Reading the Seasons: Books Holding Life and Friendship Together

By Germaine Leece and Sonya Tsakalakis

It's an old cliché that books 'transport you'; but as any avid reader will tell you, there's far more to them than that. Alongside comfort and retreat, books offer insight into ourselves and others; they tell us how the world is, was or might be; they are windows into other worlds, whose meanings resonate through the ages. It's this multiplicity that is at the heart of bibliotherapy, the ancient practice of reading for therapeutic effect.

Reading the Seasons charts the evolution of a friendship through candid letters between bibliotherapists Germaine Leece and Sonya Tsakalakis. Ignited by a shared love of reading, of finding a book for every occasion, every emotion - both for themselves and for their clients - their conversations soon confront life's ups and downs. The authors they reach for range from Stephen King to Javier Marias, Helen Garner to Maggie O'Farrell, as they reflect upon loss, change, parenting, careers, simple pleasures, travel, successes, fears and uncertainty.

Reading the Seasons not only offers an entryway to new titles but affirms the power of books to console, heal and hold us together as friends and as individuals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Release date: Mar 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781760761868

Book preview

In memory of my father, Paul Joffé, who showed me the love of a reading life. For Stuart and our children, Lily, Edward and Louis, who have taught me that the answers are not in the books but within ourselves.

For my parents, Anastasia and Yianni, for unwittingly giving me the hunger for books, and my darling children, Danaë and Samuel.

Contents

Introduction

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Spring

References

The Bookshelf

Texts Index

Acknowledgements

Introduction

‘If you had to describe yourself using a quote from a book, what would it be?’ asked my husband, Stuart, as we sat in a cafe recently.

I paused, but he continued: ‘I would either be It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how, from The Cat in the Hat, or a line about Ratty and Mole messing about in boats from The Wind in the Willows.’

I found that quote later: ‘Believe me, my young friend, there is NOTHING – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.’ He was right, those quotes fit him. They fit him as the nineteen-year-old he was when we met and they fit him as the forty-five-year-old man he is now.

Surprised by how quickly he answered, I was concerned by how impossible a question it suddenly seemed to me. It felt unanswerable, which left me curious; if reading is such a big part of my identity, how could I not find a quote that fits?

Back home, I realised that I cannot pin myself to just one quote, as I have found fragments of myself in so many books and characters. Different selves have expanded and contracted, demanding more or less attention over time. My bookshelves symbolise quests of self-discovery rather than self-recognition, and I am scattered throughout.

The only constant throughout it all has been my love of reading. As one character says to another in Ali Smith’s Autumn:

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

A constant what? Elizabeth said.

A constant constancy, Daniel said.

This ‘constant constancy’ has created an intense lifelong relationship with books. For a time, reading became my Achilles heel; it has been both a blessing and a curse, a strength and a weakness, my light and my shadow.

Reading protected me in childhood and adolescence, while simultaneously allowing me to explore the complexity of the adult world and the human condition. It prepared me for romance, intimacy, parenthood, mid life – all the existential questions – yet I began to start using these stories as how-to manuals, so I would know how to be in those relationships with myself and others. It sheltered me from grief and gave me words for feelings I couldn’t articulate, yet it also became a proxy for feeling my own emotions. A way to believe I was processing more difficult feelings without having to experience them; instead keeping them neatly understood and contained in my head. I used books as my wise elders and guides to living, mistakenly believing they were my oracle and contained all the answers I would need to get me through; a way of feeling in control.

The love of reading also led me into two different careers that seemed unrelated but ultimately became the perfect bedfellows for bibliotherapy. While I studied psychology and sociology in my undergraduate degree, a passion for books saw me desperate to become a fiction editor. Frustrating years followed, working in different roles for different publishers. After my first child was born, I began writing book reviews and profiling authors, actors and artists for a variety of publications. I was becoming more interested in real people’s stories rather than fictional ones and, after my third child started preschool, I went back to study and became a psychotherapist. I started working at a counselling centre that offered long-term therapy and finally felt I had found my passion. I fretted that I had lost a decade in the ‘wrong’ career and wasted precious time in the ‘right’ one until I read about bibliotherapy.

