Our Lives (Sort of) on Literature’s Pages

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In 2017, I wrote a post titled “Perceiving the Personal in the Pages We Peruse.” That piece was about how some novels we read remind us strongly of events, places, and other things in our present or past lives. Now, after lengthy penance for using too much alliteration in that post’s title, I’m back with another reminder-themed piece — this time featuring novels I’ve read during the past seven years or, if I read them earlier, hadn’t mentioned in that earlier post.

One relevant novel, which I finished last week, is Val McDermid’s 1979 — a compelling crime thriller starring a young female newspaper reporter in Scotland. I was a young male newspaper reporter in the U.S. around that time, so my experiences were obviously different, but I certainly recognized the McDermid-depicted newsroom back then that was filled with typewriters instead of computers, copy-editing done on paper, journalists smoking cigarettes and drinking a lot, unfortunately rampant sexism, and more.

It was that same year of 1979 when I visited Rome, and one of the sights I saw was The Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. Memories of that came back when I recently read Irving Stone’s historical novel The Agony and the Ecstasy about the life of Michelangelo — who famously painted that iconic chapel’s ceiling.

I was living in New York City back then (from 1978 to 1993), and worked in NYC (from 1978 to 2008), so of course novels set in The Big Apple evoke personal memories of Manhattan and other boroughs — even if the books were set before my lifetime. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel Gone Tomorrow, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Pete Hamill’s Forever, Adam Langer’s Ellington Boulevard, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, etc.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay had the double familiarity for me of starring cartoonists, which reminded me of when I covered those creators for a magazine. I had even met some of the real-life cartoonists Michael Chabon mentioned in passing — among them the friendly and masterful “Terry and the Pirates”/”Steve Canyon” comic strip creator Milton Caniff (1907-1988).

Now I live in Montclair — a New Jersey suburb big enough and interesting enough to occasional pop up in novels, including Joel Dicker’s The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair. The character from Montclair wasn’t super-appealing, and the Swiss author didn’t really capture the feel of my burg, but…

Modern-day Paris? One of the novels that got my recollections rolling was Jane Smiley’s Perestroika in Paris, published two years after my last visit (in 2018) to The City of Light.

Whenever I read a novel (such as Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things) in which police behave badly, I think of my much-more-minor experiences of being profiled by law enforcement. (My hair used to be longer than it is now.) One time, while working as a reporter, I drove into the parking lot of my newspaper’s office. A police car pulled in behind me, lights flashing, after which the officer approached my car window and asked rather menacingly what I was doing there. I took out my press card, and enjoyed seeing the policeman’s embarrassment. One of my “beats” was covering that officer’s department. 🙂

Novels that have sparked personal memories for you?

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work “Misty the Cat…Unleashed” — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for my book features a talking cat: 🙂

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about an upcoming township manager search and more — is here.

106 thoughts on “Our Lives (Sort of) on Literature’s Pages”

  1. I read Robbie Cheadle’s review of your “Misty” book, and it inspired me to check out your blog. I like your idea here of books that click with us to cause memories to surface. Reading George Pelecanos’s books have done that for me, as he lives in Maryland and includes the names/addresses of places. I also live in Maryland, so it’s neat to connect the books with the actual places — like you mentioned about books that are set in New York City.

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    • Thank you very much for stopping by, Dave! Great that you and books by George Pelecanos (who I haven’t read) share a Maryland connection! There’s something thrilling about seeing one’s state, town, etc., be the setting of a novel — and even better when the author gets the details right.

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  2. Also not a novel, but:

    It is a pastime in our teensy NYC apartment, when movies or most especially “Law and Order” is on the teevee, to watch out for various stores and sights from decades back, and have occasionally, seen a bit of the old neighborhood as it is no longer, and disconcertingly, as we would not have remembered had it not been for the visual reminder.

    But we also enjoy seeing New York before we got here– movies like King Vidor’s “The Crowd” which begins with a fantastic bird’s eye view of midtown Manhattan before narrowing to single desk in a room containing hundreds, each manned by a file clerk– the bird, the room and file clerks all relegated to the ash heap of yesterday. Every once in a while, but only once in a while, we see buildings and even businesses that managed to survive time and fortune and fate till the present.

