Sue Bailey

On Tuesday, The Guardian had a feature on the book that changed my life. I’ve been considering this question every since it arose in Mig’s comments so long ago that I can’t even find the post, and the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

to change a life is a big ask from a book.

Let me make this clear – I love books. If I had to choose between [sex + alcohol + music] or books, I would pick books. If I had to choose between the internet or books, that would be tougher – because it’s all about the reading, innit.

If you want to talk about pivotal moments in my reading, I don’t need whole books: two sentences cover it. Aged 7 or 8, reading that “most evolutionists reckon the natural world to have emerged in the same order as that listed in Genesis”, and realising I didn’t have to disbelieve in science to carry on believing in God. (I expressed my delight to my mother, who responded that the theory of evolution was just a theory, while the Bible was fact.)

A decade later, a raw atheist who sometimes felt that she disbelieved the truth, I read in another book whose title I no longer remember, the phrase “St. Paul’s misogyny”, and had a Damascus road trip all of my own. Suddenly the Bible wasn’t the revealed word of God, but just a book, written by men, with a point of view I could choose to disagree with.

But however they felt at the time, I don’t think these sentences changed my life: they reflect a whole process that went on over a decade and longer. My life changed, and I found reading to go with that. When people talk about Books That Changed Their Lives, what they seem to cite more often than not are books that said they weren’t alone. This is why Catcher in the Rye gets picked so often: read it at the right moment of adolesence and it’s a revelation; you’re not the only one that feels like that. (Read it five years later and it’s a bunch of nonsense: that’s adolesence for you.) Catcher never got me like that, but Bridge to Terabithia did: Katherine Patterson’s pre-teen story said it was practically normal to feel like a cuckoo chick in your own family, and that retreating into fantasy might be a way to deal with that.

And maybe more important than any single book is the fact that when I wanted books, the library supplied them, half a dozen a week for years and years. If we want children to have imagination and curiosity and open minds, we might encourage them to be greedy about books: Harry Potter alone is not sufficient. And Broomhill Library’s liberal policies undoubtedly meant that I read some totally “unsuitable” books – which too told me I wasn’t alone. Judy Bloom and Cider with Rosie are all very well, my friend Jude’s mum’s Jackie Collins’ were well-thumbed, but I really need to thank The Man Who Travelled on Motorways for the weird sex. I haven’t read it since I was 12; I wonder if it’s as kinky as I remember.

So I observe from this that if you want to affect me with your book, you need to have made sure I read it before I hit my teens. Books I read subsequently – Tigana, Perdido Street Station, Alistair Campbell’s Old English Grammar spring to mind – have delighted me. I’ve been moved and infuriated and gone running to the bookshop to buy Everything Else They Ever Wrote (Terry Pratchett’s Mort for that last one). But that jaw-dropping moment when a book crystallises something you’ve been trying to think forever, I’ve lacked that for the last 25 years.

Until yesterday.

Facing my angels

Let us cut this very long story shorter, and say that in the story of my madness, the church’s part is significant. I spent many, many years beating myself up and being beaten up by others for failing God: there are undoubtedly some more posts in this (so, you know, if you’re only here for the Victorian porn, you might want to unsubscribe), but for now, take my word for it. And if I’m going to be less mental at 40 than I was at 20, I have got to get this shit dealt with.

There’s a book I’ve been avoiding for the last 20-odd years. It’s called In the Crucible, and it was written by Robert Warren, who was the vicar of the church I attended until I stopped attending church. And somehow, in my head, Robert and my father and God have become conflated into a black weight that hung over the first 16 years of my life and damned me to hell every single minute.

For some reason I can’t quite explain, I needed to read his version of those years.

And so I bought it for a penny on Amazon, and I read it.

I’m not sure, now, what I was expecting: perhaps something between Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and The Last Battle (Susan being the one who abandoned Narnia was always a terrible prophecy for me). But that would be my story, not Robert’s.

This is an entirely ordinary and really rather dull story of how a church grew in size quite dramatically, raised an astonishing amount of money for a building project, had some administrative problems, pretty much overcame them, and dealt with the tricky problem of how to get the under-40s through the doors. In fact, it’s an amazingly human story about how communities work, and don’t, how leadership works, and doesn’t, what it means to give and how you get people to do it. It’s not massively dissimilar to articles I read everyday on online communities and how they work. It has God in it, but actually Robert Warren’s God is a well-cleaned window: you know you’re looking through him, but the scene outside is so much more interesting.

I expected to be torn apart by this book, and instead, I’m rather wondering what I was making all that fuss about.

I think that – albeit in a way far, far from how Robert would have wanted it – that this book may just have changed my life.

Tags: books, religion

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 5:13 pm and is filed under mental, self-indulgent.