Good in Bed

I just finished reading “Good in Bed” by Jennifer Weiner today. Yah, I know I’m waaay behind the times but I’ve already explained in this blog how I don’t get much time to read (or write) for pleasure because of the baby, grad school, yadda yadda. The novel was so good it floored me, or rather ‘couched’ me and ‘pinned’ me to my bed for the last couple of nights and most of today. Damn. That stuff might be “chick-lit” or whatever other condescending term they’re using for popular fiction (especially by women) these days but it was good! The main character 'Cannie' is so vulnerably sweet and the plot twists are riveting right up to the end. No wonder this was a New York Times best-selling novel.

I found myself crying like a baby towards the end and it reminded me of something author Tim Waggoner (Nekropolis) said at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop that I attended last week. It was about the restorative power of literature, and the way that certain kinds of writing can truly sustain us in times of need. He said that it’s not always the ‘best’ literature that does it for us. Sometimes it’s the trashiest novels; the most disparaged science fiction, mystery writer or 'chick-lit' author du jour whose writing helps us. Sometimes they simply transport us to another time and place; somewhere far away from our problems. Other times they’re able to reach in and entirely re-arrange the inner furniture of our emotional lives.

There’s a certain delicious mystery to the way that reading a novel pulls us apart with the character and then slowly mends us back together in a different (more beautiful) shape than we were before. As I read Cannie’s story, her struggle with body-image, self-acceptance, failure, success and abandonment issues, a separate part of my brain was dealing with all of those concerns in my own life. I ended the book feeling healed along with Cannie; feeling altered in a good way by the reading of it.

Writing, both great and ordinary is incredibly powerful and it changes lives. I always knew it, but I gave my power to other people for a long time and I’m only just beginning to find my voice again. Feels pretty good.