    Then there’s Harold Lloyd’s “Speedy” in which our hero is a plucky, nervy and nerve-racking cabbie, hurtling through the city with lucky yet haphazard abandon. Much of the movie is filmed here, in 1927-8, and features Babe Ruth, the man himself, as an exasperated passenger– best acting he ever did! And Yankee fans (I’m one) are treated to a good look at the original Yankee Stadium, and a few plays on the field!

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    • Thank you, jhNY! I LOVE seeing film footage of old New York City — and I’ve watched the Babe Ruth clip you described. It IS fascinating to see what is gone and what remains in NYC.

      Yes, Yankee Stadium had that major renovation in the 1970s and then was of course totally demolished for a new Yankee Stadium about 15 years ago.

      Since leaving NYC as a resident (in 1993) and as a daily commuter (in 2008), I’ve come into the city many times and always see new stores, new or renovated buildings, etc.

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  3. Not a novel, but:

    In the long ago 1980’s, had a modest recording deal with what we used to call a “major record label” for a few thousand dollars,offered to record a song that had caught the ear of a junior a&r (artist and repertoire) man. The day I learned the label had reconsidered its offer, my musical partner and I, leaving the lawyer’s office, on a whim decided to see “Spinal Tap”, which we knew only a wee bit about.

    By the time the rhythm guitarist’s girlfriend was booking dates for the band on the basis of her own astrological readings, the comedy in our delicate condition, seemed more tragic than funny. So many of the cliches enshrined in that breakthrough movie about the rock music business hit home– most especially the essential ridiculousness of so much of it– that we could hardly stand it.

    In fact, I couldn’t swear we sat through it all to the end that day– over the years, I’ve watched “Spinal Tap” in whole or in part a few times.

    When you attempt diversion from your daily cares, don’t choose entertainment that only magnifies them, even if you get a few rueful laughs out of the experience– experience being, as another cliche would have it, the school for fools.

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    • Thank you, jhNY. Ouch — a very painful day. 😦 I can see how what would be normally experienced as a funny/diversionary movie would be almost unbearable at that moment. The music business — like a lot of businesses — is, at least in part, poorly run, inconsistent, insensitive to people’s feelings, and more.

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  4. Remembering what a fun and interesting place the Seattle I was born in was, distinguished for its quality of life and futuristic leavings from the 1962 World’s Fair, and then contrasting today’s pollution, overcrowding and cynically self-serving government, thronged with fresh arrivals from Laos and Arkansas, the only kind of fiction that stands comparison would be one of those dystopian novels . . . As an avid hiker (until recently) I couldn’t help but be aware of the rapid retreat and disappearance of what had been reliably permanent glacial boundaries; available information regarding the world’s fresh water supplies underlines the suspicion that the current population of 8 billion is unsustainable, and that people manage to be certain that catastrophe can’t happen merely because it hasn’t materialized yet . . . The likely outcome actually surpasses most of those books for bleakness, except perhaps as far as ‘Cat’s Cradle’ approaches reality in its depth of pessimism.

    While it is deemed acceptable in some communities to blame oil companies for the situation, the subject of Overpopulation is effectively tabu everywhere . . . When even a slight danger of mass extinction threatened, a rational response would be for intelligent persons to investigate and take every measure to avoid the possibility. That we are instead generally sanguine with affairs suggests, as per the Latin motto ‘Qui tacet consentire,’ that this species is content to let the worst happen.

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    • Thank you, Evan. I’ve been to Seattle twice and loved it, but those visits were in the 1990s. Sorry the city is not to your liking now.

      There are certainly many reasons for today’s climate crisis — overpopulation (as you note), the oil companies, other corporate polluters, many politicians opposing cleaner sources of energy, many countries emphasizing cars more than mass transit and cycling, many big SUVs in the U.S., gas-powered leaf blowers, etc.

