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  I saved my allowance until the December day I could go into Waldenbooks and buy Love Story, the first real book I’d ever bought, and the first book I would give as a gift. Could the shaggy-haired, green-eyed boy who rang up the purchase understand how important this moment was for me? I don’t think so. After all, he stood behind that cash register all day selling books, as if it were nothing special. Muzak Christmas carols filled the air. Lights twinkled from every storefront. I had never felt the Christmas spirit as much as I did at that moment. But when he asked me if I wanted the book gift-wrapped, I hesitated and shook my head, even though the wrapping paper there was much more beautiful than the kind we had at home from Ann & Hope.

  Instead, I tucked the slim book in its Waldenbooks paper bag inside my jacket, and walked home along the snowy streets, past the dilapidated mill houses with their flashing blue Christmas lights, over the bridge that crossed the sluggish Pawtuxet River, past the three churches, and up the big slippery hill. Once inside and warm, I pulled my treasure from the bag. Then I carefully opened the book the tiniest bit, and read it from beginning to end without cracking the spine. I think I began to cry at the first line: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?” By the end, when Jenny dies of leukemia and her young husband, Oliver, delivers that iconic line—“Love means not ever having to say you’re sorry”—to his wealthy father, I was sobbing.

  Certainly I was sobbing because Jenny died, and because Mr. Barrett had acted so mean to her and Oliver, and because the father and son were together again. But looking back on it now, I think too that this story of a blue-collar girl from Rhode Island falling in love with a rich Harvard jock made me—perhaps for the first time—aware of deep class differences. In my town, though there were a few wealthy families with lawyer or businessman fathers, most of us were varying degrees of middle class. We were used to the kids, many of them, on welfare; we barely took notice of the kids who couldn’t afford rain or snow boots and came to school with Wonder Bread bags tied around their shoes with rubber bands. Jenny and Ollie, I realized, came from two different worlds. And those worlds didn’t easily accept each other. What would my place be in this big world I wanted so desperately to see? Through teary eyes, I closed the book and wrapped it in the flimsy Ann & Hope Christmas paper, topping it with a big silver bow.

  Since that long-ago day, I have given more books than I can count as Christmas presents. But none have meant as much to me. That first one showed me something I already knew—that owning books is not a waste of money, not at all. But I now realize that it was my first step toward a kind of independence, entering into that world of books and language that was so foreign to my family. But not to me—no, I understood that I would always buy books, that I was a reader and a writer and that to be surrounded by books would always bring me comfort.

  THIS SUMMER, I FOUND myself in the throes of upheaval. Newly divorced, I was leaving my home of almost twenty years, a cozy red Colonial built in 1792, and moving across town with my twelve-year-old daughter Annabelle to a big bright loft in a renovated factory. Of course the week I had to pack and move was the hottest one of the summer, with temperatures and humidity in the nineties, and that old house had no air-conditioning and windows that stuck shut when they swelled. In those hot, airless rooms I packed up my married life—the carefully saved art my kids had made, my enormous stash of yarn, the Fiestaware and Italian pottery I’d collected. My final task: the rows and rows of books that lined three walls of one room.

  Back when I moved into that house, on another summer day, I’d happily alphabetized the books, separating them into categories: fiction, memoir, biography, poetry, drama, reference. How happy I’d been that day as slowly the books took their places, as my daughter Grace twirled around the empty dining room (we couldn’t yet afford a table and chairs for it) in her sparkly tutu and my son, Sam, sang “Wonder of Wonders” from Fiddler on the Roof. And what a contrast this moving day was, this taking down of all those books and putting them into boxes—FICTION A–C, FICTION M. Sam grown and living in Brooklyn, Grace dead fourteen years, my heart, once so full, now broken again.

  I cried as I packed my books. And I screamed. But I smiled too, a lot. As I held each book, deciding if I really needed to take it with me, I could remember reading—and sometimes rereading—it. Here were all my Alice Adams short story collections, a writer hardly known anymore but whose stories I still quote when I teach; my small paperback of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, read on a New York City subway; Bright Lights, Big City, which I bought at the Spring Street Bookstore the day it came out; my dog-eared copies of The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald and So Long, See You Tomorrow; three copies of C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, all given to me after Grace died to help soothe my grief, which it did (“Her absence is like the sky,” Lewis wrote, “it covers everything”). So many books, each of them returning a piece of myself to me—starry-eyed optimist, new writer, single Manhattan young woman, grief-stricken mother.

  My new home had no built-in bookshelves, so my books stayed in the dozens and dozens of boxes until the new IKEA shelves were built; the older, smaller shelves found places in the loft; and still more bookshelves were bought and assembled. Until one day I looked up and the boxes were gone, the books—alphabetized and by genre—lined up again. What is this life? I ask myself almost every day as I look around at my new home, so big and open and sunny. I have two cats, Hermia and Gertrude, who sleep on my feet and lap. I’ve bought a turntable so that I can play my albums again, those songs of my youth also returned to me. And the lines that had so moved me as a teenager, that played even as I sat on my bed and read Love Story, move me still, perhaps even more true all these years later: I have my books, and my poetry to protect me . . .

