The Books That Made Me Who I Am

With Forever and Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Judy Blume held my hand as my body changed and my heart changed and I began to feel less like a girl and more like a young woman.

My yearning was stoked by Sweet Valley High. My yearning was stoked by the lives of Elizabeth and Jessica Wakefield, their seemingly perfect lives, how everyone loved them and wanted to be them. I was nothing like them, but I wanted to be them or I wanted to be in their golden circle. Through these stories, I understood, intimately, what it meant to be on the outside looking in, utterly unable to look away. I understood what it meant to be enthralled.

As I realized I would never be like those girls, I read The Outsiders and learned there was fierceness in not fitting in.

Boarding school intrigued me, so I read about The Girls of Canby Hall, all 33 books, and then I went to boarding school and it was nothing like The Girls of Canby Hall — but I was a girl from Nebraska, and Shelly Hyde, one of the main characters from the books, was a girl from Iowa. Even though I was a stranger in a strange land, something about boarding school was familiar. As has always been the case, I was not alone because I had so many stories making the inside of me.

Something terrible happened to me so I began to read voraciously about terrible things that happened to other women. This is where I learned gratitude when I did not think it would be possible. This is how I taught myself to believe I was lucky. In Perfect Victim, a young woman is kidnapped by a couple and held prisoner in a box beneath a bed for seven years. What she endures is unfathomable. I took no pleasure in reading this book but I found comfort in knowing our bodies and minds are built to endure. I read this book so often the spine is now white and softened, the pages yellowed with age and the ministrations of my tear-stained fingers.

Something terrible happened so I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. I learned that there was strength inside me if I could just hold on, if I could just find my way to reach my strongest place. I learned how to write what I could not speak, and how even if I could not use my voice, it was still there, waiting, waiting, waiting.

Something terrible happened and I needed a different way of being in my body. I read Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg and for a while, I was able to live in my own skin on my own terms. In the stories of Macho Sluts by Pat Califia I found swagger. I turned to ink and marked myself with a new skin. I was able to live in my own skin on my own terms.