.
Mimi is an original member of Writers Co-op. She’s contributed many posts, but when Mimi’s name comes up, you probably think of a talking cat and a richly communicated history hundreds of years in our past with just a touch of creative interpretation. Yet she never wanted to be a writer.
..
My earliest reading memory
I was nine years old when we brought a furnished house in Crystal Beach, Florida. I can’t explain this, but I have no memory of reading before that. I did, of course, because that house had a built-in bookshelf with a hundred books on it, short on fiction, heavy on history, and I read most of them over the six years we lived there. I was already an advanced reader.
My mother had her own bookshelf. When I was around twelve, I discovered Gone with the Wind, and read it straight through in a day and a half, with a break to sleep. Nothing could make me put that book down. I ate while I read, off a TV tray. We kids ate off trays, in front of the TV.
My favorite book growing up
I loved the Anne of Green Gables series and the Nancy Drew series, not as well written, but what girl didn’t long to have Nancy’s independence?
The book that changed me as a teenager
I also loved Catcher in the Rye. I can’t say it changed me. I was already a rebel. Not outwardly, I didn’t dare show it. I grew up in Florida and went to segregated schools. Many of my classmates were unapologetically racist. I went for books that reflected my anti-status-quo point of view. I read several things by James Baldwin.
I don’t recall how I got hold of Baldwin. It certainly wasn’t out of our school library. And I don’t remember setting foot in a bookstore in all the time we lived in Florida. Tarpon Springs, the nearest town with stores beyond the equivalent of a Seven-Eleven had a Western Auto, and a Woolworth, and a beauty parlor, and a Publix grocery store. I don’t remember a bookstore.
Ah! I’m suddenly picturing a drug store on a corner next to a park in which old Greek men sat under Spanish-moss-covered trees and played board games. The drug store had one of those vertical book displays that rotate. It would have held paperbacks, romances and mysteries, not James Baldwin. Baldwin wouldn’t have gone over there in the late fifties/early sixties. That drug store wouldn’t have wanted to be fire-bombed.
The writer who changed my mind
Many writers have pushed me in one direction or another. I can’t say they’ve changed my mind. They strengthened my resolve to continue tendencies I already had. At the top of this list would be Laurence Sterne and his Tristram Shandy.
No, that’s not quite correct. Prefaces are not admired these days, but a high-toned preface to a work of silly, faux-historical fiction could be great fun. The intro by John C. Gerber to a 1930 edition of Henry James’ The Ambassadors is priceless. I’ve chuckled over it for thirty years. An intro to Wanderings and Excursions by J. Ramsey MacDonald, published in 1929, is equally beguiling, and the intro to Brothers of the Quill, Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street by Norma Clark, I just read it today, settles it. I’m going to give a preface a whirl. Three writers have changed my mind.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I never wanted to be a writer. I wrote well, but aside from being given a theme in school, I had no ideas. I felt I had nothing to say. What made me start writing? An odd little character popped into my head, and I began to tell his story. And the more I wrote, the more I wondered about him. And the more I wondered, the more I wrote. When I’ve said all I have to say about Sly–unlikely to happen while I draw breath–I’ll figure out what became of Pedro, Mama B, and the Countess of Guiche, in a spin-off story.
The book I could never read again
Books I will never read again, I don’t read to begin with. I sample books before I bring them home, and I’m attracted most often by style. If I lose interest in the story, I have the style to keep me going.
I have several shelves deep enough to hold two rows of books, one in front of another. I’m trying to find books I don’t mind parting with so as to have all titles visible. The things I’ve chucked, I can’t say I’ll never read them again. I don’t toss anything that isn’t available on Gutenberg.org or that I don’t have a pdf of from my days working for a compositor. Why don’t I buy another bookshelf? This is a tiny house; I have no more wall space.
The book I am currently reading
I just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. A narrator who introduces himself as Death narrates the struggles of a working-class German girl, comments on them, and adds collateral material in frequent author intrusions.
Liesel’s family hides the son of the father’s World War I army buddy, a Jew, in their cellar. Books are central to the story: *Liesel’s hunger for books in Hitler’s Germany–in which books were burned in bonfires–pushes her to steal them when she can. *She’s helped to read them by the fugitive in the basement. *The two write their own stories on pages of Mein Kampf coated with house paint, her father being an out-of-work house painter.
The Book Thief, while written for a YA audience, is, in addition to its interesting structure, a lesson in an economical depth of emotional truth on a thrillingly high level.
.
A note from Sue: If you’d like to be In the Spotlight, answer the same questions Mimi did and send your answers in the body of an email (no attachments, please) to me at stranscht@sbcglobal.net. Feel free to include a very brief bio with a couple items you’d like people here to know about you.
WRITERS CO-OP: A WRITER COMMUNITY FOR YOU. 