Internationally bestselling author Anna Snoekstra is back with her latest novel, THE ONES WE LOVE, which is now available. This gripping domestic thriller follows the newly transplanted Jansen family, who moved from Australia to Los Angeles for a fresh start. When their reality soon turns into a living nightmare, they each must ask themselves how far they will go to protect the ones they love. Anna’s mother certainly knows a thing or two about protecting her daughter. Read on as Anna explains how a trip to the library when she was seven years old became one of the most important days of her life.
Sometimes the most important days are quiet ones. I was seven years old, and I didn’t want to go to school. This wasn’t uncommon. What was unusual was that my mother took a day off from her job as a government speechwriter and let me stay home. She told me later that she knew how unhappy I was and had a plan on how to help.
I was a very shy kid --- partly naturally, but mostly for reasons more physical. I had gone through years of painful ear infections as a toddler, which muffled my hearing. I let my sister speak for me, and I sunk inside myself, to the characters and languages I created in my mind. Once I began to hear clearly, it was a huge adjustment. The world was too loud.
Eventually I did start to talk, but my words were hard for anyone but my family to understand, which prompted more embarrassed silence. The delay in language translated to reading and writing. I reached the end of my first and then second year of primary school with an increasingly heavy sense of humiliation. I was the only one in my class who couldn’t read.
That day when I was allowed to stay home from school even though I wasn’t sick, my mother took me to the library. It was a place I adored, regardless of my problems with reading. I loved the towering Leucaena tree out the front, which dropped long, brown pea pods that I imagined were monkey’s tails. I loved the sudden, magical hush as the automatic doors opened. I loved the huge kids’ section full of squashy bean bag chairs.
Usually, I’d have to dodge loud kids, including my sister. But that day I had the children's section to myself, and my mother had a plan. She realised that the glossy letters on my classroom wall and phonetic sounding-out of words wasn’t helping me and that my quietness meant that I was getting overlooked in the crowded classroom. Instead, she let me go at my own pace to pick a book with a story I really wanted to know the end of. I sorted through books very slowly until I’d found one that interested me most. It was a chapter book about a girl who found an advertisement selling a dragon in the local paper. Before this, I couldn’t even read picture books. I felt such extreme pressure that even the prospect felt overwhelming. But that day, with my mother’s quiet patience, the pressure dropped away. Nestled in that bean bag with her soft warmth, I began to read. I took the book home with me; by the evening, I’d finished it on my own.
After that day, reading and writing became my favourite things. This was shocking to my teachers, but not as shocking as what I was writing. I would create long stories set on an 18th-century island, then I’d dip the pages in coffee to brown them and burn the edges. The stories themselves bordered on the macabre, which was not what people expected from a sweet, chubby, curly-haired girl who still spoke in almost a whisper. I still write scary stories today, but my friends and family have gotten used to it.
I have a daughter myself now. She’s nothing like the girl I used to be. She is loud and boisterous, and is the spitting image of my mother-in-law. But she’s in love with books. It’s miraculous. When she was 18 months old, I’d watch her on her baby monitor as she’d spend silent hours in bed in the morning, leafing through the pages of picture books as if she could read them. She is now almost four, and I sneak into her room each night to remove the book open on her chest as she sleeps.
But my favourite thing is to watch my mother reading to my daughter. I love to watch her curl up into the patient warm space my mother creates, just like I did on the day I learned to read.
