I’m a privileged nerd.
I was a nerdy kid, but happily before bullies took over the school culture. So my oversized glasses and undersized body were tolerated, even vaguely respected. I was allowed to love learning.
At home I was read to in the safety of a parent’s lap, or in my bed, cocooned in summer-smelling sheets. Applauded when I proudly presented my own made up tales.
I don’t remember learning to read, only that one moment I couldn’t and the next moment I could and my world changed forever. A shy only child, I was suddenly surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Connected to them. Their words were in my mouth, my head, my heart. And that introduced me to the wonder and mystery of story. I knew that these characters, these people, lived in a reality outside my own small post-war bungalow, and yet somehow the writer’s words drew us together in a common space. Unsurprisingly, I wrote stories in which I and my favorite characters adventured together. My Covid lockdown novel (doesn’t every writer have one?) was a sort of odyssey through the various story-worlds that had shaped and now sustained me during isolation and anxiety.
Predictably I majored in English, got a doctorate in literature, taught in college and kept writing.
What those years have given me is not just a toolbox of critical apparatus—though I obviously became a more discerning, if less surrendered, reader (shades of the prison house). But the tradeoff was genuinely those philosophic joys Wordsworth himself is a bit iffy about. I came, I believe, to a deeper understanding of story, of its essential, life-giving importance. I don’t think I was altogether wrong when I imagined that Jo March and Jane Eyre must somehow recognize me in that world we inhabited together. As those stories lived in me and I in them they became an exchange of love.
Just before Covid I lost a lifelong friend, and with that, a large part of my personal story, of the me I had defined through our friendship. And yet because we had also shared and talked about and marveled over the wonder of stories, I remain connected, perhaps more firmly and fully than before, to our friendship. Because it included more than just the two of us.
When a mountaineer friend reminisced about his adventures, I discovered another way of seeing story: as a climbing rope. Our stories tether us, but lightly, to the past, steady our steps in a slippery present, pull us up into an unseen future. Beyond the mountaintop lies the dawn, my friend said, and beyond that the great mystery. It’s a mystery we can hate because it eludes our comprehension and control, or love because it opens range on range of possibility. Many of the people dear to me were dead or created before I was born. Yet in that mysterious transaction of love in our shared story space, I can love the mystery.
That’s why I especially appreciate stories about stories—about people who trace a story, follow its windings, tease out its enigmas, and yet never completely solve them. Why I’m a big fan of those detective novels in which the solution to the crime is almost incidental to the tantalizing but ultimately insoluble mystery of the human beings involved.
Why I’m grateful to be a privileged nerd.
