The Book I Didn't Like

Given from someone who understood me

Out from college, I began keeping time with a girl from Pittsburg, a girl from Jackson, and a girl from Memphis. I assumed one of them would decide that I was a keeper and make it clear that she wanted something more substantial. It didn’t work out that way. They wanted something more substantial, just not with me.

I knew the girl from Pittsburg from National School Supply and Equipment Association meetings. She worked for Scholastic, which published books for young adults and children. With a fresh master's degree in English, she wanted to be an editor, but being young and inexperienced, they stuck her in marketing, where she performed her duties but wished for other things. She wore her hair in a mocha-chocolate ponytail. Her eyes were so black you could see yourself in them, and her body was covered in a thick blanket of freckles that formed a constellation guiding visitors to unknown galaxies.

In those days, Scholastic's publishing department wasn’t doing so well. There was a lot more famine than feast. Other divisions of the company were spending all their available cash on unsuccessful products, and children just weren’t reading like they used to. Since the advent of television, people have complained about children not reading as much, and now, with video games, it has become a national crisis.

In those days, what I was reading, but especially what I was writing, was something of a secret. My father was aware that I was unhappy with what I was doing with my life at that point, but he was determined to convince me that his plan for me was the only logical choice. One day, he called me into his office and listed all the reasons he was right and I was wrong. I had more connections in business, politics, education, and finance than any other fella my age in Mississippi, he said. There was something to that. I knew the presidents of both banks, and they knew me. I had memorized the names of every committee head in the Mississippi legislature and had a pretty good idea of which college football team they were aligned with. People still spoke of my Uncle Boyd, whom I was named for as if he were still alive. Sometimes, I got phone calls from people looking for him, and I had to explain that he died twenty-two years before.

My parents knew what I wanted to do with my life; they just didn’t believe in it. Writing was risky. Business was safe. Writers were weird, often alcoholics or homosexuals or both.

One afternoon, I went to a SWAC football game with my dad and his best friend, Rowan. Three white guys at a SWAC game was something of a spectacle, but people seemed to like that we were there. I was old enough that they didn’t hide the bottle they snuck in. They even let me have a taste.

“Coke! Sprite! Peanuts!” Teenage boys marched up and down the stairs of Veterans Memorial Stadium, serving trays loaded with blue JSU plastic cups. A stadium cup full of crushed ice, coca-cola, and Tennessee sipping whiskey is pretty good in the sun.

“Tennessee Williams was a homosexual.” My father said. “Ernest Hemmingway shot himself.”

Rowan squinted, “Yeah, he did.”

I knew what he was doing. It wasn’t an ambush, not a violent one anyway. My daddy loved me. All he wanted was for me to be safe and happy, and neither of the men he mentioned were safe and happy.

“Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe,” I responded. Rowan laughed, and then Daddy did. “Yeah, he did,” Rowan said.

“Do you know anybody like Marilyn Monroe?” Daddy asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Not yet.” We all laughed.

The girl in Philadelphia was probably the only woman I ever knew who talked to me about the things that were important to me. She knew that I wrote. She knew what I wrote, what I read, why, and what I thought about it. She knew that arts and letters meant more to me than anything, but that it frightened me because I never believed I was any good, and if I wasn’t any good, what did I have left that mattered?

She ended up married to somebody else. Having never gotten her chance at editing, she went to law school and did that instead. For a while, though, for a brief shining moment, she was a promising young editor, and I was a promising young writer. That was a dream that made me very happy, but it didn’t last.

One day, she said her company was releasing a new book. I might like it, she thought, because it was filled with all the things I like, monsters and things. I asked Lemuria when they would get a copy.

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone” was not a book anybody expected to do well. They considered it too long for American young people. Reading it, I made notes of all the places where she stole characters and situations.

I wrote to my dappled inamorata, “JK Rawling might not be a great writer, but she’s certainly a good reader. The book is too derivative for my taste, but whatever else you can say about her, at least she steals from a very high class of people. Please keep me updated on how well the book sells. I miss the tips of your fingers and the smell of your hair. Please write soon. I remain, Faithfully yours.”

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone” went on to be the best-selling young adult novel in history. It saved Scholastic from bankruptcy and allowed them to expand their operations considerably.

In the middle of all that, I still didn’t like the book. I still thought it was derivative, and the conflict never seemed all that dire to me, but I greatly respected Rawling for getting American children to read again. She made the kind of things I read about and the kind of things I wrote about not only respectable but wildly popular.

She sent me the book, I think, believing it might inspire me and make me take a chance on myself. It didn’t work out that way. I think she could tell our time together was coming to an end. In a year, I’d be promised to someone else. In two years, she’d be married and in law school. I let the girl I was promised borrow my copy of “The Sorceror’s Stone.” I wish I hadn’t now. She enjoyed it. She ended up reading all the books in the series. Besides being a book to read, that particular copy was meant to be a gift to help me cross a barrier I needed to but couldn’t. I never got it back, which is a shame, but I’ll never forget it.