Autobiography of a Reader

                When I was four years old, my father sat next to my bed and read ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ aloud to me as I fell asleep. His voice got deeper and quieter as he drifted off, the poem so familiar he didn’t need to refer to the book in his hand. I thought that the ‘Michelangelo’ the ladies talked of referred to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. I liked to think I was the only four year old in the world who could recite reams of Eliot.
                When I was eight I sat in a deckchair in the back garden in the rain, holding an umbrella and a paperback. My whole world was the patter of rain above me and the chill of my feet on the wet grass. My father told me I could read anything in his library; I read Stephen King’s The Shining because it had a bloody axe on the cover and J.G. Ballard’s Crash because it had a half-naked lady. Both seemed like things I should not be reading, and I barely understood a word. I liked to think I was the only eight year old in the world who read books about axes and naked ladies.
                When I was twelve I had my first secret girlfriend; we exchanged closed-mouth kisses and our favourite books. She gave me illustrated books on revolutions, executions, and hundred-year-old jails; I gave up my Mallory Towers books and all my secrets. It lasted a month before she ran off with an older boy. I liked to think I was the most heartbroken twelve year old in the world.
                When I was sixteen I only read books by and about sad girls: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Susanna Kaysen. I thought that Virginia Woolf, walking into the lake with her pockets full of stones, made suicide romantic. I wrote my own sad-girl poetry and performed it to my cat. I liked to think I was the most misunderstood girl in the world.
                When I was twenty I spent my days in the university library with Proust and Pound, prowling between the stacks until closing time. On weekends I worked in a local bookshop, putting discount stickers on the covers of endless crime thrillers and Booker winners. After a few years I graduated with a hangover, a broken heart, and a back bent from carrying armfuls of books.
                Now, at twenty four, I have more books than I could read in a lifetime. I keep books at my house, my mother’s house, my father’s. My girlfriend jokes that she needs to buy me a bookcase for the stack I keep next to her bed; I take it as a personal slight and resolve not to let the pile get taller than my knee. I tell myself that books are a vital part of life. I tell myself that education means reading. I tell myself that literacy is a sign of intelligence, and intelligence is attractive.
It’s 8pm on a Thursday night and all I have touched today is books.

Kirsty Logan is a writer, editor, teacher, reviewer, waitress, and general layabout. Her short fiction and poetry appears in PANK, Popshot, Polluto, and some other places that don't begin with P. She likes bad horror films and sticking pins in maps. She lives in Glasgow with her girlfriend. Get in touch at kirstylogan.com.                                      

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #009