Words Changed My Life

Words changed my life. Maybe it is more accurate to say that books saved my life. I am, after all, a reader more than anything else. But without reading and an absolute love affair with books, I am not sure I would have ever started to write or know how or why I did. 

I was no more than 11 when I read Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson for the first time. I remember so clearly lying on my bed, the late afternoon light streaming down on me. While reading it, I had felt each cruel word Sara Louise’s grandmother delivered to her and found myself resentful of her twin sister, Caroline. I could recognize the main character’s feelings of inadequacy and being less than. As the second of three sisters, I had experienced the same emotions as Sara Louise. I was not the favorite sister either—at least not for the only grandmother we had. She would often lash out at me for no reason and it hurt because I didn’t know why she treated me as she did. Reading Paterson’s Newbury winner was the first time I can remember feeling known by someone or something other than the people in my family. When I read the end of the book, I closed it and held it close to my heart. I didn’t move, but stayed where I was in that faded sunlight reveling in the idea that I was not alone and that I was not wrong. I knew that because I had read it in a book. The words changed my life.

The fact that books help readers see themselves and understand others is a major reason why I tell other people to read books. It is why I read them and taught them for twenty years as an English teacher and school librarian. Watching students connect with a book reminded me of my own joy in reading. It was one of the reasons I got up each day and went to work, knowing I would see a smile when I found just the right book for a reader. I want to hope it made them feel known just as I had felt that afternoon, lounging in my childhood bedroom, finally beginning to understand I could make my own way in the world without favor from someone else.

Writing has changed my life. I finished my first novel in three months and quickly started on The Fullington Road Monster. Both manuscripts are my own story as much as they belong to the very real-to-me characters I created. I have read a lot of books, and while I have stories to tell, writing them down is not as easy as it seems. I think about George R.R. Martin’s words often: “Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.” The act itself is difficult. There is no way to create the objects of my affection, however, without the work. So I write. During the last year when life shut down so many other opportunities, writing remained. It was there for me, a focus and a panacea.

 Living on her family’s farm, immersed in the legends and lore of a family and place, Daphne’s story mirrors my own experience in many ways. Through her, I grappled with my own family’s struggle with alcoholism and came to terms with adult and childhood traumas. As I wrote and rewrote the story about Fullington Road, so much of what I thought I knew was transformed. Instead of feeling disconnected and far away from the people I loved but couldn’t see because of the pandemic, I visited them every day, had conversations with them, and overcame misunderstandings and decade-old hurts. Writing changed my life. 

I know that words change lives. I have seen it in the faces of my students. I am still in contact with some of them on social media and they surprise me with their memories of how a book we read in class or one I recommended in the library still resonates with them. I have felt known and understood after closing a book, the words changing me and my perspective. Writing for me is about giving back, reaching a child who feels not enough, misunderstood, and so alone to find herself in my words, the story on the page. Words change lives.