I was newly living in London in the summer of 1995 when my husband had a stroke that left him partially paralyzed down his left side and, for a time, barely able to talk. I was 31. We had been married for just two months.
The world became so small so quickly. I’d spend the days with him in the hospital and then stagger home, exhausted and frightened. I didn’t know many people there, and I felt alone in my little bubble of grief. And as so often when things feel overwhelming, I turned to books for escape and consolation.
Life was challenging enough; what I wanted was comfort. I re-read my favorite Agatha Christie books, which felt like old friends. I read the wonderful Scottish mystery writer Josephine Tey: “Miss Pym Disposes,” about an undetected murder that forces the title character to make a wrenching decision that will alter the fates of two young women she has only recently met; and “Brat Farrar,” featuring a long-lost twin who comes back to claim his inheritance (or is he an impostor?), much to the discomfort of his brother.
I read Barbara Vine’s insidiously creepy “House of Stairs,” and I forgot about my own problems for a while. Meanwhile, in the hospital, my husband’s father read to him from the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, with their exquisitely constructed sentences and perfect plots of gossamer nonsense.
Different crises call for different sorts of books. This current one is hard for readers even though, for many of us, it has brought the unexpected gift of free time and nowhere to be. But it’s so hard to concentrate right now, so hard to feel calm and banish the fearful noise in your head. I’ve been thinking a lot about Francie, the dreamy girl in Betty Smith’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” whose life is transformed by reading, who knows after she learns to read that she will “never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends,” because the world is “hers for the reading.”
Set among the impoverished tenements of Williamsburg in the early 1900s, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is a good book for this moment. It’s the quiet story of a quiet person whose life is very hard, but who confronts adversity with curiosity, imagination and ambition. It’s also about how books can sustain us in difficult times.
It’s easy to feel like a child just now. The news is so frightening, and we have so little control over what comes next. Sometimes the books we loved early on can help us again. Gretchen Rubin, the author of “The Happiness Project” and a great lover of children’s books (I belong to a book club she runs devoted to children’s literature) said that she is spending her time inside re-reading, among other things, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books.
“I feel I have been preparing my whole life for this because of my passion for Laura Ingalls Wilder,” she said, of being holed up at home with her husband and children. “If you think about it, the most memorable parts are about a family alone in a house facing some kind of challenge.”
The books are about the excitement of small things when there are few things to be had — candy made from maple syrup poured into the snow; a homemade Christmas present; a sleigh ride through the snow to visit your grandfather. Home in these books means warmth and refuge, families hunkered down against the difficulties of the world, the larder stocked for hard times ahead.
From London, the author Alain de Botton, whose organization The School of Life is devoted to helping people find ways to wrestle with their troubles, recommends a story for young children, “The Tiger Who Came To Tea,” by Judith Kerr, about a tiger who unexpectedly shows up at the door and demands to be served tea. It’s a lesson in how to adapt to the unforeseen with flexibility and aplomb.
He also suggests the essay “The Death of the Moth,” in which Virginia Woolf considers the pathos of a humble moth fluttering ineffectually outside her window. “Properly seen, it is a marvelous, beautiful thing,” de Botton said in an email. “Through her essay we can be drawn to see afresh, and with deserved generosity, the worth of our own lives.”
And I, in turn, would recommend one of de Botton’s own books, the surprisingly delightful “The Consolations of Philosophy,” which is both an introduction to six philosophers and a primer for applying their ideas to our own lives. The chapter on Nietzsche’s belief about the link between happiness and painful experience is particularly appropriate right now. “All lives are difficult,” de Botton writes in that chapter. “What makes some of them fulfilled as well is the manner in which pains have been met.”
One way of measuring a life’s reading is to remember what books have helped along the way. When I was 8 and my father died, I spent much of the summer lounging around with a stack of Nancy Drew mysteries, fortified by Ring Dings (correct eating method: surgically nibble off the chocolate coating, work through the “cake,” and then savor the crème reward). With her titian hair and her harmless boyfriend and her nose for mystery, Nancy Drew got me through those first few months.
But it was Madeleine L’Engle’s classic “A Wrinkle In Time,” which I read and re-read to counter the lingering sadness of the ensuing years, that soothed my soul. How I loved stubborn, awkward Meg and her lanky boyfriend, Calvin, and the three exotic extraterrestrial ladies who descend to help them and our young planet fight their way through the darkness. And at heart (though I didn’t realize it at the time), the book is the story of a girl who loses her father and then finds him again, so it was just right for me then.
In 2001, I was still in London when the 9/11 attacks occurred. Much as the coronavirus feels both personal and global, 9/11 felt like two tragedies layered on top of each other, the larger one and then a smaller one, because that day I (along with so many others) lost a person I loved.
I consoled myself with Ian McEwan’s “Atonement,” a novel set partly during World War II about love, grief and the transcendent ability of fiction to present a counter-reality to the sadness in our lives. I found it profoundly moving, and I have gone back to it often. I read it again as my mother was dying a few years ago, and I read perhaps my favorite book of all, “Charlotte’s Web,” aloud to her as I sat by her bedside. We were both so reassured by the notion of Charlotte living on in her children and grandchildren.
I’m not sure what the exact right book is for today, and I suspect our notions of what we need will change over these next weeks and months. But for now, I’ve been losing myself in Nancy Mitford’s novels. My favorite is “The Pursuit of Love,” set in England (and Spain and France, a little) in the years before and during World War II. It is elegant and funny and romantic and written with the lightest touch, but it also bracing and wise. It shows us how to be brave, how to approach daily life with humor and pleasure and occasional joy, even when the world seems to be falling apart.
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