The Best of Connie Willis (60 page)

But most important,

I need to thank

Which brings me to the subject of this speech.

You’re supposed to talk about something significant in a guest-of-honor speech—

But I want to talk about something completely personal.

I want to talk about books and what they have meant to me.

Which is everything in the world.

I owe books my vocation, my life, even my family.

I’m not kidding.

You probably don’t know this, but I only got married because of a book.

And, no, I’m not talking about love poems.

And, NO, not
Lolita
.

I got married because of
Lord of the Rings
.

To quote Kip Russell in
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
, “How it happened was this way.”

I was flying out to Connecticut

for the express purpose of breaking up with my boyfriend

and I bought this set of three paperbacks to read on the plane

and by the time I got to New Haven

I was so worried about Frodo and Sam

that I said to my boyfriend, “It’s awful. They’re trying to sneak into
Mordor and the Ringwraiths are after them and I don’t trust Gollum and …”

and I completely forgot to break up with him.

And, as of yesterday, we’ve been married thirty-nine years.

I owe my daughter’s name to a book, too. We named her after the good daughter in
King Lear

and she has lived up to her name in absolutely every way.

And I owe all the books I’ve written to books.

They taught me how to write.

Agatha Christie taught me plotting

Books also gave me all sorts of good advice on how to cope with everything,

from following the rules—

“There are three rules for writing a novel,”
W. Somerset Maugham said.
“Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”

to the stupid questions people ask writers—

Heavens!
[Harriet Vane thought.]
Here was that awful woman, Muriel Campshott, coming up to claim acquaintance. Campshott had always simpered. She still simpered … She was going to say, “How do you think of all your plots?” She did say it. Curse the woman
.

to coping with the pressure to write what your publisher—or your readers—want—

“The only thing you can do,”
Dorothy Sayers said,
“is write what you want to write and hope for the best.”

to feeling like you’ve made a hideous mistake in your choice of career—

“It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing,”

Robert Benchley told me,
“but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was famous.”

They even showed me what to write and how to write it.

When I went to England for the first time,

I remembered that book about the Blitz Mrs. Werner had read out

loud when I was in the eighth grade,

and it made me go to St. Paul’s,

where I found the fire watch and Oxford’s time-traveling historians

and my life’s work.

Above all, they taught me what it meant to be a writer.

“Storytellers make us remember what mankind would have been like had not fear, and the failing will, and the laws of nature tripped up its heels,”
William Butler Yeats said.

And books—

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me begin at the beginning.

I loved books from the moment I saw them, from before I could even read.

And as soon as I did learn,

I read everything I could get my grubby little hands on.

You couldn’t get a library card till you were eight years old when I was a kid

(These were dark, benighted times)

and you were only allowed to check out three at a time

(Really dark and benighted times).

So the day I got my library card,

I checked out three of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books.

Rita Mae Brown says,
“When I got my library card, that’s when my life began.”

Mine, too.

I read all three Oz books that night

and took them back the next day

and checked out three more.

And then I checked out all the other Oz books

and all the Maida’s Little Shop books

and all the Elsie Dinsmore books—

possibly the worst books ever written—

and all the Betsy, Tacy, and Tib books

and the Blue, Green, Yellow, Red, and Violet fairy books.

No one else in my family liked to read,

and they were always telling me to “get my nose out of that book

and go outside to play,”

an order which had no apparent effect on me

because I went right ahead and read

all the Anne of Green Gables books

and all the Nancy Drew books

and all the Mushroom Planet books

and
Alice in Wonderland

and
A Little Princess

and
Cress Delahanty

and
The Water Babies
.

When I was in sixth grade,

I read
Little Women

and decided I wanted to be a writer like Jo March.

When I was in seventh grade,

I read
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

and decided to read my way straight through the library from A to Z

like Francie does in that book.

When I was in eighth grade,

my teacher Mrs. Werner read us

An Episode of Sparrows
by Rumer Godden, a book about an orphan who plants a garden in the bombed-out rubble of a church, and I fell in love with the Blitz.

And then, when I was thirteen,

I read
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
,

and it was all over.

How it happened was this way.

I was thirteen

and shelving books in the junior high library,

and I picked up a yellow book—I can still see it—

with a guy in a space suit on the cover.

The title was
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
,

and I opened it and read:

“You see, I had this space suit
.

How it happened was this way:

‘Dad,’ I said, ‘I want to go to the Moon.’

