So Many Books, So Little Time

by Sara Nelson

  I believe that an unreturned book between friends is like a debt unpaid. It can linger, fester, throb like a sore wound. The best preventive medicine is the simplest: Return All Books.

  That shouldn’t be so hard, except that the circumstances and side issues involved in lending and borrowing are fuzzy. What do you do, for example, if someone lends you a title in January but you haven’t gotten to it by, say, June? Is there a statute of limitations? Do you need to check in with the owner again and see if you can get an extension on the loan? Will they even remember the book? Or the loan? Or that it was you who borrowed it?

  It’s complicated. Book sharing demands a level of clarity in communication that is often lacking in interpersonal relationships. I personally try to avoid these problems by not lending to or borrowing from people I don’t know well and by reading what I’ve borrowed right away. This doesn’t always work, of course, as evidenced by the “borrowed stack” I keep next to my bed. (Keeping nonowned books separate from owned ones is a recent rule, one that I instituted after I discovered a frightening number of volumes on the cherry shelves with other people’s names written in them.) And when in doubt, I return. So what if Jessie thinks I’m an imbecile for muttering something incoherent about Ivan Klíma’s Love and Garbage, which I borrowed six months ago and never read. At least I gave it back.

  That said, there was a time in the early eighties when my friends and I were so broke that we had no choice but to learn to share. The object of our mutual affection was Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which vies with Fay Weldon’s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil as the great revenge novel of all time. In any case, this was Topic A among my group of friends at the time. We all wanted to read about Nora Ephron because we all wanted to be Nora Ephron.

  With such fond memories, I set out this week to find my copy of the novel, which was published in 1983. I face the mammoth cherry shelves, expecting instant retrieval of Heartburn. But for some reason I can’t divine its location. Eventually, I do spot it, high up toward the ceiling. I pull the armchair over and climb up on its right arm. (If I were the kind of person who wrote “notes to self,” this one would read, “Ask Leo to build library steps.”) I pull down the hardcover (“First edition, acceptable condition, light edge rubbing, slight dj discoloration, light dj chipping,” in the patois of used-book dealers). I think I even detect my friend Janet’s scribblings on the back.

  I open it and spend the morning enthralled.

  Heartburn is great because nearly twenty years after publication, it is still achingly funny in a way that some later revenge-novel efforts have not been. Maybe that’s because it is based very closely on events in Ephron’s life. For the uninitiated: In the late seventies, two famous journalists met and married. The woman, Nora Ephron, had written many witty essays for Esquire, some of which were collected in the delightful Scribble, Scribble and Crazy Salad. The man was Carl Bernstein. Bernstein is, of course, half of the team of reporters who gave us “Deep Throat,” made Watergate a household word, and brought down the Nixon administration. A little while later, Ephron and Bernstein had a son. Soon thereafter Ephron was pregnant again, and Bernstein began an affair with a diplomat’s wife. Finally, Ephron left him. That’s the story of Heartburn.

  But what would have been a familiar sad story of the heart was given new life on the page by Ephron’s wit (“The man is capable of having sex with a Venetian blind,” she said of her philandering mate) and by her rage. This is easier said than done. Would that some later spurned-woman memoirists had more of either. Consider Catherine Texier’s 1998 Breakup, for example, a chronicle of an extramarital affair and its predictable aftermath that was plenty angry, all right, but succeeded only in making readers cringe at the behavior of both the wronging husband and the wronged wife. Or Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss (and before that, the novel version, Thicker Than Water), in which the author confides details of her consensual affair with her own father. Even a Harrison fan—which I am—would have to admit that this book overflowed with a self-consciousness and affectation that couldn’t cohabit the same hard covers as humor and pain. Like Ephron before her, Harrison was excoriated for writing such a personal story because she had young children, who might (might?) not want to learn, or to have their elementary school classmates remind them, that their mother slept with their grandfather. It seems to me that an almost equally serious crime was to write in prose so turgid its only purpose was to make the airing of dirty laundry look artful.

