Reading for Writers or for One Reader

When I first began teaching, my father told me that if I affected the life of just one child then it was worth it. That’s what success was to him. He rarely gave advice. I was surprised he even knew what I was doing, so I nodded in agreement. It turned out that I needed to influence the life of more than one student in order to survive, but I did appreciate his support of my teaching.

As writers, we may be keen to make an impact on the lives of readers, if in intangible ways. Take the author Alexander Chee. Towards the end of his nonfiction collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel he offers an anecdote. In 2001, he published an auto fiction novel named Edinburgh for which he’d painstakingly plumbed the depths of his emotional psyche. It was not only a best-seller, but marked the first time he’d admitted publicly to the sexual abuse he’d suffered as an adolescent at the hands of a choir master. Only when the novel was published did he realise that he hadn’t informed his mother about the abuse.

A friend sent book Chee’s book to a prisoner he knew. The man, convicted of paedophilia, reported not being able to put the book down for days. The other prisoners thought he was ill. He wrote back to his correspondent, ‘This is the only thing that ever told me how what I did was wrong.’ 

I found this statement stunning. The sexual predators of the world may well have no concept of the harm they do. But for me, Chee’s tale highlights the important role literature can play in readers’ lives. His autobiographical novel showed the prisoner things about himself that the law – with its system of rewards and mostly punishment – could never do. Ditto for religion.

When Chee toured the novel to enthusiastic audiences in the US, he says he wishes he could show us the rooms full of people who told him that Edinburgh was ‘the story of their lives.’ He didn’t know he had written the memoir for that purpose, ‘but then,’ he says, ‘I did.’ Meaning, somewhere deep down he knew he had to write it.

Both his novel and the collection of essays sold well. But Chee’s real achievement might be measured by my father’s criterion for success: how has it helped shape the life of one single individual. By that standard, Chee shows himself to be a master of the literary classroom.