thekeptJR: I met James at the New England Independent Booksellers Association annual meeting in Providence. I am currently reading his fantastic novel The Kept. James was kind enough to provide us with an essay, which covers one of my favorite books.

When We Fell In Love – James Scott

In high school I got decent grades but I had a difficult relationship with some of my teachers, especially my English teachers. At the end of one particularly trying academic year, my teacher told me she was glad it was over. “Me, too,” I said, “it was a long one.” She looked at me, a bit confused, and she said, “No, I mean I’m glad this year is over because I did not enjoy having you in my class.” As if I’d had any doubt about that. She had told me previously that I was: a bad person, never going to get anywhere, lazy (this one may have been true), rude, impolite, and countless other wonderful things.

Our final project was to select an author from a pre-determined list and read at least three of their novels and write a paper (maybe the paper was twenty pages, maybe more, maybe less, but it was at least twice as long as the longest paper I’d ever written) about the overarching themes and preoccupations of their work. Time went on, and I didn’t pick an author, and she would angrily remind me every day of how much time I was losing by not getting started. Finally, she told me there were three authors left and I had to choose one. I selected Tim O’Brien, though I can’t remember why. I probably liked the sound of his name. I read Going After Caccitato, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and The Things They Carried. I loved them all, but The Things They Carried changed my life.

things they carriedEver since I was a child, I had wanted to be a writer. Reading The Things They Carried made me understand for the first time what a writer really does. The book works on so many levels, one of which is exposing the underpinnings of the stories, and pointing out the relationship between the truth and their creation. Before The Things They Carried, I thought of a writer as a storyteller, but O’Brien’s short stories, with their switchbacks and references to one another, encouraged me to think of how the pieces were assembled, from the book to the story to the paragraph to the line. I looked at the words O’Brien selected and wondered why this one over that one. I read some of it out loud to see how it flowed. I considered the architecture of my reading, and the author’s hand in it. In short, I started to read like a writer.

Given all of that, what’s most incredible to me is that to this day, I can read The Things They Carried and see that architecture if I stare long enough, but I still feel the terror and heartache of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, poor Lemon and Kiowa, and of course, Tim O’Brien.