  Ephron doesn’t bother with artful. She just unloads the laundry—and it’s as deliciously dirty now as then. She changes some names and probably leaves out at least as much as she puts in, but you would have had to be living in an Afghan cave not to know of whom she was talking—and to feel her pain. Back then, my friends and I—aspiring writers who had visions of being the Noras of the next generation—couldn’t get enough. (Except for the recipes, which, like most people, we skipped.) The hardcover I pulled from my shelf today is beat up because it was passed around among us so many times.

  If the definition of intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing thoughts in your head simultaneously, then Nora Ephron was the first woman in my adult life about whom I could successfully feel two opposing feelings. I admired Nora Ephron and I envied her. She was, after all, making it in the big time, which to me meant any world outside of women’s service magazines and the style sections of newspapers. She was already a star, and this was before she became the top female film director of her time. (Sorry, Penny Marshall.) But her subject matter—life, relationships, social politics—wasn’t intimidating. She was one of the very few female contributors to Esquire at the time, and the fact that she addressed mundane issues in publications that were almost exclusively male-dominated made her all the more enviable. We could do this, we thought. We’re as funny and as smart and as engaging as she is.

  Except, of course, that the kind of writing Ephron does in Heartburn and did in her columns is a lot harder than it looks. Whether writing about life issues big (her ambitions) or small (her breasts), she has an edge, a knowingness that we tried hard to emulate. In Heartburn, she took the ultimate chance: exposing herself as a naïf, a wronged woman, a loser. She remained winning. But it wasn’t lost on us that a woman we so admired, a woman we believed to be so highly evolved and self-possessed, suffered the most prosaic of humiliations—sexual betrayal by a husband. A husband even more famous than she! (A husband being the one thing none of us had.) If this was the first time I showed signs of mature intelligence, it was also the moment at which I learned about schadenfreude.

  My group of friends—Joanne, Janet, Marcy, and I—would dissect Heartburn the way little kids today discuss Pokémon. We’d talk about the characters as if we knew them. We’d refer to Ephron’s Rachel by her first name, as if she were in the room. We’d quote relevant passages when appropriate. “Why do you feel you have to turn everything into a story?” Rachel’s shrink asks her about her wisecracking take on the disastrous marriage. “Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me,” was the Ephronesque reply we would repeat every time one of us dramatized a minor incident. Passages like “It’s kreplach, remember?” became shorthand for loosely translated Yiddish wisdom meaning, “It’s still the same old thing, no matter how you slice it.” Heartburn provided us with the mantras to survive young adulthood.

  In fact, rereading Heartburn this morning reopened my mental diary on a five-year period I had thought I had forgotten. An old book can do that for you. It can help you re-create your life’s calendar. (It’s engraved in my mind, for example, that Philip Roth published Patrimony in 1991, because I can see myself lying on my living room couch on one winter day reading a galley and thinking how much I wished I could give it to my father, who had died just the year before and was constantly on my mind.) An old book can remind you of where and who you were then. It can define a moment in your life, as surely as the moment Rachel’s marriage
ended was defined by her opening a songbook to find an inscription from her husband’s lover.

  Sharing Heartburn is notable because it was so effortless and because I trusted the people I lent my copy to. I knew that Joanne, Janet, and Marcy were book people, like me, and that they’d sooner run off with Ephron’s husband than with her book.

  But I learned, the hard way, that not everybody is so highly principled.

  As I finished Heartburn, I had one more mental picture: that of a twenty-something woman lending her only copy of a beloved novel to a man she thought at the time might be “the one.” It turned out that he wasn’t, a fact she discovered soon after she gave him the book. (Was there a connection?) He had told her he would return it the next time they saw each other. Except there never was a next time.

  Months went by, and the young woman grew angrier and angrier. She began to leave messages on his answering machine. “I want my book back! Where’s my Heartburn?” No answer.

