For the most part, I’m a person who prefers her privacy. I’m awkward showing anything in public: I hate the whole shake-hands-or-hug dilemma, and although I know it’s de rigueur to let your bra straps show alongside spaghetti straps these days, revealing my underwear in public is simply not in my repertoire. Put a great book in my hands, though, and I’m a literary underwear exhibitionist.
On trains—well, yes, but everyone reads on trains. Airplanes? The dentist’s office? Those hardly count. Park benches? Cafes? But we’re talking newspaper readers. Magazines. The occasional best-seller thriller, perhaps. A mere peek at a literary bra strap compared to the torn, baggy knickers of pulling War and Peace from your purse—or, in my case, your bright red parachute-material backpack, complete with outside slots for the pens and highlighters I like to attack my reading with. Not found reading material to pass the time; I have not once come upon an abandoned Tolstoy novel on a café table or park bench, or even in a doctor’s lounge.
Is that me weeping over my latte as (spoiler alert) Anna throws herself on the tracks? This at-heart-still-Midwestern girl who is mortified to tear up at a funeral, for heaven’s sake, will bawl in plain view over a moving passage in literature, all the while wishing I could just get up and slip into the ladies’ room but unable to step away until the last page of the scene. There is some connection there, no doubt—some essential emotion I suppress in real life slipping out in response to the fiction I read. What I fear to be a fundamental weakness—emotion in public—becomes a mere reflection of a strength: the strength of great literature. Yes, this book is so compelling it makes me cry.
Or laugh out loud. Which is something I do freely when out with friends, but feel quite awkward about when I’m reading. I hesitate to bring, say, a previously-unread Anne Tyler or Barbara Pym out in public. If I’m rereading, okay: I remember where the funny parts are; you can’t catch me off guard. But it’s a weird thing to see someone laughing alone in public, don’t you think? Even over the pages of a book. Although it does more often lead to inquiries about what I’m reading than the weeping thing does. And then there is the laughing-so-hard-I’m-weeping double whammy. Think David Sedaris. I do not read David Sedaris in public. If I’m driving and he comes on the radio, I change the channel unless I’m headed directly home.
True, I was a person who actually loved Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath in high school—not that the teenaged me ever admitted to that. I might even have liked The Brothers Karamazov or The Odyssey back then if I’d read them—though not, probably, if I’d had to keep an eye on the meaning of the bird on the line at the end of chapter three. Really, there are some books that ought not to be ruined by too-early required reading, or by at-least-one-notation-per-page coursework. How can a teenager, not the most patient of readers to start with, possibly be expected to sink into six hundred pages of even a story as vivid as Oliver Twist if he or she must be ever vigilant for metaphor, alliteration, hyperbole?
Even now, when I pull out the big, fat literary masterpiece wherever I’m reading—and I do read everywhere; I even “read” while walking my dog now that I’ve discovered audible books—I feel the same urge to explain myself that I did as that closet-reader teenager: “Really, Middlemarch is just like Jane Austen” (because no one doesn’t like Jane these day) “only better, because Eliot gave us female characters who wanted more than just the happy-wedding ending, even if she did do it from behind the façade of a pen name that’s male.” Not that I don’t love Austen, too. Yes, that’s me: the one bawling in my latte, or on the bench in the mall, or in the stands at the swim meet; the one wading through the mud on her walk as determinedly as Elizabeth Bennett ever has, enjoying Lizzy’s ride into the sunset with Mr. Darcy while my dog Frodo (yes, named after that Frodo) looks up with concern at the tears streaming down my cheeks.
Come join me. Reading great literature is not one bit like you remember from high school. And there will be no quiz at the end.
Meg Waite Clayton in the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, most recently the Langum Prize honored The Race for Paris.