“Are You There, God? It’s Me, Mariann”: How Reading Shaped Me

by: Mariann Devlin 

I’ve loved reading since I was a little kid. My mom said it was impossible to get me to pay attention to anything she was saying, if I had my nose in a book. Belle from Beauty and the Beast was my favorite Disney princess because she loved books and libraries (not to mention she didn’t judge people for the way they looked). Growing up, my favorite books were just as much an influence on me as my favorite music or movies.

It started with Little Women. Reading about the misadventures of Jo March, a creative, spirited tomboy who loves to read, and finds her happiness by simply being herself, encouraged me to keep up with my interest in reading and, of course, continue being myself even if I struggled socially.

Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, and basically everything written by Judy Blume and Cynthia Voigt, were some of my other favorites. At the library, there was no shortage of complex, clever, strong and sometimes tragic female protagonists, unlike the very flat, one-dimensional female characters in movies and television. These authors gave voice to a perspective that, more than being “female,” was utterly human.

My relationship with books hasn’t changed much. Just as I was drawn to complicated coming-of-age tales as a kid and a teenager  – I had a rather complicated childhood — I’m still interested in books that deal with the question of existence, only now from a more adult perspective. Reading, for me, has always been a journey toward better self-understanding and growth. Not just because the books I love are ones whose narratives I identify with, thus granting me some hope when they (sometimes) end happily, but rereading those favorite books has given me the gift of knowing I can reinvent my life.

All of my favorite books have pencil marks. I underline the sentences that mean a lot to me, and sometimes I’ll make little notes next to them. Upon reading them a second, third, fourth, or fifth time, I can reflect on why that passage was once so moving to me, and which ones provide me with new insight.

Take one of the greatest books I’ve ever had the honor of reading. Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by the lesbian postmodern writer Jeanette Winterson. It’s a semi-autobiographical metafiction about a teenage girl traumatically rejected by her fundamentalist Christian mother, and her church community, for being gay. Even though I identify as straight, I could immediately relate to, as Winterson once put it in a short story, her life’s struggle as she walked the “narrow path between freedom and belonging.” She went on, “I have sometimes sacrificed freedom in order to belong, but more often I have given up all hope of belonging.” (It’s called the “24-Hour Dog.” You should read it.)

Of Oranges, Winterson said that thinking of her life as a narrative yet to be told, a story constantly unfolding, offered up a feeling of freedom in the face of chaos. It gave her life meaning when it would otherwise be fated to be empty, or of someone else’s making.

I come from a comparatively poor and unstable background, one which still restricts me in many ways. But writers like Winterson or Hermann Hesse, largely interested in the heroic spiritual journey, have (ironically) planted the seed of self-authorship in my mind.

Since this is a piece for the queers, let me go ahead and recommend you pick up that beautiful and often very dark, inverted fairy tale about queer self-acceptance. Here’s a video of Winterson also talking about her own favorite books, the ones that opened up new opportunities of existence for her:

We are creatures of language. Human beings invented language because we have to deal with all these things, not just our outside world or inside world, but we have to find a way of expressing that in a way which is complex.

Of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, about a gender-bending nobleman, Winterson also says, “Reading Virginia Woolf, this great romp, this gusto, this extravagance, this excitement with language, I thought, ‘That’s how I want to write. That’s how I want to be.’ It’s this world beyond the world first seen through Mrs. Winterson’s eyes in the Bible.”

From Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret to The Color Purple, books have given us this invaluable gift. From the time we’re born, our lives are shaped by the stories we’re told — and to spend my life reading and rereading those tales of self-discovery, loss, triumph and grace, have given me a sense of freedom over my own story that I may not have had.

Mariann Devlin is a recent journalism school graduate from Loyola University. She’s a reporter for Patch.com, and a volunteer contributor to Streetwise magazine, a publication dedicated to ending homelessness. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, Mariann moved to Chicago four years ago and still complains incessantly about the cold winters. Follow her on her blog at  mariannecdotes.wordpress.com.