The Collins Dictionary defines bibliotherapy as ‘the use of reading as therapy’. Suddenly I could make meaning of my two divergent careers. In 2016, when The School of Life opened its Sydney doors and offered bibliotherapy as a service – among its other classes and workshops dedicated to developing emotional intelligence – I leaped at the opportunity to become their resident bibliotherapist. This role allowed me to give people space to have a conversation that reflected on their relationship with reading and how it could nurture and sustain their lives. No two people read the same way, just as no two lives are experienced the same way, and recognising the individual meaning books represent creates a more personal connection to literature.

My own relationship with reading allowed me to recognise the patterns of losing myself and trying to locate myself in another’s words. It also gave me the space to notice this tendency and have the awareness to read differently. In the words of poet JV Cunningham, books ‘enable us to see how we could think and feel otherwise than as we do’. Yet, it wasn’t the books alone – to paraphrase psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, it is difficult to surprise yourself in your own mind – it was also the multitudes of conversations about reading that have been flowing between myself and Sonya for the past four years. Thinking about why I was reading and what I was taking from the stories, discussing it with Sonya, who was also considering why she was reading and the effect it had, created novel reflections and deeper self-awareness.

Sonya, a bibliotherapist working with The School of Life in Melbourne, contacted me by email to introduce herself soon after I began my bibliotherapy practice. Books became the foundation for a deeply enriching friendship; examining our life experiences and those of our clients through the lens of literature started an intimate and trusting friendship that continues to grow.

Having only met twice, ours is also a story that celebrates the power of letter writing. Despite using email to communicate, I still label these exchanges as letters. When I write to Sonya, I am as focused as I am when reading. I create the time and space in my mind to pause, think and compose. When receiving emails from her, I wait to open them until I again have the time and space to absorb myself in her words. There is a contemplation involved that creates a stillness and reflection in my day or week that would otherwise not exist. As our friendship deepened, so did my thoughts and musings about the books I was reading.

This form of communication also created a space for me to become more personal and honest. Like books, letters are written and read in isolation. There is time to digest and reflect, as they are not responded to instantly, unlike in a conversation. Also similar to reading, letter writing happens privately, in silence. The silence this friendship created allowed me to finally, properly hear myself.

It’s a similar process to the way we both practice bibliotherapy, and I hope that by peeling back the covers on the books that have spoken to us and our clients over the changing seasons of a year, you are also inspired to reflect upon how stories nurture, challenge and shape you on your own journey. To help with this, we have added notes in the margins of our letters to continue the conversation with you, our reader. The clients I have mentioned throughout my letters are compilations of people I have worked with; however, their struggles, experiences and reactions to reading are real. The books are real, too.

Another week, another cafe and again Stuart asked if I had found ‘my’ quote. I realised that I finally had. Reflecting on my reading life, my work with bibliotherapy and psychotherapy clients, and my ongoing conversations with Sonya led me to a new understanding about the freedom that comes ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason’. John Keats wrote this to explain his concept of ‘negative capability’ in a letter to his brothers in 1817, and it sums up my understanding about life now. There is no certainty, and no book will ever provide the answers, yet how hopeful to be in a world of mysteries and doubts with authors whose work explores the questions that create endless curiosity and learning. The poet Mark Strand once said in an interview, ‘I don’t think it’s human, you know, to be that competent at life. That attitude is far from poetry.’ And perhaps that is the closest I will ever get to an answer about looking for certainty within the pages of books.

Germaine

In one of her letters, Germaine asked me what I was reading when I was fifteen. I responded, but it wasn’t easy to immediately traipse back to that time and recall the books to which I gravitated. Finally, I was able to conjure a response, a truthful one, but there was an omission – the book I went back to time and time again was the dictionary. I loved reading the dictionary! Every night I would learn five new words and ecstatically write them in a notebook. And I would make every attempt to use them whenever I could. I remember an essay returned by my high school English teacher with the comment in red, ‘occasionally, use a simple word!’

Words for me conveyed such power, magic and possibility. The sound of them, the length, the mystery they embraced. I could say ‘mellifluous’, ‘parsimonious’ or ‘vituperative’ and imagine thoughts that would take me beyond the reality of my world. They felt safe to me, besides offering untold, private exhilaration. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray this is beautifully envisaged: ‘they seemed … to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?’

