Turn the Page

It seems like my life is, and always has been, concerned with books. I’m either reading them, checking them out of the library, buying them on Amazon, reading free ebooks on various sites, writing books, publishing books (okay, so far it’s just been two, but it’s a start), or altering books.

I’m not sure what it is about books. I’m sure it has to do with my childhood.

Growing up, we didn’t have many books in our house. Neither of my parents read books; in fact, my mother struggled with reading. I think she may have had a reading comprehension problem. She dropped out of high school in her junior year, and maybe that’s why.

I was happy when I was finally given permission to walk all the way to the library by myself. The public library became my refuge and my sanctuary. There were some books that I checked out over and over again and other books that I challenged myself to read. One was by Wernher von Braun. His books on space and rockets were way over my 9-year-old head, but I checked them out anyway and tried to absorb what I could. Those books created an interest in science that exists today.

I started to see the parallel between the books I read and my life.. that my life was just that, a book full of chapters that had a beginning and ending and that I could move on from one to another.

This was really illustrated for me when I started writing my own biography. I’m also writing ones about my daughter, my mother and my grandmother. I’m not sure if anyone will ever read them, but I want to make sure that our stories and our lives I remembered somewhere, somehow.

But more than that. I am discovering that writing my autobiography helps me to put the events of my life, both good and bad, in a different context than they were when each event occurred. I can then see it from a different perspective, and the negative events tend to lose some of their traumatic power.

Once I’ve written about it all, I can tell myself it’s over and move on… to literally ‘turn the page’.