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seanan_mcguire(I thought a lot about whether this needed a trigger warning, and decided that it was better to err on the side of caution. So...TW: very oblique and carefully worded mention of a suicide attempt.)
I don't think it's any secret that I am a voracious reader. I read constantly. My friend Michelle has commented on more than one occasion that she, as a lifelong reader, is still amazed by the way she'll turn her back for thirty seconds, look back, and find me with my nose in a book. Since I grew up very poor, I also grew up a voracious re-reader; my favorite books were likely to be read five, ten, twenty times before I moved on, and I still go back to them. There aren't many new books added to that shelf these days—I finally have more than I can read—but when I need a friend, those favorites are always there.
When I was fourteen, I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for the first through fifth times.
Tam Lin is based on the ballad (which I was already enamored of, and would become obsessed with somewhere between readings three and five), but only very loosely so; it shares a structure, and not the details. It's about a girl named Janet, who loves to read, and goes to college, where she can read as much as she wants. It's about growing up and growing older and how those aren't always the same things, and it's about the things she does while she's at school, about falling in and out of love, and Shakespeare, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and festive elephants, and pink curtains, and growing apart, and oh, right, the Queen of Faerie and the Tithe to Hell.
The main character, Janet, was everything I wanted to grow up to be. She was strong and smart and living in a world where the magic was subtle enough that I could see myself in her. She loved all the books I loved, and she wrote poetry constantly. It was because of this book that I wrote a sonnet a day every day for my entire high school career. Some of them were terrible, and some of them were just technically clean without being anything more than homework I had set for myself...but all of them taught me about word choice and meaning what you said, and they sparked a lifelong love of structured poetry.
Books were my salvation when I was a teenager (they still are, although I've gotten better about knowing how to save myself), but very few of them had real people doing things I could relate to and understand. Not like Janet. She was flawed and fallible and exactly what I needed, and better still, she gave my friends and I access to concepts like saying something when you needed help, and knowing that phrase would get you what you needed instantly, no questions asked. Because we thought we were being terribly clever, we used the phrase "pink curtains," which had been adopted for that purpose by Janet and her friends.
When I was sixteen, I decided I was done. I was out of cope. I was finished. I took myself and my favorite book (not Tam Lin, IT, by Stephen King) and went to a place and did a thing, and it was supposed to make me not have to exist anymore. And somewhere in the middle of the thing, I changed my mind. I literally started thinking about the characters in the books I loved, and how disappointed in me they would be, and how they wouldn't do this to themselves. They had more important things to do than die, and maybe so did I.
I went to a pay phone. I called a friend. I told her it was pink curtains, and she came and got me, and she did not judge, and she did not yell, and she helped me, because we had a framework for friends who would do that. That, like so much else that was good in our lives, we had learned from a book. From this book.
I still love T.S. Eliot and I still write sonnets and I went to college as a folklore major partially because I wanted to read, and study "Tam Lin," and be Janet Carter for a little while. Tam Lin influenced so much of who I grew up to be...and it helped me know that I could ask for help. So it's part of why I was able to grow up at all.
I love this book so much. I always will.
You should read it.
I don't think it's any secret that I am a voracious reader. I read constantly. My friend Michelle has commented on more than one occasion that she, as a lifelong reader, is still amazed by the way she'll turn her back for thirty seconds, look back, and find me with my nose in a book. Since I grew up very poor, I also grew up a voracious re-reader; my favorite books were likely to be read five, ten, twenty times before I moved on, and I still go back to them. There aren't many new books added to that shelf these days—I finally have more than I can read—but when I need a friend, those favorites are always there.
When I was fourteen, I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin for the first through fifth times.
Tam Lin is based on the ballad (which I was already enamored of, and would become obsessed with somewhere between readings three and five), but only very loosely so; it shares a structure, and not the details. It's about a girl named Janet, who loves to read, and goes to college, where she can read as much as she wants. It's about growing up and growing older and how those aren't always the same things, and it's about the things she does while she's at school, about falling in and out of love, and Shakespeare, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and festive elephants, and pink curtains, and growing apart, and oh, right, the Queen of Faerie and the Tithe to Hell.