School was a battlefield for me, where cataclysms of both the emotional and psychological kind took place almost daily. I started without knowing a word of English, being the first-born in a migrant family where we spoke the Cypriot dialect. It was a struggle to fit in, to feel included, for many reasons that were not within my capacity to control. I was never the pupil in the middle of the schoolyard, frolicking in the sun. I was always on the periphery. Just like the fearful muskrat, Chuchundra, in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, who skirts around the dark edges of the room. It was an era when children were left to their own devices, expected to have agency from a young age rather than parental intervention. Well, that was my experience. It sounds lugubrious, no wonder I have such an affinity for the Russians! Rest assured, it wasn’t all grim. I had a wonderful, kind librarian in my primary school, Mrs Bowen, who was so thrilled about reading. She was instrumental in introducing me to a cornucopia of books; before I knew it, I was clutching Enid Blyton, marvelling at the quirky characters, their hijinks and how they were part of a community. I never felt lonely between the covers of The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair or The Magic Faraway Tree. Their power lay in the prolonged enjoyment and solace they conferred, long after the book was closed. My mind could wander and seek sanctuary in a word, a character, a fanciful encounter, in the face of abject unpleasantness inflicted by others. Another grand thing about my childhood were the Little Golden Books in the supermarket – so accessible, so cheap. Every time I accompanied my mum to help with the groceries, one would find its way into the shopping trolley. I think the first book I possessed was The Tawny Scrawny Lion. Or The Little Red Caboose.

Unbeknownst to me then, from that early age I was practising bibliotherapy. I was holding on to literature as a drowning person clings to a lifeboat to stay alive; this was something that has remained with me ever since. This self-medication on books has endured and has enabled me to weather the vagaries of existence. Or as Simone de Beauvoir said (as I rapturously scribbled in my notebook after finding the quote on Pinterest), ‘When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair and that convinced me that art was the highest of values.’

My careers adviser in secondary school was a strong advocate for the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, so much so that truth held no merit for her. She would highlight that there were far more job prospects in the STEM domain. Even back in the Dark Ages (as my kids call them), aka the 1980s, they were lauded over the arts. But English was by far my favourite subject, and discovering Tennessee Williams’s moody A Streetcar Named Desire was a stunning revelation. The play’s tragic antihero Blanche Dubois, the most interesting character in literature in my mind, quotes whole tracts of texts from Hawthorne and Poe, and in her grandiloquent gentility, her human failings, she shines like a glittering jewel. ‘And so the soft people have got to – shimmer and glow – put a paper lantern over the light’ – it taught me that sometimes the loneliest of us all can be the most intoxicating company.

Dutifully following the misplaced advice, I was called the displaced science student by my peers at university, as I would often be found in the humanities library reading the classics, and then I decided to take an English Literature unit – let’s just say that it took a while to finish a very expensive science degree!

Then followed further study and careers in allied health. The proverbial turning point didn’t occur until years later, at home with my young children, after reading a newspaper article by Blake Morrison called ‘The Reading Cure’. It delved into research as to why reading for pleasure was beneficial for wellbeing, how it engendered self-knowledge and meaningful connection with others. I was excited beyond measure! Something I had always known and felt was the importance of being held and grasped by a book; finding refuge from the tyranny of the self by being ensconced in other perspectives, interiorities, emotions. Seeing this conviction on the printed page, and learning that there was such a thing as a ‘slow reading movement’, was the impetus for my quest to engage in further research about how I could put it into practice and help others.

In 2013 I launched my enterprise, The Literary Hand, and began group bibliotherapy in aged care settings. Within those walls, I discovered the richest stories and eyes that twinkled with the knowledge of poems inscribed on the heart. This passion led me to London, where I attended a conference on reading and mental health, and participated in shared reading coordinated by the Reader Organisation in the UK’s public libraries. On my return, I approached The School of Life in Melbourne and was subsequently trained by British bibliotherapist Ella Berthoud, who co-wrote The Novel Cure. Over the years, I have had the privilege of bearing witness to accounts of fond childhood memories from clients in places as far afield as Copenhagen, New York and Seoul, and how the trials of life are mollified and friendships strengthened in the presence of books.

