Literacy Identity Autobiography by Jen Liddy

Reading happened early, easily and often, but it wasn’t a collaborative experience. I read alone and spent all my free time devouring books, systematically consuming any author’s entire collection: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Francine Pascal. One summer afternoon, I stopped dead in the middle of a Nancy Drew mystery. I realized, with shock, there was a formula! These books revealed themselves to be the same story disguised in different characters and settings. Carolyn Keene had duped me. Furthermore, I was disappointed: I still had over 10 unread Nancy Drew books sitting on my corner shelf, awaiting attention, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish them, bringing much guilt upon myself. I was done with children’s books and went looking for more sophisticated reading.

Reading in my family’s house was not a sport for the cultivated or urbane. Trashy titles were thoughtlessly thrown about the coffee table, and no one stopped me when I picked up Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight.  A tween, I was thrilled to be thrown into the abyss of adult literature; it was so corrupt, naughty, and prurient. Whether my mother ever noticed I was reading this smut, I don’t know, but I began another round of wolfing down as many books as Sheldon would author and was immensely disappointed when I finished this list, so I moved onto Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark. Reading helped me escape from my mother and unhappy family, a pastime she could not begrudge me of. It was an escape that earned me nerd status among family and friends, but it also gained me approval from adults, and I felt desperately grown up.

I truly identified myself as a reader, easily excelling at reading in school and at home. However, there was never any overt discussion about the different types of reading that one is expected to do. The reading I was doing was purely escapist: I did not process it or analyze it. Comprehension and plot, characterization and conflict were ideas that I could easily discern, but frankly, if asked about themes or symbols or irony or the social importance of a text, I’d be flummoxed. Reading obviously got more difficult in high school, when offerings like The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick were on the menu. For the first time in my life, I struggled with reading and I had no framework to understand why. Suddenly, reading was no longer fun, easy, or enjoyable, but I slogged through and managed to still be a good, effective reader, albeit a much more unhappy one.

This very struggle, as I see it today, led me to become a reluctant English major in college. There was nothing else I was really good at or wanted to be, but I knew I was a fast and good reader. So, I shrugged my shoulders and became an English major, barking the caveat that “I don’t want to be a teacher” and “I am just doing it because I can write papers instead of taking a test” to anyone who would listen. But at college I found I had a knack for talking about literature with others and could bang out a paper in a few hours. Once a strong, independent reader, at college I discovered that I only thrived in an interactive, interpersonal environment. I’d struggle if forced to analyze in isolation, and I constantly questioned my literacy abilities. I felt less intelligent than my peers and fearfully avoided classes like poetry and Shakespeare. I now see it was a lack of guidance that crippled me, and I wish I could go back and tell myself, “Jen, you are an interpersonal learner who processes best verbally.” Knowing and embracing that would have instilled a confidence that I would not have for fifteen years to come.

A new shift in my literacy and identity happened after college: I had become a reading snob, thinking that as an English major, I should only engage with ‘real literature’.  And it was on a daily, monotonous commute from Long Island to Manhattan that I saw everyone reading a new author, John Grisham. I was disgusted; I would not read that trash. But the commute was long and John Irving had just broken my heart with A Prayer for Owen Meany. I had to give this Grisham a try. I confess: I was hooked. And thus, my literacy identity throughout my mid-twenties was punctuated and defined by learning to ‘never say never’. This philosophy allowed me to intersperse my reading, to not judge it. I could mull over Hamill’s Snow in August and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but it was also okay to blow through each of Grisham’s newly-published books. It allowed me to enjoy a bus ride in silence with Groom’s Forrest Gump but to seek out a book club to process my thoughts on Ondaatjee’s The English Patient or Schlink’s The Reader.  It allowed me to realize that of course I couldn’t understand Melville or Hawthorne in high school! These complex novels created deep thematic schemas that were just impossible for the undeveloped sixteen-year-old mind to comprehend without facilitation.

I had the epiphany that there had to be better, more relevant ways to teach classic authors. Wait! Why only teach the classics in high school? I fantasized about how to help real kids connect with fancy books and deep ideas. Ultimately, on those cross-town bus rides, I began to listen to that inner voice, the one that said, “Maybe, perhaps, you might become an English teacher. Maybe you can make these books understandable, relatable, and palatable to high school kids. Maybe you can even introduce them to the cool contemporary books that you love so much.” And I did the distasteful and unthinkable thing: I became an English teacher.