      Climate change IS looking dystopian. 😦

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  5. Hi Dave, a fun post idea. There are lots of books that remind me of my childhood as I spent a great deal of time reading. All the Famous Five books and the Adventure series by Enid Blyton are like that. Also the Hardy Boys and Three Investigators books, as well as wildlife adventure series by Willard Price. I also read a lot of the Chose your own adventure books when I was a girl. Jane Eyre always reminds me of the Bronte Museum and the moorland around that area. Most books by British authors remind me of England as they have a specific style of writing and describing things.

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    • Thank you, Robbie! So true that a lot of books remind us of our childhoods, as you note is the case with you. Often a wonderful, nostalgic feeling, but not always.

      And an interesting point about how we associate books with museums about the authors. I unfortunately haven’t visited the Bronte Museum, but have been to such places as the London home of Charles Dickens, the Connecticut home of Mark Twain, and the Massachusetts home of Herman Melville. Plus the Chateau d’If island prison off Marseille that figures so prominently in “The Count of Monte Cristo.” Oh, and Westminster Abbey in London and The Pantheon in Paris where many famous authors are buried.

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      • HI Dave, I haven’t as yet made it to Dickens’ home but I have been to Sherlock Holmes house (there was a picture of Amelia Dyer the baby killer on the wall) and to all but one of the Shakespeare houses. I’ve also been to Charles Darwin’s house and the house of his grandfather. So many wonderful places to visit. In SA, I visited the Herman Charles Bosman Museum which was also amazing.

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  6. Honestly, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came to mind.

    Yes, I’ve been to Las Vegas many times, but that’s not why.

    When I suddenly left home (ran away) in my youth, I fell in with an arts crowd. Lots of musicians, artists and writers all experimenting with drugs, any drugs, including a lot of hallucinogenics.

    My friends had names like Zap, Pink Floyd, Babbler and Rumpelstiltskin (changed his name to The Entire West Coat- West for short).

    Sometimes it was like living in an R. Crumb comic, sometimes like living backstage at an endless rock concert, or in a light show on some other planet.

    Years later I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s the closest description to that time of my life I’ve ever come upon.

    I’ve told a few some of the tales, but everyone thinks I’m making it up. So I don’t bother any more.

    You have certainly brought back some crazy memories with this post!

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    • Thank you, Resa! Sounds like quite, quite, QUITE an experience you had! And any experience evoking a Hunter S. Thompson book is vivid and colorful indeed. Very glad you survived it all (which is never a given with that kind of lifestyle).

      Also evoked is a lot of great music when one sees a nickname like Pink Floyd. 🙂

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      • True.
        Some did not live long. Some led lives of alcoholic and/or drugs tragedy. Some are dying at younger old ages due to early physical abuse. A few went straight and onto good lives. Very few got rich and/or famous.

        Pink Floyd was a real character. He ended up fleeing the law, and evaded them for quite awhile before going to jail.
        🙃

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      • In Thompson’s “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72”, a character of gargantuan size and menace dogged the Muskie campaign train– can’t remember what he did exactly, or how he was handled, but I do recall anarchic unstoppable force was resident, if not bursting forth, in the man.

        In 1974, I learned the character, initials PS, was flesh and blood one dark and stormy night at a trendy Georgetown bar, wherein I had been told to remove my hat, which at the time was a constant fixture on my head. It was not a request.

        But only a few minutes later I was happy to learn the character out of “F and L” was an actual person– of gargantuan size and menace– when he happened to put his elbow on the bar next to me, and ordered a drink. He was wearing a cowboy hat, probably about size 16, and his hands were about the size of mine– if I’d been wearing boxing gloves. His name, as soon as he had walked in,went whispered around the bar– it was the fellow in Thompson’s book!

        I put my own hat back on, and when the bartender again ordered its removal, I told him I’d be happy to comply, but only after he got the big fellow to remove his. The hat, on each of us, stayed on.

