I resist the story. I don’t want to know these things. Please, not to the Amazon. Please. I don’t want to hear the insects, to feel their ferocity. I don’t want to go. Put the scalpel down. Don’t remember. Don’t tell me, please.
Mary gives me a story that begins like this: When she was twelve, the man told her to get into the car, and she did. She didn’t reappear for 7 years.
No. No, thank you. I don’t want to know even so little. It’s too heavy.
She adds, pityingly, “That story is not unusual. I have several more just like it.”
The Book Thief sits on my bureau; I pet its spine, but cannot make myself open the book.
Each time, I resist for several chapters. Sometimes I resist for a third of the book, flipping repeatedly to the end, exhaling slowly. And then it happens, the story tells me something true. Something that I have never been able to articulate, that I have felt and known, something that chimes through me like morning bells.
Bett Norris emails that she has finished Room: I am certain I can never read this one again. I love Donoghue for writing this, and I hate her too. I cannot read this again.
Sometimes the story hurts us. Like living. Sometimes living hurts us. Sometimes I see someone and I want to lift her like a child, to murmur, “Hush,” before she can speak. Before she can tell me what she must. What she must say. What I must hear. The urgent business of experience.
