I am not proud of it, but I will admit to having felt a twinge of envy when I read, over the holidays, of President Obama’s latest book purchases. How amazing would it be to have the president buy, and read, your novel?
I didn’t think about it continually or anything, and it’s not like there was, at one point — just to fabricate a completely hypothetical scenario out of thin air — an email in my drafts folder asking my publicist to send him a copy. Nor am I the kind of person to, say, check the White House website for regulations concerning how to send the president a package (“The President and the First Lady strongly encourage all Americans to consider sending contributions to their favorite charities in lieu of gifts to the First Family. … Additionally, items sent to the White House are often significantly delayed and can be irreparably harmed during the security screening process.”).
Around the time I learned of the president’s book shopping, I opened a card I had put off reading for a few weeks. The return address was a prison. It was from a cousin of mine, who was convicted of vehicular manslaughter. She sent the card to congratulate me on my novel’s publication. I’m looking forward to reading it, she wrote, as were several fellow inmates.
The card, along with another note, described the escape that books had provided her, from the very early days of her incarceration, when she found comfort in the Bible and “The Great Gatsby.” Lately her favorites include Dostoyevsky and Deepak Chopra. For the past year or so, she has been in a lower security unit, enrolled in a job training program and taking a college course. I hope you don’t feel sorry for me, she wrote. I really am thriving and learning so much.
My mother had sent her a copy of my book a couple of months ago, and when she was summoned to retrieve it, she wrote, there was a problem. Prison rules normally prohibit inmates from owning hardcover books (perhaps they can be used as makeshift weapons). When such books come in the mail, a corrections officer takes a box cutter to the front and back covers before releasing the denuded volume. In a detail that should bring tears to my book designer’s eyes, the head of my cousin’s job program couldn’t bear to let it be mutilated it and persuaded the officer to hand it over mostly intact.
My cousin committed her crime soon after my father died. He was a medical school professor, and much of his research focused on adolescents and their often remarkable capacity for resilience. But his own end, when it came, was unexpected and brutal. He was undergoing punishing treatment for esophageal cancer, yet his prognosis was promising. The parade of oncologists and specialists all said the same thing: this is serious but beatable. They quoted odds and probabilities. He was treated at the same Boston hospital where Senator Ted Kennedy was a patient, and he took great comfort and pride in this fact.
After he died, once we heard of my cousin’s accident and that she was going to jail, I remember thinking, “Thank God my father is not alive for this.” They were never that close, though I vividly remember his sense of helplessness and fear whenever news reached us of her increasingly extreme scrapes through her teenage years. He would not have even begun to understand how to absorb what had happened. His was not a world in which derailments like this were supposed to occur.
It was a fuzzy time. Sudden loss does that, warps the hours and days, makes them too fast or too slow, nothing in between. Friends and relatives gathered at our home, swooping in and out, helping and not. It wasn’t their fault — some things are beyond our reach. They brought food and toddlers and other distractions. It was dark outside when we learned about my cousin. We were on the couch, three, maybe four, of us. That couch was too long for the living room, I had always thought. It looked icy unless there were nearly too many people on it. Not one of us knew what to say. There was so much coursing through that room. Tendrils of loss, the echoes of bad decisions, gestures made and not. Only later did I begin to understand its weight: what we can do for others, and what we can’t.
It’s impossible to predict the trajectory of a book, my editor warned me when he acquired my novel. He was talking about things like film options, sad remainder stacks, the fickle palates of critics and readers. Yet it wended its way to an anonymous American prison cell, where it is one of the few possessions belonging to an inmate who is piecing a jagged life together — someone I proudly claim as kin.
Novelists dream up all sorts of things, from the mundane to the magical, the dreary to the divine. I never pictured this, and that is what makes it all the more humbling.
Ethan Hauser, a former editor at The New York Times, is the author of the novel “The Measures Between Us.”
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