How the Library Changed My Life

At four years old, the coolest thing I could do with a Saturday was dress myself entirely in navy green and sneak into our backyard, where I would hide behind some shrubbery and hope my brothers couldn’t see me. From my position among grass and weeds, I’d watch as they lifted the front tires of their bikes up and over enormous jumps, obstacles they’d built by packing mud and leaves into dense, intimidating mountains. Sometimes they made it over, but when they didn’t, I felt the fall, the vibrations body and bike made as they collided with the earth. I’d stay hidden like that for hours, subsisting on crackers I’d packed in my pocket and a Capri Sun I’d frozen the night before, until the sun began to melt and our parents yelled that it was time to come in for dinner. I was a girl in Pennsylvania; it felt like the best of what was available.

Then, at five, I learned to read. No longer was the best Saturday an afternoon of laying low and out of view, but one spent sprawled across a carpeted bay window inside the Indian Valley Public Library. Unlike so many libraries I’ve visited over the past few years, Indian Valley’s was not new, not modern, and not aesthetically pleasing, though the giant brick donut structure—complete with a gaping hole I always felt tempted to run up, as if I were a hamster inside a wheel—at the front of the building may have suggested otherwise. This was a small town with, therefore, a small-town library, complete with stale coffee smell and elderly folks in swishy pants. Still, there was nothing I loved more than spending whole hours inside that building, tracing one aisle and then the next, running my fingers over the books and re-alphabetizing if I caught an error, instinctual as an ape who picks the bugs off other apes. You may have guessed then that I’d become a writer, had you caught a glimpse of me at a too-low table with a too-high stack of books I’d pulled only for their first sentences.

No good.

So good.

One morning, after a weekend trip to Ford’s Theatre, I pulled every Young Adult book I could find on the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, and inevitably Harriet Tubman, so that when I came to the age of wanting one of the ever-popular American Girl Dolls, it was Addy I had to have. The only other dolls available were Caucasian and I deemed them boring, to say nothing of their failing paralleled historical significance. In a story my mother loves to tell, she once came upstairs to check on me—many hours after my bedtime—to find me crying in bed. When she asked why, I said, “Because Abraham Lincoln was so good, and now he’s dead.”

In junior high and high school, the library became the ideal dating scene; as innocuous as it was, it was also a breeding ground for the men I wanted: sweet, shy and sensitive, bookish but not agoraphobic. I can’t tell you how many men I’ve shared a $0.50 hot cocoa with, or how many walks I’ve taken to the neighboring convenience store, where’d we buy Cheetos and register pastries to illegally split behind “Anthropology-1850s.”

Now, as an adult, I still spend every moment I can inside a library: reading, writing, note-taking, making my grocery list, and people-watching. Last week, in New York City, I disembarked from my regional Amtrak and immediately left the hubbub of Penn Station for the Muhlenberg branch of the New York Public Library, located just a few blocks away. I was in town for a reading, and there was a lot I wanted to do—eat ramen and walk aimlessly and find the city’s best plate of waffles—but first I wanted to occupy the most isolated, hidden cubby and unpack my laptop and turn off my phone. It’s like this all the time; I visit a city’s public library the way others visit art museums, historical buildings, and once-famous homes. There’s no especially pressing need anymore; I have my own desk and an impressive library and a home office with a gigantic window. But still I love the possibilities inherent to these public institutions—in a library, any library, however many thousands of miles from my own, the architecture and people are always different, yet similarly in love with that familiar musty smell.