I originally posted this on my personal Substack last year. I considered editing it to post here, but as I started to change things, it altered the meaning of it, too, so the dates are off, but the meaning of it holds together better this was. National Library Week, runs April 19-26, 2026.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to clean out a closet and open up some space on a few bookshelves. My attention span was on the fritz and I was frustrated, and the effort of putting things in a giant pile that took up most of the open space in the room was the kind of exhaustion I needed to get out of the snit I found myself in. I hadn’t expected to seek out books to get rid of, but I saw one I knew I didn’t need, then another, and then some more, until I found this one.

This book gently haunts me. I’ve never read it, and I thought I’d lost it. Part of me has been a little disappointed through the years that I might have let it go at some point, and now that same part of me is slightly astounded that I’ve carried it around through eight or ten moves to land here, on this final day of National Library Week 2025, to finally put this book to use.

Before I go further, let me make it clear that I never meant to keep it this long. As an adult, I’m a reasonably responsible library patron. But I’ve had this book for 43 years.

I had it in my head that I took this out of a different library, during a different time in my life, but now that I see the due date it makes more sense.

Things were weird in 1982. My parents were separated and I had just finished seventh grade in my third school in three years. In the weeks or months before I took this out of the library, I had stood in a crowded corridor of Boston Children’s Hospital, where my dad worked at the time (not as a doctor), and told him that I was nearly flunking English. I didn’t mention my slightly better grades in math and science and possibly geography. English was all he cared about because my parents were both huge readers, and the year before, in a smaller school, I would “publish” my first short story: a ten-page, handwritten mystery that was hung on the bulletin board outside my classroom for everyone to see. My parents counted my interest in reading among their greatest successes.

I’ll never forget my father slowing to a stop in the middle of the corridor, people scurrying around him as he backed up against a wall to brace himself.

“Hon…,” he whispered. “A D minus? How?”

I could only shrug. I couldn’t tell him I had barely read any of the books or handed anything in because I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t tell him that the beginning of The Outsiders scared me and I couldn’t stand to finish it, or that The Old Man and The Sea made me sad, thinking about how lonely it would be to be on the ocean alone. I certainly couldn’t tell him that I had no idea what The Red Pony was even about because I’d never opened it.

I also never told him that my teacher, Mr. Gregory, the trim, blond man who spoke like he summered in Newport and whose campy sense of humor was just odd enough that I felt somehow safe in his class, had stood in front of me a few days before as he read all our final grades aloud and summarized my entire experience with one acidic sentence:

“And you, young lady—you’re lucky if you even pass this class.”

I couldn’t tell my dad that Mr. Gregory had broken my heart. Never mind that I felt humiliated by the kids that I hadn’t known long enough to befriend. I couldn’t describe how it felt to hear them laugh together—around me—about me. I also couldn’t tell my dad that I didn’t do the reading because I was lonely enough already, thanks to some of the decisions by the adults in my life. I couldn’t explain that I didn’t need to immerse myself in someone else’s problems because I had enough of my own.

Soon after that scene in the corridor, my mother (in a lightly delusional frame of mind) would take me to interview at a tiny school in an old Victorian house where they said they would teach me French and Latin and have me read “the classics.” It seemed like a place where I would get lots of attention as one of fewer than fifty other students in the entire school. I thought that sounded great—that it would be like that scene in The Little Princess with Shirley Temple when her dark, drafty attic room is suddenly transformed into something warm and bright and semi-palatial.

My father, meanwhile, would go and speak to Mr. Gregory, who—the story goes—wondered aloud if I might be struggling to read. My father clenched his teeth and glared and hopefully kept his thoughts to himself. Soon after the woman who would become my stepmother a few months later, and thankfully had the means to come up with new ideas, steered me toward a school that would become one of my favorite places on earth. But back to July, 1982.

By the time I took this book out of the Dedham Public Library, I would have known that I didn’t have to go back to the junior high school where I didn’t have any close friends, and I could imagine myself in that new school, like Shirley Temple and her new, warm, attic room. Maybe when I went to the library that day I was feeling like I wanted to redeem myself, so I picked out a book that felt important. It was far beyond my capabilities, but just the gold lettering on the spine allowed me to think I could escape that day I learned my English grade along with my classmates.

I vaguely remember knowing we needed to return the book, but by the time July rolled around I was living in a different town with my mom and sometimes living with my dad in a third town. Chaos reigned that summer and would come to a head in October, and so asking someone to take me to the library felt like a luxury no one could afford.

A few years later when I would apply to college, I wanted to go to a place that had one of those wood-paneled, stained-glass libraries, but what I wouldn’t tell myself is that I would almost never set foot in any library. They made me uncomfortable—fidgety, snarky, and impatient. I never studied in the very modern library where I went to college. I went there only to meet friends and then high-tailed it out of there as fast as I could, like I was afraid every librarian on earth could sense that I’d accidentally stolen a book.

It wasn’t until it was time to start taking my son to the library in 2008 that I got over it—kind of. To be a person who studied English and writing for several years and have a chip on her shoulder about libraries feels dramatic, but it was only in the last few years that I’ve found my way back. Somewhere in my mind I was still afraid they would judge me, 26 years later and 250 miles away. I walked in to libraries for years braced for a scolding—and maybe an expulsion—that would never come.

I spend a lot of time in libraries now, and after a long while I’ve learned to like them. Sometimes that old uncertainty still creeps in—that I don’t belong there, that I don’t deserve to be there, that I don’t respect the place enough to have earned my way back in.

There’s an older man who goes to my local library pretty frequently and sits at one of my favorite tables. He keeps a cart loaded with his belongings beside him and he sits with what seems to be several notebooks and pencils and a Bible that he keeps in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. One day he was using several sheets of brown paper towel as bookmarks. He sits there for hours taking notes on what he’s reading or what he’s thinking about, whether he’s reading or not.

Sometimes I’m disappointed when he gets to my favorite table before me. I’m envious of him somehow, of the sense of belonging—even faintly—that it takes to spread all your stuff out, though I’m starting to learn how to do that at whatever tables are available. I’m happy, too, that he has that sense of certainty, however briefly, even if maybe the rest of his life isn’t certain at all. At least there’s one place he knows that can offer him some time and space to think.

Libraries do that, offer people a little grace. I had to learn that the long way around and through the experience of a preschooler. What’s happening to libraries right now scares me not only because of all the specific, essential stuff libraries do, but because I want to believe I live in a society that understands that very basic need to be allowed to come in out of the cold.

I worry that I’m making too much of this one missed due date, except that this book represents a small but potent nest of guilt, a source of prickly defiance. A faint but persistent “you can’t fire me, I quit” kind of energy.

A couple of years after I graduated from college, I went back to that junior high school and found Mr. Gregory. I felt strange; I was definitely—politely—settling a score. He didn’t remember me at all, but pretended that he might, and I told him I had majored in English, then reminded him I had nearly flunked his class.

I noticed that he and I were the same height and I felt ridiculous, going back to prove something to someone who didn’t even remember me—to prove I could do more than I seemed capable of during that one lonely, messy year. As I said it, I wished I hadn’t come. Mr Gregory listened, though. He nodded patiently, and said, in a much softer tone than he had that day in seventh grade, “Yes. Well, we teach differently now. You would probably be okay these days.”

It wasn’t some poetic benediction, some heartwarming absolution—it was a simple reassurance from someone I had wanted approval and patience from in 1982. Maybe taking Ivanhoe out of the library was an indirect appeal to Mr. Gregory: a way to try to be forgiven, to be less lonely, to be invited back in. Maybe the library helped me by giving me a way to tell myself, I’m trying to do better.