Breaking the Cycle of Abuse… With My Books
Author Rachel J. Lithgow reveals her struggle to break a cycle of abuse between her and her books, the ones she can’t quite finish…or quit.
It starts as it always does.
A longing look. A gentle caress. The butterflies when I realize that I’m sure what I want, leading to that first moment of delicious flirtation when I let my feelings be known. Finally, the anticipation reaches its zenith when we’re at home, in bed, opening up to one another for the first time, my fingers practically tingle when I’m ready to jump in with both feet.
Typically, this is when it all falls apart. The battle for control, my self-esteem and intellectual pride begins: me vs. the latest book I’ve just purchased or downloaded.
The first book, where I learned the rules of engagement, was Foucault’s Pendulum. I found it at 20, casually sitting on the dollar table at my favorite used bookstore on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It took me six months. Six months to read a paperback. I wanted to throw it across the room on a nightly basis. I knew Eco was no good for me. I thought about the book during class, on the T, and when I was bored during dinner listening to the ambient noise in the dining halls. A lesser person would have given up, but not I.
I will dominate the book. It will bend to my will. I will love it and it will love me. When I read the last sentence and it was all over, I didn’t feel victorious, but rather hollow and depressed. I didn’t get what I wanted out of the relationship, part of me wishing that I’d never started up with it in the first place. It haunted me for weeks afterward, and though I wanted to leave it behind, the book has followed me to every apartment and home I’ve lived in since, sitting in the back of my bedroom’s bookcase. I just can’t let it go.
And so it went with dozens of books in its wake: The Little Friend, a book I had been desperate to read since I fell in love with the author’s first novel 10 years earlier. Some left bigger scars than others. Metahistory almost killed me, both triggering my imagination and confusing the hell out of me, toying with my moods and emotions. When I realized I would be a better failed academic than an actual one, I left historical texts and heady novels behind, preferring instead to read biographies and memoir. There was a brief respite of joy. I read The Baron in the Trees and gave out the Calvino book to everyone I knew one Christmas, but then my old patterns emerged. I got stuck in the cycle all over again with the likes of The Romanov Sisters, which still sits on my nightstand, seductively waiting for me to try again, just one more time.
Lest anyone reading find this pompous, or some kind of intellectual virtue signal, let me be clear. I’m an equal opportunity victim in these relationships. For every Tartt, Eco, and White, there lurks a Brown, James, Hoover, and Balducci. These rebounds. The books I end up with late at night in the alley after the club closes and I don’t want to curl up that night alone. The worst was after a particularly bad go-around with The Children’s Act, a book everyone I knew loved but I hated, I hit rock bottom.
I confess this only to you, but I downloaded and binge-read Sweet Valley Confidential: Ten Years Later in a three-hour shame spiral that actually made me forget to pick up my kid, who I discovered alone in the rain, frantically texting me when I pulled up 25 minutes later than I should have. I just couldn’t help myself. There were similar humiliations with It Ends with Us and The Da Vinci Code, but I don’t have the strength to go into detail. Suffice it to say, I couldn’t quit wrestling books, both popular and not, intellectual and…not, into submission.
I knew then it was time to break the cycle. Alas, how terrible is knowledge when it brings no comfort to the wise.
These days, I’m more careful in how I engage and put myself out there, but I have good days and bad, like any other abusive cycle or addiction, it’s one-day-at-a-time. I do move slower. I try to learn something before I make the commitment. I often think I should join a support group that keeps me in check and accountable so I can see the pitfalls coming. I try not to ignore the warning signs on the jackets or the Amazon reviews, thinking that I can change the inevitable outcome, but sometimes, the book bomber devil that lives on my shoulder whispers in my ear: This one might be different! Try it! Who knows? Do you want to have IG Bookstagram FOMO?
Maybe I should apply the same strategy to the men I date? Aw, hell, one problem at a time. Bird by bird.
Check out Rachel J. Lithgow's My Year of Really Bad Dates here:
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