Have you ever read a book that resonated with you so deeply that it left you feeling like 'this is my book'? C. S. Lewis describes this phenomenon in the following terms:
“A book sometimes crosses one’s path that is so like the sound of one’s native language in a strange country that it feels almost uncivil not to wave some kind of flag in answer.”
There is a siege of books beckoning to be read. No person alive can boast (as John Milton once could) to have read them all! But it is not most books, I would say, that prevail to be deeply special to us. Books that touch so poignantly on some element of human nature that they have transcended time are often good examples of those with the potential to strike us so, but the feeling will vary from person to person. For example, I was greatly underwhelmed by Tristan and Iseult (predating and possibly inspiring Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), but absolutely, spectacularly taken with Little Women. The latter surprised me; I'd always thought Little Women was going to be boring. How wrong I was! Reading Louisa May Alcott's classic, and a handful of equally wonderful books, have made it possible for me to identify with that 'my book' feeling.
I remember a story J.K. Rowling told about a Harry Potter book signing (this is Harry Potter, mind you: huge crowds, costumes, clusters of excited fans in animated conversation). There was a girl who had come alone. She had the book pressed tight to her chest and was gazing about her with a bewildered expression. When her turn arrived, she approached the table where Rowling sat, still clutching the book to her heart. Presumably, there would have been a greeting or some other preliminary exchange, but at one point, she simply blurted out, “What are all these people doing here? This is my book!” And Rowling knew exactly what she meant. She recognized the feeling as something she herself had experienced when it came to books she really loved.
I am currently reading Unorthadox by Deborah Feldman (the inspiration for the 2020 Netflix series) and I was unexpectedly delighted to find some rich thoughts about libraries and reading in the early passages:
“Sometimes it feels like the authors of these books understand me, that they wrote these stories with me in mind. How else to explain the similarities between me and the characters in Roald Dahl’s tales: unfortunate, precocious children despised and neglected by their shallow families and peers?”
Deborah Feldman
This is how it is with stories: we see ourselves in qualities and circumstances, in resoundingly human characteristics, hopes, fears, disappointments, loves, and triumphs (be the characters furred, fleshed, or feathered). There are stories that tell us something about who we are: things at once universal and deeply personal. We are alike in so many invisible ways and books are magical portals that allow us to look inside those secret places inside one another and (often) find something that we recognize gazing back. As W. H. Auden writes in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, "Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and me only." It is extraordinary. We wouldn't eat a piece of chocolate and intuit that the confectionery was invented explicitly for us, but books feel so personal that we incline to have this exact response. And here it was again! This same sentiment appearing over and over ('this is my book')! I began to sit up and take notice.
Amy Tan, the acclaimed author of The Bonesetter's Daughter and The Joy Luck Club, considers fiction "one of the best ways of finding truth." Perhaps it is truth that resonates with us when we read these stories. I always find it fascinating that anyone from anywhere can produce a work of art that will touch someone on the other side of the planet or a hundred years in the future. Picasso famously believed that his paintings (as blatantly unusual as some of them may be) revealed something true and I think that many artists and writers seek the truth in undertaking the work of their crafts.
Amy Tan recalls readers coming up to her, bearing their battered copies of The Joy Luck Club and enthusing "You've written my life!" There is a sense of intimate familiarity when we stumble upon something true to our own lives in a book.
“It’s part of the magic of fiction; once it gets into the reader’s hand, it transforms and it becomes their book and they will pick the traits that they identify with. And 'This is me,' is what they end up saying. I’ve had mothers and daughters from other cultures—not just Chinese—cultures like Arabic cultures or from Spanish cultures or from, you know, even German cultures who say, 'My mother was just like that.' Jewish mothers, you know; 'That’s how my mother was.'”
“And what’s happened here is that by your telling the truth, where something very deeply personal, very specific to you—your story, your voice—has crossed from the page into somebody else’s hands, into their mind and in their heart and it becomes their story.”
Amy Tan
I've certainly had this experience myself: finding pieces of my own life, or something about myself, that seemed so impossibly unknowable right there in the pages of a story! And one does feel that one ought to wave some kind of flag in recognition (it's awfully true, Mr. Lewis: well put)!
I read a similar version of this story (reader-sees-her-own-life-in-book-and-approaches-the-author-to-say-so) in Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic. Only this one with a twist!
"One day, a woman came up to me at a book signing and said, "Eat Pray Love changed my life. You inspired me to leave my abusive marriage and set myself free. It was all because of that one moment in your book—that moment when you describe putting a restraining order on your ex-husband because you'd had enough of his violence..."
