HOW TO LIVE FEVERISHLY

on the pleasure of escaping into a book

I’m at the library in Sausalito. I’m here because I ran into someone I didn’t know at the bakery in Marin last week, where I was crying, not writing, and walking by a creek and lugging my laptop around, as I do. This person was so cheery that I almost murdered her on the spot. She delighted in the marked trails that are strewn all over Mill Valley. They can take you on a delightful march through the backroads of town. When I mentioned that the Mill Valley library was under construction (just the porch, but it’s noisy), she pointed me in this direction. Today, I walked in and went upstairs and found the cover of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe staring at me from the science fiction section.

I routinely swap this book in my mind with A Wrinkle in Time, which is my favorite children’s book, and I wonder why I get them confused.

The important thing is that Olive won’t read either. She will read Harry Potter and Warrior Cats, an infinite series of books about violent animals that kill each other and send themselves to the clan in the sky, including their medicine cats.

I tried to read her A Wrinkle in Time because I found an old copy of it at the Waldorf School sale, after we had left the school, but returned to visit a friend’s booth of potions.

The cover drove me wild, and I now see I’m not the only one obsessed with the artwork. I think this was the first image that I ever really thought was erotic, and I didn’t identify it that way. I was in fifth grade, and I was in Mr. Baldino’s Theatre Arts class, and I was in the lowest reading group because I was dyslexic, and nobody knew. I also wanted to be a women’s rights lawyer, which maybe I could have been (!) if anyone had identified that I was dyslexic. Anyway, when I tried to revisit this book with Olive, I realized she doesn’t want to read a book about a missing dad. It’s not something she relates to. Her dad, however flawed he may be (HA VERY, OBVIOUSLY), has been there for her.

I also realized, when rereading this book, that the wildly ambitious science fiction novel I’ve been writing for eight years is really just a thinly veiled version of the most innovative time traveling portions of this book which I had forgotten had time travel as it’s most relevant part. Which is maybe why I confuse these two books, because they both address time and storytelling in different and strange ways.

Matilda Wormwood (the character in the book by Roald Dahl) says that The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe is a good enough book, but there isn’t anything funny about it. That’s why Olive doesn’t want to read that book either.

When I saw the cover standing in its little prominent section today, I wondered what I even had loved about it and if I should just reread it myself. I remember there’s a closet and you walk through it, and then I think of Tilda Swinton and also of the past, when I was a child, and I learned that her character in the book froze everyone (turned them to stone) and how terrifying that was. I also think of when I ate Turkish Delight for the first time (it was recently!) and just how amazing it is, especially when the interesting flavors like Orange Jasmine or Pomegranate, and how they are all dusted with powdered sugar, and how satisfying that is.

The real reason Olive doesn’t want to read this book, besides that a fictional character she loves does not recommend it, is because her friend told her that everyone dies in the end. I had to look that up to see if it is true, and I’m realizing that actually everyone is dead at the start, but we don’t find out until the end, which seems devastating and a legit reason not to want to read a book.

I’m remembering something - it is the beginning of the pandemic and Olive and I are the last people besides the librarian still standing at the library and the librarian is scared and Olive and I should also be scared but I’m still in denial. I have never known a life in which the library, which is my safe place, hasn’t been open.

Even now, I often find myself lost when the library is closed. “You must live feverishly in a library,” said Ray Bradbury. I’ve taken what he said to heart. I will admit something to you. The real reason I love the library is that it’s the only place I felt allowed to feel sexy as a pre-teen.

Bet you didn’t see that one coming!

Where else could I read magazines about fashion? Where else could I read The Babysitter’s Club? Those lines and lines of books, the endless titles that went on forever in the lower shelf of the children’s section, which was always deliciously quiet and deliciously cold.

There was another moment, after the public libraries closed, and I still had the key to Olive’s co-op, and I opened the gates, and Olive didn’t want to go in. I remember the chill that hit me when we walked in — how all the little huts: the block house, the dress-up house, the meeting room, the co-ed bathroom, were all boarded up. I had wanted to poke around in the small dusty library with worn pillows and spider webs one last time. We ran out of there, me with the feeling that she had been right that it had been wrong to go in. It was the last time we were there before it turned into a nightmare of X marks on benches and black rubber gloves and thermometers, and hand-washing stations.

Do you, too, remember what you were asked to forget?