Listen to the audio version of this blog on SoundCloud.
Why does any fool write a book? It can’t happen without the insistent fantasy that someone somewhere will read it, some day. Secretly, many writers keep writing under the useful delusion that, with a little luck, many people all over the world will read this book, and forever. Even modest writers hope their books will outlive them, a path to one kind of immortality. How else could books get written?
But the life of a book is harder to predict than the life of its writer, and almost always shorter. Books drop into our culture like bottles in the ocean. Who knows who will find it, read it, or be moved by it? The splash on the publication date may be orchestrated, but the magic of a book’s life often comes through the ripples, many of which go unseen over uncountable times to places the writer never imagined.
Last month, while traveling in Kenya, I got a voicemail message from Andy Benoit, a friend I shared an apartment with during medical school at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1970’s. I haven’t heard from Andy in over a decade, but he called me because he’d just found in a second hand bookstore in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, a book my brother John wrote called The Spirit of The English Language, published in 2008 by Lindisfarne Books. Andy said that finding the book brought back “fond memories” of a brief conversation they had in 1974 on a ferry to Hurricane Island, where they were attending an Outward Bound alumni event. Then he said, “I always felt that he might have said something on my behalf that may have given my application [to UC College of Medicine] a second look…”
Here’s a book published in 2008 in New York plucking Andy’s web in 2024 in Boothbay Harbor to make a call of gratitude to me in Kenya for an imagined favor by my brother who now lives in Austin, Texas, a favor that may have led to Andy’s life-shaping event in Cincinnati in 1974. That’s the spirit of the language at work before Andy even read the book!
Two weeks ago I had a conversation with a colleague at work who has for the past ten years has often reminded me in both her looks and a few speech gestures of a woman I was in love with for a year in college, Dixie Brown. As I was biking home that day, I had the startling realization that, though I have not seen or heard from Dixie Brown since 1976, I could “find her” on the internet. Daring to find her that way after all these years may be loosely or tightly associated with anticipating my 50th college reunion next month.
What I found was Regicide in the Family: Finding John Dixwell, by Sarah Dixwell Brown, published by Levellers Press in 2022. I spent the next couple of hours reading the blogs she posted that year. I ordered the book that day and have spent the past week reading her account of how finding her seven greats grandfather John Dixwell has revealed to her new ways of understanding her roots and our ancestors’ high-risk efforts to give birth to democracy.
Her website picture, her blogs, and her book bring back the same smile and endearing tilt of the head, now with white hair, the same plucky voice, quick wit, and curiosity that I fell in love with before I learned how to take care of a love. Her book in a bottle has washed up on my shore, bringing me a clarity about my college years I’m sure she never imagined when writing her book.
This week on April 18 my book Toxic Stress is scheduled to have its splash, orchestrated by Cambridge University Press. To generate some advance ripples, the PR and Marketing team suggested I post some articles about stress in Psychology Today and The Conversation. This experience has taught me that there are ripples, and there are digital ripples. My one article in the online magazine The Conversation from March 19th has now generated over 60,000 “reads.” Who knows what a digital read means. A glance, a minute, maybe two? A third of the readers are in Brazil (reading a Portuguese translation!) and in India. Will the e-book and audiobook versions of Toxic Stress ripple as far? Will the softback survive long enough to be found on a secondhand bookstore shelf a generation from now?
I hope this means good news for my book, but who knows? Books, like children, go their own ways. Some day someone will put tracers on these books and follow them like birds as they migrate to their readers in unimagined places.