Sarah
SOUND: MELODIC PIANO MUSIC BEGINS AND REMAINS IN THE BACKGROUND
SARAH There is a futility to redacting everything I have ever read into one representative title. It’s almost laughable, the breadth and depth of things I have read. But, invariably, once someone finds out I’m an editor I get the question. “What’s your favorite book?” Either that or “Will you look at my manuscript?” I’m not sure which is worse. So, in an attempt to answer the unanswerable or at least to make fun of it, I’ve picked out some of the books that have changed my life. This Is Not My Favorite Book. My birthday is March 2nd, which just so happens to be the birthday of one Theodore Geisel, more commonly known as Dr. Suess. This means that my birthday is Read Across America day and through middle school, I got to come to school on my birthday and read all day. It’s really rather telling that I decided to be born on a day that celebrates books.
LORAX I speak for the trees. Let them grow. Let them grow!
SOUND: CLIP FROM 1972 THE LORAX MOVIE – CHAINSAW NOISE BEGINS AT END OF THE CLIP AND THEN STOPS
SARAH The Lorax is a book that a lot of kids get read to them when they are little, and it’s a funny story about trees with a moral that is vaguely about greed and the environment. I cared about as much as any other one-year-old when it was first read to me, but I kept coming back to it. I kept coming back to the word “unless.” Because “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not!”
SOUND: CLIP FROM THE MANY ADVENTURES OF WINNIE THE POOH
WINNIE THE POOH (SINGING) I’m just a little black rain cloud hovering under the honey tree.
SARAH The movie Christopher Robin just came out, and I went to see it in theatres. Has everyone seen it at this point? I don’t want to spoil anything. But boy did I cry, and I’m not a crying person. However, I have a special connection to Winnie the Pooh. I didn’t watch TV as a child, but I had a lot of books. And I had all the original A.A. Milne books as well as the later Disney Winnie the Pooh picture books. My teddy bear was named after the poem from When We Were Very Young- Mr. Edward Bear. Better known as Pooh. To say that my parents did this on purpose, allowed me to have a childhood like Christopher Robin, so many adventures with my pooh bear, is probably giving them too much credit, but I associate those books with my childhood more than anything else. And while I’ve grown up, I’ve kept a lot of those lessons and quotes and thoughts close to me throughout my life. Sometimes the smallest things take the most room in your heart. Eragon was the first book that truly showed me the magic of reading. I was eight and just on the verge of that time of your life when you start questioning things like Santa Claus and dragons and God. I read Eragon in one day. The book is 544 pages and I read it in one day. And I was totally enthralled- I was in Alagesia and I was on a great adventure and nothing could have removed me. That was one of the first books that I had read that was entirely about a fantastical world, and I was in that world completely. The hardship was real, the dragons were real, and I couldn’t have told you my own name. That world had come to life for me, and within that world, anything could happen. Dragons could exist. I didn’t know books could do that. Because of Eragon, I’ve always been able to hold on to my belief in dragons, at least between the pages of a book. And to this day, I’m still a sucker for a book with a dragon on the cover.
SOUND: CLIP FROM THE 2006 SKY1 ’THE HOGFATHER’ MOVIE
SUSAN You’re saying that humans need fantasies to make life bearable.
DEATH No. Humans need fantasy to be human.
SARAH I first read The Hogfather when I was twelve, which is hilarious to me now because I must have been the only seventh grader using “Anthropomorphic Personifications” in conversation and trying to figure out if enough belief could actually make someone exist. I read the book every year at Christmas and every year it reveals something different, always in Terry Pratchett’s wonderful, witty tone. I didn’t get a lot of it when I was that young, but I think it was the best possible way for me to learn the truth about our holiday figures. Because, due to that book, I never stopped thinking that Santa, as the spirit of Christmas, is something we can all believe in. And that Death was really quite docile and likes cats. I have my 9th and 10th grade English teacher to blame for my life-long love of David Sedaris. My teacher was the kind of man who would read Santaland Diaries aloud to a group of 14-year-olds, and I loved him for it. I was also hooked. The first book of Sedaris’s that I got was Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I had to hide behind my bed on account of the porn, strip poker, and openly gay men addressed within its pages. It is still my favorite of his books, although I will read absolutely anything that he writes. Even, it turns out, his journal.
NEAL SHUSTERMANN In the depth of his illness, he told me ’Sometimes it feels like I’m at the bottom of the ocean screaming at the top of my lungs and no one can hear me.’ And I knew what Challenger Deep was going to be about.
SARAH Challenger Deep and I have a terse relationship because I can never read it all at once and a lot of times I try to read it again, only to put it down for a month or two. Despite the way the book makes my heart race, Challenger Deep is still the most accurate and achingly beautiful portrayal of mental illness I have found. It shows the unromanticized truth about these illnesses while showing the parts of life that are still beautiful and worth hoping for. When I met Neal Shustermann this summer, I brought Challenger Deep and thanked him for writing such an important and beautiful book. He signed it “To Sarah- Read Deeply.” I have. And I will.
SOUND: MUSIC PLAYS FOR A MOMENT, FADING 16 SARAH (cont’d) This audio bio was made by Sarah French. The music is Periculum by Kai Engle, the clips are from the 1972 Lorax movie, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The Hogfather, and Neal Shustermann’s National Book Award acceptance speech.
SOUND: MUSIC FADES OUT.