Growing up, my single mom could not afford those omnipresent, overpriced classroom book club orders. Offered to elementary school participants every quarter, the books ranged from educational to purely plot-driven entertainment. I pouted, of course. I assumed parents of kids my age across the country bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of books every quarter. Imagine the riches! Those gold-bound lovelies. Those dense chapter books. I wanted them. I did not realize until much later in life that not every elementary-schooler had the same voracious appetite for reading that I did.
Instead, I scoured my mother’s bookshelves, reading her Wordsworth Editions children’s classics. This is how, in the second grade, I both read Oliver Twist and found out what “heaving bosom” meant—she forgot to stash away the Danielle Steel. I read omnivorously, like a little, book-starved weirdo. I haunted the Milwaukee Public Library closest to our south side home, waiting to find out what happened next in the Mr. Popper’s Penguins saga or The Baby-Sitter’s Club special holiday edition.
My grandfather worked for an express delivery company, picking up and delivering packages across the southeastern region of Wisconsin in his van. One of his stops was the dock of a printing company, where the workers would save middle-reader chapter books for him. The caveat—their covers were missing. The publisher had made printing errors on the book covers, and the company instructed the warehouse workers to tear them off, so the books could not be resold. Resale of these books would have been illegal. Giving them away to a local delivery driver for his bookworm granddaughter? Ethically debatable, but in my grandpa’s defense, I am probably now a much more educated adult than I otherwise would have been.
One evening, when I was seven years old and in second grade, he brought home Eleanor Coerr’s stunning historical novel, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. It describes the traumatic aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The lyrical language in Coerr’s book, relayed by her endearing, dying protagonist, Sadako, opened my eyes to what writing could be. Prior to reading Sadako, I read mostly with a preference for a delightfully compelling, quirky story. After Sadako, I fell in love with the power of well-crafted language.
Later that same year, as cancer cells began ravaging my chain-smoking grandfather’s esophageal cells, he brought me Lois Lowry’s The Giver. When he passed away the winter I turned eight years old, my heart was torn into pieces. I envisioned him sledding down the snowy hill with Jonas and Gabriel at the end of the book, into the great abyss.
At my conservative-leaning, private, Catholic, all-girls high school, a bevy of sneakily liberal, feminist English teachers made me read Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood—lots and lots of Margaret Atwood—Shirley Jackson, Kate Chopin, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, and, occasionally, some Shakespeare. This reading list shaped my writing style, my priorities as a creator of strong female protagonists, and my adoration of feminist literature and writers.
To this day, now enrolled in an MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles where I design my own reading list, I tend to choose female writers or books with strong women protagonists. Ironically enough, I have graveyard-shift warehouse workers and my rough-and-tumble, Miller-drinking grandpa to thank for my passion for feminist lit. My grandpa’s greatest gift to me was not dolls or toys or other material possessions, but his unwavering encouragement of my endless reading.