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    • I too came into adulthood with a fast crowd, though decades earlier, during the 1960’s, and many of my old running buddies are no more. Recently, as one does, I was looking up a pal on the internet i hadn’t seen for decades, and discovered he was a murder victim last Christmas– but only because he had first murdered the father of the son who murdered him! A first, in my experience, but not the first to die young and often in pretty poor shape after years of too much of everything.

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  7. In 1973, I was reading The Spice-Box Of Earth by Leonard Cohen. I was on my way via Greyhound from Texas to California to visit a friend, Outside of El Paso, the border patrol stopped the bus and began checking the status of passengers. They approached me, and asked me what country I was from. I am dark skinned and had been mistaken before as being of Hispanic descent so it was not surprising. Still the fact a law officer was asking me really shook me up. I gave them my address in Houston and the address to my friend’s house in San Pedro, and that was that. However, I was so shook up by it that at the next bus stop I left my book there. Always wondered what happened to it and never read any of the poems in it again. When I arrived in Cali, I told my friend all about it, and he thought it was hilarious, started calling me Pancho and himself Lefty from the song by Townes Van Zant. Nice theme Dave. Thanks for the painfully funny and awkward walk down memory lane. Susi

    https://youtu.be/m9trdd3kFwc?si=5jcKi5ZyDa3Nqd-r

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    • Thank you, Susi, for sharing that scary memory. Law enforcement can be really intimidating, and it’s infuriating when one is under suspicion for no good reason. You told your story well — with some humor, too. 🙂

      And many thanks for the link to the video of that beautifully sung song.

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      • What was really a saving grace, in an odd way, you weren’t required to have an ID or other documentation in order to travel. Nowadays, you can’t even board a plane, boat or bus without something anything to validate your existence. Though it was a wee bit chancy still it did keep you free and clean as the old saying goes: a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse. Thanks Dave. Pancho. Ha.

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      • In the late 1960’s, I had a pal named Joe Smith. You can imagine, when pulled over in a car full of suspect types late at night, the fun he had when the cop asked him his name, and he told them.

        Said cop: “Okay, smart ass, I’m going to ask everybody else for their names, and when I come back to you, you’d better come up with something better than Joe Smith!”

        And yet, how could he? Nor did he. Thankfully, though not the driver, he had his license in his wallet– but could not reach for it before he was ordered, after first being ordered out of the car with vehemence– the drawn pistol forbade such a rash act.

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  8. A wonderful post Dave. I agree wholeheartedly. Books serve as a portal to the past, allowing us to revisit memories long forgotten. Through the pages of a book, we can immerse ourselves in different eras, cultures, and experiences, triggering nostalgia and uncovering buried recollections. The act of reading not only transports us to another time but also helps us connect with our own personal history, making books a powerful tool for reminiscence and reflection.

    Books that evoke my memories include “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, “The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, and “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen. Rereading Nancy Drew books instantly transported me back to the age of eight, where the mysteries, adventures, and clever detective work fascinated me all over again. I recall having a huge fear that I would run out of Nancy Drew books. And then what would I read!! YIKES!!!

    And of course, here is a quote that I recall….

    “We are our injuries, as much as we are our successes.” Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

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  9. You’re very welcome for the recommendation, Dave, and since “1979” isn’t one of the books of McDermid’s that I’ve read, I bought it! Interesting to me what lyndhurstlaura wrote about the way starting to reread a book can suddenly and almost uncannily bring back where you were when you last read it, sometimes in great detail. I have that experience even more strongly with audiobooks. Rosaliene talks about Barbara Kingsolver, and that was who I thought of when I read your post. Something in her book, ANIMAL DREAMS, speaks to me as if it were about me, even though I have never lived in Arizona. It’s the story of two sisters who spoke English with their parents and each other who grew up in a primarily Spanish-speaking community. It’s told from the point of view of the older sister, Codi. My younger sister and I grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with parents who spoke English, and we went to an English-speaking school. Perhaps what makes the book seem spiritually important in a personal way is Codi’s sense of having grown up an outsider. I loved living in San Juan, but I always felt like a gringa, which I was!

