Read How Reading Changed My Life for Free Online Page B

Catholic home, and at the homes of my relatives, I remember the works of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, whose radio show was enormously popular, or
The Day Christ Died
by Jim Bishop, a dramatized account of the road to Calvary. (For the more secular audience, there was also
The Day Lincoln Was Shot
by the same author.)
    These books were on the bookshelves of many of our homes when I was growing up. By contrast, the dirty books—for it was a simpler, more black-and-white time, when books were not objectionable or titillating, just dirty—were almost universally to be found between the box spring and the mattress of our parents’ beds. To read them—and read them we did—we had to make sure that we were alone in the house and that the bedroom door was latched, muchas our parents had to do when they were actually engaged in the acts described in the books, which were far less likely to be novels than so-called marriage manuals. (In the case of my own parents, there was a copy of
Tropic of Cancer
, which I think of rather proudly today, being the only evidence I ever saw that they were forward-thinking in matters of literary taste.)
    These were the books from which I learned about the mechanics of sex, but of course mechanics was not really what was wanted at all. I learned about sex, among other things, from another Catholic girl, Mary McCarthy, and the enormously popular and controversial roman à clef about her Vassar classmates entitled
The Group
. I have my original paperback copy, published in 1964, its cover softened with a smattering of daisies, and it still falls open, automatically, to the sections in which the reserved Dorothy loses her virginity and then goes to a clinic to buy a birth-control device. Both the description of female orgasm, and of the hot burning embarrassment that a clinic visit can provoke in a newly sexually active woman, remain quite vivid despite several decades and a sexual revolution. I don’t know how other young women learned to identify the sensations of climax, or how mortifying a first visit to a gynecologist can be. I know I learned from Mary McCarthy. Come tothink of it, she was my first introduction to lesbianism as well.
    But, looking back, I realize it was not so much the sex as the sedition in the book that I found seductive. Like
Tropic of Cancer
, which I did indeed filch from my parents’ bedroom, or
Portnoy’s Complaint
, or
Peyton Place
or
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, the events of
The Group
were matters that I was not supposed to know about, or even be capable of understanding. The attention of our elders focused on sexual activity, but perhaps other elements were even more corrosive of the conventions: disappointment, infidelity, duplicity, hypocrisy. In all of those books, too, there was a sense of forbidden female license that translated, at some subconscious level, into female freedom. I can remember my mother poring silently over a copy of
The Feminine Mystique
, the revolutionary book by Betty Friedan describing the worm at the core of the fruit of marriage and motherhood. But I was too young to have either husband or children; I found feminism, my eyes wide at the infinite variety of the unknown, in
The Group
, in Kay’s suicide, Lakey’s lesbianism, the sad settling that Dorothy makes of her life after her one sexual adventure. All seemed to shout, to belie those daisies on the cover by shouting, that the lives of intelligent women had to amount to more than this.
    Sedition has been the point of the printed word almost since its inception, certainly since Martin Luther nailed on that church door his list of ninety-five complaints against the established Catholic hierarchy. The printing press led to the Reformation, and to revolutions, political and sexual. Books made atheists of believers, and made believers of millions whose ancestors knew religious texts only as works of art, masterpieces hidden away in the monasteries.
    And the opposite was true. Ignorance was the