The Three Anns
My elementary school library was a glorified closet tucked into the top side of the ‘T’ where the tiled hallway broke away to the science wing. It was big enough to walk in, but barely. Each side was lined from floor to ceiling with books on cold metal shelves, and the lighting came from a bulb hanging from the center of the ceiling that you pulled a string to turn on. This is where I discovered Nancy Drew.
I read all 56 of the Nancy Drew mysteries without ever once thinking about who wrote them or why. I read them voraciously. I read them proudly. I read them like I needed to, though for what reason I can’t imagine. I don’t even particularly care for mysteries—at least not now anyway. But, maybe I did then. In a small town where the greatest mystery I was ever aware of was what the cafeteria was serving for lunch, maybe I was hungry for a little intrigue. Or maybe I just needed what Tom Peters refers to as a ‘big hairy audacious goal’. Fifty-six books is a lot. Especially for a ten year old. The more I read, the more I discovered there was to read. And so I just kept reading like Forrest kept running. It’s hard to say what propelled me. I just know that I devoured Nancy Drew.
And I loved to check out books. Every week I signed my name on the little card that fit perfectly inside the half envelope glued to the interior of the back cover of the books, and I felt like a grown up. Like I had a job and somebody expected me to do it. Each book check-out would be punctuated with a stamp that basically said “Welcome to the opportunity of a lifetime! These are the rules, you’re expected to follow them, and your signature says that you will.” The whole process reeked of responsibility. I did cartwheels in my mind. Checking out books was almost as good as reading them, as I’m a sucker, still, as much for the means, at times, as I am for the end. But Nancy Drew books gave me a hat I liked to wear. I was ‘A Reader’. And it fit me. It fit my tortoise shell octagon shaped glasses, and it fit my soul.
Each book check-out would be punctuated with a stamp that basically said “Welcome to the opportunity of a lifetime! These are the rules, you’re expected to follow them, and your signature says that you will.”
From Nancy Drew, I grew into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louisa May Alcott, …and Walt Whitman. (My literary ladder had weirdly spaced rungs that sometimes stretched me out like a gymnast.) I read poems and I read novels. I read essays and I read autobiographies. I had little guidance and no intentional road map. I just read.
I fell into and all about transcendentalism before transcendentalism was cool. (If indeed that ever happened.) Ralph Waldo and Henry David were North Stars whose reliance on nature and simplicity made such sense to me. I could envision a life with their anchors. They seemed to be onto something, sternly rooted in stuff that would last. I lapped up “Self-Reliance” and I wanted to live on “Walden Pond”.
I also grew early and deeply attached to Rudyard Kipling’s “If”, memorizing it several times over throughout the course of my life. It had a catchy meter and common rhymes so it felt natural to recite, though I never knew what a spinal cord it would become, each stanza supporting me like vertebrae through the course of a twisty life. “If” lets me bend but pulls me always back upright. If my life had an anthem, what Kipling wrote would be it.
Through higher education, I grew to love William Shakespeare and Jane Austen and George Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I learned through Hemingway and Steinbeck and the lengthy list of other classics, enjoying some for what they said and others for how they said it, and some—at different times for different reasons--for both.
I stretched my reader wings from there. One summer from the lure of an airport bookstore, somewhere between formal higher education and the birth of my second child, I fell hard for Pat Conroy. Every. Single. Thing. He. Ever. Wrote. I loved his descriptions, the way he saw inside of people and things with his super-power wonder lens and the masterful stringing together of words he used to tell us what he saw. Even through the dark threads of all his creations, I never closed one of his novels not wishing for one more page.
The beauty of a book, or a passage, or a poem lies in the fact that words and sentences are chameleons that sit with everyone in different ways. On different days, even. Writing has shades and random adhesive. How we read what we read depends on who we are and where we are in our lives. Therein lies the magic of words.
Despite a lifetime of reading and pondering about who I’ve read and why (a question that became important long after Nancy Drew), if you ask me to tell you what my favorite book is, I cannot tell you of all time. I can only say that it has been at certain times this and at certain times that and more than one at some junctures, depending on what my soul is hungriest for. One of the most interesting books I’ve ever read is called My Life in Middlemarch. Interesting for its content, yes, but maybe more so for its organizational premise. The author, Rebecca Mead, reads and reacts to George Elliott’s Middlemarch at various stages of her own life. I think the academics call her work a ‘bibliomemoir’, but I think it’s just what readers do—they typically just do not (and mostly cannot) write about it. The basic premise though is bedrock: sometimes light comes in the side door, sometimes through the front, and sometimes through a hole you have to cut in the roof. Where it hits you depends on where you’re sitting at the time.
