Once, while visiting an old friend, we went into her daughters' room. She walked up to an imposing shelf of books that lined one wall. She took one down, stroked it like a fetish object and sighed like a lover. "This was one of my favorites when I was young. I saved all my old books and gave them to my children." She lightly fingered the spines of a few others. "Did you save your books from childhood?" What an odd question.
"No. Of course not," I answered. "I never intended to have children."
"But I didn't save them for my children," my friend went on. "I saved them for myself. Do you mean to say that you got rid of all your books?" She looked at me as if I were a serial murder or something worse.
"I guess so. I just never thought about it."
"Well," my friend said brightly, evidently trying to put the conversation on a happier plane, "which were your favorites?"
I stammered.
"But you're such a reader. You must have had favorites. Which books made you a reader?"
Indeed, I do have a reputation as someone who likes to read and did enjoy reading as a child. However when I think of books that made me a reader, I don't ever think of children's books. It was mainly the books I encountered during that formative period on the cusp of puberty that made me what some might call, significantly, "a reader."
The local public library in the town where I lived was a handsome modernist building. The children's section was down in the basement. For many years of my life, I walked through the double set of glass doors and strait ahead to the staircase. There were stairs going up and stairs going down and, like all of the kids, I headed down.
One day, when no one I knew was around, I decide to mount rather than to descend. I had never been on the upper levels of the library except to look for my mother. I was familiar enough with the layout to know that the novels were on the mezzanine level. I couldn't help feeling the thrill of doing something forbidden as the linoleum tiles came into view, vaguely wondering what I would say if a librarian asked what I thought I was doing in the adult section. But books are not movies and there are no age prohibitions. If the librarian noticed me at all, he said nothing.
A number of years ago, a librarian friend joked about the people who were so worried that others might go to the library and use the computers there to look at forbidden things. He laughed, "Don't they know what sort of smut we have on the shelves?"
For a time, I wandered up and down the stacks, somewhat disoriented. There were quite a lot of books and I wasn't sure how to choose one. Funny names caught my eye. I took a book by one Fyodor Dostoyevski off the shelf. Crime and Punishment did not, I'm afaid, sound like a fun story and I put it back. Some months later I would come back and get that one. Not that day. I needed a less intimidating introduction to the world of adult books. Further down the aisle, I saw another funny name. The book had a funny name for a title. The flap on the book said it was funny. Jackpot.
Thus I picked up the book that would change my life and, since this is a political site, give me something to share with Michele Bachman. Yes, she and I have be irrevokably touched by Gore Vidal. Apparently, she didn't start with the right book. Unlike poor Michele, I did not pick up Burr. No, I picked a book that would be influential in making me the woman I am. Certainly, had Michele read it at the right, vulnerable age, when she was a quivering bud about to open, she would be a different person today. The title of that book was Myra Breckenridge. It was not my patriotism that was challenged, but only assumptions about gender and identity.
But perhaps poor little Michele never had the opportunity to read such a liberating book, because the book has been banned in many, many places. It is in honor of banned books week that I write this.
The town in which I read such a book heightened its impact and cannot be ignored. The library which sheltered such controversial works was the pride and joy of a town in which the residents frequently bragged that the school budget had never been voted down within anyone's memory. It was a northern New Jersey town of ticky-tack houses occupied by members of a surprisingly narrow socio-economic class. Many of the people were what are sometimes called ethnic white. Not working class ethnic whites, but lower middle class ethnic whites. My parents were odd in having been born in New Jersey. Most of my classmates had Nannas or Bubbes living in Brooklyn or on the Lower East Side. To have parents who were the first generation to go to college was the norm and education was seen as the great equalizer. Book burners were lower than pedophiles in the moral world in which I was raised. Yet. Yet. I cannot recall a single childless adult in that world. The land of ticky-tack houses was populated by two parent households with two point five children each. The library was, by far, the most daring place in town.
You might be, reasonably, saying at this point, "Great, kid, you've told us a lot about yourself and vurtually nothing about Myra Breckenridge."
Not quite, because it is in large part thanks to Myra that I am who I am today. It was Myra who first taught me, to quote the ever quotable Shakespeare, that "there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Certainly, there are more things on heaven and earth than are easily accomodated in the world of ticky-tack houses.
Before writing this, I reread the book. All the awful things you've heard about it - they are not at all true. The book is far, far more offensive than that. If your sensibilities are injured by. . . by anything, really, I highly suggest you do not read it. Vidal has been called a gay rights activist, but do not for a moment think that this book is a warm fuzzy book about how homosexuals or transpeople can make great neighbors, unless your idea of a great neighbor is someone who follows brutal sado-masochistic sex with stealing your significant other, and never mind the gender of either you or your significant other.
So who is Myra Breckenridge, you might reasonalby ask. Simply one of the most meglomaniacal narrators to have ever condescended to entertain her fortunate readers. The plot of the book is so well known, I believe I give nothing away in saying that Myra was born a man and became a woman. At the outset of the novel, she has arrived in Los Angelos to claim her inheritance, her half ownership in a piece of property also owned by her Uncle Buck Loner. To do so, she tries to pass herself off as the widow of Myron Breckenridge, her earlier identity.
I cannot reccommend the book without giving a trigger warning for sexual assault. This is a more challenging scene than you might anticipate because the narrator of the assault is not the victim, but the perpetrator.
It is in large part the voice of the narrator that carries it. You don't read it so much for the plot as for the exposition. A sampling:
The sailor who stands againt a wall, looking down at the bobbing head of the gobbling queen, regards himself as master of the situation; yet it is the queen (does not that derisive epithet suggest primacy and dominion?) who has won the day, extracting from the flesh of the sailor his posterity....
. . . the young men compensate by playing at being men, wearing cowboy clothes, boots, black leather, attempting through clothes (what an age for the fetishist!) to impersonate the kind of man that our society claims to admire but swiftly puts down should he attempt to be anything more than an illusionist, playing a part.
I alone have the intuition as well as the profound grasp of philosophy and psychology to trace for man not only what he is but what he must become, once he has ceased to be confined to a single sexual role, to a single person. . . once he has become free to blend with others, to exchange personalities with both men and women, to play out the most elaborate of dreams in a world where there will soon be no limits to the human spirit's play.
and finally,
That my plans have lately gone somewhat awry is the sort of risk one must take if life is to be superb.
My sister saw the book lying on my coffe table and thumbed through it. How did you understand this as a kid? Good question. All I can say is that I have always had a high ambiguity tolerance. If you don't, you had better not read that book at any age. On the other hand, perhaps it is to that book that I owe some of that ability. It is exactly that amibiguity and complexity that turned me into "a reader" rather than simply a kid who reads a lot. I can't say that I entirely understood it, but I was highly entertained and engaged, and it gave me a lot to think about. It also gave me the distinct sense that there were other ways to live than the one I knew in our little, frankly claustrophobic, suburban town. Furthermore, it gave me the notion that we are the authors of our own selves.
It is funny, clever, quotable, sick, perverted, challenging and disturbing. I'm not even sure that I should admit to having enjoyed it. It's not exactly p.c. Yet, as Myra herself says, after relating how Buck Loner's wife "gave up diking" after finding religion while buying Belgian endives at the farmer's market, "The story is not without its inspirational side."