The Place I Am Most Myself
“What I have had for the past six years, what has been constant and steady in my life is the novel I’ve been writing. This has been my home, the place I could always retreat to. The place I could sometimes even feel powerful, I tell them. The place where I am most myself. Maybe some of you, I tell them, have found this place already. Maybe some of you will find it years from now. My hope is that some of you will find it for the first time today by writing.” —Writers and Lovers by Lily King
I have written for my whole life, ever since I could hold a pencil, ever since I realized it was something you could do. It is, most definitely, one of the places I find home, although writing for an audience sometimes feels like someone ripped the side of the house off, and now everyone can see me standing at the stove in my pajamas, scrambling eggs. Still, writing is the place that I return to, the home I carry with me, and one of the ways I try to find truth.
I found this book through the recommendation of Annie B. Jones, owner of the Bookshelf in Thomasville, Georgia, and I couldn’t wait to read it. Yet it took me a while to find my place in this book, because in the beginning, everything felt so bleak for the first person narrator, Casey. But the thing about life is that it doesn’t stay bleak for long, if you’re willing to look for the hope in unusual places. Friends show up to her doctor’s appointment. A friend reads her book and recommends agents. Sweet little boys capture her heart and make her remember what it is to be human. Geese help her mourn her mother. Her brother helps her remember what it is to be a family.
This is a quiet book, but at the end of the day, I think I prefer a quiet book, because I live a quiet life, and while I am not a novelist (yet), or a waitress, I recognize myself in the ordinariness of Casey’s days, in her pain and in her joy. We don’t need fireworks to recognize what is human in other people. We just need to be willing to open our eyes. When we do, we may find that what we’re looking for has been right in front of us, in crazy places, in all kinds of different people. In writing. In books.