Susan Orlean: Libraries Preserve the Stories That Make Up a Culture

In this episode of A Phone Call from Paul, Paul Holdengraber talks to American journalist and author Susan Orlean. The two discuss the smell of books (also known as, bibliosmia), Fahrenheit 451, and her forthcoming book, The Library Book.

Paul Holdengraber: I feel as though your forthcoming book, The Library Book, is not only a celebration, an elegy, an homage to your love of libraries and one library in particular (and we’ll get to that); but it’s also in a sense a book—I feel, perhaps I am wrong—that is written for your mother.

Susan Orlean: Absolutely, very much so. And I didn’t expect that. I didn’t set out with that in mind at all. It came as a surprise to me that the more I wrote the book the more she emerged, because I associated those trips to the library so strongly with her. Just coincidentally, she used to talk about how much she would’ve loved being a librarian. It just was the fascination with how attached she was to libraries.

But there was also this other strange, and very painful process that was unfolding while I was writing the book. Libraries to me are about permanence and memory and preserving forever the stories that make up a culture. It was during this time when my mom began flipping into dementia. By the time I was approaching the end of the book, she certainly didn’t outwardly recognize me.

People are such faulty vessels of memory and stories; and books are so reliable and sturdy, and libraries preserve books and hold them forever. It really was the trope of watching my mom losing her memories when I was writing about preserving memories. It was something I had never expected.

My mom actually passed away before I finished the book, which made my recollection of our memories of us going to the library together that much more poignant for me. And it also felt very urgent, because I just really wanted to remember that time. It really was one of the sweetest memories of being young and taking that trip to the library. It just felt like everything was perfect. One of the reasons, which I realize now that I have a kid, is that unlike taking him to a store where he wanted this and he wanted that and I said “no, you can only have one” and “that one’s too expensive.” It’s a bit fraught. Going to the library is like falling into a gigantic treasure box. You can have anything and everything. For a kid it’s just unimaginable. Yes, you can have everything. Take whatever you want. We can have it. I loved it.

PH: You can have it and in a way it doesn’t have the drudgery of possession.

SO: This is one of the reasons I feel incredibly optimistic about libraries. We went through a period as a culture of being madly inquisitive, and I think we are leaving that period. I definitely see, especially in younger people, this real reconsideration of why you have to own everything. They are big sharers, which is really what the library is all about.

After I moved 20 times with my huge number of books that I would box up and haul off to my next apartment, I thought about how I felt when I stopped buying record albums. It probably cut the drudgery, as you say, of moving by 50 percent, just because that was probably the bulk of my possession: record albums and books. I mean, I love owning books.

I have started taking books out of the library again because I remembered very freshly how my parents felt: “sure if there’s a book that’s really important for you to own, you should own it. But if you just want to read it, well that’s what the library is for.” And you go and you borrow it and you read it, and that’s great. Then you have the purpose of the book’s existence, which is for you to read it. They were the original millennials, my parents, by being very into sharing and not feeling like they needed to own books. They didn’t own lots of books, but they liked reading lots of books.

PH: You know just about the last conversation I had on A Phone Call from Paul was with Alberto Manguel, who wrote a beautiful book which you must read—and you mustn’t necessarily own—called The Library at Night.

Now he’s written a book that’s just come out called Packing My Library. It’s a take, in a  way, on the fabulous essay by Walter Benjamin called “Unpacking My Library”—which of course is a gesture we all know. The books when packed up and when unpacked also become—you know there’s a Latin word for possession which is impedimente.

SO: Oh my god.

PH: Isn’t that good? What does that inspire?

SO: Well the idea that they are obstacles, which is interesting because I’m sure the word object and obstacle have some root in common.

PH: And if it doesn’t, it should.

SO: At the same time, I hear the p-e-d, and assume for some reason it’s about pedestal, something permanent. I’m flailing, but I’m a great lover of word roots and what inspired them to make a word. Impedimente. That’s amazing.

PH: Isn’t it? And we become possessed by our possessions, of course.

What struck me in the very moving moment we had when you were speaking about your mother, is that as she was less and less present, writing this book—it seems from what you have written—provided you with a certain form of sustenance. Just being able to continue. Just being able to continue to write it and to finish it, even as your mother was less and less present.

SO: I’m sure that it influenced my wish to keep reviewing those memories of her in the library and at the same time seeing her memories sliding and feeling a bit of urgency, on my part, to persist and to capture my feelings about the library and to finish the book and to see it through. They ended up being so intertwined. In a deeply moving way for me, but also in a sustaining a way, a feeling that I was doing something that was a memorial.

PH: And truly, deeply meaningful. You know there’s a line by a Malian writer and ethnologist Amadou Bâ, you may know it: “When an old man”—and I’m sure we could also say an old woman—“When an old man dies, a library disappears with him.”

SO: To me it’s very natural that a person contains volumes of stories—the way a library does—and knowledge and experience. At the same time, the inverse is that books, to me, seem animated in a way that most inanimate objects are not. I think that’s why it’s nearly impossible to throw out a book, no matter how little you’re interested in it.