I think my mother was trying to make sure we didn’t grow up to be assholes.
She had three white boys in their teens in the 1980s. We played sports, went to big schools, and lived in a world full of bad role models. Some nights, that included my father, who enjoyed winding her up at dinner—wiggling his eyebrows about sex or finishing the meal early and leaving her at the table eating dinner slowly while he turned on a Clint Eastwood movie. I’ve never met such a slow eater as my mother.
There was something in our house more powerful than the television, which we watched together most nights, or a .44 Magnum, which we did not own. Books. I will never understand why, but they were respected. My mother was a reader, and it is a testament to the power of books that her simply holding one, or talking about it, made us respect her. Every other month, a novel or book of popular psychology from the Book-of-the-Month Club arrived at our house in suburban Sacramento. Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Into a cone of silence, my mother disappeared with these books, and we respected it.
I should say that this habit preceded my mother. Her own mother had been a reader and member of the BOMC, and she still remembered reading Richard Wright’s Black Boy that way, not to mention thrillers by C.P. Snow, Anne Tyler’s novels, and the reporting of David Halberstam. Whenever we visited her house back East, I would study her shelves of books as if they contained some clue as to the roots of my grandmother’s stupendous charm and intelligence. How she seemed to know everything. I now see it for what it was—both my mother and her mother had studied literature and politics in college. Both could have become journalists, professors, community activists. The book club from afar was how my mother and her mother kept their minds going while raising families.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Thinking about this, I wonder how my mother felt, making dinner and us sitting down like it was a buffet. I have an answer in memory. One night, at dinner (which she had made, and which I remember devolving into a degraded conversation), she threw up her arms and said, “OK, that’s it. We’re going to do dinner a bit differently. We’re going to all read a book together.” I don’t know if she said exactly those words, but it’s how I remember it. She produced a copy of Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I’m pretty sure she read us the first chapter and then made us discuss it.
For those who haven’t read it, Fulghum’s book examines kindness, living in balance, sharing and cooperating, and saying sorry when you’ve hurt someone, laying out a concept of a life lived well and fairly. And it all begins in kindergarten. My mother had been a hospice social worker: She knew how to listen, but also how to get people to talk. I don’t remember what was said, but I do recall that the book lasted the week, and thus I had my first experience in a book club.
I know this was not quite a book club like the one you might be in, or the way we see them presented in movies—a group meets once a month to eat a potluck meal and discuss a noteworthy title. But really, is that all a book club is? What if a book club was any group that meets outside of a structured school environment to talk about a book that people may or may not have read? Doesn’t that encompass a whole range of possibilities? Like classes where people learn a language while reading stories? Like any group that reads and studies religious texts? I’ve been in a few of those. Like my work colleague’s daughter and her friends who are reading Vivian Gornick’s book on communism right now? Do you have to declare yourself a club to be one? Probably not.
But getting together feels good, at least at first. Reading is such a solitary act with such social consequences—how else are we supposed to deal with that contradiction but by doing it together? It’s so easy these days to scroll one’s way into the 2 a.m. hour. A book club can keep you honest about your best intentions, how you want to live or to inhabit your mind. Some books are so big, too, it feels as though hiking in with a few friends means you won’t get overwhelmed. Were it not for a book club I was in 30 years ago, I’d never have read David McCullough’s Truman. Some books are so intense, giving them to a friend creates the club. When I first read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room in 1996, I made my roommate read it, just as my mother had made us read Robert Fulghum. After he finished it, he pressed it on our other roommate. Our apartment became a three-month-long Giovanni’s Room book club.
Every 10 years, I ring the guys up to propose an anniversary reading—this fall will be our third go-round.
Books don’t just change us; they change each of us in different ways at different rates, and the totality of a book—its almost infinite possibility, if it’s really good—can only truly be grasped in a group, I believe. Watching someone else slide headlong into love with a character other than the one you believe in, or hearing someone interrupt the dream of a book with some key questions that didn’t even occur to you—this is magic. I’ll never forget being part of a presidential-biography book club and one of our members asking some questions of Ron Chernow’s President Washington that made me think of America in a totally different light.
Since that humanist intervention of my mother’s almost 40 years ago, I have been a member of more book clubs than I can even recall. The ones where someone had to be right quickly ran out of steam. So did those where we had different ideas of commitment. I think that like all group settings, a book club thrives on respect. It requires curiosity. Its shape depends on patience and understanding—some weeks, some months, some people really aren’t going to be able to keep up. I always liked the clubs that could operate that way. If I wanted to be in school, I’d go back to school.
I raised the issue of my mother’s dinnertime book club with my older brother recently, and he had no memory of it all, but he does remember my mother reading the book. It’s not a surprise that her dinner book club didn’t last long. In book club terms, my mother was bossy. She chose the book. She read from it aloud?! We had one more installment. I still remember that book, too. First You Have to Row a Little Boat. God, she loved self-help books. In spite of his dinnertime antics, my father did too. When my mother became sick and my father took care of her, it was to a support group and books that he turned for comfort. He also helped my mother set up for the book club that remained among the last social things she did in their home. When I think of her friends patiently waiting for her to finish a thought when she was losing her ability to talk, circling and circling, the words evading her, I just need to sit down and cry.
I am lucky that my version of what a book club could be began with someone I loved, presenting a book that might help me live a little more easily, with a bit more dignity. I didn’t associate the club with the worst parts of school, the grind of it, the emphasis (then) on rote learning. It felt like a warm and familiar way to deal with some big questions. I still feel that way. It’s why I love Alta Journal’s California Book Club, for the way big dilemmas of time, love, and memory carom off well-told stories, be it a mystery of Walter Mosley’s or a memoir by Maxine Hong Kingston. As a Californian, I especially love how the imagined geographies I encounter on the page make the one we inhabit in this one life we get to live clearer. Some 40,000 people have signed up for our California Book Club gatherings at this point, most of whom I’ve never met. Still, watching something as simple and comforting as a book open up the insides of fellow adults to core memories, core longings, core questions, I feel at home. Like we are together in the midst of something fundamental—trying to figure out how to live, with nothing but one another and a light at the center of a circle. Sometimes that light is fire, sometimes it’s a book throwing off the warmth.•
John Freeman is the host of the California Book Club and the author of California Rewritten, among other books. He is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story and an executive editor at Knopf. He lives in New York.
