How Books Have Changed My Life

When the words and characters shape the person you will become, there is no choice but to keep turning the pages.

By Louisa Hall, Illustration by Jessica Wetterer

Books have been changing my life since the first one I read on my own. My parents’ story is that they came home from a dinner party and found me in their bed reading Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, weeping uncontrollably. Not only had I learned that those strings of black shapes on the white page could impart significance, but I’d discovered that in order to love as nobly and as well as that admirable tree, I’d have to sacrifice fundamental parts of myself.

When I was a sophomore in high school, I wrote an essay about that first reading experience, extolling the virtues of selflessness in true love. Handing the essay back after class, my English teacher sniffed that The Giving Tree had ruined her last relationship. She suggested The Awakening. That week, I stayed up late every night consuming the story of Edna Pontellier’s quest to find self-fulfillment. With Edna, trapped in a loveless marriage, I began to comprehend that a good relationship might not involve giving up crucial parts of myself so the man I’m in love with can go build a nice boat. I began to feel a little offended. Was I meant to believe that fulfillment existed in reducing myself to a stump so some boy can enjoy playing captain? I’d rather, I thought, walk into the ocean myself.

So there I was at 13, and already there were two women within me: that generous stump and Edna Pontellier. Then I read Anna Karenina, and I was also Dolly and Anna. I curbed my expectations of life and loved a man who was unfaithful. I discarded a boring, kind man for the sake of adventure. I read War and Peace and I was Natasha, leaving the pleasures of childhood to settle into a marriage. Before I’d had a real relationship, I had hundreds. Without having to walk into the ocean or throw myself under a train, without having to cut off my arms or be faithful to an inveterate cad, the wisdom of those experiences was already within me.

Since then, of course, I have, in fact, been faithful to an inveterate cad, and I have also discarded a kind man for the sake of adventure. But in the wake of all my real experience, I’ve had the benefit of consulting a pantheon of interesting fictional women on the best way to emerge from such heartbreak with my integrity and my selfhood intact.

Imagine going through life without the luxury of practicing first in great books. Imagine having no recourse to the characters we’ve loved in literature. I consist of a great and varied assemblage of real and imaginary women and men, and I am so much the better for that.

In the moments in history when people have reacted most fearfully and angrily against books—when books are burned and readers imprisoned—the fear is always that books infect a reader’s mind, that Humbert Humbert will reach into an innocent brain and poison it to lust after children, that the novels of Thomas Hardy will tinker with the soul of even the most pious Christian, making her question if God really exists.

Those fearful people are right to imagine that books can change the way we think. But that isn’t a bad thing. That’s the best thing about reading. We read and the words enter our minds. They change us, we who resist change with such fervor. Reading good books, we become part The Giving Tree and part Edna Pontellier. We titrate our generosity with the desire for self-fulfillment. We insist on knowing ourselves before the best option is throwing ourselves in front of a train. We are larger and more multiple and more wise for the characters that reach into our brains and take over our lives while we’re turning their pages.

See Louisa Hall at the Texas Book Festival
Oct. 17, CSPAN tent, 2-2:45 p.m.
Artificial Intelligence—Fact or Fiction?
texasbookfestival.org

December’s Last Word topic will be “The Joy of Giving.”
To be considered, email a 500-word submission by Nov. 1 to submissions@awmediainc.com.