Resilience, empathy, strength, learning
How books are helping my daughter find her place in the real world
My daughter is always reading.
“Just one more page,” is the standard refrain before bed. “Or four.” If someone asks, “Where’s Madeline?” the answer is likely sprawled out on the couch with a book, dreaming with her eyes open.
More often than not, I’m reading novels or comics or essays. Or writing them. And writing consists of more than simply typing. Sometimes, while eating dinner or raking leaves, I will go still and stare into the middle distance with a slack expression, muscling through a plot point. I’m always taking notes. A camera technique in a film. A conversation at the bar. A hike in a marsh, a falcon in the sky. All of it feeds into me, and I greedily try to break it down into nourishment, something I can use on the page. Every day, through whatever I expose myself to, I’m learning to be a better writer.
Something similar is happening to Madeline now. The books she’s reading are feeding her. Through them she’s learning how to live. Parents always fuss over what their children eat, worrying about the vitamins or toxins that will impact their bodies. I worry about what Madeline reads. Not prohibitively. Just the opposite. I want her to gorge.
Because books don’t merely entertain. They incite action, create empathy, spark critical conversation and make you a better citizen and more fully realized human being. The more books she gobbles up, the more lives and worlds she has packed impossibly into her nine-yearold brain.
I imagine the inside of Madeline’s mind as a house. It’s a sunny, comfy sort of place. But in this house, new doors appear every day. One leads to a ballroom lit by floating candles. Windows appear that offer views of a sandstorm in Egypt, a giant squid propelling itself through the murky ocean depths. Each book she pulls off the shelf opens up another secret passage. What kind of mansion will her mind become? This is where she will live as a woman, and I want the foundation to be strong.
Each night my wife and I read to her on a rotating schedule. Tonight I will crack open A Wrinkle in Time, and tomorrow my wife will read The Witches. We want her to read classics, and we want her to read whatever is rocketing to the top of the bestseller lists.
We want her to read poetry and graphic novels, and we want her to read Newbery winners. We want her to read across religious and gender and cultural barriers. We want her to be swept away, but we want her to learn.
We want this so that she’s resilient enough to survive and open-minded enough to explore whatever life throws at her. So that she’s educated enough, strong enough to carve out her own place in the world.
But Madeline also has her own ideas. When she was six, she picked the novel Inkheart off the shelf at the bookstore. It’s as big as a brick, 560 pages.
She had never read, on her own, anything that was remotely as long or as challenging. And to this day, it remains her favourite book.
Each weekday, at about 4 p.m., the front door creaks open and booms shut.
Two backpacks thump to the floor. It isn’t long after this that Madeline rushes into my office and tugs my hands away from the laptop and says, “Time to be done.”
But today she doesn’t come. I find her at the family computer. “I’m writing a novel.”
I’ll admit that my black, poisonous, gravy-clotted heart beat a little faster then. “What? That’s amazing. Can I read it?” “Sure.”
We recently finished The Hobbit. When we finished the book, I asked her what she thought. She absolutely loved it. “But … it’s kind of weird it’s all boys?”
I hadn’t noticed up until then, but the gender discrepancy is extreme enough that the word “she” appears in the novel only once. We talked about this criticism more when we watched the films and how much she enjoyed the addition of the female character Tauriel.
Now I lean in to read what she has written.
“Once there was a hobbit, and when you read this story you might think this is a lot like The Hobbit, and as a matter of fact it is. But this story is about a girl hobbit.”
When Madeline was a toddler, she used a possessive article in front of each noun. My brother, my piggy, she would say. “My share” was her standard declaration when she grabbed a cracker or climbed onto a swing. As though she knew the world was hers to claim.
“How do you like my book?” she says, and I say, “I like it a lot. Keep going.”