'For all the kids like me, and the adults we turned into, summer reading meant transport to places we could never go,' writes Susan Straight.
Susan Straight reflects on summer reading for those who don't live by the beach:"For all the kids like me, and the adults we turned into, summer reading meant transport to places we could never go."
This summer, I have a memoir coming out, and as always when writers are finished with a book, circling in our heads and uneasy in our bones, I’ve been reading obsessively. Having lived here all of my life, and so having kept my childhood books, I have original editions of “Little Women,” “Sula” and “Julie of the Wolves.” Looking back, I never read about the beach. My summer novels gave me places far from the sea, where girls and women were fighting to stay alive, stay free and stay themselves.
When I was 22 — having just finished my first year of a graduate program in writing and planning to get married in August — my professorgave me “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.” He kindly noted, with disbelief, that I hadn’t read her before, adding that her prose, imagery and dark vision were perfect for a writer working on stories of a place like mine. In “Parker’s Back,” Obadiah Elihue Parker falls in love with a hard girl, with “ice-pick eyes.
I swear that Amelia Bedelia helped me think about my own dialogue in fiction. She entertained my girls on searing summer days, and when they fell asleep at night on the porch, too hot to be inside, I listened to possums rustle through the grass, thinking about my father-in-law, General II, saying, “Oh, he can really cut a rug!” and my brother-in-law, General III, saying, “We’re fixin’ to hat up right now.”Book lovers! Sign up for the new L.A.
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