Morningstar: Growing Up with Books

As a child, novelist Hood (The Book That Matters Most) had an insatiable appetite for reading, a preoccupation disdained by her large, no-nonsense Italian family in 1960s Rhode Island. For Hood, as she lovingly recounts in this ode to the power of words, books were an escape from the dead-end mill town, West Warwick, where she lived. Books guided Hood through her outsider youth and helped her to define the “yearning” for something bigger that she knew wouldn’t be found on West Warwick’s small, ordinary streets. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the first book to transport Hood away from West Warwick; the next was Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar. Marjorie Morningstar brought Hood enormous pleasure because of its heft but also because Hood thought it was as if Wouk were writing about her family’s immigrant story. Morningstar (and later Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar) captured what Hood was feeling but could not express or share: dissatisfaction, anxiety, sexual curiosity, and the aspiration to write for a living. In adulthood, books such as John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath taught Hood how to be a writer and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago ignited her desire to travel. Hood has beautifully crafted a very convincing case for discovering literature and getting lost in the pages. (Aug.)