The Book that Made Me

by Various

  I said, “Thank you, but I’d rather keep it.”

  I’ve still got it, I hope, somewhere in the accumulated trash of my life.

  My First Reader

  Ursula Dubosarsky

  Some children never stop reading

  I remember when I learned to read. I was six.

  Slowly, strangely, the letters gathered meaning –

  That procession of long-spotted necks

  “Giraffes” reaching upwards across the page

  Of my very first reader. A Day at the Zoo

  With Jill and Ken. “Here is the cage

  Of laughing monkeys – look!” says Father. Blue

  Is Mother’s dress, blue the sea, the sky.

  Home in the yellow car, sunlight fading

  Shhh, Baby is asleep. Goodbye, goodbye!

  The elephant’s trunk is waving …

  Words and pictures – the dream revealing –

  That’s why some children never stop reading.

  In Folded Arms

  Cath Crowley

  I read Zigzag Street by Nick Earls one warm day, while I was sitting on the verandah of a house I shared with three other people. It was early spring – pink air, a sharp blue sky, the kind of weather that a friend once said made him feel hopeful and sexy – two things that seemed far away as I sat in a deep wicker chair, un-showered and wearing pyjamas.

  I’m pretty sure I stole my copy. I can’t remember from where – maybe a housemate that I lived with when I first moved to Melbourne. It definitely belonged to someone before me, and probably to a few people before them.

  Over the years I’ve found all kinds of things in books – letters, shopping lists, bus tickets, dreams. I’ve found tiny spiders, flattened cigarettes and stale tobacco in the creases. I found a condom once (wrapped and unused but ten years out of date – a story in itself). Mostly, they leave circles and lines, parts of themselves.

  My copy of Zigzag Street has what looks like teeth marks near the spine on the front cover. There are two coffee rings on the title page, and an inscription from a past reader in purple pen and small letters: Dear Chop, Hope this book brings you some relief, as it did me. Love Chop xxx

  I’d never met either of the Chops, and I never did. But I imagined they’d needed the same kind of relief as I did. I’d just broken up with someone. I don’t remember the details, except to say that I was left feeling pretty shit, and if I’m honest, sort of insane.

  I’d seen other friends go through that kind of insanity; the kind where you have to keep busy or you’ll do something stupid like calling. And calling. And calling. And calling. And calling. The two of you saying terrible things to each other every time, wanting to get closer but getting further and further away.

  I was in my early twenties, I think. Technically it was the second time I’d been dumped, but both times were by the same person, so in my memory I’ve squashed the two hurts together into the one event. It was definitely the first time I’d been in love and trying to get out of it.

  I don’t remember starting the book, the moment of picking it up and reading. I remember the author’s inscription though: This is for SG, for support and foolishness, both without limit. I’m fairly sure that I underlined the second part of it – but I can’t remember doing it, so maybe it was someone who’d been unlimitedly foolish before me.

  The book tells the story of Richard Derrington – he’s doing it tough, the blurb tells us. Ann’s trashed him and his job seems pointless. Tuesday, Richard tells us, seems moderately fucked by ten.

  One of the Chops had marked that line. I marked it too. It was Sunday when I was reading, about midday, and my life seemed to be monumentally fucked. So that made four of us who’d been where I was – me, Chop, Richard (and so I assumed, at least in part, Nick Earls).

  I won’t tell you the rest of Richard’s story – except to say that the plot was nothing like my break, but the specifics, the feelings, the lines about music and takeaway food and loss and lunacy that can attack you, felt written for me. Of course they felt like that. Nick Earls is brilliant at capturing what it’s like to be human.

  Zigzag Street made me laugh. It kept me occupied, and in another world that was just to the left of mine for a day. The last line – read the book, read it – gave me that feeling I’ve had so many times since – momentum. Because the right words, in the right order and rhythm, mess with you in exactly the right way. Sentences written well point at things with their shape – here, look at this sadness. Here, look at this light.

  There was the exact right combination of humour and insight in Zigzag Street that day. I felt stupid along with every other human in the world.

  I’m pretty sure I chased it down with Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Markus Zusak’s Wolfe Brothers Trilogy. Second-hand copies both of them, and marked up by ludicrous humans in love before me.

  I haven’t read Zigzag Street all the way through since then. I dip into parts of it, and I read the last line. It’s sitting on my desk as I write this – the same copy that I held on the verandah that day. On the pages, invisible to other readers for the most part, but completely visible to me, is that day in spring, the house where I read it, Chop, who’d needed and read it before me, the person that I loved and was trying to forget, the person I would love after them – who arrived at the end of that spring.

  I can still remember how I felt when I finished Zigzag Street. I was smiling, holding it in folded arms. I still felt a bit shit, sure. But at least I didn’t feel so alone.

  What Would Edith Do?

  Emily Maguire

  I don’t remember what made me buy Grand Days by Frank Moorhouse. Given I was, as a teenager, constantly broke and constantly hungry for books, it’s likely I picked it up because it was as thick as the mattress I slept on each night. Thick books meant days, rather than mere hours, of distraction and escape.

  I’ll be honest: if I’d known how much of this book was taken up with discussing the inner workings of the League of Nations, an ill-fated organisation founded in 1920 to resolve international disputes without war, I probably wouldn’t have given it a chance. Re-reading over the years, I’ve come to appreciate the humour with which Moorhouse describes the machinations of international diplomacy and am now moved by the soaring, though ultimately futile, sense of hope driving the League. At seventeen, however, world politics felt as relevant to my life as yak farming, so I mostly skimmed those bits.

  What did feel urgently, thrillingly relevant were the adventures of the protagonist: Edith Campbell Berry, a young Australian woman who goes to Geneva in the 1920s to take up a post at the League. In the very first chapter she shares a meal on a train with the older, charming Major Ambrose Westwood and ends up pashing him in her private compartment. By chapter three she’s firing an ivory and silver pistol, riding through the streets of Geneva dressed as a sexy cowgirl and shagging Ambrose while he wears her silk underwear. I loved her instantly and would have trawled through any number of pages about committee meetings to get to her next daring escapade.

  Being a voracious reader I had, of course, come across many fictional heroines who did cool, adventurous stuff; what was different about Edith was that she was nothing special. She was clever, yes, and had the advantage of a good education, but she was not breathtakingly beautiful, impossibly talented or born to royalty or great wealth. Despite being a decade older than me, and living before my grandparents were born, I related to her instantly and entirely. She was the role model I didn’t even know I’d been searching for. She was who I wanted to be when I grew up.

  I can’t emphasise enough how significant this was. Although I was lucky enough to have some truly wonderful women in my life, I didn’t have any role models for ambition and adventure. Within me there had always been this drive to seek out new lands, to explore new ideas, to collect experience just for the sake of it, but no one I knew did any of those things. Because of that, I’d gotten the idea that people who did amazing things were themselve
s naturally amazing. They were brilliant, brave, well-born, breathtakingly beautiful, knowledgeable about everything and never doubted themselves. In other words, I had the idea that adventure was not for the likes of me.

  And now here was this fictional heroine: Edith Campbell Berry, who was, in terms of talent and beauty and courage, an awful lot like me, and who constantly chucked herself into situations she wasn’t prepared for and might not be able to handle. What’s more, her tendency to rush in and stuff things up was not treated in this glorious book as a failing or a sign that she was too big for her boots; it was shown as an intentional and marvellous way of living.

  This was momentous. I had been raised to be ultra-aware of every risk. I wasn’t allowed to walk home from school or ride a bike and was constantly warned about the dangers of choking, drowning, being kidnapped, hitting my head, breaking a bone or catching a rare, permanently disfiguring disease. My mum would call out “Don’t get hit by a car” literally every time I went anywhere there might be roads to cross. By the time I finished primary school I was scared of pretty much everything and everyone.

  At twelve I started at an exclusive, selective high school and began to absorb a different kind of fear: the fear that the rest of my life was being unalterably affected by every single thing I did. Every piece of homework, every exam, every question answered in class counted. Miss one day of school, mess up one test or hand in one assignment late and I would have started the terrible downhill slope that ends in dropping out of school, working behind a fast-food counter and living in a cockroach-infested slum.

  By fourteen I was alternately paralysed by terror about my future and driven manic by the feeling I was wasting my life. I ricocheted between playing perfect daughter and rebel-without-a-cause. I was a frightened, confused, angry mess of a girl and by sixteen the terrible predictions came true: I was indeed a high-school dropout supporting herself behind a McDonald’s counter (no cockroach-infested slum, but I was sure it was coming).

  It was a terrible time. I’d quit school and cut my parents out of my life because I wanted to be free, only to find myself more restricted than ever. I had to work three jobs so I could make enough money to pay my rent and have some left over for books and alcohol. The books and alcohol were essential: my only means of escaping the grim, disappointing reality I’d created for myself.

  And then, along came Edith and her realisation that:

  … she needed now in her life to put herself in a position which made her productively nervous. Even if it was a bit uncomfortable at times. She had to be where she didn’t know quite what was happening next, to be living precipitously. She wanted to be in the presence of people who made her a little nervous. She wanted to be among objects, buildings and art works which made her mindful and sentient, which could cause her, now and then, to be in awe.

  And something clicked. No, clicked is too mild a word. Something kicked. Smashed. Exploded. I hadn’t ended up in a mess because I’d taken risks; I’d ended up a mess because the risks I’d taken were small, meaningless acts designed to show I was capable of rebellion while never forcing me to actually push beyond my own limits.

  While I was still absorbing all this, another passage from Grand Days slapped me across the face:

  … it was a nonsensical paradox, to talk of planning for the unforeseeable. Life was a series of agile responses. How to modify the response precisely enough was the trick. Life was not technique. It was knack and artistry.

  Oh! Planning for the unforeseeable was nonsensical? Of course it was! Which meant that the adults who told me I’d ruined my life by leaving school, couldn’t actually know that. The future – my future – was unforeseeable!

  These ideas popped and crackled in my mind: risk and nervousness could be things to chase after, living a good life meant sometimes being in awe, and sometimes throwing myself into situations in which I couldn’t foresee the outcome. These things had never, ever occurred to me. Once they did, I was on my way.

