Raptured in Misery

For quite some weeks I had been thinking about a summer at the beginning of the nineties, when I worked my way through a very tall reading pile that had been growing by my bedside table while I was at school. I don’t remember all of the books which I read at that time, but I do recall two: The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Postman. I worked through these in three days or so, sitting on the sofa and unable to enagage with life as it was taking place around me. That’s because I was engaged with the life of my characters. Nothing was more important than to know what would happen next and how they would react to it.

I remember fondly my mum calling from the kitchen, and my impatience bursting right across the corridor and back at her: WHATEVER MUM I AM BUSY! I wasn’t just busy. I was annoyed. Didn’t she get it? I was reading. I know that over the years I’ve subcosciously tried to re-capture that summer of reading love when my own life did not exist, if only as a subservient corollary to the characters’ own endeavours.

When three weeks ago I started Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, I was equally shocked and delighted to find a specific description of my state of mind from many years before:

I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture–with a book. I loved this book, I loved every second of it. [...] I was in anguish over the fate of its characters. I felt alive, and engaged, and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I’ve loved. I composed a dozen imaginary letters to the author, letters I’ll never write, much less send. [...] the state of rapture I experience when I read a wonderful book is one of the main reasons I read, but it doesn’t happen every time or even every other time, and when it does happen, I’m truly beside myself.

[...] Days pass as I savor every word. Each minute I spend away from the book pretending to be interested in everyday life is a misery. [...] Every so often I look up from the book and see a roomful of people waiting for me to make a decision about whether the music is too soft or the thunder is too loud, and I can’t believe they don’t understand that what I’m doing is Much More Important. I’m reading the most wonderful book.

I am grinning as I type these words for you my dear reader because she is so right when she says that one cannot decide to get raptured, it just happens. When I trail bookshops and libraries and look at fiction, deep down I always hope, nay pray, that this book right here will be my next life-changing book. Curiously, this does not affect me insofar as non-fiction is concerned. You know that I love to write it and to read it but as my eyes scurry across the lines, I’m never raptured, not even when I read books that were obviously written with me in mind.

Then something happened last week, when I found myself in Waterstone’s during one such expedition, hoping that the books would beam a subliminal message as I was looking at their spines, considering the shade of the pages and the faint smell of the inks. I came across a flipback, specifically Stephen King’s Misery.

Now there’s something I must tell you about Stephen King and me: I can't stand him. Over the years I attempted many of his offerings, most nostably Four Past Midnight and It, and albeit gritting my teeth hard, I could never make it past a third of the pages, if that. And I’m not one who’s put off by a tome, you know? In fact, I like a good, old-fashioned tome, better if hard-backed also. No, my problem really did reside with the author himself who, in my mind at least, was The Most Boring Story-Teller Ever.

Then I saw Misery re-published as a dinky little package, a tiny book, no bigger than a pocket diary (albeit thicker, at 717 pages), with a beautiful, snowed-under typewriter on the cover. I knew I was already half-lost because, even though I’m not one who judges a book by its cover, I certainly choose it on its basis exactly. It still didn’t seem right though because, hey, I don’t want to spent ten quid on the most boring writer ever.

So I went home. Then I returned the day after. Then I went home again. Then I returned the day after that. Then I let a couple of days expire and went back again, each and every time leafing through the book and considering that they must have used paper very much similar to the one used by Smythson of Bond Street, an extra-thin compound that barely weighs anything, even when it clocks up 1,000 pages. Eventually, I bought it. The day after I had finished it.

I am not saying that my other experiences of Stephen King were somewhat misguided: you wouldn’t catch me giving It another try (life’s too short for many things, one of them reading books you’ve already deemed shit), but with Misery he accomplished something else: he put me in a state of rapture so entirely all encompassing that I barely ate or thought of anything or anyone else as I was reading of Paul’s experiences while being looked after by Annie Wilkes.

As I finished the chapter in which he describes his first foray outside of the room while Annie is in town, my head was buzzing and my heart was pulsating in my mouth. I was so worried, so tense, so barren-eyed, so gasping for air myself that when the phone rang I had to put the caller to voicemail, for I would have been unable to articulate a sentence without alarming him. The experience was so sublime that I am still reeling from it, the embers of that sacred fire flickering within me with such underlying intensity that I want to do it all again. Immediately.

Alas, one cannot know which book will have this inebriating effect, no more than one can know which bag will become our perfect bag or which guy will make the perfect husband. Still, I think that Misery (if you can stomach the violence in places and, really, it isn’t any way near as bad as American Psycho by any stretch of anyone’s imagination) makes for compelling reading for any writer. It was written many years before the rather wonderful On Writing, yet already offers plentiful insights into the writing process channeled through Paul’s experience. Consider this for example:

He remembered sitting down.

As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light.

As always, the glum knowledge that he would not write as well as he wanted to write.

As always, the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a blank wall.

As always, the marvellous joyful nervy feeling of a journey begun.

And this:

Because writers remember everything Paul. Especially the hurts. Strip a writer to the buff, point to the scars, and he’ll tell you the story of each small one. From the big ones you get the novels, not amnesia. A little talent is a nice thing to have if you want to be a writer, but the only real requirement is that ability to remember the story of every scar.

Art consists of the persistence of memory.

This is therefore a book that isn’t simply likely to put you in a state of trance in which only Paul’s predicament matters, but one that will speak subliminally to you as a creative person. And for that, I am so grateful I finally caved in. And for that I should add that, dear Stephen King, I apologise for thinking you boring and crap and not at all worth reading.