35 Growing Up in a Book’s Margins

I first became foggily cognizant of my desire to study literature when I was handed a slim novel with a lovely cover in English class during my senior year of high school. The assigned book was Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and I was struck by the way it made my pulse race yet eased my teenage existential dread while I read its weird, lanky sentences. Something about the novel called to a deep, hidden part of me. It rendered life more bearable, more beautiful, while simultaneously articulating something deeply sad, lonely, and lovely about adult life that I desperately needed to know was universal rather than just my unique emotional defect. That literature could attempt to make visible such a secret, quiet part of life piqued my curiosity, called out to my desire to know more. At that time, at 18 years old, I did not know that studying literature, that reading it and writing criticism of it, was a thing you could do as a career. I knew, since I had an English teacher right in front of me who assigned novels to read for homework, that you could teach books as a job. It didn’t occur to me, though, that I could actually study literature for the rest of my life, that I could make it my profession. All I knew, as I read To the Lighthouse, is that the object in my hands made my heart flutter, made me want to know all I could of it and those like it.

Well before I was awestruck by Woolf’s novel, I was already a bookworm from a young age: I was the quirky, bookish child who would rather spend the long, heavy days of summer break sealed up in my room reading than go to the sports summer camp my mom enrolled me in (I cannot, for the life of me, tell you what she was thinking, as I am and always have been woefully un-sporty). On the contrary, my idea of a good time was lying on the carpeted floor of my tiny bedroom, fully drenched in the world of the book I was reading, inhaling the paper’s old or new smell each time I turned a page, relishing the way I was being literally — in my mind — transported into a new world. My heart would ache when I finished a book, feeling as though I had lost permanent access to whatever location the book had taken me. For a few days I would walk around heartsick, like someone who had been unexpectedly broken up with. Quickly, I would begin a new book or series, desperate to experience new places and people, seeking to alter my perspectives on life and reality.

It was perhaps my thirst for a book-heavy, strange, and adventurous education that led me to pass up the state university that was only four hours away from home. Instead, I enrolled in a — by all accounts — odd and experimental liberal arts college buried in the dense, damp rainforest on the Puget Sound, across the country entirely from where I grew up. I was drawn to the culture of a college where having exploratory discussions about books mattered more to people than almost anything else. No one made small talk about sporting events (much to my delight), but they were interested in knowing what you thought of reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest alongside Descartes’s philosophy and figuring out what it means to be human. To care for nothing but books and how they inform one’s understanding of life was par for the course there and I immersed myself in it, glad to spend my days close reading, pondering, writing, and talking about books with other people who didn’t fit into tidy categories.

During the first half of my senior year of college, I moved alone to Berlin, Germany — where I knew not a soul — with student-loan money to attend a language school, explore the bomb-scarred city, see every museum possible, eat all the world-cuisine street food I encountered, see operas from the cheap seats, and read in book shops. On a whim, I purchased a copy of Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and spent hours reading, annotating, and educating myself about how such a vibrant and alive city could have been the site of so much death. The book and I walked the city together as it told me, an American student of 23, of my small place in a long history punctuated by violence. What is, I scribbled in the margins, my role in this?

As I write this narrative, I am nine months away from defending my dissertation and completing my PhD in English literature and German studies. It is perhaps unsurprising that one of my dissertation chapters is actually on Woolf and To the Lighthouse is one of the texts I focus on. It feels eerie and wonderful that this particular novel has been my companion for so long. In fact, in my dissertation research I still use the same copy of the novel I was handed over a decade ago as I sat squished at my high school desk. When I open the battered and heavily worn book, I can see my first unsure annotations, my painfully obvious points, my naïve questions about the plot. The pages of the book are warped with crystalized salt water from beach trips, the tears I cried into it while reading its most stunning moments, spilt wine, and from being crammed into boxes for my various moves. What is true — I see now — is that I grew up in that novel: my annotations maturing with me, my understanding of myself, my education, and life itself slowly ripening in its margins. Whenever I wonder, anxiously, about where I will go next in life, I know at least that I have a record, an archive, of where I have already been.

About the author

name: Sovay M. Hansen

Sovay Muriel Hansen is Assistant Professor of Practice with the General Education program and the W.A. Franke Honors College at UA and is an affiliated faculty with the Department of German Studies. She earned a PhD in English and German Studies and her interdisciplinary research investigates the way material culture and female desire commingle in British and German modern novels. In addition to editing Wildcat Perspectives and Wildcat Reflections for the Office of General Education, Sovay teaches UNIV 101/301 and has also taught first-year English courses, for which she has won teaching awards. Sovay grew up near the Rillito River in Tucson, went to college in the mossy forest of the Pacific Northwest, and lived on the canal in Berlin, Germany for a time. Sovay enjoys truly terrible and quality period dramas alike, cooking overly complicated dishes, attending art events, hiking, and stressing over the small things.