we’d left off the night before in whatever book we were currently enthralled by. We cried together when Bambi’s mother was killed; we raced through
Swallows and Amazons
and all the rest of the books in the series by Arthur Ransome, cheering for Captain Nancy and her first mate, Susan.
The Princess and the Goblin
was our gateway drug to George MacDonald, then came
A Little Princess
and
The Secret Garden
. Sometimes, between books, my mother invented stories for me about a little goatherd named Roland who lived in a mountain hut with his father and had many adventures. She loved making up the Roland stories as much as I loved hearing them.
And I read books to myself, starting a new one as soon as I finished the one before it, checking out whole stacks once a week from the school library. I read as voraciously as I ate. The two activities went together perfectly. Like all kids, I read the back of the cereal box while I ate the cereal; everyone did, it was nonoptional. This compulsion, however, extended for me into other areas not everyone seemed to need to explore. Theabsolute greatest pleasure I knew when I was little was to eat along with characters in books I was reading, or to write about characters who ate what I wished I could be eating.
A keenly piercing brain hunger gripped me whenever a character in a book ate anything—an urgent craving for the pemmican in
Swallows and Amazons
(which I imagined as a chewy kind of Spam); the Turkish Delight in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
(I pictured pillowy glittering candy that tasted like perfumed nuts, and I wasn’t far off); the dripping sweet flesh of the enormous traveling fruit in
James and the Giant Peach
; or some miniature version of the gigantic, caloric, wonderful
Little House on the Prairie
breakfasts, which seemed to consist of equal parts carbohydrates, cured meat, pickles, and preserves. Part of the excitement of all this food was the stuff that preceded or accompanied it—pirate sailing games, a sleigh ride in snow with a glamorous, dangerous witch, a perilous journey in an oversized fruit, the hard work and terrible weather of nineteenth-century midwestern farm life. With travel, danger, and adventure, it seemed, came food.
Once during an overnight at a friend’s house, I snuck off and read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. As a budding hermit, I used these overnights as an excuse to read whatever books my friends had that I didn’t, sidling away from my hostess to read her books as fast as I could before she noticed I was missing.
I finished
Charlie
in my friend’s bedroom beanbag chair and ventured back into the light, blinking with the force of the imagined taste of chocolate. On my way to the glass sliding doors that led to their backyard, where my friend and her sisters were playing, I ran into their mother. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. “What’s up?”
“I just finished
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
,” I confided. “And I am craving chocolate now like crazy.” I wasn’t asking for chocolate; that would have been rude. I was simply answering her question, and I expected her to say longingly, “I knowexactly what you mean,” looking off into the middle distance as she viscerally remembered the book’s lascivious, melting descriptions.
“Well, sorry,” she said instead, her cheer undaunted, “I don’t have any!” And off she went, before I could explain. This might have been the first time I realized that not everyone’s brain was wired the same way mine was.
CHAPTER 11
Curios
For our first Thanksgiving in Arizona, my mother heard about a group of people who were having a potluck celebration near the Superstition Mountains just outside Tempe. Ruth Ann and Frieda, our former Berkeley neighbors, were visiting, so we all drove there together.
There was a huge tepee set up in the desert, a real one; we all sat inside it in a big circle around the fire in the middle. People played wooden flutes and drums, and there
Swallows and Amazons
and all the rest of the books in the series by Arthur Ransome, cheering for Captain Nancy and her first mate, Susan.
The Princess and the Goblin
was our gateway drug to George MacDonald, then came
A Little Princess
and
The Secret Garden
. Sometimes, between books, my mother invented stories for me about a little goatherd named Roland who lived in a mountain hut with his father and had many adventures. She loved making up the Roland stories as much as I loved hearing them.
And I read books to myself, starting a new one as soon as I finished the one before it, checking out whole stacks once a week from the school library. I read as voraciously as I ate. The two activities went together perfectly. Like all kids, I read the back of the cereal box while I ate the cereal; everyone did, it was nonoptional. This compulsion, however, extended for me into other areas not everyone seemed to need to explore. Theabsolute greatest pleasure I knew when I was little was to eat along with characters in books I was reading, or to write about characters who ate what I wished I could be eating.
A keenly piercing brain hunger gripped me whenever a character in a book ate anything—an urgent craving for the pemmican in
Swallows and Amazons
(which I imagined as a chewy kind of Spam); the Turkish Delight in
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
(I pictured pillowy glittering candy that tasted like perfumed nuts, and I wasn’t far off); the dripping sweet flesh of the enormous traveling fruit in
James and the Giant Peach
; or some miniature version of the gigantic, caloric, wonderful
Little House on the Prairie
breakfasts, which seemed to consist of equal parts carbohydrates, cured meat, pickles, and preserves. Part of the excitement of all this food was the stuff that preceded or accompanied it—pirate sailing games, a sleigh ride in snow with a glamorous, dangerous witch, a perilous journey in an oversized fruit, the hard work and terrible weather of nineteenth-century midwestern farm life. With travel, danger, and adventure, it seemed, came food.
Once during an overnight at a friend’s house, I snuck off and read
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
. As a budding hermit, I used these overnights as an excuse to read whatever books my friends had that I didn’t, sidling away from my hostess to read her books as fast as I could before she noticed I was missing.
I finished
Charlie
in my friend’s bedroom beanbag chair and ventured back into the light, blinking with the force of the imagined taste of chocolate. On my way to the glass sliding doors that led to their backyard, where my friend and her sisters were playing, I ran into their mother. “Hello!” she said cheerfully. “What’s up?”
“I just finished
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
,” I confided. “And I am craving chocolate now like crazy.” I wasn’t asking for chocolate; that would have been rude. I was simply answering her question, and I expected her to say longingly, “I knowexactly what you mean,” looking off into the middle distance as she viscerally remembered the book’s lascivious, melting descriptions.
“Well, sorry,” she said instead, her cheer undaunted, “I don’t have any!” And off she went, before I could explain. This might have been the first time I realized that not everyone’s brain was wired the same way mine was.
CHAPTER 11
Curios
For our first Thanksgiving in Arizona, my mother heard about a group of people who were having a potluck celebration near the Superstition Mountains just outside Tempe. Ruth Ann and Frieda, our former Berkeley neighbors, were visiting, so we all drove there together.
There was a huge tepee set up in the desert, a real one; we all sat inside it in a big circle around the fire in the middle. People played wooden flutes and drums, and there
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