The Writing Life

Sometimes the best way to lead a kid to books is a soft sell and a line of credit.

Growing up, I was given a minuscule allowance and the unlimited use of my parents' credit card at bookstores. This was intended as a statement of priorities, but to a child of my disposition -- reading ranked somewhere between a hangnail and an enema on the list of desirables -- it was insult added to injury. My parents were flaunting the chasm between us: They were intellectually curious; I was a root vegetable.

But then came my saving grace. (It wasn't literature. Not yet.) In the months after my bar mitzvah -- an entirely unrelated coincidence, I'm sure -- my neighborhood bookshop, began to diversify. The introduction of new products was subtle at first (refrigerator poetry by the register, T-shirts with funny lines from Finnegans Wake ), and then more audacious (Brontë bookends, Yo-Yo Ma bootleg). Then came tofu wraps and chai drinks. And nerdy bumper stickers. And a handicapped restroom -- not a product, per se, but a symbol that a bookstore had better start swimming or sink like a stone. Without anyone exactly noticing, the bookshop became the highest-brow department store in history. And by the time I left for college, one could, quite literally, satisfy all of one's earthly needs there. It would have made a terrific bomb shelter.

I charged ginger infusions and good-luck bead bracelets. I charged Passover bookmarks, coffee mugs with Far Eastern thoughts and nightlights for lesbians. I charged tchotchkes not even eBay would have been able to find a home for -- had eBay existed then. And when the bill came, I was applauded for being intellectually curious. The moral of the story? Reading is fun.

I was born in Washington, D.C., and spent virtually every day of my pre-college life there. While I don't know how good a place it is to be a writer (I haven't lived there since I started writing), it might be the ideal place to become a writer. It's urban enough to offer exposure to a relatively wide mix of people and experiences, and suburban enough to be slow, to give one room to think. I don't know of any other place in America that strikes quite that balance of noise and quiet. And given a public-transportation system whose lines all intersect at the one place no normal young person would want to go, kids under the driving age spend a fair amount of time amusing themselves.

That's how my older brother and I passed our afternoons and summers. We invented a Secret Fort at the base of the Big Hill -- whose grade, I realized upon a recent visit back to D.C. (to see my brother's first child), couldn't be more than 10 degrees. Our neighborhood had Good Guys (Mr. Saydoff, across the street, with his Invisible Swimming Pool) and Bad Guys (The Twins, whose names I never learned) and paths I never crossed alone, especially not after dinner. We carved a Football Field out of The Alley. We squeezed our thin bodies through the Unelectrified Bars of the Embassy Fences across Reno Road, knowing that at the rate our grandmother told us we were growing, there was no reason to assume we'd be able to squeeze back out. So we lived it up with the time we had.

We surrounded ourselves with capital-letter words. Everything was a stand-in for something bigger, more vivid, more scary and wonderful. The triangle, of which the Big Hill was one leg, was The Triangle. The drugstore, to which we would walk with no means actually to buy anything, was The Drugstore. It's only when I return home that I can see how perverted our senses of scale were. In fact, everything is small, and always was.

When I think about being young in D.C., I think about the house I grew up in -- The House. It was the physical embodiment of my family. I never considered it the place we lived any more than I considered my skin what held my insides in.

I remember walls of books lining the attic. A rope ladder, on the other side of the window, ensured the possibility of escape -- which is different from the promise of escape, as neither my brother nor I could reach the window. There was a Secret Passageway behind the Wall of Books -- a storage corridor -- into which my older brother and I would take Inappropriate Materials, most of which were Inappropriate Books.

One didn't have to like books to like Inappropriate Books. My brother and I loved Inappropriate Books. They made us think, and they made us crack up. We studied Our Bodies, Ourselves with the meditative energy of Talmudic scholars. I can remember specific passages about the female vagina (as I then knew it) as if I'd written them myself.

You spend enough time near a peeling wall and you end up eating lead paint. You spend enough time near a bookshelf and you end up taking down books. Having exhausted all of the Inappropriate Material, we ran our fingers along the spines -- as if the Wall of Books were a spinning globe and we were conjuring where we might one day live -- and let them stop wherever they stopped. That's how I discovered literature, one book at a time. My finger came to rest on The Catcher in the Rye , so I took it down from the shelf. My finger came to rest on Dubliners . It rested on The Sun Also Rises , Lolita and Siddhartha . It took me a long time to exhaust the Wall of Books. Years. And when I did, I made use of that damn credit card.

In the summer after my freshman year of high school, I charged something in the neighborhood of $750 at Politics and Prose. My parents weren't rich enough not to notice it, but they never once mentioned it. When my father would pass my open door and see me reading on my bed, nothing was explicitly exchanged. Knowing that his approval would be a reason for me to stop reading -- high school freshmen don't like to know that they're doing exactly what their parents would want them to do -- he never asked what the book was, or how I was liking it, or if I wanted any recommendations. And I never shared with him what was in the heavy Politics and Prose bags that I carried through the door. We never talked about what was happening to me. It was too wonderful to risk.

Jonathan Safran Foer | Extremely Young and Incredibly Talented