‘Certainly,’ he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome

K. Jerome’s
Three Men in a Boat,
which he must know by heart
.

I said, ‘Dad, please! I’m serious!’ ”

There’s a scene at the end of
Star Wars
.

The Death Star has cleared the planet

and Luke Skywalker is going in for one last run.

Princess Leia is back at command headquarters,

listening intently to the battle.

All the other fighter pilots are dead or out of action

and Darth Vader has Luke clearly in his sights.

And all of a sudden,

Han Solo comes zooming in from left field

to blast Darth Vader

and says,

“Yahoo! You’re all clear, kid. Now let’s blow this thing.”

Now, when he does this,

Princess Leia doesn’t look up from the battle map

or even change her expression,

but my daughter, who was eight years old at the time,

leaned over to me and said, “Oh, she’s hooked, Mother.”

And when I opened that yellow book

and read those first lines of
Have Space Suit, Will Travel
,

I was hooked.

I raced through
Have Space Suit
and then—

after a brief detour to read
Three Men in a Boat—

I read
Citizen of the Galaxy

and
Time for the Stars

and
The Star Beast

and
Double Star

and
Tunnel in the Sky

and
The Door into Summer

and everything else Heinlein had ever written.

And then Asimov

and then, oh my God,

I discovered the Year’s Best short story collections

and the world exploded into dazzling possibilities.

Here, side by side, were the most astonishing short stories

and novelettes

and novellas

and poems

“Vintage Season”

and “Lot”

and “The Man Who Lost the Sea”

and “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream”

and “Flowers for Algernon”

and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”

stories by Kit Reed

and William Tenn

and James Blish

and Fredric Brown

and Zenna Henderson

and Philip K. Dick,

all in one book

nightmarish futures

and high-tech futures

marvelous Shangri-Las

and strange distant planets

aliens

and time travel

and robots

and unicorns

and monsters

tragedies

and adventures

and fantasies

and romances

and comedies

and horrors

“Surface Tension”

“Evening Primrose”

“Day Million”

“Continued on Next Rock”

“When We Went to See the End of the World”

“I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”

and “One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts,”

stories that in only a few pages,

a few thousand words,

could turn reality upside down and inside out

and make you look at the world,

at the universe,

a whole new way,

could make you laugh,

make you think,

break your heart.

I was beyond hooked.

I was stunned.

I was speechless with wonder,

like Kip and Peewee looking at their own Milky Way from the Magellanic Clouds,

like the two hobos in Ray Bradbury’s “A Miracle of Rare Device,” gazing at the beautiful city in the air.

And I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading.

And writing.

I stopped reading my way through the library from A to Z

and started reading all the books I could find

with the little atom and rocketship symbol on their spines.

I had only gotten as far as the
D
s on my plan to read my way

through the alphabet when I stopped,

but, as it turned out,

it was a good thing I’d gotten that far.

Because when I was twelve,

my mother died suddenly and shatteringly,

and my world fell apart,

and I had nobody to turn to but books.

They saved my life.

I know what you’re thinking,

that books provided an escape for me.

And it’s certainly true books can offer refuge from worries and despair—

As Leigh Hunt says,
“I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather.”

I remember particularly

a night in the hospital at my five-year-old daughter’s bedside

waiting for tests to show if she had appendicitis

or something worse,

clinging to James Herriot’s
All Creatures Great and Small

like it was a life raft.

During the Blitz,

in the makeshift libraries set up in the tube shelters,

the most popular books were Agatha Christie’s mysteries,

in which the murderer’s always caught and punished,

justice always triumphs,

and the world makes sense.

And when I’m anxious about things, I reread Agatha Christie, too.

And Mary Stewart.

And Lenora Mattingly Weber’s Beany Malone books.

Books can help you get through

But it wasn’t escape I needed when my mother died.

It was the truth.

And I couldn’t get anyone to tell it to me.

Instead, they said things like:

“There’s a reason this happened,”

and “You’ll get over this,”

and “God never sends us more than we can bear.”

Lies, all lies.

I remember an aunt saying sagely, “The good die young”—

not exactly a motivation to behave yourself—

and more than one person telling me, “It’s all part of God’s plan.”

I remember thinking, even at age twelve,

What kind of moron is God?

I
could come up with a better plan than this.

And the worst lie of all, “It’s for the best.”

Everybody lied—relatives, clergymen, friends.

So it was a good thing I’d reached the Ds because I had