one, sitting silently for hours, enthralled.  It didn’t change as I grew, either: eventually, the silent library became my refuge.  I realized, one parched July in the middle of a cowtown that was more of an afterthought than an actual home for people, that there was no one around me like me.  Not at my home, not in my town, and not in my school.  The isolation was too much for me to comprehend, and I fled to the fictional world of others, where, I rationalized, I have a better chance of finding…finding…well, finding whatever I was looking for.

I read everything:  my mother’s Redbooks, (until she caught me), Reader’s Digest terror tales, those lurid descriptions of campers being attacked by mountain lions, or contracting fatal diseases from gym equipment, Sherlock Holmes,  John Grisham, the entire series of The Babysitter’s Club, something my mother deemed not-quite-academic enough, and everything that came my way. From the indiscriminate intake of information, I developed some quirks unusual to the average eleven year old: phobias of bear attacks, camping, and undercooked chicken.  I tracked down one of those tweed Sherlock Holmes double-brimmed hats, and begged my nonplussed parents for a pipe.  I would attend slumber parties only to forage the bookshelves of my friends, ignoring the shrinky-dinks and friendship bracelet festivities, preferring the inky pages to the clamor of the party.  I was on a mission.

Looking back, I realize I was searching for the literary representation of myself, picking up fragments from each new book I encountered: Jane Eyre was decidedly plain, and lived in a perpetual agony of shyness.  Scarlett experienced the same ostracism that I did, left alone with nothing but her defiance.  I empathized.  Like C.S. Lewis said, I was reading to make sure I wasn’t alone.  But, in my rural school, heavily patrolled by parents urging censorship of library materials, no books with any LGBT characters made it past the filter, and for many years, I remained quite solitary.  It wasn’t until I came across a cover-less copy of The Well of Loneliness that I finally found my story-self, and it cleaved my brain neatly in half.  It was shocking, terrifying, delicious, and ultimately soothing: someone, eighty years ago, wrote about someone who felt like me.

Stephen, the main character in the novel, was the only gay person I ever encountered, living or fictional.  Can you believe that?  A single book character changed the course of my entire life, and set off a chain of events that brings me here, sitting in a college classroom 600 miles away from my birthplace, majoring in the one thing I’ve ever really loved.  This weekend, I received my early acceptance notice from the library science program at McGill, a Canadian university.  In my cover letter, I discussed the ALA’s Rainbow Project, and the need for everyone to freely access reading materials.  As part of the application process, I created a blog, reviewing and rating books, mainly YA Lit, and focusing on those that represent a wide variety of people.  I’m grateful for the experiences from my youth, and the opportunity to spread the reading love.