I was adolescence incarnate. And like many adolescents full of adolescent feelings, I wanted to commemorate my angst and fury the way adolescents do: in a diary. I had brought a blank book with me to France, purchased at a local stationery store for its forbidding charcoal exterior and wide-open unlined pages. This diary, I’d decided from the get-go, would be different from all my previous diaries, each of which I’d pushed aside in dismay after a few months of erratic entries.
Those diaries were hellish. For the most part, I’d open them only when I’d sunk to a true low, and as a last and loathsome resort. I wrote when I found out that Katie had slept over Ingrid’s house after she’d said no to sleeping over mine. I wrote when Ingrid and Wendy played a prank by using the then new conference call function to simultaneously get me and a stranger on the phone together, each of us thinking the other had initiated the call, and then cackle inaudibly at our mutual confusion. I wrote when every single one of my silent, humiliating crushes in junior high went unnoticed or ignored, each awful in its own way—and, in the aggregate, devastating. I wrote when I was angry, I wrote when I was rejected, I wrote when I felt fat-thighed or uncoordinated or especially pimple-ridden.
On occasion, I’d pick up an old diary, hoping to see flashes of Anne Frank or at least a Judy Blume character, some flicker of talent or originality of thought. I found nothing of the sort. Instead, revisiting past entries became an exercise in regret, a resurrection of dormant upset and humiliation, all of it in flustered prose full of delusional self-promises and fleeting gusts of determination, ink swelling where I’d leaned heavily on the pen as I wrote: “I’m never calling Wendy again!” “Could it be possible he likes me, too, but is too proud to admit it?” “I didn’t want to go to that stupid beach party, anyway.”
Not surprisingly, these diaries did not make for a pleasant or rewarding reading experience. No way was I going to vomit my insecurities and insults into another one, not on my first trip abroad, not the summer before my senior year, not so close to my impending collegiate escape. No. This diary would be about something better than me, or rather about the better part of me, the imagined part, and yet the real part. This book would be about my books.
One morning, when nobody else was in the dormitory, after I finished the last pages of The Trial and put it on the shelf over my bed, I pulled down the new diary and a pen. Across the top of the first page, I wrote my name in black ink and, directly below, “Book Journal.” Then I flipped the page and began my Book of Books. Neatly across the top, I wrote in underlined columns: “Date,” “Author,” “Title.” And I marked down my first entry: “July/August 1988, Kafka, The Trial.” Later, I would add an asterisk next to Kafka’s name and the names of all the other books I read that summer. This symbol I gave to books that were fun reading, my books. Books for school, which dominated during that period of my life, would go unmarked; they were the default. (This designation later reversed, then disappeared altogether.)
I didn’t tell anyone else at AFS about my new diary; like my hangover and the rudimentary state of my French and The Trial under my covers, it was my secret. My book of books. My Bob.
Eventually, I made a few friends, the kind one now sees scroll by on Facebook, though none of them close enough to tell about Bob. As it happens, the closest friend I made in France wasn’t even there. Reading a letter over the shoulder of a fellow AFS student named Susie, I met someone for the first time purely through writing. He was sharp, opinionated, and very, very funny. He wrote far better than anyone I knew spoke, not just getting the words out but choosing them with consideration before committing them to the page.
“Who wrote this?” I asked Susie when I got to the end of the letter, which read as if it had been written as much for the sake of the writing as for the conveyance of information. The handwriting was exquisite, the kind girls with calligraphy kits fantasize about; writing was something to which he paid attention.
“My friend Josh,” Susie said.
“This is the best letter I’ve ever read. Can I have his address?”
And so I wrote Josh back. (“I read the letter you wrote to Susie, and I just have to say, I’ve never read such a…”) We began a correspondence that continued through the following school year, peaking at the moment we thought we might actually go to the same college and falling off the way high school friends do when he decided on another school instead. But throughout that summer and our senior year, he wrote to me from his suburb of Cincinnati and I wrote back from my suburb of New York.
Once in college, I forgot about Josh. But years later, back in New York, I was rifling through a copy of the Washington Monthly and saw his name on the masthead. I sent off a letter immediately. “I knew you were a good writer!” I exclaimed. We corresponded briefly and several years after that I found his name among the instructors teaching writing at the New School. I decided to surprise him by stopping by the first class to introduce myself.
“We meet at last!” I cried when he walked in. It had been nine years since our first letter exchange. Since then, we’ve e-mailed.
After the monthlong confinement in Mauriac, I was shipped out to my homestay with a commuter family in a nondescript suburb of Albi, birthplace of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who had hightailed it to Paris, and one hour north of Toulouse, home of the French airline industry. The father was an engineer; the mother held a nondescript part-time office job and was Italian by birth. At first, I felt ripped off anew, as if her national origin made my French homestay somehow inauthentic. Wasn’t I supposed to be learning about French culture? But she grew vegetables in the backyard and made a tomato tart that rivaled the best New York pizza. For the first time in my life, I ate tomatoes that weren’t pinkish simulacrums from Burger King, biting into them like apples. I had nothing in common with this family but I grew to appreciate them.
The twin five-year-old girls were still learning to pronounce their French r’s, and I liked listening as they gurgled “Encore! Encore!” when they wanted another helping at dinner. I realized for the first time that when concert audiences cheer for an encore, they are actually pleading, “More! More!” like small children. The twins beat me handily at French Scrabble, which is pronounced in French exactly how you think it would be pronounced. These losses stung, conveying to me in no uncertain terms: You know nothing of this language. I still had so much to learn.