#MicroblogMondays: "Grief stole my love of reading"

The New York Times had a wonderful personal essay this past weekend, written by Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest and a lifelong reader, who was dismayed to find she'd lost her ability to read books after the loss of her father, a complicated pregnancy and two miscarriages (further complicated by her social media consumption). (Caveat: Living children are mentioned in the article.) Sample passage: 

I could still go through the motions. I could open a book and stare at its pages. But I couldn’t concentrate. My eyes floated on the page like a castaway adrift. I couldn’t sit still. Every few minutes, I’d pop out of my chair and get busy with something else. I’d return to the page unable to remember what I had just read.

What was worse was that I didn’t care about what I was reading. It all felt stupid and pointless. Sitting with a book requires some level of compassion and energy. A reader sits with the thoughts, stories, insights or opinions of another. She opens herself empathetically to the world of another human being. And I didn’t feel I had the requisite compassion or energy to do so...

No one told me that grief affects reading. No one told me that this was common. But apparently it is.

I mentioned this experience to my therapist recently and she told me that some find comfort in reading. But for others, in times of intense grief or stress, our brains decide to spend their energy elsewhere. This was the illiterate impulse of my poor, overtaxed limbic system.

She said it was analogous to her experience after a recent surgery. She assumed that during her recovery, laid up all day, she’d get a ton of reading done. But she read nothing at all: “I was in so much pain, I just didn’t give a crap about what was in the books.” She said her body had to focus all that energy on healing. It is the same, in seasons of grief, when it comes to our heart and souls.

I could relate to Warren's story. While my love of reading never totally abandoned me -- and while I think the Internet/social media also had a lot to do with the marked decline in my reading consumption during the past 20-odd years -- grief most certainly had an impact on how much I read, and what. I remember Jody Day of Gateway Women telling me the same thing happened to her for the first several years that she grieved her childlessness. If I remember correctly, she said that while she was eventually able to get back to reading, it was mostly non-fiction for a very long time. (As Warren noted above) Jody explained that reading fiction requires us to put ourselves into the lives and minds and feelings of others -- empathy -- and sometimes when we're grieving, we just don't have that capacity. Coping with our own situation is taxing enough without taking on someone else's, even when they're just characters in a book.  

This rang true to me. My fiction reading took a real hit in the years after stillbirth and infertility, although there were a few exceptions, which I think I've mentioned in previous posts on this blog. I fondly remember reading "Bridget Jones's Diary" by Helen Fielding, not too long after Katie's stillbirth in the summer/fall of 1998, and having to stifle my impulse to laugh out loud while reading it on public transit. At a time when I felt like I might never laugh again, it was a real comfort to find that I could. 

And when my dad flew in for Katie's funeral (Mom was already with us), he brought me a gift from my sister: a copy of Elizabeth Peters's newest "Amelia Peabody" book, "The Ape Who Guards The Balance."  Both of us had/have been big fans of Peters (who also wrote as Barbara Michaels) since we were teenagers.  There was a handwritten note inside which read (in part), "I thought Amelia chaining herself to #10 Downing Street would be more entertaining than flowers."  (She was right. :) )  (I wrote more about our love of Peters/Michaels -- and how I got the book autographed by the author, a few months later -- in this post from 2017.)  

It's only in recent years that I've started reading fiction again in significant quantities.  Joining both real-life and online book clubs (which mostly seem to choose fiction, it seems) has helped, I think. Some of these books wouldn't have been something I would have chosen to read on my own, and some of them were a bit of a slog to read to the end (*cough* -- "The Three Weissmans of Westport" -- *cough*).(lol)  But some were delightful surprises, and got me picking up other works of fiction on my own. Last year, for the first time in many years (and certainly since I started tracking my reading), my fiction choices outnumbered non-fiction (many of them re-reads, but still...!):  36 fiction, 22 non-fiction and 1 volume of poetry.

Warren notes that she turned to "doomscrolling" social media after Donald Trump was elected, and that while many people took comfort in reading while everything else shut down during covid, others (including herself) found they could not focus on books.  (I've taken part in the Goodreads challenge every year since 2016.  After reading Warren's article, I checked:  2017 -- the first year of the Trump presidency -- is the only year to date in which I did not meet my reading goal, which was then a rather modest 24 books. Hmmm....)  

But having felt this way before, she was confident it would pass. It did:  

As we slowly return to some semblance of normalcy, part of my “recovery” has been taking up deep reading again with a newfound joy and fervor... I am feasting after a fast, drinking words down deeply after a time of drought. After these blank years of stress and sorrow, page after page is just waiting to be savored.

Have you noticed that grief/covid has affected your reading life? In what ways? 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.