The Shame of Not Reading
When my mother retired, she became a professional reader. Truly. After a lifetime of working to improve the U.S. education system—first as a principal and then as the assistant superintendent of Evanston, just outside of Chicago—she finally had time to sit in the living room on the beige couch, her face lit by the glow of the lamp, and read.
She started a book club of two. They read not the usual book club fare but tomes like Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. They did so with the discernment of scholars, complete with marginalia and many, many, many Post-Its. Book club meetings lasted upward of three hours, the two of them going page by page.
At about the same time, I lost the ability to read.
Sure, there were the student essays and stories and poems for the graduate and undergraduate courses I taught. The occasional articles skimmed online. Drafts of the book I was writing.
But those are different modes of reading, not the kind I’d once loved. No longer could I lose myself in words. My mind raced or was too sodden to take anything in. I couldn’t focus. The words seemed to shift: sabo-ta-ge, mi-ne, a-re, ho-ur. The marks seemed random: commas strewn, apostrophes dangling, dashes dashed.
It’s hard to say what caused it. The usual suspects—social media, Netflix, the internet, etc.—weren’t to blame.
It probably had something to do with getting an M.F.A. in creative writing, where reading became a predatory act. We were expected to learn, learn, learn from certain anthologized and sanctioned writers and write just like them.
I also had an acute case of Ph.D. burnout. I’d spent six years in the stacks reading upward of fifteen hundred pages a week. (For those under thirty and perhaps unfamiliar, the stacks are those aisles of shelves, where, once upon a time, sat actual books made of actual paper in places called libraries.) Earning my doctorate in literature was so absorbing I missed most of the Obama administration. At one point, I went to the doctor because I was having double vision and discovered I had a condition called asthenopia (eye fatigue from over-reading).
And then there was my mental illness. (My mental illness, like it was something I owned.) After getting my Ph.D., the serious mental illness I’d lived with for twenty-five years worsened and with it so did my overall inability to read. I could no longer live independently, which was why I lived with my mother. With every heavyweight bout of depression and mania and anxiety and compulsivity and suicidality, books became less and less a part of my life.
And there, in the next room, was my mother—reading, reading, reading—that soft light cocooning her face.
It was easy and painful to let books go. Easy because during that decade, bookstores shuttered one by one so even in a city like Chicago, you could walk down the street and never happen upon a book in any shop window. Painful because reading can quiet the mind and still the nervous system as only petting an animal can.
I’ve always been a reader. Every time I heard someone say that in an interview, talking blithely about some book or other and themselves as “a reader,” my teeth clenched. Then jealousy pumped through my chest.
Cue: shame. I’m a writer. Writers read. Writers who don’t read aren’t really writers—or so my thinking went. The assumption is that if you don’t consume words, you shouldn’t produce them. Writers who don’t read aren’t “real” writers.
By that point, I thought of myself not as a reader or a writer or even a teacher but as a diagnosis. The psychiatrists and GPs and psychologists and emergency room doctors had finally won: I was a diagnosis and little else.
Then my mother stopped reading, too. No longer did she sit on the beige couch in the living room. She grew paler.
It took too long for me to realize that she was breaking down. My breakdowns were breaking her. She’d been on suicide watch for five years. Five years. That’s too much to ask of anyone.
I moved out. After a few months, she recovered, the color came back into her cheeks, and she returned to her beloved books stronger than ever.
For me, it wasn’t as straightforward.
Eventually, I figured out that I could read if I listened to the audio version with the book in front of me. I needed someone else to help me find the words, place them, and order them beside and between the correct punctuation marks to gather meaning. I needed to be read to the way my mother had once read to me.
We don’t think of reading as medicine, but as I read—actually read a book on paper—I could feel my humanity coming back to me.
Yes, I’d been listening to audiobooks, watching films, and seeing plays all this time, but my ability to empathize had atrophied. It’s different to process words— arcs and lines—and make them into images, allow them to exist in our minds, merge with our ideas, transform into people and places as familiar to us as our own families and homes. When reading, we can only let ideas play themselves out and characters do what they’re going to do, and watch our responses without interfering and maybe even learn something or just bear witness—at least for the moment. It’s the only time everything slows.