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    • Thank you, Kim! Very glad you recommended Val McDermid, who I plan to read more of. She’s an excellent writer.

      Great that you related to Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal Dreams,” which I read a long time ago; your description of it refreshed my memory. 🙂 I can see why it reminds you of some of your (very varied) life experiences.

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  10. My goodness, Dave – I went to Rome in 1979 as well. We went to many bits of Roman stuff, the Vatican and the Trevi Fountain (still to go again), then going down to Naples to see Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii. Did we see each other?

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  11. You have mentioned several books here, Dave, which have a little story of it’s own! I remember that when our daughter’s first boyfriend came to visit us from USA I gave him my beloved “The Agony and the Ecstasy” and when I took up French again my friend and me decided to read “Joel Dicker’s “The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair” but finally gave up on it, because we didn’t really enjoy it!

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  12. James Michener’s The Drifters resonated with me, so when I spent a semester in Spain in 1980, I made sure to get to Malaga. I worked for the Cabrini Sisters and can picture the Mother Cabrini Shrine in Washington Heights in one of Harlen Coben’s books (I forget which one). My book club recently read Tom Lake, set in Michigan with references to southeast Michigan when we live. I could go on. Thanks for the prompt.

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  13. Don Quixote is a novel that holds particular meaning for me. My dad recommended it because he and I had quixotic tendencies in common. Candide will always remind me my brother. The way he recommended the book to me was hilarious and irresistable. I couldn’t NOT read it. Wind in the Willows will always remind me of my mother. She was so excited to give me her childhood copy when I first learned to read.

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  15. Yet another interesting theme, Dave. Lots of novels–names long forgotten–have sparked personal memories for me. Though the two novels you recommended by Barbara Kingsolver are set in worlds vastly different from mine, I could connect with the shared humanity of the lives of her characters that sparked memories of my own childhood. A History of Loneliness: A Novel by John Boyne, about an honorable Irish priest caught up in revelations of child sexual abuse within the Irish Catholic Church, sparked the self-realization of my own loneliness as a young nun. Our lives were so filled with day-to-day activities, responsibilities, and commitments that we never have the time to realize how lonely we truly are.

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    • Thank you, Rosaliene! So true that a novel doesn’t have to specifically remind readers of their own lives to…remind readers of their own lives.

      And I appreciate the mention of “A History of Loneliness.” It does sound like it can spark strong memories for people who have had direct experience with organized religion, as you did.

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  16. That reminds me that I have to read The Agony and the Ecstasy which has been on my shelves for a long time. I read Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow and it reminded me of my family and living on the Canadian prairies. I also love reading books about places I have visited as I can envision the paces described. I’m currently reading James Joyce’s Dubliners and since I visited there last year, recognize streets and landmarks he mentions.

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  17. Another thought-provoking post, Dave, and many thanks for it. All that come to mind for me on this topic are ‘The Cairo Trilogy’ by Naguib Mahfouz as well as ‘The Alexandria Quartet’ and ‘Bitter Lemons’ by Lawrence Durrell. Although all were written about periods well before I lived in Egypt and Cyprus respectively, the places and areas mention evoke my own memories of them. Additionally–and it’s not quite the same thing–I find that re-reading books stirs up memories of where I was and what I was doing at the time I read them the first time around. Great to remember those times. 🙂

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  18. Another interesting post, Dave. My big takeaway is that we lived in NYC at the same time (for a little while). I lived in Queens in 1977-78 before moving to Seattle.

    That move to Seattle was an attempt to save a failing marriage, and since that ultimately ended in frustration, I’m going to identify with Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan which is set (sometimes) in the Pacific Northwest.

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    • Thank you, Dan! Sorry about the failed marriage back then. (Been through that myself.) During my 15 years living in various boroughs of NYC, I was in Queens from 1984 to 1993 — a while after your brief time there.

      Seattle is a great city, and there’s some excellent fiction based in the Pacific Northwest — including “Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey and a number of novels by the always-compelling Kristin Hannah.

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