Finding Yourself in an Expanding Universe, Reading Literature

[Valin]

National Review

A letter to Audrey Hall, eleven years old and the winner of the New York Public Library’s 2019 summer-reading essay contest.

Kevin D. Williamson

August 16, 2019

Dear Audrey,

I enjoyed reading your essay in Slate about Sharon Draper’s novel,  Blended. I myself have not read it, but it sounds like a pretty good book. I am sure your review did it justice.

You wrote that you enjoyed the book in part because you saw something of yourself in the main character, Isabella, who, like you, has a white mother and a black father who are divorced. What’s funny is that I saw something of myself in your essay, even though you wouldn’t think at first that you and I are very much alike. I’m a lot older than you are, for one thing, and you’re from the Bronx, while I’m from a small city in West Texas. (But some of the best New Yorkers are from Texas — take, for example, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.) My parents were divorced when I was little, too, and I found it disorienting and confusing to travel between their houses. I’d go stay with my father for a week or two in the summer, and I didn’t like it, because I was far away from my friends and my things, and I didn’t know anybody where he lived.

I don’t know what it’s like being mixed-race, though there are a lot of people who are mixed-race where you live (about one person out of every 20 is mixed-race in the Bronx) and also in much of the rest of the country. I was adopted when I was three days old, and I’ve never met my biological parents, so I don’t really know what my background is like. They told me I was of German ancestry on one side of my biological family, but there isn’t any way to know that, really, and sometimes people in Texas used to say “German” when they really meant “white, but I don’t really know from where.”

What I do know something about is libraries. When I was your age, there were not a lot of bookstores in towns like the one I grew up in — there was no such thing as Barnes & Noble back then. And even if there had been, I wouldn’t have been able to make much use of them: There are not a lot of people in the town where I’m from (not by New York standards, anyway) but it is very large and spread out, and everything is far from everything else, which is really, really inconvenient if you don’t have a car, which I didn’t when I was eleven. (Because I was eleven.) I also didn’t have any money. (Because I was eleven.) So buying books would have been difficult.

(Snip)