  Lesson 5: How to Write a Book

  • The Grapes of Wrath BY JOHN STEINBECK •

  IF ONE BOOK CARRIED MAGIC, IMAGINE WHAT FOUR books could do. Four books nestled together in a box wrapped in red-and-green striped paper, topped with an extravagantly large bow, like a red dahlia had perched there, sitting under the Christmas tree with a tag bearing my name. Those four books were all by John Steinbeck, a writer most kids today have read by ninth grade when they were assigned Of Mice and Men. In my junior high, however, we weren’t assigned novels. We read the short stories in our English literature textbook: “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson; “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Herman Melville; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” by Mark Twain. And I loved those stories, loved taking essay tests on them and discussing them in class, loved reading them and thinking about them. Why did Bartleby prefer not to? What would I do if I was the one chosen in “The Lottery”? Could I have sat through Simon Wheeler’s long story about Jim Smiley and his jumping frog?

  But oh! A novel! And that Christmas of 1973, four novels!

  “He’s really good,” my brother Skip said as I held that boxed set of Steinbeck in my hands. I wonder now if he saw that his gift made me cry? Somehow, he knew the real me; knew that I was someone who wanted nothing more than to read books; knew that, as C. S. Lewis said, “You can never get a book long enough to suit me.” Two of those Steinbeck books were big, fat ones, the kind I loved to read most: The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden. The other two were slender: Of Mice and Men and Travels with Charley.

  Skip was telling me how Steinbeck had won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature. But I had no idea of the import of those prizes, or even what the distinction between them was. I managed to say thank you and to give him a quick kiss on his bearded cheek before I slipped away. Alone, with the twenty-four hours of Christmas music playing on the radio downstairs and the smell of Mama Rose’s baking lasagna wafting up to me, I tore off the plastic and let the books drop from the box into my lap. I touched each cover in turn, held each book in my hand, opened to random pages. “Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime . . .” “I reme
mber about the rabbits, George . . .” “All great and precious things are lonely . . .” And then this: “To the red country and part of the gray of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.”

  I read that first line of The Grapes of Wrath, and I couldn’t stop.

  THE GRAPES OF WRATH was published on April 14, 1939. Steinbeck wrote it in just four months, from June to October of 1938, when he was thirty-six years old. He put himself on a writing schedule to complete the novel in 100 days, averaging 2,000 words a day. Though some days, when the pressures of his life intruded (houseguests, buying and renovating a ranch) he only wrote 800 words, other days he wrote as many as 2,200. On October 26, he wrote the final 775 words and beneath them, in inch-and-a-half-high letters: “END.”

  Steinbeck had that ending in mind from the start, an image that he wrote toward, something the writer John Irving does too. “I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters,” Irving told The Paris Review in 1986. “I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don’t know the ending first?”

  When I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, so many things about writing a novel became clear to me. Plot. Character. Conflict. Escalating stakes. Metaphor. The Grapes of Wrath begins with a drought and ends with a flood. Years later I would hear a lecture by a writer on this very device, which she called the rules of polarity. In my own novel The Knitting Circle, the protagonist, Mary, is empty-handed, both literally and emotionally, at the beginning; the final image is of abundance, Mary holding so much yarn that her arms are overflowing. When the Joads are in a rain-soaked barn at the end, I understood the impact of such a polarity.

  In that barn they encounter a starving man and his son, whom the father had given their last bit of food. The dying man needs soup or milk to survive. The eldest Joad daughter, Rose of Sharon, has had a stillborn child. Ma Joad and Rose of Sharon “looked deep into each other,” and Rose of Sharon says, “Yes.” Ma smiles: “I knowed you would. I knowed.”

  For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort around her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.

  I had never read an ending that affected me like this one of Rose of Sharon giving her milk to the dying stranger. Speechless, I read the final scene again and again, its power never lessening. Even as a teenager, I understood the symbolism and power inherent in Rose of Sharon’s selfless act. In A Life in Letters, Steinbeck said that he had “tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he [the reader] takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness.” Referring to there being five layers in the book, he added that “a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.” It may seem hyperbolic, but I believe understanding this not only shaped me as a writer but also led me to become an English major when I went to college. I wanted more symbolism, more of those layers in literature. I wanted to find as many as I could, in both my reading and my writing life.

  •

  FOR YEARS MY math whiz brother was a mysterious blur in my life. Five years older than me, he mostly kept his distance from his bookworm little sister. I was, in the way of all little sisters, a nuisance. I cried if he sat too close to me in the backseat of the car. I cried when he got control of the television and forced me to sit through Combat! or The Three Stooges. I snooped on him and his first girlfriend, a tough-looking blonde with plum-colored suede boots and a leather miniskirt. I snooped on him and his buddies when they whispered together in his room, the air thick with exotic, musty, sweaty smells. He sat across from me at the dinner table, reigning over the bowl of mashed potatoes, getting extra pieces of steak from our grandmother, always the slide ruler nearby. “Does your face hurt?” he’d ask me. “’Cause it’s killing me!”

  Then he was gone, off to college in his raspberry Bermuda shorts and matching polo shirt. I barely noticed. By then, I was entering junior high and my world became slumber parties and crushes on boys. I never even thought about Skip. Until he returned home that summer, now long-haired and wearing ripped jeans and pocket T-shirts, driving a lime-green VW Bug. He brought boys with him. And not just any boys, but college boys. Loads of them, each in their own VW Bug. Once again, he seemed to reign, this time over the picnic table in the backyard with a cooler of beer beside it. He worked that summer as a stock boy at Zayre, a local discount store, and there he acquired a cool, aloof, freckle-faced girlfriend who wore brown suede moccasins and a hard stare.

  I kept a diary back then, mostly documenting how boring my life was. The one glimmer of emotion came in March of that year when I heard that Paul McCartney had gotten married. Oh God, I wrote, please don’t let it be true. The next day’s entry: Bored.

  But when my brother’s new girlfriend arrived, hanging back by the front door, glaring, clutching his hand, I began to write about her. And them. If I had been a more mature twelve-year-old, I might have recognized the sexual tension between them, understood that her constant desire to “go now” was sexual desire. Instead, they seemed oddly mysterious, with their whispering and disappearances. I became the Nancy Drew of romance, mistaking that sexual energy for what, I believed, must be love.

  This, of course, made me even more of a nuisance. No, I couldn’t go with them to the mall. Or for ice cream. Or on a walk. Or to the beach. Or anywhere. Still, I persisted in asking, and reported to my mother every time I was rebuked. My mother knew exactly what was going on, and she didn’t like it, didn’t like this brown-moccasined girl who kept my brother out late, made him miss dinner with the family, and wouldn’t join a game of cards with us. Take your sister, she’d insist, and sometimes he would relent. I’d sit squeezed into the backseat of the Bug, watching his girlfriend’s hand rub his thigh.

  By Skip’s junior year, they’d moved in together and he hardly came home at all that summer. And then, as his college graduation approached and he got a job with a chemical company in Connecticut, they announced they were getting married. Reluctantly, his fiancée asked me to be a bridesmaid, and she and her friends mostly ignored me through the endless bridal showers and gown fittings that ensued. The May day they got married I stood holding a bouquet of daisies, dressed in a pale yellow chiana gown, as “Sunrise, Sunset” played. But I was insignificant—to the wedding, and to my brother.

  Or so I thought.

  When he returned from his honeymoon in Europe later that summer, he brought me a gift—a cork box shaped like a windmill from Portugal. Perhaps he knew I was already chasing after windmills? We sat at the picnic table in the backyard together, his new gold wedding band glinting in the hot sun.

  I asked him about his travels, and he told me that there was a shortage of cork trees and someday wine would all have twist-off caps. That was the thing about my brother, the thing I didn’t realize until after he died nine years later. He was a visionary, always predicting technological advances and changes in the world as we knew it. Years later he would buy one of the first Betamaxes, showing me the miracle of taping television shows and watching them whenever you wanted to, zipping past the commercials. And a few years after that, he was one of the first people in the United States to get corrective eye surgery, restoring his bad eyesight to twenty-twenty vision and eliminating the need to wear glasses. So long ago was this that the surgery, performed by a Russian ophthalmologist, was done with scalpels instead of lasers.

  That afternoon in our backya
rd, Skip asked me about myself, as if I were someone he’d just met. “What do you do?” he asked me. The answer was that I did a lot. I listed my activities: Marsha Jordan Girl, traveling back and forth to Boston to do fashion shows and mother-daughter teas, a floater at Jordan Marsh covering people’s breaks and vacations in the Linens or Misses department. As I told him all this, he cocked his head and looked at me as if for the first time. He grinned. My brother had the most charming grin.

  “Mostly,” I said, “I read.”

  BEFORE SKIP GAVE me that boxed set of Steinbeck, no one had ever given me a book as a gift. But the gift was even bigger than he’d imagined. When I read the first line of The Grapes of Wrath—“To the red country and part of the gray of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”—some writerly thing broke loose in me. “Spread a page with shining,” Steinbeck once advised writers, and I could see that shine as I read. I understood it. I had read big, fat novels before, losing myself in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Those sweeping stories, tragedies and triumphs spanning years and years, had captivated me for their otherness. But The Grapes of Wrath was so American, and the Joads so familiar somehow, and the language so lyrical, and the setting so real, that by reading it I saw what writers could do. And it dazzled me.

  For years I had asked English teachers and guidance counselors how to become a writer. No one could tell me. John Steinbeck could though. Write like this, he seemed to be saying. Tell our story. Tell your story. Steinbeck intentionally wrote The Grapes of Wrath in five layers, intending to “rip the reader’s nerves to rags by making him participate in its actuality.” By writing the novel this way, Steinbeck ensured it would have an impact on all kinds of readers, and that impact might be personal, historical, sociological, or political. Grace Paley said: “No story is ever one story, it’s always at least two. The one on the surface and the one bubbling beneath.” I understood this somehow when I read The Grapes of Wrath, those layers slowly revealing themselves to me, showing me how a novel can have such breadth and touch anyone.