Seven or Seventeen and Beyond, What We Really Love Is Reading

My daughter is campaigning to read an advance copy of my book. Her arguements are quite good. She does well with her chapter books in school, so how hard can an adult book be, really? She is an avid reader; a bit of a writer herself. And the author's daughter, afterall.

My reasons for not allowing her to read the book better. She is seven-years-old. The words of movie ratings come to mind: adult content, mature situations, adult language. I realize that A VACATION ON THE ISLAND OF EX-BOYFRIENDS includes four sexual acts in the first five pages. Not that I'm suddenly counting.

As a parent one is always anticipating, but I hadn't properly anticipated this moment.

It is beautiful for me to see this book finally out in the world yet odd that the most important person in my life will not read it. Not immediately, anyway. Perhaps when she is seventeen, I think, or twenty-seven.

I explain to her that she must wait until she is older to read the entire book and I am trusting her to wait.

I am not the sort of mom who locks cabinets or puts books on high shelves. At a later time, if she truly wants to she will find a way to read it, of course. She is beautifully mischievous at times and utterly determined.

I wrote most of the stories in EX-BOYFRIENDS years before I became a mother. The manuscript sat in my drawer for years after that. And now the advance reading copies ....

I decide to celebrate their arrival with my daughter by reading only my table of contents aloud together. She finds one story title, "Ten Reasons Not to Sleep with a Poet," quite hilarious. In fact, she sets off to draw a cartoon in which I say this to the barista at our local Starbucks. "You know, there are ten very good reasons ..." So this is our moment and an amusing one--I hadn't expected illustrations.

I remember my how my friend Heidi and I used to sneak teen and adult books into her room and read them under her covers during sleepovers. I think we were eleven. We read FOREVER by Judy Blume that way. Later we read Jackie Collins novels. Later still we discovered that we could change out book jackets with school-ish books and read whatever we wanted all the time. At first we loved getting away with this; we loved the shock of the so-called naughty things we found on those pages. But really what we loved was reading.

If reading could always be that way; could stay that way for girls .... Not a secret necessarily, or even a risk, but a connection--an adventure we will strive to take.

Tags: Blume, Collins, Jackie, Judy, daughters, ex-boyfriends, reading