Shadow Work

February 1, 2025
Reflections on a life of reading. A writer, English professor, and single parent to two young sons, Anderson offers a gentle meditation on loneliness and connection, with books central to her thinking. Her aim, she reveals, is "to weave together my own often contradictory thoughts on labor, literature, and companionship and to explore how books had taught me about solitude and also brought me closer to the people I most love." She intends, as well, to reconcile the contradictions inherent in being a writer and a mother, both involving "so much work and passion." Confessing that she's "someone who believes that the answers to life's mysteries are to be found in books," Anderson reflects on what she has learned from a wide array of authors, some of whom wrote for children--Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, James M. Barrie, and her beloved Laura Ingalls Wilder--and many others for adults, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Zadie Smith, John Milton to Toni Morrison. Anderson juxtaposes her own experiences--as a graduate student, competitive runner, mother, teacher--with the books that afforded her insights. "Novels," she notes, "have long been celebrated as a literary form that offers readers unique access to that illusory and intoxicating kind of 'knowing' not otherwise possible in real life." That access, though, is not particular to novels: Samuel Beckett'sWaiting for Godot, for example, makes Anderson uncomfortably aware of the sameness of her days, focused as they are on child care. She feels she is "not living so much as waiting," and she yearns to move forward. Shakespeare's ghosts also incite a feeling of recognition. Ghosts and shadows intrigue her, she admits, "because I feel like them in this regard: not sure if I am really there." In books, she has traveled paths to self-discovery. A graceful literary memoir.

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