`leɡəsi

My personal book collection meant nothing until it grew bigger than me. A 1938 publication of Oscar Wilde by Frank Harris, inscribed in beautiful purple hand by “Jack Rhodes. October, 1941 (Kinloss),” I found in a London bookshop. I can imagine Mr. Rhodes studying the truth of Oscar Wilde’s life for the first time, his note inside the book flap: “on children in prison.” 

Not even when I slid my mother’s old books onto my shelves did I fully understand what a collection could mean. What did Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh (1893) mean to her? Did she keep The Castaway by Hallie Ermine Rives (1905) because her own mother cast her away when she was eight, abandoning her to a couple of farmers in Gainesville, Florida? Was a brand new hardcover of 1001 Riddles for Children compiled by George Carlson (1949) supposed to make an eleven-year-old girl forget what her new “father” did in the cotton field? These answers I will never know.  

Not even after I bound a 143-page master’s thesis in a spring-back binder, felt the weight of my own handsome faux leather book, and placed it on my shelf next to literary journals, published with stories that I’d written or edited, did I comprehend the purpose of my collection.

What was I building here?

It’s not about numbers. In fact, I’ve recently simplified my oversized home into a comfy apartment, shrugging off stockpiles of unnecessary stuff. Downsizing is therapy in disguise. My book collection was cut in half, but I didn’t cry. It was never about the numbers.

I have sixteen hardcover Stephen King books that I’ve picked up over the years at yard sales and as gifts because when I was twelve, I wanted to read Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret by Judy Blume, but my mother handed me John Saul’s Comes the Blind Fury instead. When she finished Dean Koontz’s Twilight Eyes, she tossed it into my lap and I turned down the volume on MTV. While she was reading The Dead Zone by Stephen King, and it was just the two of us living together in her little yellow ranch house near downtown Fort Myers, Florida, I kept a close eye on the progress of her bookmark. Horror was our thing. Mostly though, I’ve collected King’s books because when I remove the dust jackets with their loud and colorful designs, what I have left is ye olde bookshelf and it looks damn good. Still, looks don’t define a collection.  

My mother had a book that had been passed down through her adoptive family for over a hundred and fifty years. Inside the front cover is inscribed “Margaretta A. Fleming, 1856” in beautiful hand, most likely written with a fancy feather pen dipped in ink. Why my mother kept this book, The Blind Girl of Wittenberg: A Life-Picture of The Times of Luther and the Reformation by John G. Morris, is unclear, but I can guess that she too appreciated the provenance that one single book can carry. It’s on my shelf.   

I take great care to keep these older books preserved safely in a closed bookcase away from dust and damaging light. These books mean more to me than any of Stephen King’s handsome hardcovers, even the one he signed for me back in April, 2014, one year and four days after we signed my mother’s paperwork and turned off the machines. All I could think about, standing in line at Bookstore1 Sarasota, was how much Mom would have loved to meet Stephen King. Still, my signed copy of Doctor Sleep remains to be just another book in a fangirl collection. It didn’t change my life.  

What changed my life was finding an old brown spiral notebook, labeled English II, buried under a cache of stained and discolored family photographs and a bundle of letters bound with an army green band, in a mysterious box of my mother’s things. I flipped through it and found vocabulary lists and poetry about stormy waters and teddy bears. I recognized my mother’s script: her fat cursive l’s and her roaming o’s, leaning too closely into the letter before it. In Mom’s handwriting, the words love and alone looked very much the same.

I flipped through the pages thinking: my mother wrote these things when she was a teenager, a time in her life that she never talked about. Then I saw why. In the back of the notebook were twelve pages in her handwriting detailing how her mother abandoned her, how the rest of the family didn’t want her, and the events that followed after she was adopted. This was everything she buried deep within her, all but anger and pain. It was everything she’d wanted for years to write about, told in a little girl’s point of view, she’d said, but the truth was too painful to get down. It was my mother’s story, and it was sitting in my lap. 

From that mysterious box, I pieced together clues found in old photographs and letters. I did research online and found the family she’d tried so hard to forget: my family. With today’s technology, I learned more about my grandmother than my mother could possibly have known. When they were still a young family in the early 1940s, they lived in Galveston, Texas. Today, my mother’s childhood home is an Airbnb, so I went there. I slept in my mother’s room, I fried eggs in their kitchen, and I wrote their story in their own dining room. Then I sprinkled Mom’s ashes onto her mother’s grave in a long-overdue gesture of forgiveness. And when my research was done and the first sloppy draft of our book was written, I held her notebook to my chest, perhaps like my mother may have done right before she buried it deep within that mysterious box. Good night, Mom, I whispered, and I slid her notebook into my collection.