This is my favorite book of all time. The above copy is mine. You'll understand the importance of that soon enough.
I've put off reviewing this book for years because, well, how do I? Just calling it my "favorite" book seems like an insult because that description is not good enough, not big enough to encompass the entirety of my feelings and memories and all that it means to me.
This book is the foundation onto which my entire adolescence, and hence my adulthood, were constructed.
There are better books, sure. I've read lots of books that are better than this one. Reading this as an adult for the first time would not be the same as reading it as an adolescent, no matter how imaginative or appreciative you are of coming of age stories. Reading this for the first time as a ninth grader within its first year of publication without the internet to praise it or word-of-mouth to guide me while I was dealing with a very difficult and trying time was one of my life's biggest serendipitous events.
I found this book on the way back from one of my little brother's baseball tournaments in Oklahoma City. It was April 2000. I know that because while we were in Oklahoma City we visited the brand new Oklahoma City National Memorial for the victims of the Murrah Building bombing (a big deal in general but an even bigger deal if you happened to live in Oklahoma as I did). We had already made it back to Tulsa, where I lived close by in the suburb of Broken Arrow with my mother, and my dad decided to stop and buy my brother and sister something to read on their 3-hour drive back home to Wichita. They were already so close to dropping me off that I assumed this bookstore trip wasn't for me and that I wouldn't be getting anything, which I was used to. You know, being the part-time older kid. I understood.
As my brother and sister took their time elsewhere in the store I gravitated to the fiction section.
Keep in mind that at this time in my life I wasn't the biggest reader but my dad's side of the family was, so when I was with them I read because that's what you did. Books were special to them. I enjoyed reading but I didn't get it yet. I hadn't felt the need yet.
I ran my fingers along the shelves of Borders (may it rest in peace) and there on the shelf beneath the library ladder I spotted a small book with a baby blue binding and a long title that I vaguely recognized. I pulled it from the shelf and was immediately spellbound by the bright minimalist cover, the feel of it in my hands, the perfect dimensions, the comfortable bend of it. I turned it over, read the blurb, and my interest was appropriately piqued. Voraciously I opened the cover to reveal not a bunch of reviews or praise, but this first page:
Time was like a stopped breath, that minuscule moment between breathing out and breathing in. I was occupying that fragile space like I never had before. You might think I'm exaggerating, but my fifteen year-old self really did feel like the only person in the world in that extended heartbeat. Suddenly owning this book was the most important thing in the world to me. The desperation that came over me, the intensity of it, to know in my bones that I could not allow myself to leave that bookstore without that book in my hands.
That, that right there, was my first experience with the need to read.
I gripped the book tight to my chest and searched through the aisles for my dad.
"Dad," I said, showing him with the book with sincerity. "Dad, please."
He must have seen it in my face or in my tone. He showed a small amount of trepidation at the price tag (my dad is a very frugal person and this book was $12, more than I had ever paid for a book at the time and twice that of what my brother and sister had chosen) and on top of that I was almost home, I was not in need of entertainment for the drive. He didn't have to do it, but he did. And if he never bought me another gift in my life, he bought me this book, and that is worth everything to me. Not just any copy. My copy.
You see... I love my copy. That picture above is of my copy and if you look closely enough you can see the thin bit of tape between the cover and the binding to hold it all together because I taped both covers back on when they fell off. It's been lost, bent, cried on, stained. I refuse to buy a new one. They don't make them the same anymore. They don't make them with that all-important enchanting first page anymore. My copy is one of a handful of treasures that I will collect in the event that my house ever goes up in flames and I have only a short time to make it out. It is irreplaceable. My favorite thing about my copy is that so many people that I have known over the years have borrowed it. Most of my best friends have read it. I loaned it to the best teacher I have ever had, my ninth grade English teacher Mrs. Camp, who was the Bill to my Charlie. It is a relic of my life.
I took that book home and read the whole thing that very night. Every sentence, every feeling, every everything about it spoke to me and mattered to me. It was the very first time that a book made me realize that I was not alone. Do you know how valuable that was? To know that at least one other person in the whole of humanity understood me and the way that I thought about things? I felt invigorated and justified and comforted and real. Those are powerful emotions for a 15 year-old girl.
I made the One Winter mix tape and listened to it religiously. I read a lot of the books that Bill gives Charlie to read and a lot of them became favorites. I started Secret Santa exchanges with my friends. I wrote in my diary in letter form. I joined newspaper because of Punk Rocky. I decided I wanted to be a writer. It influenced the way I speak and think and react to things. Without this book I would really, actually, truly be a different person today. To my core, I would be different. I know that.
I try not to get too hipster about things but sometimes I can't help it, and this is one of my biggest hipster triggers in that I will staunchly proclaim that I read this book before everyone in the whole world had read this book, that it was my favorite first, that it's mine and private, and that nobody understands. In those moments I am Holden Caulfield and everyone else is a phony and a bandwagoning poser and the Holden in me is sick and disgusted with it. Then Holden recedes into the shadows of my mind a little as Addie comes back out and tries to be very appreciative that at least people are reading it and appreciating it and that should be enough. It can mean different things to different people, and that's the beauty of literature. Interestingly enough when people talk about this book around me I find myself erupting into a knowing smile but I stay very silent. Internally I am being very loud about it but the last thing I want to do is waste words with people about my favorite book if they're just going to have a light understanding and appreciation of it. I can't reign it in once I start. I don't know how to explain to them that I get it, that I know and that I hope they do too but that I doubt it very much.
I would say that everyone needs to read this book, but truthfully, it's not the same unless you're a lonely ninth grader with a secret and a new family full of crazy people to navigate through without disturbing the delicate waters of harmony in a house that is not your house but it also is and how sad it is when all you want in the world is your mom back and for things to be how they were before.
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