She Read to Us in theLate Afternoons: A Life in Novels

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Into the life of the author, a novel appears, as if by chance, and changes everything. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author comes across Willa Cather's novel, Lucy Gayheart, and is prepared by fiction for an actual death by drowning of someone near her. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, she assigns Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism, and visits an old slave port where she is made aware of her own benighted American innocence. In Nigeria, too, she is given A Portrait of a Lady and deeply ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer's cautionary fate, remembers her adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. Afterward, spending a year in northern France, she puts Madame Bovary resolutely aside to discover in Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest a detailed guide to the town where she is living, the poverty and suffering hidden within its walls. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author's friendship with the writer Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust's masterwork, an undertaking that requires six years to complete. Faced with Diana's approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading, after all, may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.

Reviews

"In this multi-faceted gem of a book, Kathleen Hill, a great reader, pays tribute to the masterworks of literature which have inspired her, and uses her prodigeous memory and her lucid prose style to celebrate love and compassion as the most noble and enduring of human qualities."
"We've always believed that books were like a soundtrack to our lives and that our day-to-day lives stood in the foreground. But this stunning book tells different and surprising tale: it is our lives that slip into the background, and booksthose fabulous books that alter who we are when we know how to read them or when we're lucky to have them read to uscan become the real face of our lives."

Author Bio

Kathleen Hill teaches in the M.F.A. program at Sarah Lawrence College. Her first novel Still Waters in Niger was named a notable book by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, and was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award. The French translation, Eaux Tranquilles, was short-listed for the Prix Femina tranger. Her second novel Who Occupies This House was selected as an Editors Choice by the New York Times. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XXV, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories.