life-ruiner

on "Bibliophobia," motherhood's plotlessness, and returning to reading after maternal brain fog

Time has begun to feel strange to me. Stretched-out and gauzy. I feel the most un-tethered I’ve felt in years, like I am unable to locate myself in any chronology. I think this is a reaction to my youngest son leaving the baby stage (he’s 21 months old! how?) in combination with not being pregnant or planning to conceive for an undetermined amount of time. I really underestimated how much pregnancy and postpartum had rooted my life in some sort of timeline. My baby doesn’t change so quickly now, my sense of time is stretching like taffy. I turn back to the seasons to keep my feet on the ground, but that doesn’t feel like enough. I need another drum beat, so I find my way to one — and that rhythm has been, to my surprise, reading fiction.

It is surprising because I am still so exhausted. Carousel of caregiving every morning, afternoon, and night. Trying to work more earnestly on new sewing pattern projects , aka my real job. A life so full of so many different flavors of labor, so much so that true rest had begun to feel like a fleeting memory. But it was dread that got me — this year’s relentless newscycle (full of huge real problems!) filled me with so much fear, stress, and looming desperation that I finally stepped away from it a little so as not to self-implode. I was wasting so much time on my phone, thinking that was all the attention I had to offer, tiny useless bursts. And for a time, while Ben was tiny, that may have been true. But the dread! So, now, instead of doomscrolling, I am reading more books after the kids go to bed than I have in many years — novels mostly. I sit on the couch next to my husband (who, quite the cinephile, is always watching something kind of obscure that I’m only sometimes into) and just exhale into a book. It feels amazing. Breezing through gorgeous thick novels, digesting them like the meal that they are.

Reading Sarah Chihaya’s Bibliophobia recently, a passage early in the memoir’s first essay caught me off-guard: “I want to think of reading not as productivity but as a kind of produce: something that grows in whatever unpredictable way it will, sometimes smooth and beautiful and delicious, sometimes bitter and gnarled and thorny. I want to think with writers who… produce books like a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins; fruit for fruit’s sake, not for the sake of whatever moral preserve or pedagogical jelly might be made of it.” Fruit for fruit’s sake — I think those are the books I am most drawn too, too. The ones that feel like they were grown rather than manufactured. Energetically organic books. Books that flowed from the writer like a weighty instinct. Inevitable books, that come straight from the marrow. “Like a pumpkin vine grows pumpkins.”

That passage meant something to me because it explained to me why I read, but maybe even moreso, why I continue to write. I’ve all but abandoned the “career” of writing at this point. I know I don’t have the resilience or cleverness for it. Just like I knew that, despite lifelong love and devotion toward theater, I should not make it my career — that doing so may kill me. Writing-as-career feels that way too. But still, the pumpkin vine. It keeps growing pumpkins! Poems appear under me as if they are an egg I’ve laid. Is that a gross metaphor? I’m so sorry. The writing will continue, whether I sell it or not. And the reading? A deep, deep well I lower my little bucket into with increasing desperation, drinking my fill again and again. What of my “career” as reader? Not a career at all, instead a lifelong vocation, maybe. A mode of being I slip back into like a garment that, sometimes, fits perfectly.

I wonder, though, how it is affecting me, all these books read so quickly. It’s begun to feel gently obsessive. I always want to be reading. The moment I finish a book I soak it in for only a few hours (minutes?) before moving on to the next. I can’t let the silence hang too long or I feel like I begin to sink in it. I think I’m feeling afraid that I will soon not be able to read again. That I will lose this energy and speed. You see, for years I’ve had the opposite problem — reading so slowly, feeling so frustrated. I couldn’t focus. It would take me a month to get through a book, one plodding page at a time. I still felt like a “reader,” still enjoyed what I read, and maybe even absorbed it more with so much time for the words to sink in. But it was terribly tedious, to feel so stuck in each book. I blame brain fog, which has hit me hard during and after each of my two pregnancies. I blame not getting enough sleep. And I also blame my phone. I hate the way it pulls me from the page, little lightbox begging my precious attention. We all know something about that.

My reading now feels like I’m 12 years old on summer vacation. It’s such a vivid sense memory. Bringing home a heavy bag of novels from the library and reading them all, no problem, going back for more whenever I wanted. I plowed through my library’s YA-Fiction section. Some of those books absolutely glisten in my memory, the true treat of reading them. Opening a new book the moment after finishing one. Laying in bed, sitting in the sun, under the backyard tree, reading at the pool, staying up late. Feeling fully free, fully comfortable. What a privilege to be twelve in the summertime with a library card. My reading now is actually very far from the true twelve year old summer reading experience, because then I had days to fill and now I have approximately two hours after my boys go to bed each night before my eyes start to blur with sleepiness — but still! Book after book. It’s the voraciousness. The hunger. There’s an engine inside of me that hummed back to life. I’ve missed my reader self. She’s one of my favorite versions of who I am. She wants to feel a million different versions of life. She wants to find love everywhere.

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The only discomfort I feel about all of this reading is that I don’t quite know what it means. It’s like my meaning-making adult self is looking over my twelve-year-old shoulder. What does all of this reading add up to? Is the answer “nothing”? Is that ok? Or can I spin it into something helpful, something worth all of the time I am pouring into the well of reading? Can I become some sort of critic or thinker about these books? — Or, are these books seeping into me, changing me somehow? All these new stories clattering around my mind. And if they are changing me, even in some undetectable way, then what does that mean?

