Why do you think some stories stick with us for years or even decades when others start to fade the moment you put them down?
I have some guesses about this. Maybe some stories brush against an experience we’ve had. Maybe they echo a hidden longing or fear we’ve been trying to avoid. Or maybe it’s partly the timing, that we read the thing we needed to hear right when we needed to hear it.
Back in 2002, my high school librarian (shout out Miss Altman) recommended a book to me. I don’t remember what it was called, I don’t remember who wrote it, but what I do remember is the theme. The book was about a teenage boy who had accidentally killed someone and how he had to exist in a world where he’d taken a life. The primary theme was that anyone can kill another person. It doesn’t have to be on purpose. You don’t have to be a monster to do it. It can literally just happen.
What a freaking message.
Almost twenty-five years later, I still think about that book. For the record, I’ve never killed anyone–accidentally or on purpose. It’s just incredible that a single book can completely change the way you look at something as seemingly innocuous as looking away to change the music when you’re behind the wheel of a car.
Whew.
I didn’t expect this post to go all macabre, so here’s one more example of something that stuck with me. In The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, he’s reviewing sunsets, and he goes into this page-long analogy about a dog asking for belly rubs and the act of being vulnerable. He concludes it all with, “This whole thing you’ve been doing where nothing gets five stars because nothing is perfect? That’s bullshit. So much is perfect. Starting with this. I give sunsets five stars.”
It made my brain purr and my stomach clench just to grab that book off my shelf to find the quote. The prose itself is lovely. I adore the hands-thrown way he basically said, “I like sunsets and screw you if you disagree.”
That’s not why I keep remembering it, though. That review of sunsets stuck with me for one very simple reason: I suck at being vulnerable. The thought of exposing my belly to someone who might stomp on it fills me with anxiety.
And that right there is a clue. A one-liner — no matter how carefully crafted, how resonant, how pithy — is still just a sentence. A literary theme is just a lecture. A book itself is just a message in a bottle. To me, it might only be words on a page, but to someone else, it might be lightning and it might strike them right where they need it.
Why? Because something in it brushed up against who they are or who they want to be.
And if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
