Laurie Frankel’s sixth book, ENORMOUS WINGS, is an exuberant and timely novel about female agency and bodily autonomy, morality and mortality. It’s about motherhood and family, sex and love and friendship, and how those bedrocks --- even so late in the day --- can still change, and then change everything. Laurie and her sister inherited a love of reading from their parents and grandmothers. They, in turn, have passed down their passion for books to their own children. Reading has been and always will be a family affair for Laurie and her loved ones. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
My grandmothers were readers. Both had teeming bookshelves and indulgent reading habits. The way other granddaughters inherit two sets of china or silver, I have crumbling heirloom Shakespeare editions passed down on both sides. When I slept over at their houses, my grandmothers read to me before bed. They were inclined to do so, but they wouldn’t have had a choice. Going to bed without stories would have seemed to me like going to bed without brushing my teeth. (This is still the case; the only difference now is that I read while brushing my teeth and honestly can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t.)
My grandmothers raised readers. My father is as left-brained as they come, mathematically gifted, tech-inclined, and an engineer by trade. But he still reads more --- mostly fiction --- than anyone I know (and that is saying something). My mother taught me to read. No doubt lots of mothers are the ones to teach their kids to read, but my mom taught many people to read. At the beginning and end of her career, she taught elementary schoolers to read. In the middle, for more than three decades, she taught college students to read: immigrants, refugees and English-language learners of all kinds, students with dyslexia and learning disabilities, students who somehow had fallen through the cracks and made it all the way to community college without learning how to read. You can imagine how in love they all were with my mom.
My parents also raised readers. My sister and I never go anywhere without a book. We married readers and are raising readers. As more kids grow up scrolling and replacing words with videos and AI-ing their homework, the ability to read critically and joyfully, to engage with a text for 10 hours instead of 10 seconds, to consume books instead of posts is nothing short of a superpower.
I worry that I sound smugly self-impressed here when in fact I feel the opposite. The readers who raised me, the ones who surround me, the one inside feel like nothing that I or my forebears get credit for. None of us chose or caused these readerly proclivities and dispositions. Rather, our family inclination towards books is clearly hereditary (and this despite my daughter being adopted). My very literate grandmother would say that we all came by our bookishness honestly. Readers beget readers. I have been lucky to spend my life surrounded by books, but even better (well, at least equally as good), I have been lucky to spend my life surrounded by people who read.