A restraining order? Violence?
That never happened! Not in my book, nor in my actual life! ...But that woman had subconsciously inserted that story—her own story—into my memoir, because, I suppose, she needed to... she had embroidered herself into my story and erased my actual narrative in the process. Strange as it seems, I submit that it was her absolute right to do this... Once my book entered her hands, after all, everything about it belonged to her..."
Elizabeth Gilbert
This is certainly the oddest example I came across, and perhaps atypical of a reader who simply recognizes congruencies between things in the story and in themselves, but (real or imagined) there is something about reading a book that makes it your own. Here is another perspective, and it has to do with co-creation. Co-creation is the reason I often prefer books over movies or television. Reading is an active, participatory act: we have empirical evidence that the centres of the brain associated with all sorts of things—even sight, sound, and touch—all light up when we imagine the world of a story, as compared to the neural passivity involved in consuming a sitcom, for example. As the writer, Dan Brown, says, "One of the things I love about books is that they are different things to all people. When you write a novel, you're not writing one novel, you're writing a million novels and each person reads it in a different way, imagines your character in a different way."
The Harry James Potter I saw in my head (before the movies came out) would not have been the same Harry you saw in yours, nor would it have been the same cupboard that he slept in, the same Hogwarts Express, or the same Gryffindor common room. My version of the story would have been so entirely my own that nobody else could possibly replicate it exactly, let alone observe it in any authentic manner. The same for your version and for all of our intracranial versions of the tale—our inner experience of a book is individual.
The interesting thing about the ‘this book was written for me’ phenomenon is that it is so common. Another way to think about it is that this is something many people experience and that we simply get to be a part of when we happen upon the feeling ourselves. I love this description by Paola Merrill, which I think gets to the heart of that very thing: the feeling that a book was written especially for you, as it was written especially for many thousands or millions of other readers as well. She recognizes that many of us love stories and love to read and have found a home there:
“Let me tell you a story. It’s about a child: a dreamer that wasn’t too sure she ever wanted to grow up. She spent her days with the trees, speaking to them about her plans to be a great explorer. The child built fairy houses and sketched the gnomes she spotted in the grasses. She told stories to the fishes and secrets to the starlings, marveled at the night sky, and would return home with very muddy boots. One day, she happened upon a portal to a wondrous land: a world afflicted by eternal winter, where the homely beavers and sly foxes feared to wander in the open, lest vicious wolves enslave them to the service of a malevolent queen [referring to reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis]. When the child returned to the human world, she was different. There was a hunger inside her: a desperate need for new and fantastical tales.
As the seasons changed and she grew older, she made new acquaintances: friends that would hold her hand through the tribulations of growing up. Some of them were real, and some were in her books. She had no choice but to eventually enter the land of big people and at times she felt very alone. But no matter how dark things seemed, her books could take her to places of hope and warmth and sweetness. Through her journey she found people that were quite similar to her and that her story was shared by many. And that made all the difference.”
Paola Merrill
I was one of those children who didn’t want to grow up. Many of my friends at school, my cousins, couldn’t wait to be sixteen, to drive a car, to get their first boyfriends; not me. I watched each passing year with a rising sense of dread as the clock ticked ever closer to a time when I could no longer call myself a child. My tenth birthday was the worst—the single-digit days were over and gone and so much was yet to come—childhood was ending. To say that Merrill’s piece resonated with me is the understatement of the century. I loved everything that she said and I love the sentiment that we are often more alike than we are different. Our differences matter very much—they make us individuals: never to be repeated anywhere ever—but we are kindred, too, and that is a beautiful thing. The next time I pick up Anne of Green Gables and feel that the book was written especially 'for me', it will be with a renewed inner warmth as I think that it was probably written especially for you, too, and for all of us who love to dream.
I have truly enjoyed engaging with this subject. The mathematician Farkas Bolyai described that "When the time is ripe for certain things, these things appear in different places in the manner of violets coming to light in early spring" and that is what happened here! With the coming of spring, I seemed to see this idea—the 'my book' concept—growing everywhere I watched and read like spring violets, and gratefully I share them with you.
Have you ever read a book that felt like it was written precisely for you? I hope that this article has brought it to mind. Perhaps you have yet to be introduced to such a book? I hope we can help you find the perfect read at your local Angus or Thornton library. We are still offering curbside services, including reading suggestions and book bundles. There are many new and exciting things to discover and (I hope) a few treasures.
Wishing you joy, love, and very good books,
Victoria Murgante
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