My Story of Reading

I read memoirs now.

I started out reading every fiction story I could get my hands on, for decades, both before and after majoring in literature in college. My gosh, you could actually get a college degree via the simple act of reading novels and writing about them? Sign me up!

In elementary school, I always had a storybook open underneath whichever textbook we were supposed to be studying in class. School was way too easy for me, so I had no need to pay attention to textbooks and teachers. And nobody at home cared about my school performance, so I gave it very little thought. Thus, I’d sit in class and slide my textbook to the right, exposing and reading the left page of my storybook, and then I’d slide the textbook to the left, so that I could read the right page of my storybook. Lather, rinse, repeat. (Don’t get tense: I still won every spelling bee and math bee that I cared to win.)

The teachers must have known that I was reading, right? None of them ever told me to put my book away. I was a quiet kid, and they probably felt a little sorry for me, what with the telltale signs that I came from an extremely dysfunctional family. The dozens of days of late arrivals at school each year. Never having a snack at snack time, when every other kid brought snacks from home. The weird hair. The ill-fitting clothes. The fingernails bitten down to blood. The untreated sicknesses. There was more. Whatever. I never fit in. And so I read books.

After college, I spent three hours on the Long Island railroad each workday, commuting to and from Manhattan. There wasn’t much else to do on the train but read. There was no internet in those days. I once became so terrified amidst a Stephen King story that I had to shut the book and stop reading, even though I was surrounded by bright lights and a hundred fellow passengers.

I did eventually join a group of evening commuters who played euchre and spades in the middle of the train car, where there were two bench seats that faced each other. The guys would put their briefcases on their knees, forming a table for the playing cards. That was great fun. As an extrovert who loves playing games, I was in my element. After an hour or so, the card game would be dismantled as the commuters disembarked, and I’d switch back to reading until arriving in my small town on the south shore.

Years later, something shifted, and I switched exclusively and permanently to non-fiction books: politics, investment markets, bible studies, child-rearing, history, psychology, sociology, gardening, healthcare, art and cooking. I have no idea what triggered my new approach to reading, but I never looked back.

And then, seemingly overnight, my reading habit came to an abrupt halt. For about a decade, the trauma from being falsely accused of a crime wired me and wound me up so tightly that I couldn't unfurl and let go and just read. Hell, for the first two years after that episode, I couldn’t even sleep! And don’t even get me started on the sheer panic that would slam me when a sheriff’s car crossed my path.

When I was a teenager, the term “flashback” was frequently associated with Vietnam vets reliving the trauma of war. I always pictured a flashback as something like a psychedelic dream, maybe because there was also a lot of talk about LSD in those days. But after my own trauma situation, it became more clear to me. When you relive a situation over and over in your head, those are flashbacks. When sights or sounds or smells return the unfortunate past experience to the front and center of your mind, those are flashbacks. And during the worst of those years, I just couldn’t read. I had no peace.

I’m okay now; permanently different, buy okay. I started reading again a while back. First just a handful of books per year (or less). But now I’ll have several books going at once, or at least patiently waiting for me on top of my bookcase.

Lately, I seek out stories about people’s lives, their memoirs, which are not really the same as their autobiographies, because they’re usually documenting a specific phase of their lives. And they’re still living; forging new paths and making new memories. A memoir is just a piece of a person; usually a valuable tale that formed part of their character.

I’ve always been fascinated with and connected to people. They’re interesting and inspiring. And they all experience pain. There’s something about an awareness of people’s pain that makes them more precious to me. People need to be cherished. So I read their memoirs, and I cherish them. They were kind enough to share the stories of the brutalities of their lives, and I honor that.

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Crista Huff is a hedge fund portfolio manager who writes on many topics, including politics, economics, investment markets, healthcare, child-rearing, gardening, Christianity, sociology and psychology.

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