Free Women

Do you think the books we read choose us?

Sometimes I feel like that. It's happened a couple of times to me. Where I've read something that resonated with me so much that it seemed like fate that I picked up the book at all.

I'm reading the Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing right now. My cousin gave it to me as a present last year before I left England. I'm about halfway through right now. It's a very feminist book, it was written before the feminist movement in the 7o's but it's about all the things women from the 70's were fighting for.

The right to choose to be married or single. The right to choose whatever work they wanted. To raise children on their own. To use birth control.

But mostly it's about learning to be alone. Which is something I think I've only recently learned to do after the nuclear fallout of my first great love and heartbreak. It wasn't 'clicking' when I first read it...partly because of the structure.

But now I get it. And it feels nice to read something that mirrors how I feel.

There are a couple other books that I read that felt like they chose me, instead of the other way around.

When I was 17 I read Echo by Francesca Lia Block. It's a book that changed my life. I read it towards the end of school when everything was confusing and I was falling in love for the first time and it was all new and frightening.

Everything Echo felt and did I could identify with. More than anything reading it crystallized the vague idea I had of how I wanted to write. I don't write anything close to the type of liquid poetry FLB uses in her books, but it taught me a little more about my own style and how to write.

The only other book that's given me a light bulb moment was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. I've known the whole story for a long time. I read the abridged version when I was little, I watched movie versions, and I watched a play.

But I hadn't gotten round to actually reading the whole book, until last year. I read it during my lunch breaks at TopShop. I read it on the way back from the British Embassy when I was crying in the back of a taxi because my working holiday visa was rejected.

Most of all I read it when my life felt like it had no purpose. When I was headed in a direction that wasn't my choice. I felt trapped and stifled. I felt like Jane. I felt just like this Victorian girl who wanted to be in charge of her own destiny. Who wouldn't settle for anything less than what she wanted. Who always knew what she wanted.

I wanted to be that strong.

I don't quite have Jane's strength. But I'm getting there. =)

What books changed your life?