AN ATTACHMENT

know I am in love with a book of fiction when I begin rationing its pages. Sometimes, like with Jennifer Egan’s , it happens early on, when I, it’s only when rounding the bend toward the last chapter that I realise every page read is one less tether to a place I’ve become attached to. I eke out each paragraph, holding on until the very last second when the last word triggers the slow collapse of the world I have built with someone else’s words and my faith. “Attached to” is a strange especially when concept, supply describing the longing to stay in a place that isn’t pleasant or even particularly safe. Toni Morrison’s was the first book I found myself slowing down to read at age 16, allotting myself two pages a day, then two paragraphs, then finally stopping altogether as I came to terms with the fact that I would have to let go of Sethe, and I would never again be free of America’s bloody history. What an unnerving gift: To bear witness to an imaginary life, to glimpse at the kind of humanity that makes you re-evaluate your own. This, I like to think, is the promise fulfilled in the pact between author and reader. They us with the trail map, but we are the ones who wear it thin with our clutching, our opening and folding shut and reopening and re-folding shut and studying the paper like it might, at last, show us where we are.