I blame Harlan Ellison.
He was my first literary crush. Picture all those little 6th grade girls, talking about the Partridge Family and trying out for cheerleading, and then add me in, dragging around my dog-eared copy of I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Hey, maybe I didn’t get to wear the kicky outfit, but come on — that was a really good book!
It just got deeper from there, my love affair with words. Fortunately, my asthma was severe enough to get me out of gym class and into the library, where I pounded the last nail into the coffin of my social life by reading exclusively everything in the science fiction section.
As I got older, I learned to mix with my own kind. We could be spotted by our inability to tan (or play dodgeball) and our desire to somehow share what we had read. I remember the summer I read The Mists of Avalon, or as my mother calls it, “that book you love and everyone else hates that you try to get everyone to read.” At the time I truly thought if only I could get people to read it, everything would change. (See here for the fate of that particular book.)
Eventually, friends stepped in to get me to look at books not set in 1) the Middle Ages or 2) on a spaceship. I will always be grateful to the friend who pressed Jane Austen into my trembling hand. Pride and Prejudice is now one of my favorites, but she went too far when she gave me Mansfield Park. Should’ve left well enough alone.
When I moved to Key West, I got a job as a disc jockey, and believe me, if you work as a DJ in the Keys, you have a part time job unless you like living in a refrigerator box. I was lucky enough to work at Key West Island Books, where I was introduced to folks like Jim Hall, Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen. When it was time to move on, I found that friends didn’t want to help me move (again) because of the inevitable mountain of cartons full of books, and writing ‘fragile’ on them?
Isn’t fooling anyone, at least not more than once.
These days I have bookshelves in every room of the house, including the bathroom. Amazon sends me birthday cards.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night just to look at them all, all my friends, each one its own adventure. So while my resume looks like I played Jimmy Buffet records for tourists and went on to talk about the traffic, my real life is on those shelves. I used to believe that if you could get someone to read, it could change things.
Now I’m absolutely certain it’s true.
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