My Mother, Libraries, and Me: A Love Story

This spring, the teacher who nurtured me most in high school invited me to read to her class from my debut novel, Boy From the North Country. It was an intimate moment. I was back in the class of the teacher who had encouraged my aspirations, sharing the novel I’d written about my hometown, my mother, my dreams to one day leave home and become a writer.

We held the event in the school library. I noticed the librarian paying close attention as I read. Afterward, the librarian approached me and told me that she had known my mother. I looked and spoke like her, she said.

It was a tender moment, one that stretched across time, between the living and the dead. It was surprising, and, in its own way, unsurprising. Of course my mother had known the school librarian. She had first given me my love of libraries, books, literature. It was because of her that I had begun to write as a child.

I remember her driving me to the library in town when I must have been four or five years old. Our home was in the quiet woods, upstate New York. Our drive to the library was always a thrilling journey into the wider world. The road to the library was called King’s Highway, and wound through majestic hills and farmland. Gazing through the window with gathering excitement, I knew we were going to be at the library any moment now.

At the library, my mother would read aloud to me from any book I chose. We could travel anywhere! The four or five aisles of books in that one-room library made me feel as if the whole world was waiting to be discovered. All we had to do was open a book and let the rustling pages welcome us into the story.

I spent my twenties traveling as far from home as I could. Different cities, different languages. But libraries were a constant. Looking up from a library desk, lifting myself out of the pages of my book, remembering where I was. Like waking from a dream and not knowing in those first moments of consciousness in which bed you’re sleeping. A desk at the Zentral-und Landesbibliothek in Berlin. The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford. The Goshen Public Library. 

I’ll always think about the first time I came into my college library. The most extensive I had ever seen. Walking endless shelves and seeing all the books I wanted to read and feeling more certain than ever that this was my path, to read and write and live beside books. When I’ve struggled on my road, I’ve always found comfort in that memory, knowing that the books are not going anywhere, that this is where I need to be.

For years, I’ve operated my own library, informal as it is. Works by the honor system. Any friend can have any book off my shelves any time she pleases. My friend O has had my copy of My Name is Asher Lev for nine years. That’s alright, she’ll get it back to me when she can.

Earlier this summer, I had the privilege of speaking at a keynote Gala Author Tea at the ALA Annual Conference, moderated by the legendary Donna Seaman and including a number of other writers whose work I admire. After so many years using libraries, it was an honor to meet so many librarians at ALA. I had time to listen to libraries talk about the problems they face, from budget cuts to book banners. I left inspired by the librarians I met, who are keeping the faith, keeping the books, keeping our literary communities vibrant.

For all the difficult news, there’s also this: Today, there are more libraries in America than there are Starbucks. That makes sense to me. I’m a coffee addict, but I need libraries even more than I need coffee.

These days I live around the corner from the Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library, in an old walk-up apartment that my mother first moved into in the 1970s. I’ve spent many afternoons in the silence and sunlight of that library. She used to read and write in that library, too. I like knowing we’re in touch, across time, even if I’m still living and she is no longer. The books last forever, like her love.

Sam Sussman is a New York-based writer whose debut novel 'Boy From the North Country' will be published by Penguin Press on September 16.