I think reading Bibliophobia brought up these questions. The book is largely about the way reading both saved and ruined Chihaya’s life, and it revolves around a mental breakdown that was largely spurred on by “bibliophobia” or fear of books. It sounds simple and even silly but it isn’t. The memoir, without saying so outright, regards books as somewhat magical objects — a feeling I share. But magical objects are not neutral, and I think Bibliophobia helped me ponder the possible darker side of reading. The memoir is a bit meandering and heavy (the first essay is by far the most clear and propulsive) but it does offer a strange and intense little mirror the reader can hold up to their own life of reading books. It’s tantalizing — to suddenly turn an appraising eye to one’s own reading. What has this meant to me? Why do I do it? What has it given and what has it taken away? At what point is reading risky? What is at stake? What is precious? How can I approach each book as if it may, in some big or small way, ruin my life?

I know I have read books that have ruined my life (my first life-ruiner was Anagrams by Lorrie Moore, that book very truly changed my brain chemistry in measureable ways). But, I am not sure I’m afraid of that anymore. Maybe I could afford to have my life “ruined” a little. Maybe I want to be shocked that much by a book, electrified, obliterated. Instead, I feel kind of soothed by my constant reading, lulled into a warmth of endless story, atmosphere, metronome. Nothing feels ruinous, even the very best, the most beautiful. Maybe if I was better at thinking. That’s where I fear I fall short. I am not, and probably never will be, a critic. I tend to process stories from an open, sort of all-trusting position. Books, movies, tv shows. Even relationships, things in real life. I don’t often seek ways to innovate or change what is happening. I most often enjoy the ride, feeling the story’s logic pulling me along, asking no questions, never looking back. I almost never can predict the ending of any book I read or movie I watch — in fact, I sometimes feel sort of upset when conflict comes up (as it must!) because I was enjoying just sort of existing within the world the story offered. Plotlessness comforts me — but I know this is not a popular opinion. I feel this is kind of a facile way to be, but you can’t really change your own natural proclivities. I am who I am. Homebody, creature of habit. I wouldn’t say I am easy to please, but I do know that I demand very little. I find it difficult to even write reviews of books. What did I think? How would I know?! When I finish a book, the biggest thing I remember about it, beyond plot or analysis or anything else, is the way it made me feel. The atmosphere of the book is what lingers. What little life was there inside?

All that to say to myself — calm down. Step aside, meaning-maker, let the twelve-year-old enjoy her summer. Maybe the books I read can just be neutral. Maybe I don’t need to have a take, and maybe they don’t even need to shock me or sink into me very much beyond feeling whatever feelings the book offers. A chance to travel, to feel the challenge of rising stakes without personal danger, to meet new people, new places, to enjoy a well-crafted unfolding of a story inside someone else’s mind — something I did not need to sustain or invent. Somewhere to visit, to lay down the burden of my own life for just a little while. In this time when my children are growing and very little else is happening, this time of little drama and little movement and no plot at all but so much loving effort and energy — this long summer of my life —I want nothing more than to soak it all in, with presence that is somehow infinite, and then in my slim spare time I want to, very briefly, forget my life, and therefore feel it. So maybe I don’t want my life to be ruined. I just want to work my way through a too-big stack of novels at my leisure, feeling everything.

Ruinous or not, I’m so comforted by this return to ease in reading. It was scary, to be honest, to have trouble getting through books. It felt like a real identity crisis. I never panicked about it — sort of understanding that it was really connected to this season of having babies. Early motherhood has asked so much surrender of me, reading strangely included. I felt able to trust that reading would come back to me, that it was waiting on the other side of… something. And now, with the brain fog lifted, I feel a sense of relief, while also knowing that reading is likely one thing I will lose for a time when we grow our family again. Oh, the offering. It has been worth it, for me. But I have to remind myself to count the cost, or at least just thank myself for what I have given. To have been so brave, without escape. To have stayed so wide open to the demands of my family, to have had no where to hide for a little while. That old comfort: plotlessness. No other story beyond the one inside our house. Story of babies nursing around the clock, of occupying toddlers and teaching them how to live. Story of cooking and laundry and picking up toys. Story of carrying people’s bodies around, keeping them clean and healthy and safe. Story of pregnancy and birth, of newborn shifting into infant shifting into baby shifting into kid. The stark plotlessness of domestic labor, the endless atmosphere. Motherhood’s immersive literature was enough for a while, I suppose. That romance. Motherhood was the true life-ruiner, that’s the truth. In some ways, it was the best book I ever read. I think hate to see it go, even temporarily. It’s a little shocking to feel that way, I must admit. That immersion is powerful, this time is so singular, so intense. I was feeling all that, I suppose. No novel could touch that feeling, not for a while at least. No external story needed.

But now, for the time being, I don’t have a baby to take care of anymore. My boys run off together to play, asking me to give them space. How wild! Maybe now I can allow some plot to creep in. Seeking a new chronology, I fill the void with a tall stack of novels, turning pages with an un-fogged mind. I read books without babies in them. I remember who I was before. I imagine who I could be after. I honor what I’ve offered, look above, behind, and ahead. Fruit for fruit’s sake. How sweet!

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My favorite books I’ve read recently:

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

Foster by Claire Keegan

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer

Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

Practice by Rosalind Brown

(the links are affiliate links so I will make a small commission if you buy the book using this link — a great way to support me in a tiny way! but I read almost exclusively library books, so I always recommend first supporting your local library by circulating books!)

I’m also on Storygraph if you’d like to see my full recent reading list! I don’t write reviews on there though, those are reserved for my physical “little book book” — I share photos of those little reviews on instagram sometimes.

I always love book recs! Especially if you can tell that we’re into the same things based on the thoughts and rec’s I’ve shared. Leave some in the comments!

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Amy