While lots of books and fewer authors have stayed on my nightstand for multiple weeks at a time, none have stayed longer than the three Anns. Anna Quindlen, Ann Patchett, and Anne Lamott are my Mount Rushmore Writers, gifted artists who write fact and fiction with interchangeable ease…well, if not ease, at least unparalleled success. Swimming between the two genres is a feat mastered by few, but the Anns have nailed it. These are women who write about real life—pot roast, prayer, parenting, grub worms, stray dogs, marriage, nature, alcoholism, hateful people, life changing clergy, bad relatives, feminism, God, physical deformity, and a host of other things, including the dichotomous life of a writer, particularly a female one. And when they do, it feels like they slip their arm inside of mine and lock it at the elbow. They know me even though we have never met.
Anna Quindlen had to step across a chasm wider than her 19 year old stride when just as her life was taking off, her mother’s was stolen by ovarian cancer. I’m 56 and have my mother, still. I’ve lived the charmed life of a college graduate taking smiley pictures with her mom on the campus lawn after a too long ceremony with a keynote speaker no one wanted to hear. I’ve been the bride with her mom beaming proudly from the front row of the church, looking better in her dress than any bridesmaid ever could. And, I’ve been the mother who watched her mom hold every one of her grandbabies for the first time, one by one. No one should be deprived of that. Anna and I do not share a similar daughter path. She got short changed; I won the lottery. In years shared, of course, that is. I feel guilty about that—what I’ve had and what she’s missed. Not because she’s somehow incomplete but because she would have so treasured growing old with her mom, and she would have written about it on our hearts with a calligraphy pen. Quindlen is from the east coast. I’m from the Bible belt. She wrote from home when her children were little, I flew all over the country while mine were. We have lots in common and lots not. But we overlap in the places nearest the marrow of our bones.
Anne Lamott is 67 and she rocks dreads. I feel like I should just start there. She’s a believer who was raised in an atheist home, a self described ‘closet Christian’ for a time. She crawled bravely down a crooked road to Jesus, the search carving a spiritual rut lined with double stick tape, the kind of jagged lifeline that seems to give her some secret handshake with Jesus, the kind that my straight as a board Christian walk can’t quite get me to. She’s a recovered addict, a liberal political activist (who is not timid about publishing her most personal thoughts and opinions), and she’s the most irreverent, reverent believer I have ever encountered. Her religion is real. When you read her you know she knows Jesus on a ‘hey let’s go grab a cup of coffee’ kind of level. She’s a single mother, a devotee to the poor and less fortunate, a truth teller the likes of which we would all benefit from having in our daily, predictable lives. We are not much alike, Anne Lamott and me. And yet we are. We feel our way through our distinctly different worlds in very similar fashion.
Ann Patchett attended Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she owns a bookstore called Parnassus Books. Of course she does. She’s a wife, but not a mother. A creator of beautifully complicated characters who are relationship rich and relationship poor, much like herself and the people in her one and only real life. And the people in yours and mine. I stumbled upon Truth and Beauty and was so immediately enamored with the honest portrayal of her intimate female friendship with Lucy Grealy that I ordered five copies and sent them to five friends. And then I ordered every novel of hers in publication for myself. When This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a collection of personal essays, came out, I read it twice, back to back. And I’ve read it over again since. I feel like Patchett is a cardigan sweater with pearlized buttons and I’m a hoodie with a number on the front, and while we probably would be seated at different tables, we might order the very same thing.
The most gifted help us see what we look at from a place we haven’t sat before. Sometimes through a lens we didn’t know existed. My three Anns turn the floodlights on. When I read their work, sometimes I cry. Sometimes I laugh. And sometimes I feel the need to turn my head sideways like a dog does when he’s trying to get to the bottom of something. They give me fresh eyes.
It’s not really important that I know who authored Bel Canto, or Traveling Mercies, or Every Last One, but it matters. I’d read the three Anns if we had no crossing longitudinal lines because they are each uniquely gifted as sayers of significant things in simple and impactful ways. But I read them differently because we do.
The pundits say reading is a free pass into a world you might not be able to access any other way. I won’t argue. But it can also be a combination code to the world we live in every single day—a flashlight on the ordinariness that is wonderful disguised by a brown paper bag. The most gifted help us see what we look at from a place we haven’t sat before. Sometimes through a lens we didn’t know existed. My three Anns turn the floodlights on. When I read their work, sometimes I cry. Sometimes I laugh. And sometimes I feel the need to turn my head sideways like a dog does when he’s trying to get to the bottom of something. They give me fresh eyes.
That reader’s hat I found in the cramped closet at Sunset Elementary School fits me still. It’s ushered me through doors I could have never entered without it, and it’s kept me warm when my insides were cold. Wearing it is like driving with a pike pass. You get to keep moving if you want, or you can take a detour and get back on without a fee. Nothing’s ever out of the question.
Readers get to live in a world without dead ends where every wall is moveable and options flow like the water that Jesus turned into wine. Great writers supply directional coordinates and invite you to find your way. Lamott, Quindlen, and Patchett are my go-to Google Maps. Their unique perspectives and their styles-- as similarly different as their given names—get me from ‘Uh-oh’ to ‘Aha’ and almost always to ‘Wow’. They are my mentors and my travel guides, my favorite glasses and my best night light. And even though they do not know it, the three Anns are my friends.
Sherri Coale
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