Re-reading

My friend Marg recently told me that she plans to make at least one third of the books she reads re-reads. She recently picked up Ian McEwan's Saturday, and was looking forward to going back to Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I thought this was a great idea and recently re-read Coetzee's The Age of Iron, which I adore. Other books I frequently re-read are: Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, Herman Hesse's Siddartha, Helen Humphrey's The Lost Garden, Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev, and AS Byatt's The Children's Hour. I'm planning a list of re-reads that I'm hoping to sneak in between the new books I'm also looking forward to.

With this in mind, last night I set myself the goal of trying to remember the name of a book that I'd like to re-read. This might seem like a fairly modest goal, but I'm avoiding editing a novel with what feels like irreparable problems. So instead of tackling my character's uneven mental health issues, I looked to recover a lost book. This turned out to be a fairly easy, despite being frustrated by finding the title previously. Laurie Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving was  published in 1990. Colwin, an American author who died at only 48 from a heart attack, wrote for Gourmet magazine and published several cookbooks as well as other novels.

 

Goodbye Without Leaving tells the story of Geraldine, a bored graduate student who is invited to tour as the only white backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. She spends a year as a Shakette before going back to school, getting married, having kids and doing all the other adult things people do. My parents gave me the book when I was twenty-one and home from university recovering from the Hepatitis A I had picked up traveling in Morocco. I enjoyed the book, but mostly remember it because my parents and I had such radically different reactions to this light humorous read. I was horrified that Geraldine had given up her singing career to be a bored mother. I distinctly remember my mother replying, "You can't be a Shakette forever." I wondered, "Why the hell not?" Tina Turner was still performing, Madonna was still out there, the Stones were barely mid-way through their career. I had no interest in singing myself, but I had just had my first taste of travel (albeit with somewhat disastrous results) and had started to write seriously. The last thing I wanted to hear was about the importance of settling down to a financially beneficial career.

 

These days, like Colwin's Geraldine, I find myself solidly mired in mid-life responsibilities- jobs, kids, and house repairs. (Nothing says you're middle-aged like being excited over a new roof!) I'm curious to know how I'll feel re-reading Colwin's Goodbye Without Leaving. Books mean different things to us at different stages in our lives. When I was twenty-four I was sure Bruce Chatwin's Songlines was going to be a book that spoke to me my entire life. Now I'm pretty sure it's not. I think I'm closer to my mother's 'You can't be a Shakette forever' comment than I ever imagined, but I'm good with this. You can be a Shakette forever, but you can't be a Shakette (or whatever your art goal happens to be, in my case, an unemployed writer) and save for your kids' university education, go on ski vacations and afford a new roof- all things which are also important to me. Writing is an essential part of my life, but as one of my sons likes to remind me, he is much more important and interesting than any book I'm reading or writing. I must agree.