What is it about libraries that are so emotional? Susan Orlean asked this question during her recent appearance at Cleveland Public Library, and it’s one I’ve continued to ponder since. The question had persisted for Orlean, too—so much so that she wrote The Library Book, an examination of one devastating library fire and just why libraries loom so large in our cultural imagination.
Orlean shared how, as a child growing up in Cleveland, she and her mother made frequent trips to the Bertram Woods branch of the Shaker Heights Public Library. Years later, after she moved from New York to Los Angeles with her family, Orlean took her son into a library branch and felt “shot out of a cannon back in time.”
“I’ve been lots of places with my mother,” she said, “but I don’t walk into a grocery store [and have that reaction]. The experience of being in a library is resonate and emotional.”
As I listened to Orlean discuss libraries, her mother, and The Library Book, I found myself recalling my own long-ago visits to a neighborhood library branch with my mother. I grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and the closest library to my house was the Mountville Branch of the Lancaster Public Library system.
Mountville was a tiny library located a few steps down in a building that also housed the State Farm office where my family purchased car insurance. While I can remember the occasional visit in which my brothers also came along, in general, the library was a place I visited exclusively with my mother. She set off to look for her own books while I flipped through the card catalogue, wandered the dim space between shelves, and surreptitiously browsed novels about teenagers who did things like sneak off and kiss at summer camp.
Like the library, bookstores also provided the destination for mother-daughter excursions. There was the Little Professor bookstore located in the grocery store strip mall near my house, the Waldenbooks in the mall, and, it seemed at the time, countless other bookstores that could appear around any corner. Once inside, my mother browsed the novels and I headed to the children’s section. In second grade I was wholly devoted to Sweet Valley Twins, and I’d make a beeline to that row of colorful spines to see if a new book had been released in the series. I wasn’t able to buy a new book every time my mother and I visited a bookstore, of course, but simply entering a space dedicated to books offered its own pleasure.
Every year, the public library’s annual book sale at the downtown branch was a highly anticipated event, a celebration and a treasure hunt all in one. My mother and I drove downtown armed with black trash bags to carry our haul and spent hours combing through the tables of books. I grabbed children’s books by the armload, as well as some adult books, too. We drove away from the book sale every year as if we’d gotten away with something, trading just a few dollars for a collection of books that would sustain us for months.
And so, like Orlean, books and my mother will always be linked in my mind, even and especially now that my mother is gone. In The Library Book, Orlean reveals an expression in Senegal that perfectly captures all that is lost once a loved one passes away: When a person dies, the saying goes, “his library has burned.”
“Libraries replicate what is inside us,” Orlean said during her appearance at Cleveland Public Library. “I was writing this book as my mother struggled with dementia. I was watching her library burn—and she was the one who introduced me to libraries.”
I watched my mother’s library burn when she died of cancer. I was twenty, an age that now seems heartbreakingly close to the days she and I visited the library together, or those times we popped into Waldenbooks at the mall, or when we grabbed our trash bags and rushed with giddy energy to the book sale. I watched my mother’s library burn without truly being able to comprehend it was happening—that our time together was ending, that all the stories and memories and moments I shared with her would no longer be cross-referenced between us but would instead exist only within me. As Orlean writes of her mother in The Library Book, “I knew that now I was carrying the remembrance for both of us.”
In 2011, nearly eleven years to the day that my mother died, I gave a reading of my first published book at the new Mountville library branch in Lancaster. I hadn’t lived in Lancaster for years and only planned a single book event there, but I never questioned where to hold it. Even when I learned that the tiny branch library I’d known had been replaced with a far larger building a few blocks away, and even when it became clear the downtown library could provide more space to accommodate the friends and family who planned to attend, I didn’t waver. I wanted to return to the Mountville library branch, the place I visited (in spirit, at least, since the physical space had changed) with my mother. I wanted to come home.
During her author appearance, Susan Orlean also discussed libraries in terms of immortality: that libraries are eternal, that they save parts of us forever, that they contain all that we each contain as individuals. I take comfort in that thought.
“Our minds and souls contain volumes inscribed by our experiences and emotions; each individual’s consciousness is a collection of memories we’ve catalogued and stored inside us, a private library of a life lived,” Orlean writes in The Library Book. “It is something that no one else can entirely share, one that burns down and disappears when we die. But if you can take something from that internal collection and share it—with one person or with the larger world, on the page or in a story recited, it takes on a life of its own.”
Now, when I go to work in a public research library in a city I don’t believe my mother ever visited, or when I attend readings or events in independent bookstores, or when I spend a few coins to buy a book at a library sale, I think of my mother. I think of what she gave me, and all that she held inside her—and how maybe, in some small way, I can find my way back to her through these memories, this shared history, and my inherited love of books.