  I won’t claim that Grand Days alone changed my life or made me who I am – there were other books and writers and, most importantly, experiences that mattered as much or more. What Grand Days did was kickstart me by providing a role model, someone not terribly unlike me who decided to tackle life head-on.

  For a time in my late teens and early twenties I would, when facing a big decision or difficult situation, ask myself “What Would Edith Do?” I did it when deciding to go back and complete my education despite feeling terrified that everyone would look down on me for being a loser dropout who always smelled like French fries. I did it when deciding to camp my way around Europe in the middle of winter (the only time I could afford to go). I did it in campgrounds and bars and train stations and airports around the world. I did it when trying to find the courage to send my first novel – a document I had sweated blood over every night for a year and which nobody even knew existed – to a publisher.

  I did it so often it became part of my thought process. I did it until I was living in such a way that I no longer needed Edith’s example: I had become the heroine of my own life. Never mind what Edith would do, look what Emily is doing!

  I didn’t think about Edith for a long time. I kept doing stuff that would have blown the mind of teenaged-me. I had this living large thing totally under control. And then, not so long ago, I found myself in an austere, cavernous Communist Party meeting hall in the remote mountains of North-East Vietnam, in a room full of dignitaries, including several high-ranking officers in the former North Vietnamese Army. Abruptly, I was pulled to my feet and pushed towards the microphone to make a speech. My first thought was, “Goddamn it, Emily, this is what you get for jumping into a military van with a bunch of poets with whom you’re unable to communicate beyond ‘cheers’. Time to fake a fainting fit and get the hell out of here.”

  My second thought was calm and clear: “What Would Edith Do?” Well, she would speak, of course. So I did. As I could speak no Vietnamese and no one there could speak English, I’m still not sure why I was asked to address the group or why they applauded my unintelligible speech so enthusiastically. Perhaps they were simply admiring the “knack and artistry” with which I approached a daunting situation.

  Later that day as I drank home-brewed rice-whisky in the back room of the local political head honcho’s house – where I had been taken to view his teapot collection (yes, really) – I paused in my “series of agile responses” to reflect on what a marvellous life I was living. I made a toast to Edith, and the elderly Vietnamese men around me raised their glasses and I knew that Edith would be terribly pleased.

  Putting the World to Rights

  Catherine Mayo

  I was only six or seven when I first discovered Barbara Leonie Picard’s The Odyssey of Homer. It was Christmas, the sun was blasting down and I was sitting on a New Zealand beach, itching to go for a swim.

  It all happened because my mother had a theory about cramp. The theory went like this: if you swam with your tummy full of food, you got cramp and drowned. Lunch was the obvious danger meal.

  To keep me and my two brothers safe from certain death, Mum had to be pretty cunning. Every school holidays we’d spend all day, rain or shine, at Sandy Bay on Waiheke Island, swimming or mucking about in boats.

  We kids weren’t too fussed about cramp. Cramp was something weird that happened to other people – old people. It was years and years later that I found out that Granddad’s best friend had drowned. He’d gone for a swim one afternoon and died. I don’t know how long it was after lunch, but I’m not surprised Mum was a bit nervous on the subject.

  Her trick was to read aloud. She was a good reader, and the books she chose – Swallows and Amazons, The Hobbit, the Narnia books and Barbara Leonie Picard’s retelling of The Odyssey – were always gripping and often attracted half the kids on the beach. After the post-lunch chapter from the current book-to-stop-us-coming-to-a-horrible-end, we were allowed back in the water.

  The night reading sess
ion was also special. There was no bathroom in our tiny holiday cottage – not even any hot running water. At bedtime, Mum would boil a jug and we’d wash our faces, hands and feet (in that order) in a tin basin. Then we’d tuck ourselves up in our sleeping bags in the kids’ bedroom, waiting to be read to.

  First off, we’d take turns bouncing the person in the top bunk. The mattresses were supported by woven wire mesh, so we could lie on the bottom bunk and shove the upper mattress up and down with our feet. That wire mesh got pretty saggy – it was a bit like sleeping in a hammock. Once Mum could take control of the situation, she’d read another chapter.

  Sometimes Dad would take her place. Dad was hopeless. He was a scientist, specialising in plant diseases. He was also a terrible tease – a bad combination. If the hero or heroine was walking through a pine forest, Dad would have them stop in horror at the sight of a dying Pinus radiata tree, infected with Phytophthora cinnamomi. If they went into a garden, they’d find a glasshouse full of tomato plants riddled with blight.

  “Daaad,” we’d yell in fury, “it doesn’t say that.”

  “Oh yes, it does,” he’d answer, holding the book out of reach so we couldn’t grab it and check.

  “No, it does not,” we’d shout. Mum, a stickler for the written text, would be summoned and Dad would get the sack.

  Because I was the only girl and the youngest, Mum had to find books that would appeal to us all. One summer I insisted on Heidi, but my brothers vetoed it after two chapters. Or maybe it was only one. The Swallows and Amazons series, on the other hand, was a big favourite, perfect for a bunch of outdoor kids who loved boats. My eldest brother was so inspired by their adventures, he became a keen, competitive sailor.