I did fully recover from serious mental illness. It took years and is a much longer story. (Yes, full recovery from what I was told was bipolar disorder—and had previously been diagnosed as chronic depression, OCD, ADHD, and generalized anxiety disorder—is possible.)
My ability to read returned but not my love of it. Not at first.
Then the love, the quiet and stillness, came but only with certain books, books I’d already read. Richard Yates, especially. I read all of his short stories (which I’d read several times before) again, feeling transported, like I was in that apartment courtyard in the West Village. I swam with John Cheever. Smoked with Raymond Carver. Seems I like dead white guys. Always have: Seems I have a thing for canceled writers too: Flannery O’Connor is the main one. I held Hulga’s artificial leg in the barn, feared the Misfit and wished the grandmother hadn’t lied and would just shut up. Short stories were my entryway back to books.
Another twist—I’ve since become a businesswoman—and a really good one. (Who knew I had it in me!)
Seems I have a gift for marketing and sales and can teach it to others. It brings me so much joy to put money in the hands of really, really talented and good people on Substack. Because why shouldn't everyone make six figures or more?
Reading has again fallen by the wayside. Audiobooks still dominate my life but I don’t sit down to read.
Luckily, on Substack, I’m surrounded by amazing critics, scholars, teachers, and guides encouraging us to keep reading part of our busy lives:
- ’s rich personal canon, where she helps us DIY a “meaningful, intellectually engaged, self-actualized life.”
- ’s bountiful Personal Canon Formation, which offers reading challenges of Austen, Tolkien, and more.
- ’s Footnotes and Tangents, where he takes subscribers on slow reads of historical fiction (e.g., War and Peace).
And (perhaps the most pertinent to my life right now)
’s beautiful A Reading Life, a newsletter “for book people who’ve lost their way.”
Substack hosts so many amazing book clubs and reading groups:
’s Read the Classics (Dashiell Hammet coming in December!), ’s The Audacious Book Club (the one prerequisite: fearless stories), Jeremy Anderberg’s (Crime and Punishment happening now), ’s Tolkien-palooza on , ’s Creative.Inspired.Happy’s book club (for writers who love reading).Simon Haisell has created a complete directory for us here.
Most of you know that I change my Substack every year (my version of Taylor Swift’s eras) and yes this is an Easter egg of what’s coming in 2025.
So stay tuned, share, and if you haven’t subscribed, now’s the time…
Thank you for this, Sarah. I feel I could have written much of what you describe. I used to be a voracious reader and absorbed several fiction books a week. I don’t know what happened or when exactly, but even though I’ve come back to being reader a kind, I still struggle with fiction. I used to say it was because there are so many beautiful real stories in the world, but I don’t think that’s it entirely.
Almost everything I read these days is non-fiction, but I still avoid long form stuff. Like you, I’ve attributed my lack of focus to a surfeit of Netflix and social media. Words swim in front of my eyes and, unless it’s something truly absorbing, my brain cannot stay in one place for long enough. It heads off on a tangent even while I’m scanning words that don’t make it into my brain. I rely heavily on audio books which I can “read” while engaged in something physical. But I feel a great sense of shame in admitting this. As though listening to a book is a piss-poor imitation of what a real reader (and a writer) would do.
Discovering so many good writers of short non fiction on Substack is bringing me slowly back into the reading habit. And the audio versions really help. Which is why I’m trying to get over my own anxieties and—on your advice—record my new posts for other people who struggle with reading for any reason.
Thank you for your honesty in this. It’s like admitting to some shameful secret—especially when you hear those same old “writers read” tropes repeated everywhere. Having you say this out loud gives me permission to admit it myself.
An Easter Egg, you say? Do I sense a book club or something similar in the works...? Lovely post and thank you for sharing my stack and the Book Group Directory. A big part of what I try to do at Footnotes and Tangents is encourage a broader sense of what it means to be a reader: eliminating the shame attached to not reading or not reading in "the correct" way, and letting everyone find their way, their pace. Reading is such a personal experience but it can also be a way of bringing people together.