The Books That Changed My Life

Last night, after getting home from the hospital and waking up at 3:00 am, I read a great question by one of my blog baby friends named Sher.

What are some books that changed your life and why?

I realized that I barely talk about books here and I don’t even know why.  Books helped me survive growing up ghetto, they made me smarter, and they are the best form of entertainment that anyone has ever came up with, except for maybe a really good Eugene O’Neil play on Broadway, because when I saw Long Day’s Journey Into Night with my guy Phillip Seymour Hoffman I  died and went to Heaven that night, but only after getting his autograph on my playbill. 

So, I got to thinking, what books really influenced me, inspired me, changed me, created me, etc? 

And then, my favorite author during the seventies and eighties instantly came to mind, Judy Blume.  I know there isn’t a soul out there under the age of 45 who doesn’t love her.  I first read Staring Sally J. Freedman as herself and I believe this was the book that began my life long fascination of the plight of the jews.  Sally was a smart and sassy girl as I was so I really identified with her.  I adore this book to this day and have reread it  class=”hiddenGrammarError” pre=”it “>many many times.  By first grade, however I may have read Wifey, brought it to school, hid it behind a textbook, and read it over the course of many lunch hours to a table full of kids.  Yeah, I know, I was bad, but I was only trying to teach everyone about sex and love and adulthood.  It’s crazy to think I read Wifey before I read Are You There God, Its Me, Margaret.  However, the more I think about it, the more I remember that Tiger Eyes taught me to begin overcoming my fears.  Even though I love the line “If you don’t have dreams, what do you have?” this book inspired my life quote, first read in spanish in the book Tiger Eyes which also became the t-shirt  I helped design as our camp counselor t-shirt the first summer I spent away from my ghetto.  Oh, are you wondering what that quote is?  My life quote is Life is An Adventure.  If it wasn’t for Judy Blume, I think I would have never had the courage to escape the ghetto, go away to college, and end up working my dream job as a camp counselor.   All this from the girl who desperately wanted to join track but was terrified that she ran funny because she was really clumsy so she never became the jock she wanted to be. 

I read an unknown book about time travel back when I was 14 and sick w/mono.  My extremely dysfunctional mother who was afraid to drive actually went to the library for me every week and just picked out random piles of books. All were crazy fun choices, but there was one that was about time travel and teens. I would KILL to know the name of this book. It was the summer of 1985, and it was a paperback book, so it is an old one.  It started me off on my quest to learn how to time travel myself which eventually lead me to loving the tv show LOST.  I’ve read everything from A Brief History of  Time by Stephen Hawking to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain to movies like Somewhere in Time, and Donnie Darko.  

I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath as a high school senior and loved it. My high school librarian (Not the stinky one that smelled like boogers, crotch and Primo, the off brand cologne that was supposed to smell like Georgio, but the nice one whose daughter went to Russian and she did the slide show for us in Ms. Smith’s class) loved me, as I was a former assistant in ninth grade, so each week she’d bring me classic literature to read. She introduced me to a lot of good books but The Bell Jar was different from the rest of her recommendations.  It was as if she was saving it for me for the end of school, like she knew I was suffering from something, which I was, but I’m saving that shit for my book.  The book deals with madness and suicide, both topics that are close to my heart.  

I LOVED both the Little House on the Prairie books and the tv show as a child.  I often thought of myself as a Laura Ingalls Wilder type of girl. I wore my hair in two braids for most of my early life, wore print dresses most of the time, and even had a chuck wagon or my Barbies could go to the prairie lands, which was my rock garden that I had made in the back yard. I was completely fascinated by her. Laura, like I, was poor and had a rich nemesis.  Her book On The Banks of Plum Creek showed me that the embarrassment I felt from being poor white trash was ok, as Laura found friends despite her social position in life.  Damn you Nellie, you taught me a lot of lessons and this was how I found the courage to spit in my nemesis’ face at age 11 after punching her in the nose before running into my house to safety.  Of course, fate put the two of us in gym class the next year, a fate I never would have survived except for my good silly friend Patty and the forced daily jogging to Eye of the Tiger and Abracadabra which saved me from the daily tormenting and the eventual shame of my  tiny breasts.  I’m talking semi Carrie moments in the shower here.  Sigh.  Lesson learned, never punch the popular girl in the face if you are two years younger and are flat chested because the bitch will get you back.     

Jane Austen – Dear lord, I adore this woman. Pride and Prejudice really moved me when I first read it in high school. It is hard to explain how I feel so connected to her quickly, so I thought I’d use quote’s from the book instead.  All I can say is that she is just brilliant, funny and very observant, all things I always strive to do myself in my own writing.

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

“Laugh as much as you chose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”

Pat Conroy – The Prince of Tides. I read it in Myrtle Beach after I had just faced a huge crisis in my life. Wow, does that man have pain in his soul.  Sadly, I met him and did not have the book in had during the same trip, a move that pisses me off to this day!  Like everyone, I saw the movie when it came out.  My god, I was working at the theatre when it came out, in the concession stand, by myself, making popcorn and working register alone until 2:00 pm and I had a line through the lobby all the way out of the door!  Long before my love affair with dysfunctional family memoirs like Running With Scissors and A Girl Named Zippy, I read all of Pat Conroy’s novels (Except The Boo, self published, hard to find) from this man. Only he, a man who wrote a book called My Losing Season, could make me fall in love about a book that focuses on a sport that I have grown to hate with a passion – basketball.  Prince of Tides has madness and romance and emotions and survival.  Not only did it make me fall in love with the south, but it gave me the answer to the secret I had kept inside me for so long.  I was looking at how to survive, and this book showed me that it was possible anyone could survive a horrible childhood if your will was strong enough. 

John Irving – My god, who doesn’t love him? I actually saw the film The World According To Garp in elementary school and I knew I had to read everything from this man. While I adore both A Prayer For Owen Meany and The Cider House Rules more, The World According to Garp just took the breath out of me. I love this book because I struggled with wondering who my father was for the first twenty-five years of my life. I, just like Garp, also invented fantasies as to who my father was.  He was everyone from Mick Jagger to Steven Tyler, since my mom did grow up in Los Angeles and was pretty enough to have slept with them.  It’s also explained my large bottom lip (Which, sadly, is shrinking due to old age.)  I guess this is why fate paid me back and had me meet Steven Tyler at my movie theatre just a year before my BFF talked me into finding and meeting my real dope of a father a year later.  I love this quote the John Irving has said. 

“As a child, when something is denied you — when there is a subject that is never spoken of — you pretend it’s for the best. But when I was denied information about someone as important as my actual father, I compensated for this loss by inventing him.”   So did I John, so did I.

So, what books influenced you?