Bookmarked
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POSTSCRIPTS
April, 2011
I sit tonight at the dinner table with my fourteen-year-old granddaughter Zoé, who is visiting from France with her cousin Salomé, also fourteen, for a two-week stay with me in New York. They are bright, competent girls who have persuaded their parents to let them come by themselves on this adventure. I’ve been impressed by their ease in getting about on foot and by subway. (And we discuss that in English you say ON foot and BY subway.) By themselves they have gone to the top of the Empire State Building and ridden the Staten Island Ferry in order to take pictures of the Statue of Liberty. They’ve shown an interest in art as well with both MOMA and the Metropolitan Museum on their must-do list, though they also spend a lot of time on the computer—my partner Mary Edith’s Mac that she graciously has let them use—giggling together as they post on their Facebook walls and watch videos. This evening Mary Edith has gone out—we’ve been living together since I sold my Upper West Side apartment the previous year and moved downtown into hers on the Lower East Side—and I’m alone with the girls.
“Do you girls like to read?” I ask them, as we sit at dinner over the precooked chicken I picked up at the supermarket around the corner. Yes, they say. I learn that Zoé has read Jane Austen’s Emma in English, and Salomé, even more of a reader than her cousin but with less advanced English, has read Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Wuthering Heights in translation. “Eeetcliff,” she says. “Ah yes, Heathcliff,” I respond. In French the novel is called Les Hauts de Hurlevent. Hearing this alliterative foreign title gives me pleasure. It suggests at once the same and a different meaning from the title I know, the way that the book itself is the same and different for any two readers. I draw closer, though, to Salomé than I’ve felt before in that each of us has been intimate with the same novel. She, too, has paused in the world of the Heights and the Grange, Heathcliff and the two Cathys. Lockwood and Nellie. And she’s just the age I was when I first read the books she’s reading.
So it all begins again! Zoé and Salomé are readers. I imagine their lives of reading, of making the connections that reading encourages in us. It’s possible we will like more of the same books. That would please me. But I’m also excited to think of our different trajectories, for surely they will discover books ignored by me, books I’ve never heard of, and—stretching through the many decades I hope they will survive me—books not yet written, the literature of the future. For now, I cherish the moment as we touch and pass, generations crossing.
June 2014
Reader, I married her—my partner Mary Edith Mardis. The ceremony took place in East Hampton, New York, on September 23, 2011. We had a quiet wedding. Mary Edith and I, the female judge who performed the service, and two of our friends as witnesses alone were present. We alerted only the members of our families and a few close friends and promised to have a party at a later time.
I have now been married for almost three years and hold myself supremely blessed to have this late-in-life chance at happiness. We do a lot of little things together: shop for groceries, cook, watch movies, play golf, and think about small home improvements. As a photographer, Mary Edith is much more visual than I and is always helping me to see better the world around me. We both like to read and, her interest whetted by my enthusiasm, she is currently half way through David Copperfield.
When we sent out the word about our altered status, the congratulations soon poured in. I was touched by a message from my brother Robert, who lives in New Mexico, happily married to his second wife. Though we’re only intermittently in touch, he’s the person who has known me longer than anyone else alive. After I had phoned him with my news, he emailed me the following message:
Dear Wendy,
You caught me by surprise with your news that you and Mary Edith have gotten married, so I’m not sure I managed to offer my congratulations and true best wishes.
How incredible that you should be married again! It must be very nice for you . . . for both of you. My feeling is that Marriage #2 is usually a huge improvement on Marriage #1—in my case, certainly, and I hope in yours—something you embark upon with much more wisdom and with your eyes open.
So good luck and all happiness to you both.
It’s the marriage plot ending, after all! Thank you, Robert, for your heartfelt good wishes. I imagine our mother being pleased about us both and confiding to a sidekick ghost she has charmed, “You see, I hoped they would be happy in their marriages.” Thank you, Jane Eyre, for accompanying me to the last paragraphs of this journey. And thank you, Mary Edith, for our life together that goes so far beyond the bounds of fiction.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What does reading mean to Wendy Fairey? What does it mean to you?
2. Bookmarked explores the works of fiction that have most deeply affected one reader and marked the stages of her life. If you were to draw up a comparable list for yourself, what titles would it include?
3. What personal experience would you bring to your reading of one or more of the books discussed in Bookmarked? How would your relation to these books be similar to or different from the author’s?
4. Do you like to reread old favorites? If so, take one example and describe that rereading experience?
5. Wendy Fairey’s mother, Sheilah Graham, is a central figure in her book. What do you think of her as she’s portrayed in Bookmarked? Do you have someone equally important in your own life?
6. The author explores the way that socially marginal figures such as the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant became central in the English novel. Do these protagonists have an abiding appeal to contemporary readers? If so, how and why? If not, why not?
7. Can you name the literary character that you identify with most closely? Explain the basis for your choice.
8. In this age of rapid and abbreviated communication (Facebook, Twitter, blogging, ten-second sound bites), what place remains for the classic works of English fiction, some of them indeed “loose baggy monsters?” Do you have patience for long books? What is your experience of reading them?
9. Wendy Fairey explores the persistence and permutations of the marriage plot in life and in fiction. Is this a theme that engages you? Why/why not?
10. The final chapter of Bookmarked focuses on Indian English fiction of the last twenty years. To what extent are you familiar with this work or with other Anglophone fiction? What might be its interest and appeal?
11. Is there any novel discussed in Bookmarked you hadn’t previously read but would now like to? And if so, why?
12. Do you like/not like the mix in Bookmarked of personal reflection and literary analysis?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks begin with loving remembrance of my mother, Sheilah Graham, who set me on the path of reading and loving English novels, and of all the English teachers who inspired and encouraged me.
In the years I have spent writing this book, there are many people who have helped me, both with insights about particular novels they, too, feel marked by and with critiques of my work. I thank Roni Natov, Rachel Brownstein, Ellen Belton, and, above all, the indefatigable Ellen Tremper, all colleagues at Brooklyn College, not only for reading my chapters but also for sharing their very personal responses to the books we teach in common. And I thank my students, who have helped keep literature alive for me.
I am also deeply grateful to Jeanne Betancourt, John Major, Lee Quinby, and Sandra Robinson—other friends who gave so generously of their time in reading and commenting on drafts of my manuscript. I thank them for consistently challenging my language and formulations and supporting my project from its start to finish. And I thank, too, the participants in our nonfiction writers’ group, who, mostly as non-academics, critiqued my drafts and helped me be mindful, always, of the common reader: Mindy Lewis, the late Susan Ribner, Joanna Torrey, Ingrid Hughes, Christine Wade, and Patricia Laurence.
My agent Charlott
e Sheedy, whose own abiding love of English novels infused her support of my project, also deserves great thanks. Not only did she take on representing the book, but both she and her daughter Ally Sheedy also offered extraordinarily insightful readings of its earlier drafts that helped me bring the project to conclusion. I also wish to thank Jeannette Seaver of Arcade Press for her faith in this book as well as her astute input and editing, Maxim Brown of Skyhorse Publishing for his care and competence in guiding the manuscript through production, and other staff of both the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency and Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing.
Finally, thanks to Mary Edith Mardis, a support to me both as reader and life partner, to whom Bookmarked is dedicated.