My Brother's Bookshelf

In this moment I realized that, growing up, I’d had two libraries. Mine, in my bedroom, filled with girly faves like The Secret Garden, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, all the Judy Blumes and Beverly Clearys — books that any tween girl would be proud to display.

And then there was my brother’s bookshelf.

All this time, my truly favorite books from childhood were in his room. And he was just going to give those books away. Books that I might want one day. Books I remember better than the books I had on my own bookshelf. Books that defined me as who I truly was more than the girl books I had on display. Books that I have purchased and stocked in my library in Los Angeles and consider proud must-owns now.

In sixth grade, I did what few nerdy girls did: I made it up into the popular crowd. I’m ashamed to say that I left my reader friends behind. In middle school, being popular was so much more important than being myself.

But I was suspect among the popular girls for being a little weird. I wore a man’s shirt and tie to school and talked to the boys who liked Star Wars and played Dungeons & Dragons. I realized that my bedroom, where my girlfriends came over and inspected my stuff, had to be just so or I would be turfed from the group. That meant a jewelry box, pretty hair things, girly dolls, and only the right kind of books.

There were books I could never let my popular friends see, but that didn’t stop me from reading them. I would buy those books and say to my brother, “Oh, you’ll totally like these books, and as a special treat, I’ll let you keep them in your room. You can keep them safe for me.”

“Whatever,” he’d say.

My brother’s bookshelf was red. To me it looked kind of racy — car-racy, like the Ferrari Formula Ones he liked. It was my other bookshelf. My secret one. The one that hid my true geek heart. The one that my friends never knew about.

Shelved lovingly in Laurent’s room were the Tripods trilogy, the Chronicles of Prydain, Lord Foul’s Bane, Illustrated Classics comics, Jules Vernes, Tintins, Asterixes, Marvel and DC comic books, Dungeons & Dragons modules, the Star Trek Starfleet Technical Manual, and Dr. Who adaptations.

I could be loud with those books. I could be the type of girl who traveled to outer space, who fought demons, who had superpowers. The adventure books were the books that I really thought were cool.

Now that I’m older, I remember that I always got along with my friends’ brothers, and my brother’s friends. I just liked their stuff better. When I went over to my friends’ houses for sleepovers, I inevitably found myself stealing away to check out their brothers’ rooms, which in my opinion always had the more interesting things in them.

When I got to be fifteen, I didn’t care anymore who thought what of the book I was reading. Or whether my bedroom looked girly or not. My weird tastes defined me as unique, I thought. I went to an arty school and came out as a geek, and no one batted an eye at what I read.

I still used my brother’s bookshelf, though, as my overflow shelf. It just made more sense to have all the sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, and comic books in one place.

Now, I write books that most consider to be aimed squarely at girls. I’m fine with that; I write for the kind of girl I was, a girl who likes a lot of different things — and has crushes on boys. Recently, with the release of my graphic novel The Plain Janes, I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from men in their thirties who picked up the book out of curiosity. They admit sheepishly that even though they are not teenage girls, they enjoyed the book as a story just for them.

This makes me hope that there is a teenage boy somewhere out there who is reading The Plain Janes and liking it as a book just for himself, ignoring completely the “girly” aspect of it.

Or, you know, using his sister’s bookshelf as an extension of his own.

From the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine