I’ve always been in love with books. When I was a teen, this love turned all-consuming and obsessive. It got to the point where I would go to work with my mother because her office was next to a bookstore. There I would sit all day, devouring books like my life depended on it. At the time, my mother told me, “Be selective in the books you read, because you are what you read.”
She told me that she had the experience of reading too many wartime German books that had made her depressed. Eventually, she had realized that the books were the cause, and stopped reading those books. When she described the experience, I had an inkling what she meant. I had read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon when I was fourteen. It had pulled me in and drowned me, making me live from childhood through adulthood into old age, despairing at the futility of attempting to preserve a way of life. Even as the characters made peace with the changing times in the end, I could not. I remained broken and devastated and utterly listless for a month. This was my first experience of a mild depressive episode that I can positively identify in retrospect.
So what was the lesson, then? Stay away from books if I find them upsetting? Of course not. I don’t regret reading that book, nor the effect that it had on me. It had that effect because of the crisis I’d been going through, being (I felt) forced to adapt to suit Buffalo in ways that were not exactly comfortable to me.
I don’t feel that there’s anything I should have or could have done differently at the time. That book and the effect it had on me were profound. I am inclined to say that a part of it lives and breathes within me, nearly as much a part of me as a memory of my own life. It has guided me and continues to do so. I instinctively steered clear of heavy-seeming books for months afterwards.
Yet no light-hearted book could measure up to the force with which that book had pulled me in. Having sunk so deeply into a book so recently, the books I read afterwards were still entertaining, but also underwhelming. A part of me still craved that pull, that sense of complete immersion.
So I don’t believe it’s important to stay away from depressing books to keep from being depressed. I try to balance the books I read with the effect they have on my mind, and the effect that has on my real life. There is an effect, there’s no doubt about that. I try to take note of the ways books I read recently are affecting my thoughts and my actions. So far, I’ve not found any cause to steer clear of any type of book altogether.