  A decade passed. One night she saw this man in a restaurant. He stopped by to say hello, bygones being bygones and all. “I look at you and I think of Heartburn,” she told him. His face went blank. “You know, my book. The Nora Ephron thing I lent you. I’d still like it back.” He slunk away, proving his own superior intellect by entertaining two thoughts simultaneously: (1) Who knows where the damn thing is? And (2) Was she always this crazy?

  But he must have gone home and found it, because the next day an envelope containing the same battered copy arrived on her doorstep.

  To me, this was a Heartburn moment. It had shame, betrayal, revenge—and satisfaction. I like to think Nora Ephron would have been proud.

  March 29

  Nothing Happened3

  I’m like an animal off its feed. I can’t get into a novel to save my life. Biographies bore me. I’ve left so many open books, belly down, on the green bedroom rug that the whole place is starting to look like an aerial view of a town full of Swiss chalets.

  I’m out of sorts. I’m off my game. I’m irregular.

  These are the things I tried to read this week and how far I got:

  The Red Tent (20 pages)

  Invisible Man (3 pages)

  Ulysses (1 page, which, come to think of it, is as many as anybody I know ever read)

  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (10 pages)

  The Emperor of Ocean Park (300 pages, but the book is twice that long and goes from fascinating to stultifying so quickly around page 250 that I am developing some personal animus toward its author, Stephen L. Carter)

  For two months now, I’ve made lists and piles. I’ve canvassed my friends for recommendations. I’ve thought back on the books I always meant to read and I’ve dug up books I used to love as a teenager. I’ve ordered hundreds of dollars’ worth of hardcovers on the Internet and begged free ones where I could get them. The stacks next to my bed are growing even faster than Charley.

  So now I’m like the woman with a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear. (Actually, I’m not just like that woman, I am that woman, but that’s another story.)

  Poor me. I have too many choices.

  “Take a break,” my friends say. “Lighten up.” To which I reply like the surly teenager I’m becoming: As if.

  I’m a reader, I want to scream. That’s what I do.

  When things go right in my life, I read. When things go wrong, I read more. Frustrated with work, bored with my marriage, annoyed at my kid or my friends, I escape into books. But now books are my work, my marriage and my friends, so where am I supposed to find comfort now?

  I know, I know. You’re not very sympathetic. Why would you be? I’m living out your fantasy: I’m getting paid to read, I have (or have access to) all the books in the world and I have the time to read them. So what’s the freakin’ problem? as Charley asked me in another context last week. (P.S. I sent him to his room for disrespecting his mother, and he promptly picked up a Thornberrys joke book and started to, yup, read.)

  My friend Louisa knows. A rabid book devourer like me, she finally landed a job reviewing for one of the trades. “Perfect,” she crowed the day she got the assignment. “I can get paid for doing what I love.” Six months later I ask her how it’s going. “Ugh,” she snorts. “I’m overwhelmed. There’s a world of difference between reading for pleasure and reading for dollars. I should probably just start having sex for money.”

  Here’s something I’ve learned: Having limitless choices is as difficult as having none at all. Maybe more difficult. They say the key to good parenting is giving kids fewer options, not more; that too many possibilities beget anxiety, and anxiety begets anger and more bad choices. Suddenly, I see what they mean. When I’m in this off mood, the sight of those bedside piles makes me shake. There’s simply no way the books there won’t soon morph into dozens of new houses in my little Swiss town.

  So like it or not, I make the only choice of which I’m now capable. I give up. I give myself the week off. And then I do what any self-respecting New York woman with too many books and too many clothes does when she’s frustrated. I go shopping at my favorite boutique down the street. At least there I find the limits I crave, or my MasterCard finds them for me. I get out for about $200, which is a bargain considering how many years of college my previous shopping sprees have provided for the owner’s kid.

