Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

In no particular order, the books that have changed me.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Aleksandr Solzhenutsyn.

Read this in AP English. The precision he used to frame the atrocity of Stalinism in the events of one simple day took away my breath.

Eventually, I read everything he wrote. Why I was so intrigued by a cranky old traditionalist who had no use for women is another post for another day. I have no Russian or Eastern European heritage.

It was the writing. To this day, I carry the experiences from that book in my literary memory.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexander Dumas.

In my junior year of high school, I decided to read a lot of classic novels. So each Saturday, I drove to the OG Carnegie Library in Homestead, working my way through books I ought to read.

Most of this novel is forgettable for me, but the passages about imprisonment are fused in mind’s eye. The capacity to change the course of your life through education was stark. The ability to dig a passageway long before Andy in Shawshank Redemption captivated me.

Collected Works of Rudyard Kipling.

Clearly, there are problems with Kipling as a colonizers and imperialist oppressor. But I cannot deny that he was among the first writers to transport me.

My dad had this two volume set from his own childhood. He read it to me until I was old enough to press my back against the bookcase, turning the slightly yellowed pages myself. To say I was fascinated is wholly inadequate. Kipling lifted me out of the worldview of Westt Mifflin, Pennsylvania.

I’d like to find a used copy of that two set volume.

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis

I seem to be unduly influenced by intense 20th century men.

I remember quite distinctly sitting on my parent’s sofa, tearing through this book. The lamp, the drapes closed against the darkness of night, the drowsiness I pushed away in my determination to finish.

When I returned to graduate school in January, I changed my concentration from American Politics to Political Theory. Thus began a terrible internal struggle to reconcile my subjective experience with what I hoped was objective truth.

While not exactly canon, these books shaped my critical thinking skills, inadvertently pushing me toward a relationship with the Divine completely in opposition to what they intended.

Because of these books, I approached the top two

The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Brothers Karamazov, Fydor Dostoevsky

Solzhenitsyn’s brutality devastated me. Dignity trumps suffering. wtf? I love the structure, tis true. I deplore the ways in which women were cast off. I was reeling from the expectation that martyrs to political regimes were more than the sum total of people who survived by other means. It was such a grotesque sweeping indictment of Russians they purported to save.

Dostoevsky’s parables – no, not that one – transformed me. My reaction and response to the story of the allegoric abused child ripped apart my reality, propelling me down into my own childhood trauma where I was forced to face the fact that they were all wrong. You can read the passage and some of my thoughts from a few years ago here.

They looked to God for absolute truth, but rarely looked around at seemingly ordinary everyday people. They despised everyday people as much as Ayn Rand (yep, I read Atlas Shrugged) just adding a pivot to charitable condescension. Intelligence, money, power, good intentions, and righteousness mattered. Humanity did not matter.

The suffering of one small child did not matter. The destructive greed and racism of colonization eluded them. The contributions of women, people of color, of anyone who was not special like them mattered not at all.

When my feminism collided with my faith, my world collapsed. When my own humanity plunged me deeper into that abyss, it absolutely wasn’t certainty in anything that salvaged my soul.

What saves me is any god or man or even crisp writing. What saves me is my conviction that I would not turn away from the abused girl in the privy, be she me or another. I might not be able to save her from the cruelties she endured, but I could always acknowledge that she did not deserve them. That we do not get to benefit from her suffering.

And that I do not owe you, dear readers, anything generated from my own suffering.

Not even crisp writing.

Clearly, I have more work to do on decolonizing my mind.