The Healing Power of Literature

This post isn’t about writing. It’s quite a bit about literature, but really it’s about personal problems and healing. I don’t usually share such personal stuff here, but I feel compelled to do it tonight. If that isn’t for you, skip this post, but come back soon.

Books have always been my refuge. As a kid, if I got in trouble at home, I read to take my mind off what I’d done or the punishment I’d received. How many times did I read Where the Red Fern Grows or Little House on the Prairie or Old Yeller? I sure don’t know.

The retreat into the world of paper and ink continued into adulthood. I worked a lot of jobs I hated and worked for a lot of people I hated even more. I felt like I wasn’t understood a lot at home. I know a lot of people feel all that and retreat into alcohol or some other unhealthy thing. I always went for stories. I read to stop thinking about my problems, and wrote to try to work them out.

There are books that I associate with very specific times in my life. This isn’t a post about all of them, but a specific group from a recent time. I was divorced in 2018 after over 30 years of marriage. As I’ve written about before, the marriage ended because of my reprehensible actions. Although I’d been unhappy for quite a while prior, I didn’t necessarily see the divorce as freedom. There was no celebration. No clinking glasses with friends.

Loneliness had set in. I have very few close friends, and so seldom left the house. Back then, I didn’t even go to the dog park all that often. I went to work, one teaching job after another while that fire died, too. But I didn’t give up my old habit of hiding in imaginary worlds.

These worlds, though, while foreign, weren’t completely imaginary. For some reason I can’t recall, I went on a binge of British and European contemporary fiction. What’s more, the majority of the books had a similar theme … getting a fresh start in life. I can’t remember the order in which I read them, but I want to talk about a few of those books tonight.

A Man Called Ove by Frederick Backman was one of the non-British books; it’s set in Sweden. It’s about a cranky old man named Ove who plans to kill himself, but his new neighbors constantly (and unknowingly) interrupt him until, finally, he breaks out of his shell. There is a very good Swedish movie based on the book, and Tom Hanks starred in a pretty good American adaptation in which Ove is changed to Otto. Here’s a link to the novel, the Swedish movie, and the American film.

The one that had the most impact on me was Phaedra Patrick’s The Curious Charms of Adam Pepper. She’s a Brit. This one is about a man who finds a charm bracelet among his deceased wife’s possessions and goes on a global quest to learn the meaning of each charm. Of course, his biggest discovery was himself and the value of the love he’d had. I say this one had the biggest impact because it made me a huge fan of Phaedra Patrick and I pre-order every book she writes as soon as it’s available. All of her books are about older people who have suffered some sort of loss and get a second chance. Her books inspired me to write my own The Lost Pages Bookstore.

The last one I want to talk about is the reason this post is happening tonight. It’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye by Rachel Joyce. Harold receives a letter one day from a former co-worker who is dying of cancer. He goes to post a reply, but after talking to a blue-haired girl, he instead sets off walking from the south end of England to the north to visit the dying woman. It’s a beautiful novel about healing and relationships and self-discovery. I only recently learned there is a movie of it and I watched it tonight. It’s almost as moving as the novel. Yes, I cried. More than once. (Side note: The images of the English countryside reminded me so much of J.R.R. Tolkien’s illustrations of The Shire!)

So, what’s this all about? These novels helped me heal. They helped me stop thinking about what I had done and where I was in my life while I focused on the characters’ journeys and healing. Was it coincidence they all came to me one after another? Was it just an algorithm? I don’t know. But I know now that I can look back on them as a group and appreciate how they helped me when I needed it.

That’s the healing power of literature.

What books have gotten you through a rough period of your life?