What My Mother Gave Me Read Online Free PDF

of Eden, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre . . . “You’re old enough to stop reading garbage now,” she said. “You’re old enough for these.”
    A Farewell to Arms may have been the first literary novel I loved. Hemingway is accused of machismo, sentimentality, blankness, and misogyny, but I didn’t know about any of that then. Nor did I know anything significant about love or death or war, the central concerns of the book. Th e doomed romance—like crack to a teenage girl—hooked me, but it was the weird and delicate balance between detachment and intense self-awareness that drew me to the narrator.
    I believed everything he said. I thought he talked just the way someone who’d lived through trauma like that would talk. Th e troops, the mountains, the hills, and the girls were all coolly, precisely observed. And when I got to passages like this, I scrawled them into my notebook: “We were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time. If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. Th e world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
    I remember feeling that the book was telling me something about my mother, about who she was without Jesus—lonely and anxious and prone to lying awake in the darkness—and why she felt she needed Him. Reading Hemingway, reading all these novels, made me feel closer to her than actually being with her did. Th ey weren’t just fiction, they were artifacts. Th ey showed me who this woman—who’d once laughed with me over my storybooks, who’d stood so awkwardly with the other mothers in the school parking lot—had been before she became someone who lived for the Lord.
    Still, I must have internalized my mother’s discomfort with the bookish part of herself—and, by extension, her discomfort with the bookish part of me. Until a couple years ago, I secretly viewed fiction and essays as a vaguely shameful hobby. Realizing this, I stopped going out after work. I ceased reviewing. I worked on my novel for hours each day. I even started to tell my mother that I was writing. At first, she changed the subject. Not out of disapproval so much as an unease so deep-seated, so reflexive, she wasn’t even aware of it. Her urge to steer the conversation elsewhere was practically Pavlovian. But I persisted, complimenting her storytelling as I did, and eventually she started to dig up old books, Hemingway and Faulkner hardcovers, and send them to me.
    It must be a relief to her, knowing where those stories go, finally. And it must have given her pleasure—I know it did me—to learn that we have the same favorite novelist: that religion-obsessed master, Graham Greene.

My Disquieting Muse
    JEAN HANFF KORELITZ
    In the spring of 1982, I was a twenty-year-old exchange student at Harvard, struggling in a Freud seminar so far over my head that I sometimes wondered whether the class was being conducted in German. In my downtime, I wrote poetry, which I’d been doing for years. I thought of myself as a poet, but the cold hard truth was that I hadn’t read much poetry. Th at is, by poets who were not . . . me.
    To my younger self, nothing seemed wrong with that situation. After all, I considered poetry to be all about self-expression, sort of like