What My Mother Gave Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

(though she was intimidated by the wealthy kids who’d learned in high school how to write term papers on motif and symbolism) a native facility for critical reading. She knew characters and their motivations, and she knew—coming from a line of eccentric Texans and hillbillies, and having been raised by a hardworking, no-nonsense divorcée while her father married and divorced a string of wealthy widows and C-list starlets—how extreme and unreliable people could be, how mysterious their motivations. For a while she dabbled in philosophy, too. Ultimately, though, she blamed Sartre, Nietzsche, and their ilk for an existential crisis that led her to a psychiatrist, who told her she had mother issues.
    In a different era, she might have become a writer. Instead she strived to be practical. She taught school. She managed an office at Texas Instruments and tried her hand at light computer programming. She married a gregarious, womanizing social-climber of an attorney who didn’t want kids, triangulated out of that relationship with a soul-crushing affair, and then married another lawyer, my father, and they embarked on their mission to breed smart children together.
    Th is project lost focus once Mom started to interpret the Scriptures for herself. She spoke in tongues and prophesied, and eventually started her own church. She forbade observance of Halloween, declared Santa Claus a pagan, and held her own exorcisms. At last she had justification for disapproving of rock music, which she deemed satanic and likely to result in demon possession.
    Secular books should have been forbidden, too, for consistency’s sake. Th e novelist Jeanette Winterson has written of being allowed only to read the Bible and six or seven other religious volumes. She actually watched as her Pentecostal mother threw her collection of contraband paperbacks onto a bonfire. But I was still allowed, even encouraged, to read almost any stories I chose. As long as I steered clear of magic—no A Wrinkle in Time for me—Mom didn’t look too closely at what I picked up in thrift stores or at the library. And because I often stayed home sick, and, even more often, “sick,” I spent entire weeks in bed, racing through the seven library books I was allowed to check out at a time and then nagging her into going back and checking out seven more. She did not prevent me from reading Judy Blume or Paula Danziger, or, at the age of eleven, Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, a teen abortion story that still makes me flinch when I think about it.
    I see now that my mother’s ignorance about the books I read must have been, at some level, willful. Although she had devoted her life to God, she could not fully relinquish the smart-child experiment. She still needed me to distinguish myself in a way she herself had not been allowed to, and my increasingly undistinguished performance in math and science made clear that this would happen, if it happened at all, only through words.
    Eventually my mother would excoriate my opinions and my tastes. She would accuse me of being pretentious, uppity, and condescending. She would confiscate my copies of Nausea and Th us Spake Zarathustra, warning me they’d “mess up your mind.” “You’d better get right with Jesus instead of mucking around with all that pseudo-intellectual tripe,” she would say, when I moved back home after college to recuperate from an illness. Th e implication was that my body had turned against me because I, by focusing on wicked, secular things, had turned against God.
    Until then, though, her desire to acquaint me with the classics, to share the worlds her own mind had once lived in, trumped her conviction that any art not focused on God was a sin. On my fourteenth birthday, she took me to Books & Books, a beautifully curated shop in downtown Coral Gables, and filled my arms with paperbacks: A Farewell to Arms, Th e Great Gatsby, East