Now I understand.
…Despite being surrounded on all sides—as if held hostage—by books, the last thing I’ve wanted to do for the past weeks (months, even, if I’m honest) is read. This is not a confession, just a fact: I can’t read. Or read, at least, with any pretense of endurance.
As much as I may want (or have wanted) it to be so, books haven’t been a sufficient comfort or diversion as I prepared to lose my boobs, then lost them, and began trying to adjust to their absence from my body. If I pick a book up, I’ll read a few pages before setting it aside because the end just seems too far away, the time and attention it requires, too exhausting. I don’t have the energy or patience for any of it. In the months before surgery, my attention span was shot through by relentless bullets of anxiety, the salve for which—it soon became clear—was not being left alone with my own head, a pile of paper, and a bunch of words written by some stranger; since the surgery, my attention span seems to have vanished under a haze of painkillers, muscle relaxers, and exhaustion.
Two weeks gone from Brooklyn and I’m no longer sure what “literary type” means, nor am I sure whether I care, but I do know that I—the person I am—am supposed to love books. Books have thus often been what the people who love me and who want to cheer me up in this time of need have been suggesting to me, giving to me, or handing me gift certificates to help me buy. Reread Pride and Prejudice, they say, offering over an elegant new edition. Or, here’s The BFG, or try this new novel by this new wunderkind, or these brilliant essays about war and devastation. But logic does not always hold. Just as the possibility of doing what you love for a job risks turning that love into a chore, doing what you love during a difficult time risks illuminating the shortcomings of that thing you love because it cannot solve all—if any—of your problems.
Those trying to help me be proactive about the BRCA situation [this is the BRCA1 genetic mutation that predisposes the author to early-onset reproductive cancers] are the ones who touch and trouble me most. They tell me to read Masha Gessen’s book about her journey with the gene, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene. I tell them I will, that I plan on it, but the truth is I tried to read the book but couldn’t. It was too much: too much information, too much of another person, too many pages. For each individual and each situation, what one needs to know is different and varies as the days, months, and years pass. There are those things one needs to know in order to make an informed decision and then there is the information that is too much to bear in the moment. …
…It’s not easy or appropriate to tell people who love you and who are trying to help you that what they are doing is not helping, that books are not what you want or need, that what you want and need right now are flowers, letters—notes, even—stupid movies, something that might help you feel pretty, emails that contain funny anecdotes from the outside world. That what you want is quiet company, conversation, to talk about you or him or her or whatever, who cares, that the last thing you want is to be left alone either with your thoughts or with a book chock full of someone else’s thoughts and into which your own encroach all too easily. Minds can become Frankensteins, and you’ve gotten gun-shy of yours and the noises it makes in the night. Of course, I don’t say any of this to those who hand me a book they say is lovely and that they hope I’ll enjoy. Instead, I say, “Thank you. I can’t wait to read it,” because that’s closer to what I hope I’ll mean in the end.
I read this as someone who has a loved one who is suffering from cancer at the moment. You wish there is something you can do, but there isn’t all that much really. Just small things. But small things are fine.
This article has really helped – Now that Books Mean Nothing by Nell Boeschenstein.
Yes, it is fine to just sit with the person.
Oh, thank you.