For 16 years [my mother] recommended the perfect books to people and shared her love of reading with others, spreading that joy the same way she blessed me with it.
Whenever my mother and I drove through our little downtown in Madison, Ct., we always stopped at our local bookstore, RJ Julia. It was a ritual for us, a bit of magic.
Each visit was special, but I can remember a particular instance so vividly: I step in the door in a Spice Girls T-shirt and cargo pants. At 10 years old, I’m young enough that girls’ clothes still had pockets. My goal is to empty those pockets of hard-saved allowance on what this store has to offer.
There is a buzz of excitement walking into a bookstore that all book lovers know so well: the delicious smell of paper and ink, coffee wafting from the café as people chat about their latest reads.
I make a beeline for the stairs to check out the children’s books section. It’s like stepping into a toy store, only better: in a toy store I wouldn’t be able to buy everything I wanted, but in my family, when it comes to books, there’s no self-control.
That’s because we’re a family of storytellers. Be it through books, movies, songs, jokes, or exaggerated anecdotes, storytelling is our first language. As soon as I realized I could make up my own worlds, I did—constantly. I’d build upon the stories I read and fill crinkled notebooks full of my own fantasies and walking daydreams. It made my own world make more sense.
Sometimes fiction felt more honest than reality—that one story, one scene, better at evoking everything stirring inside me. The stakes inside my 10-year-old brain were more perfectly explained by the epic battles and quests and magic than homework or chores.
Every night I’d fall asleep thinking about the chapter I’d just read and dreaming up new stories. When I finally realized in my early 30s that I was neurodivergent and was eventually diagnosed, a lot of this started to make sense. Stories always flowed through me. On one level, they entertained my overactive mind with fun adventures, and on another level, they spoke to the unnamed emotions within me and helped me understand myself and the world around me.
Like I said, magic.
On this one adventure to RJ Julia, I pick an American Girl book and a magenta notebook with the word Dream written in silver across the cover. I get a pen with a sparkly butterfly dancing on the end and start dreaming of the words I’m going to fill that notebook with. To be honest, I’ll probably only write on the first 10 pages, and then it will be relegated to the shelves of half-used journals, too beautiful to put words into. Instead I’ll stick to my scrappy spiral-bound notebooks and simple black pens. (This is the year I wrote my first book—which took three scrappy notebooks to complete—all the way to “The End.” It was a dystopian sci-fi and followed a group of children who move to the city and see colors for the first time.)
In this moment, though, this journal is everything. My mother looks at the notebook in my hand and smiles. She tips her head to the bookshelf beside the checkout and says, “One day it’s going to be your book on that shelf.”
I roll my eyes. She says that every time—my overly supportive mother, my biggest cheerleader. But I don’t let on that that little spark lives within me too—that little flash of hope that one day her words might come true.
We went home, my treasures in hand, and I never forgot what she had said.
My mother ended up working at RJ Julia when I went off to university. For 16 years she recommended the perfect books to people and shared her love of reading with others, spreading that joy the same way she blessed me with it. All these many years, many jobs, many countries later, and that passion has stayed with me. Life took so many twisty turns to get me here (have I told you about the monkeys in Guatemala?). But here I am, living halfway around the world, and RJ Julia is still there in Madison—but now with my books on its shelves.
It was my first big dream to be a published author, and I’m so grateful that my mother saw my books on that shelf before I could even imagine it for myself. And I realize now she had written her own story: one of her daughter finding success, and even as she helped all those customers connect with narratives that might shape their lives, so she did with me.
Magic.
A.K. Mulford is a bestselling author and former wildlife biologist who lives with her family in New Zealand.
