Love, Loyalty and Books: Essential Reading from Susan Straight, Author of In the Country of Women—Our September Nonfiction Pick

I was three years old when my father left, my mother was eight months pregnant with my brother, and all I wanted was a book. I tried to crawl onto her lap, but she had no lap. She sat in a wooden chair under a clacking wooden clock brought from Switzerland by her stepmother. It is my first memory – my mother crying, me sitting on the floor of our small house in Glen Avon, California, a rural community 50 miles from Los Angeles. We had only oatmeal and beans, she tells me, but she took me to the grocery store and spent her last quarter on a Little Golden Book. Tawny Scrawny Lion. 
When I was growing up, she told two stories: I taught you to read in one weekend: 1, so you would go to the babysitter and be quiet; or 2, I thought they wouldn’t let you into American kindergarten unless you could already read.
But two years ago, when I was finishing my memoir, In the Country of Women, my mother, now 85, laughed and said, “No, you taught yourself to read. You read everything, the Quaker Oats box, the road signs. So, I bought you that book. I was an immigrant, and I thought reading would give you a better life.  I read it to you once, and you read it to yourself, over and over and then cried for another one. I didn’t have any money. But I found the library.”
Tawny Scrawny Lion sits on a shelf near me now, as I write. It can seem alternately terrifying and cute as a starving lion roams through strange landscapes hunting zebras, kangaroos and bears, but is fooled by resourceful bunnies into eating carrot stew and becoming family with them. It was imprinted into my brain that desperation could be tempered by intelligence and open-hearted generosity, which I still try to believe now.
My mother had my baby brother, went back to work three days later and we went to the babysitter, where I read everything. My mother remarried, to a lovely man from Canada; they met during citizenship class. They had a son, and my mother brought two foster children into our family. At six, I was the oldest of five children. Summers in inland Southern California meant 100-degree days, burning feet on sidewalks, drinking from the hose outside and baby lizards blinking at me while I lay on my belly. My mother bought me Heidi, the iconic story of the mountains of Switzerland, the place she’d had to leave after her own mother died when she was only nine.
Heidi is five, orphaned, brought to the Alps to live with a surly hermit grandfather. The book contained my mother’s childhood: goats, wildflowers, the snowy peaks always in sight. I read that novel hundreds of times, imagining the Alps in my blood. That edition sits here, too.
At 12, I found two paperbacks for sale at the local library: Sula, by Toni Morrison, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, by Ernest J. Gaines. Both of these were foundational texts for my life. Sula contains a world of women— the grandmother, Eva Peace, whose rambling house is filled with humans whose loyalties and betrayals shape Sula and her friend, Nel. Jane Pittman, 9, is freed after the Civil War and journeys for another 100 years through landscapes and families formed from geography, kinship. These novels are the essence of chosen family, of women sustaining each other through bonds sacred to themselves.
Reading every hour I could, hidden in trees and hedges and under beds, fleeing chores and children, these voices were those of the women and families in my community: immigrants from Mexico, the Philippines, Lebanon, descendants of people once enslaved in Louisiana and Mississippi; people whose language, like my grandmother and my neighbors, was an “American” concoction more beautiful than standard English.
In the last seat of the school bus, when I was 15, I met my future husband on a field trip. His parents were both great storytellers, with Oklahoma and Mississippi in their pasts, and the women in his driveway were as heroic as those in my novels. By then, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and that meant listening first. We married when I was 22, he was 23, and I studied writing with James Baldwin, whose novel Go Tell It on the Mountain is here also, the paperback I bought at 14. Even now, the image of John, the main character, watching his mother keel over the body of his younger brother, killed in a senseless act of violence, still makes me cry. My beloved younger brother died in 2002, after his friend committed a senseless act of violence.
I have three daughters now: 31, 29 and 25. They were read to from their first hours on earth, and for their entire lives, they have seen me holding books, immersed for survival. (I read Terry McMillan’s first novel, Mama, while in labor with my first child. It got me through 15 hours.)  I read my daughters Owl Moon, and, yes, Heidi and Tawny Scrawny Lion. But on the porch, I also told them stories of the women who came before them: their grandmother Alberta, her own mother Daisy who journeyed from Mississippi to California fleeing violence and poverty; their grandmother Callie, who was widowed with six children in Tulsa, Oklahoma; their tiny Swiss grandmother who missed the Alps. My mother grinned and told them she stole pears and apples from trees, and chocolate she hid in a woodpile. They listened, rapt, while I twisted their long black curls into braids and she told them her braids had been called “züpfe” when she was small. She didn’t tell me until a few years ago that her stepmother tried to give her away when she was 15, in marriage to a pig farmer in rural Canada, and that she packed a single suitcase and walked down the dirt road and didn’t see her family again for five years. She gave me books, and narrative, and it’s my task to write those journeys, of all these women who made my daughters and me a family.