  Now, if I could only figure out how to send the bill to the authors and publishers who drove me there in the first place.

  April 6

  Book by Book

  The retail therapy was a useful Band-Aid, but the real cure came to me a few days later, when I’d more or less accepted that I would never read again. I looked up at my bookshelf to see Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird sitting there quietly on a high shelf minding its own business.

  Bird by Bird is without a doubt the single best self-help guide I’ve ever read. (Okay, maybe it’s the only self-help guide I’ve ever read, or read all the way through, except for a couple of Women Who Love Too Much-type titles back when I was single.) It’s great because it’s funny and wise, and unlike what I gather about most of that genre, it’s actually helpful. I first read it in a single day, just after it was published, back in 1994.

  I remember the day perfectly: It was springtime, I had a column due at the magazine, an infant son suffering from intense separation anxiety every time I tried to sit down at the computer despite the presence of a wonderful, loving babysitter, and a husband who was spending an awful lot of time working on the other side of the country. My work was not going well, and so I was taking a break by stopping into a used-book store on my way to the gym. On the review-copy table, I came upon a smallish hardcover by an author of whom I’d only vaguely heard.

  I thought at first that the book was about birds or birdwatching or some other such pensive yet outdoorsy thing I don’t do; I’m not quite sure why I didn’t just put it right back on the review-copy table. Lamott herself might say that my finding the book was kismet, that it was God delivering to me exactly the help I needed at exactly the moment that I needed it. But Lamott, I soon learned, is on more intimate terms with God than I am and has a better handle on His schedule. I’d call my discovery of Bird by Bird simple luck, or maybe a good cover and subtitle.

  Anyway, I bought it, started it on the StairMaster, and then raced home to spend the rest of the afternoon lying in bed reading and getting up periodically to run to the computer to see if Lamott had cajoled my muse into returning. She hadn’t, but I almost didn’t care. At least I was in the company of somebody who somehow, miraculously, seemed to know exactly what I was feeling every time I sat down to write: “delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion . . . and especially paranoia.”

  When I pulled the book down this time, I was suffering more from reader’s than writer’s block, but what I was feeling last week wasn’t much different from what I’d been feeling then: I was idling, I couldn’t get into anything, I was lost. And while I didn’t
remember too much more about Bird by Bird, outside of the name and one particularly resonant chapter title, “Shitty First Drafts,” I had a strong memory of its value. As I remembered it, Bird by Bird was a book about what it’s like to be stuck, and how to get unstuck.

  My memory, as it turns out, was pretty correct. Lamott’s central point in Bird by Bird, expressed over and over in anecdotes of varying degrees of charm, essentially boils down to the kind of thing your mother told you in the ninth grade, the thing Woody Allen said and lottery ads continue to reinforce: Eighty percent of success is showing up—aka “You have to be in it to win it.” In chapter after chapter, Bird by Bird discusses all the ways in which we try to avoid the task we have ahead of us, whether it’s writing a restaurant review, cleaning the closet, or yes, reading a book. In chapter after chapter, Lamott delineates the complicated, crafty, and often hilarious ways we try to avoid tackling the task, the anxiety we feel as we realize the magnitude of said task, and the pain of just plain sitting there and doing it, and then doing it again, or more, until it’s finished—and we can start the whole joyous and agonizing business all over again.

  The book, in other words, is about process, not about results.

  Obviously, to judge by the phenomenal success of Bird by Bird (hundreds of thousands of copies sold), there are a lot of people who needed to learn the lesson Lamott was teaching—and my guess is that only a small percentage of them were, or wanted to be, writers. The things Lamott talks about in Bird by Bird are applicable to just about any daunting task where creativity is required, which is to say, just about any daunting task. Her genius is that she’d found a way to break down the anxiety, and amplify it with humor and self-knowledge, and show how she’d struggled to conquer it. That she managed to do all this in the first place is laudable; that she did it without making us hate her is awesome.