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 To understand why I’m such a fan of reading groups, you first need to know how I spend my days.
I get up, come downstairs, switch on the kettle, switch on my computer (it lives in our kitchen/living room), check my emails (hoping for something urgent to divert me from writing), open whichever chapter I’m working on, make the tea and toast, sit down in front of the computer … and stay there. I don’t stop for lunch, though I do try to break for some exercise mid-afternoon. I generally pack up about 6 and that’s it for the day. The next day I do the same. And the next.
It takes me a good five years to write a book and all that time I never know if it is going to ‘work’ and be worth publishing or if I should just stick it straight in the bin. If when it’s finished the publisher likes it, that is, of course, a good sign and a huge relief, but even that doesn’t guarantee that the book will be read. And that is what writers want more than anything else – more than money, more than fame, more than good reviews (not that we’d turn such things down if they came our way, you understand) - we want to be read.
Imagine then, at the end of all that effort and uncertainty and chewing-of-nails, being invited to go to speak about your book to a reading group. That means someone has read it! And the most wonderful thing about it is that reading groups read books because they want to; they have no axes to grind, they are not paid to read or review or praise or pull apart your book. They are made up of real readers, who are interested enough in books to come out of an evening at the end of a long day just to talk about them, and if an author is present, to ask the author questions.
I think it’s true to say that it wasn’t until I started giving readings and talks to reading groups that I really believed I was a writer. Until then I hadn’t thought of myself in those terms; I was just trying to write a book, like (it seemed) everyone else in the western world, with no real belief that it would ever be published. When I finally finished it (this was Crow Lake) I began sending it out to literary agents, who promptly sent it back. It was turned down by one agent after another for three solid years, so that when it was finally accepted I had the greatest difficulty believing it. When I first saw it on a shelf in a bookstore I was more dazed than thrilled. And then I had a phone call from a friend of a friend who belonged to a reading group not far from where I lived, wondering if I would come along and talk about the book. I said I wasn’t sure what I could say – writing is an extremely boring process. She said there were questions they were dying to ask; would I mind just coming and reading a bit and then answering people’s questions. I went, apprehensively, not knowing what to expect, and came away elated, delighted, inspired - but sobered too.
It was the perceptiveness and range of the questions that impressed me so much. The seriousness with which people took the book, the way they related the themes of the story to themes in their own lives. Someone said that reading Crow Lake had made her look again at the relationships within her own family. She realized she’d been unfair to one of her sons, she said. He’d left home long since, but she had written to him and apologized. That really gave me pause.
I don’t know why it surprised me that she and others in the group took the book so seriously. After all, I take books seriously too - I do believe that fiction helps us make sense of our lives. It just hadn’t occurred to me that anything I had written would receive that kind of attention.
In the past six years, in all kinds of reading groups, discussing both Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge, the experience of that evening has been repeated again and again. Perceptive, thoughtful comments and questions from people who really think about what they read. It has been wonderful, but more than that, it has made a difference to how I view my own work. I think harder about everything I write now. I’m aware that there are a lot of serious readers out there; if my ideas aren’t properly thought out or the writing isn’t up to scratch, they’ll notice.
Mary Lawson
June 2007
Some of my personal favourites:
Saint Maybe by Anne Tyler
What a fantastic story teller Anne Tyler is! Pick up any of her books and within a paragraph you are totally absorbed in her world. I love all of them, but my absolute favourite is Saint Maybe. It concerns the Bedloe family, “the ideal, apple-pie household: two amiable parents, three good-looking children, a dog, a cat, a scattering of goldfish.” Those two little words, “apple pie”, give the game away - you know a bombshell is going to hit that family and it does. To say what it is would spoil the story; sufficient to say it leaves Ian, the younger son, with such a load of guilt to carry that you think he’ll never be able to stand upright again. Essentially Saint Maybe is Ian’s story, but all of the characters are gripping, and all of them are so real you feel they must live next door.
Open Secrets by Alice Munro
For my money, Alice Munro is the best short story writer alive. In the space of a few sentences she can create a living, walking, breathing human being; in the space of a few pages she can tell you the story of his or her life. Her characters are ordinary people, but in reading about them you realize that no one is ordinary. The big issues, the great themes – love, death, triumph, failure – are present in all of our lives. She doesn’t pull her punches and there are no artificially happy endings to her stories, but they feel ‘right’, and that rightness is very satisfying. At the end of one of the tales in this collection, a woman whose life has not been entirely happy decides that the time has come to make a major change. Munro writes, “She was glad of a fresh start, her spirits were hushed and grateful. She had made fresh starts before and things had not turned out as she had hoped, but she believed in the swift decision, the unforeseen intervention, the uniqueness of her fate.” That’s Alice Munro’s gift to her readers – she lets them see the uniqueness of their fate.
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
I was in my twenties when I first read Slaughterhouse Five. I had never read anything remotely like it before, and with the exception of other books by the same author, I’ve never read anything like it since. Vonnegut has a unique voice and this is his masterpiece. It concerns the fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War. A terrible subject, and one Vonnegut knew at first hand – he was a Prisoner of War in Dresden at the time. Man’s inhumanity to man is a recurrent theme of his and his rage against it is savage, but he is so funny, and his touch is so light, that it is almost impossible to be depressed by anything he writes. “All this happened, more or less,” he begins in Slaughterhouse Five. “The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his.” The story is short – you can read it in an afternoon – but it will stay with you for life.
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