Ink Chorus: Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading!

Our book today is Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, a thoroughly delightful bookish 2005 memoir written by long-time NPR book critic and Washington Post mystery-novel columnist Maureen Corrigan. The book is sub-titled “Finding and Losing Myself in Books,” and if ever a sub-title was fully earned, this one is. The thing is equal parts autobiography, book recommendations, and well-told raconteur gems, and all its voices are so perfectly balanced that regardless of which register she’s in, you’ll wish she would just go on for pages and pages. Usually, this kind of books-related mish-mash tends to get old real fast, but I doubt any reader of Corrigan’s book will be ready for it to end.

The autobiographical elements range from stories of a Catholic girlhood to some funny anecdotes from the rigors of college:

But I had a price to pay for the self-knowledge I gained in graduate school: the price was being in graduate school. I think of those years as my time served as a character immured in a Gothic novel. To give you a sense of how weird – indeed sometimes even sinister – this world of graduate school was, let’s journey back to the autumn of 1977. It’s four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, and I’m standing in a small cluster of first-year graduate students who’ve been invited to the weekly “Sherry Hour” hosted by Penn’s English Department. The dark lounge in Bennett Hall where the gathering takes place resembles, to my delight, a shabby drawing room out of an Agatha Christie mystery. I’m quietly crowing to myself … Here I am sipping sherry, for heaven’s sake! I don’t like it, but I’ll learn to and … wait a minute. Professor X, who’s holding court at the center of our little group, is saying something. I’ve been assigned to be his teaching assistant, so I’d better listen. Professor X knocks back another glass (what is this, his fourth?), stares over our heads at a spot on the wall, and mutters an oracular verdict: “None of you will ever come close to Ira Einhorn. He was the most brilliant student the department ever had.”

The professional elements range from our author earning her way into the publishing world (frequent mention is made of long Village Voice book-reviews that I’d very much like to see collected in a book of their own) to the openly-confessed charge she gets out of working against a tight deadline, sometimes forcing herself to get up before dawn so she can write a review for NPR’s Fresh Air program, going over it on the fly with her producer Phyllis Myers, and hearing it broadcast that same day – a thrillingly compressed version of the usual piece-publishing rigamarole, but one that has potential dangers:

Occasionally, though, this whirlwind pace knocks me flat on my face. Like my mother, I tend to mangle names. I’ve recorded reviews in which I’ve referred to a book, even though a book that I love, by two different titles or I’ve committed dumb grammar mistakes – and the gaffe has slipped through the batlike ears of Phyllis, but not those of the listeners of National Public Radio. The worst on-air mistake I ever made was when I confused my old Jewish literary leftists, referring to Irving Howe when I meant to refer to Alfred Kazin. Oy vey, the listener mail on that one was nasty.

There are also disarmingly personal strands running through the book involving her quest to adopt a Chinese daughter, but for me, the best part of Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading was the way every single page veritably bristles with book-talk, book-reflections, book-recommendations … she loves everything from John Ruskin to Dorothy Sayers, and she writes about it all with the infectious curiosity that characterizes the true bookworm, whether she’s dissecting the common strands in Victorian women’s memoirs or lamenting the lack of post-wedding lives in some of fiction’s most memorable female characters:

Of course, once safely tucked away in their marriages, our heroines, like fireflies trapped in a bottle, flicker and fade into gray domesticity. Austen and company devote, at most, a couple of pages to imagining the postnuptial lives of their lucky brides – and with good reason. Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet spawn children, tend to their peevish husbands (Mr. Rochester probably made even more so by his temporary blindness), and carry on the debilitating round of social visits expected of upper-crust ladies. Nancy Drew fortunately remains frozen at age eighteen; although, as Bobbie Ann Mason observes in her terrific book The Girl Sleuth, even in her chaste late adolescence, Nancy displays incipient tendencies toward becoming another proper Mrs. Bobbsey. Harriet Vane makes a wan postnuptial impression in Busman’s Honeymoon, where she defers to Lord Peter in the detecting department.

The best thing about Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading is that it’s mis-titled; it’s the furthest thing in the world from a banishment. Come Join Me, I’m Reading would’ve been more accurate for the wonderful experience that awaits her fellow reader in these pages.