The main character, Janet, was everything I wanted to grow up to be. She was strong and smart and living in a world where the magic was subtle enough that I could see myself in her. She loved all the books I loved, and she wrote poetry constantly. It was because of this book that I wrote a sonnet a day every day for my entire high school career. Some of them were terrible, and some of them were just technically clean without being anything more than homework I had set for myself...but all of them taught me about word choice and meaning what you said, and they sparked a lifelong love of structured poetry.
Books were my salvation when I was a teenager (they still are, although I've gotten better about knowing how to save myself), but very few of them had real people doing things I could relate to and understand. Not like Janet. She was flawed and fallible and exactly what I needed, and better still, she gave my friends and I access to concepts like saying something when you needed help, and knowing that phrase would get you what you needed instantly, no questions asked. Because we thought we were being terribly clever, we used the phrase "pink curtains," which had been adopted for that purpose by Janet and her friends.
When I was sixteen, I decided I was done. I was out of cope. I was finished. I took myself and my favorite book (not Tam Lin, IT, by Stephen King) and went to a place and did a thing, and it was supposed to make me not have to exist anymore. And somewhere in the middle of the thing, I changed my mind. I literally started thinking about the characters in the books I loved, and how disappointed in me they would be, and how they wouldn't do this to themselves. They had more important things to do than die, and maybe so did I.
I went to a pay phone. I called a friend. I told her it was pink curtains, and she came and got me, and she did not judge, and she did not yell, and she helped me, because we had a framework for friends who would do that. That, like so much else that was good in our lives, we had learned from a book. From this book.
I still love T.S. Eliot and I still write sonnets and I went to college as a folklore major partially because I wanted to read, and study "Tam Lin," and be Janet Carter for a little while. Tam Lin influenced so much of who I grew up to be...and it helped me know that I could ask for help. So it's part of why I was able to grow up at all.
I love this book so much. I always will.
You should read it.
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Date: 2013-10-04 05:04 pm (UTC)(I also grew up with books = survival. A trip to the library was like, I don't know, living on an airless planet and the library was where they kept the oxygen bottles, and you had to bring home enough to make it to through to the next time you could get there.)
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Date: 2013-10-04 05:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 05:16 pm (UTC)I was a little disappointed when my college experience did not involve the Queen's tithe to hell. So I made my own fun.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 05:23 pm (UTC)Tam Lin is how I discovered (and fell in love with) The Lady is Not For Burning, and also (along with The Secret Country trilogy) contributes to my occasionally talking in quotes, although I don't have the breadth of literary vocabulary to do it the way the characters in Tam Lin do. I read it enough to wear through one copy and need to replace it.
Molly is probably tied with Susan Voigt and Polly from Fire and Hemlock as being top of the list of my favourite fictional characters ever.
I also discovered (but only much later - around 2000 or 2001) the secret country trilogy books, which - even if they are somewhat YA and I was in my late 20s when I found them - were immediately recognizable as the books that I would have needed had I found them as a kid, and that still provided meaning, and interest, and comfort. I recognized very strongly in Laura the kind of kid I was, and several of the characters in that book are up on my list of favourite fictional characters ever.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 05:25 pm (UTC)And I am glad you're here, and always grateful to the magic of stories.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 06:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 06:13 pm (UTC)And I'm very glad it got you through to today. The world would have been a much sadder place without grumpy coffee addicted fae and horrible zombie plagues and you gave those both to us ;-)
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 06:13 pm (UTC)Thats a good friend, one who remembered what pink curtains meant and answered the phone.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 06:13 pm (UTC)And re your pink curtains moment....you're not the only one who had moments like that. I wish I'd had verbal shorthand like that to express it, and people to express it to, but I did have a local library where I could get as many books as I wanted.....and for me, Tamora Pierce's and Diane Duane's heroines were what kept me going as a teen. If Alanna and Keladry and Dairine could pull through, well, so could I. Now it's heroines like Agatha Heterodyne, and Sarah Zellaby, and Toby Daye, because new situations and new fears demand different heroes, even when you've gotten better at fighting your own battles. So thank you also for writing such awesome characters.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 06:20 pm (UTC)That book has been on my shelves for a while now, waiting its turn in my haphazard queue. I think I'll make it be next.
