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| The Brother by Egon Schiele |
Chapter 1: Reading Novels
When I was a child, I loved reading novels so much that I while I was reading I would become so absorbed in my book that I would ignore absolutely everything that was going on around me. And if anyone in my family started talking to me, I didn’t even hear them—it wasn’t that I was intentionally ignoring them, it was just that I was so lost in the imaginary world I was reading about that the sounds my family was making didn’t even make it through to me.
Chapter 2: Annoying My Brother
My reading habits didn’t bother my parents at all. My mother even encouraged my passion for reading by providing me with all the books she had loved reading while she was growing up. I’ll never forget the morning she decided to let me stay home from school just so I could finish reading Gone with the Wind, which I could not bear to put down. But my reading habits drove my younger brother—who was two years younger than me and who I often played with when I wasn’t reading—completely crazy. Every time he saw me sitting alone on the living room couch, starting to open up a book, he would shout “reading is disgusting!” and then walk by me in a huff.
Chapter 3: Telling the Story
After we grew up, I used to tell people the story about how my younger brother gave me so much grief about my reading habits, and I would always laugh about it. But then one day when my brother was forty-five and my whole family was sitting around in my living room, my husband teased my brother about how he used to get mad at me for reading. And my brother started getting angry all over again, saying, “I even used to stand there and drop marbles on you, and you still ignored me!”
Chapter 4: Asking Why
I said, “I don’t understand—why are you still so mad at me about that?”
And my brother replied, sounding sad and even a little, bitter, “Don’t you see? You had this way of getting completely away, of escaping from the bad things that were going on in our everyday life, and you didn’t take me with you….”
Chapter 5: Trying to Understand
Hearing that was a complete surprise to me. I had always thought we had a pretty happy childhood, though perhaps his childhood was a bit harder than mine because he did have trouble learning how to read and schoolwork was more of a challenge for him than it was for me, though my parents did end up sending him to a wonderful private school, which was a lot more fun than the big public schools I went to. Although, on second thought, maybe there were bad things I didn’t know about—my parents were not saying anything. But I’d also realized by then that even though two children are from the same family, they can have completely different childhoods.
Chapter 6: Deciding What to Say
Finally, I just looked at him and said, “How could I? How could I take you with me?”
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