Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned From Reading Banned Books
By the time I read Roald Dahl’s Mathilda, a lot had happened in two years. My parents had divorced; my mom, older sister, and I moved to Atlanta, GA; mom had a mental breakdown; and my older sister ran away from home. I went from living in a small town with both of my parents, a doting older sister, and loving grandparents to living in a single-parent household with a mother who was fighting her demons, my sister with her dad a thousand miles away as she fought hers, and a father who I would now only see on summer vacations and holidays. I coped with those disruptions inwardly, as well as any 7-year-old can be expected to, and later that year, I picked up Mathilda.
I was already a bookish kid (obvi), but Mathilda gave me an experience that no other book had done before. It gave me a genuine human connection with its author. I felt as if Dahl was personally telling me, “I see you. I hear you, and you’re not alone.” That book threw me a lifeline at a time when I felt lonely and isolated. My family didn’t talk about the trauma we had just experienced, and it would be thirty years before I fully understood it.
With Mathilda, Dahl showed me another child who, while fictional, was bookish, didn’t fit in with her family, and was a little bit weird. Her courage gave me the courage to endure, overcome…