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:48 pm (UTC)Trust me.
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Date: 2013-10-04 06:34 pm (UTC)But I can always, ALWAYS, claim one book as one of my all-time, never-fail, read-until-it-falls-apart, open-at-any-page-for-comfort, love and love again, favorites. That book is Tam Lin.
Tam Lin was one of the first books to teach me about the beauty of language, the subtlety of magic, the versatility of fairy tales and legends, the joy of magical realism/urban fantasy, the complexities of characters, the idealized mystique of college, and the sheer joy of words. Oh, there were lots of other books which had some or even all of those elements, but Tam Lin exemplified all of those attributes and more, conjuring up a vivid, beautiful, strange, hazy sort of magic existence that I yearned for during my own college years. (And there were a few odd parallels between things mentioned in that book and my own college existence, for Theatre does that sort of thing, it overlaps and creeps into odd corners.)
To this day, I still try to reread Tam Lin every year or so. I agree. This is a book that needs to be read.
(For those curious, two others of the All-Time Top Five are Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, and Simon Green's Blue Moon Rising, for very different yet valid reasons. And some day, I may even decide what the last two members of that list are.)
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Date: 2013-10-05 05:48 pm (UTC)Good.
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Date: 2013-10-04 06:53 pm (UTC)And, yeah, thank god that you had a good friend and a way to ask for help. I've lost a few friends to that black dog, and I'm happy you escaped.
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Date: 2013-10-04 08:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 07:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 05:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 07:15 pm (UTC)I am so glad Janet saved you, too.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 07:17 pm (UTC)I don't love it the way you do, I didn't discover it until I was an adult...gotta love alt.poly for letting me meet Pamela Dean. I am not sure I have a pink curtain friend. But I agree that the library and books in general gave me a way to survive, and still do.
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Date: 2013-10-04 09:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 07:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 06:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 07:43 pm (UTC)I feel it was Janet more than me who did that, and I am grateful to her.
P.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:03 pm (UTC)<3
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Date: 2013-10-04 08:12 pm (UTC)HUGS!!!!!
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 09:04 pm (UTC)I've loved Tam Lin since Kate introduced me to it back a long time ago now.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 09:08 pm (UTC)I'm glad the book helped you, and now you and your characters are providing positive role models for young women too.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 09:31 pm (UTC)I am so glad and so lucky that they saved you back then too.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-05 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-10-04 10:15 pm (UTC)And seriously, I'm glad we all made it, in spite of the various ways we might not have.
I wondered for a moment about my own history of pink curtain friends - I just had dinner in Seattle with two people who would have been short listed for that honor had it come up in a more classical sense - and for a bit I couldn't think of such a dark night of the soul. But then, there were the people who walked me through the process of how to create a new identity that will stand up to some scrutiny* and help find me safe places to disappear to if it came to that. And D & C,** who let me stay with them after my father came and threatened me at my job and I couldn't go home, even though one was a lawyer and they knew exactly the risk they ran by taking me in. And the whole social fabric that meant I could move out on my own at 15 and... I made bread, and played harp, and had a garden, and made dresses and worked at a music store and it was all pretty nice, really. And the friends who did my hair, and leant me jewelry and other talismans the day I took my father to court. (Armor. It just looked like a skirt and blouse.)
(Which, among other things, meant that I was there for my sister to call when she needed to climb out of her bedroom window and midnight and live somewhere else in an awful hurry.)
* This didn't, in the end become necessary, and I suspect the process has changed a lot since the late eighties.
** Whose eldest son I've been fielding coding questions from and helping put together his grad school applications, oh my grey hairs.
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Date: 2013-10-05 06:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2013-10-04 10:27 pm (UTC)Oh and - "He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts." Good choice of favourite book at the time.
PJW
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Date: 2013-10-05 08:43 am (UTC)/hugs and thank you.
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