Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding And Losing Myself In Books - Hardcover

Corrigan, Maureen

 
9780375504259: Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding And Losing Myself In Books
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375504257 ISBN 13: 9780375504259
Verlag: Random House Inc, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A lifelong book lover and NPR book critic speaks out on the authors and the books that have played a key role in her life, exploring how the magic of reading has helped her understand herself and reflecting on how a love of literature can help transform our lives. 12,500 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maureen Corrigan is book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. Her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, The Boston Globe, The Village Voice, and other publications. Winner of an Edgar Award for criticism, Corrigan also regularly writes a mystery column for The Washington Post and teaches literature at Georgetown University. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and daughter, both avid readers.

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CHAPTER ONE

Ain't No Mountain High Enough:

Women's Extreme-Adventure Stories

(and One of My Own)



Among the many dangers of being an obsessive reader is that you tend to mediate your life through books, filter your experiences through plots, so that the boundary between fiction and fact becomes porous. One evening, during the years I was living as a graduate student in Philadelphia, I was watching TV when a commercial for the local electric company came on. The commercial was promoting a program to help addled senior citizens keep track of their bills. On the screen was an elderly man sitting at a dining room table, staring at a pile of windowed envelopes. He looked a little bit like my dad, and sure enough, as the screen widened out to include the rest of the room, there was a big black-and-white photograph of my father as a toddler, dressed in a sailor suit, surrounded by his two older sisters and their parents. "Oh, there's the photograph," I thought to myself. I had a framed copy in my living room--all the Corrigans and their descendants have a copy of that photograph hanging somewhere in their homes.

Aside from being a striking image--my grandfather with his handlebar mustache staring soberly into the camera; my grandmother in a long dark dress with a lace collar, holding my dad on her lap; my two aunts, smiling, one in a First Communion dress--it was a picture occasioned by tragedy. My grandmother Margaret had been diagnosed with cancer, and she and my grandfather John had the photograph taken to help the children remember her. She died in 1925, when my father was five years old.

"Oh, there's the photograph." It took me at least a full minute to realize that the Corrigan-family photograph was on TV. I was like those American soldiers described in Dispatches, Michael Herr's great book about Vietnam, who, as they ran into enemy fire, shouted "Cover me!"--a line they'd absorbed from countless World War II movies. I, too, had gone to a lot of movies and watched too much TV. My fuzziness in distinguishing between reality and simulacrum was a postmodern condition shared by all of us who'd come of age in the culture of spectacle. But in my case, books were the worst troublemakers when it came to wreaking havoc with my head.

From adolescence on, at least, I've read my life in terms of fiction, and so that evening, when I saw a personal object from my life turn up in a TV commercial, it seemed, at first, natural. (By the way, after calling the electric company's public-relations office, I learned that the photograph had been found in a secondhand-furniture store on Arch Street in Philadelphia. The location made sense. The one-two punch of my grandmother's death followed by the Great Depression a few years later knocked the Corrigan family down. House and car disappeared and my grandfather John, taking advantage of the first month's free rent offered by desperate landlords, moved with the children into a series of apartments in West Philadelphia. A lot of family treasures, like the photograph, were put into storage, never to be rescued.)

My Catholic girlhood, my school days, my first forays into dating, college and graduate school, tortured love affairs, jobs, teaching, marriage--all these events had been mirrored in, even anticipated by, the books I read. When I worked in a five-and-ten during the latter part of high school, I thought of myself as young David Copperfield wasting away in the blacking factory. When I found myself marooned, night after night, in a one-room graduate-school apartment that basically consisted of a bay window and some linoleum, I thought of myself as Tennyson's Lady of Shallot, trapped in glass. Jo March, Holden Caulfield, Lucky Jim, Nancy Drew, Elizabeth Bennet--I thought of myself, at one time or other, as all of them . . . and still do.

But, then, at the age of forty-three, after at least three decades of understanding my life through literary analogues--indeed, sometimes shaping my life in the image of fiction--I arrived at a crucial moment that I couldn't "read" through books. To return to the "Wrong-Way" Corrigan metaphor, I felt as though I were flying blind. For years leading up to the moment I received that life-changing phone call from the adoption agency, I had been living a classic version of the female extreme-adventure tale--a veiled narrative that I had begun to recognize as an essential component of many women's stories, old and new. By the time that realization dawned, however, I was about to set out on another kind of adventure altogether.

The traditionally male extreme adventure has been the trend in nonfiction writing--apart from autobiographies--for roughly the past decade. I can make this pronouncement with confidence because I must get one or two new specimens of this kind of book delivered to my house every week. Jon Krakauer contributed to the increasing demand for this genre of saved-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth new journalism with his two bestsellers Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Sebastien Junger's superb book, The Perfect Storm, is, perhaps, the apotheosis of this genre, which, as yet, shows no signs of waning popularity with he-man first-person sagas about polar explorations, solo round-the-world sails, rodeo riding, and firefighting steadily muscling their way into bookstores along with more scholarly works like Nathaniel Philbrick's award-winning In the Heart of the Sea, a true-life saga about the whale ship Essex that inspired Melville's better-known fictional extreme-adventure tale, Moby-Dick.

The traditional extreme-adventure story is a one-shot testosterone expenditure of physical courage that pits man against nature/man/himself, with man (the narrator usually) left standing, bloody but unbowed, amidst the wreckage of his fancy sporting gear. Scale the mountain; weather the storm at sea (or not); fight the war, the fire, the flood; carry out manifest destiny; be the first to fly over the ocean or to the moon; climb down into volcanoes and Egyptian tombs; or simply learn to survive with the intestinal fortitude of a Crusoe, Kurtz, or Leatherstocking.

Granted, there have always been women, real and fictive, who've grabbed the spotlight by playing boys' rough games by boys' rules. These women enter the fray with gusto, but they never stray so far out of the gender borders that they're dismissed as freaks. That most famous of all woman warriors, Joan of Arc, would have really shaken things up if she had led her armies in female dress; outfitted as an honorary male, she reaffirmed the militaristic status quo--although even that sartorial sleight of hand didn't save her from the stake. Harriet Tubman, "the Mother of the Underground Railroad," made solo rescue missions to the South every winter for a decade after she herself escaped from slavery. Armed with a pistol and her nerves of steel, she led more than a hundred slaves to freedom in Canada and then went on to serve as a Union spy during the Civil War. Because her missions in both arenas were clandestine and largely undocumented, the specific details of most of Tubman's astonishing exploits have been lost to history.

Aviatrixes Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham also wore men's clothes when they flew off to distant horizons, but out of the cockpit they made sure they were photographed in ladylike costumes. (The lithe Earhart never looked as ungainly as she did in those trumpet skirts and heels she trussed herself up in for public appearances.) Then there's my personal favorite female buccaneer, Nellie Bly. I first learned about the...

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Verlag
Random House Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375504257
ISBN 13 
9780375504259
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
201
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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