It was bliss when Germaine and I met. How exciting it was for me to have an exchange with someone who was as equally passionate about reading and derived an unsurpassed thrill from the books that helped change a way of thinking, of feeling, of being, in clients and ourselves. How I love that we come from vastly different backgrounds, and yet the commonality we share is far bigger. The emails sent back and forth felt like handwritten letters in their honesty; in them we shared what we were reading, the titles we were prescribing and our own private turmoils.

Our letters contain some wayward reading matter – from the Twilight series to The Slap, and from Jane Eyre to ‘The Library of Babel’ – because the imagination is such that entire worlds can be fashioned from enthusiasms which diverge and coruscate in their own unique, mysterious way. My hope is that you, too, in your jaunt through our exchanges, will find something that will delight you; a book, a poem, a line that will reawaken an attachment to the act of living, such that a cataclysm is not needed to love life today.

Sonya

Surprise discoveries; the seeds of friendship; summer reading; sex, angst, ageing; reassurance

Wanderer moon

smiling a

faintly ironical smile

at this

brilliant, dew-moistened

summer morning, –

a detached

sleepily indifferent

smile, a

wanderer’s smile, –

From ‘Summer Song’ by William Carlos Williams

Dear Germaine

For a while now I thought you were based in London, until it occurred to me that we are within the same shores!

So, I’m inviting you to please get in touch next time you’re in Melbourne. I’d love to meet you in person for a coffee. You shared such thoughtful ideas in those ricocheting group bibliotherapy emails, and I was especially pleased you mentioned Georgia Blain, an author I hugely admire. I don’t think I’ll ever recover from her mother’s Tell Me I’m Here. I was struck by the ferocity of a mother’s love despite the seemingly insurmountable obstacles – the intensity and unpredictability of psychosis, the people in her life, the law, the medical community. Apart from that, Anne Deveson’s intellectual fervour is astonishing!

At the denouement of a bibliotherapy consultation I like to offer enchantment, contain any runaway thoughts or feelings that may have been bestirred, by reading a poem out loud for clients. I have taken the liberty of sharing some lines from William Carlos Williams’s ‘Summer Song’ … Hope it ignites a wanderer’s smile in you!

Adieu for now

Sonya x

Hi Sonya

Thank you so much for getting in touch. This is a new world for me and I am feeling both excited and nervous, so it is perfect timing to meet a fellow bibliotherapist! How funny you thought I was based in London … a ‘sliding doors’ story for another time.

I wonder how you felt when you started? I have been seeing clients for a couple of months now and am beginning to notice that I’m reading with a constant sense of anxiety about ‘catching up’. This feels too much of a reminder of my English literature undergrad days and completely at odds with what my understanding of bibliotherapy is. It’s paradoxical: I have forever read for emotional fulfilment, never concerned about the idea of ‘books one should read’, and now I find myself worrying about my gaps – the classic coming-of-age novels I wasn’t reading because I was devouring Virginia Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic series, the Booker and Pulitzer novels that bored me in my twenties that I think I ‘should’ now return to. (I realise we don’t know each other at all and I find myself torn between admitting to the Virginia Andrews phase or deleting it. I’ve decided that in the spirit of how I intend to move forward with bibliotherapy, I will leave it in. I’m yet to analyse

Reviews for Reading the Seasons

[fliss88_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On the cover it says “Books holding life and friendship together.” what a perfect description for this chatty book. A year of correspondence between two women who became penfriends through their shared occupation as Bibliotherapists - a totally unknown field of work for me. ‘Bibliotherapy: a broad term for the ancient practice of reading for therapeutic effect.’ Germaine and Sonya have such an easy rapport and their letters are full of delight about the books they’ve read and now recommend for their clients and each other. They share their personal history and family news as friends do when getting to know one another. Poetry is mentioned often and at such appropriate times. Quotes tumble from them both with such enthusiasm! I wish I had the memory to quote randomly from books I’ve enjoyed. Oh how I wish! It makes such a difference when waxing lyrical to someone about a good read. I was delighted to find so many books mentioned that I have already read or have on my To Read List. I felt quite connected, one of the girls! The topics are eclectic and interesting and I’ve taken note of many new titles. In closing one letter Sonya asks Germaine “How do you ritualise the end of a book?” I sat and pondered that question.... “It depends on the book!” was my off the cuff answer.