This weekend, I drove to New Hampshire for the funeral of an old friend. We’d known each other when our children were very young, and then she moved far away, and for the most part our communication had been through annual Christmas notes and infrequent Facebook posts for the past 15 years. Still, her death hit hard, and as the news traveled from text to text, another old friend and I agreed that we would both make the trip, she from Vermont and me from Connecticut.
I love a good road trip, but I am starting to feel my age when it comes to driving long distances alone. It being a summer Friday, the drive up took five and a half hours. My friend and I met at an AirBnB, the kind where you rent a room and the host shares the rest of the house with you—something I hadn’t done before, but our plans were made last-minute, and it turned out that although the historic stone cottage was damp, damp, damp, the bathroom and the sheets were clean and the host was friendly. That night before the funeral, I stayed up too late playing Sudoku on my phone, mostly to keep other thoughts at bay, and then slept hard.
The funeral was held at a church camp. The pine-paneled gathering space was lofty and bright, with large doors rolled open to the outside. The service was a moving celebration of our friend’s difficult and beautiful life. This being a church camp, people knew how to sing like they meant it, and my friend and I, who used to sing together 20 years ago, both felt ourselves lifted up and held aloft by those 200 voices and one joyful pianist. That’s what happens when people show up for each other. They hold each other up.
The drive home that afternoon was shorter timewise, but, being the second day in a row, much harder. I took a 20-minute nap in my van next to the dumpster behind a Cracker Barrel (which, if you’ve ever seen Stephen Colbert’s Meanwhile segment, may ring a bell). I ate lots of junk. I had too much time to think. I arrived home very, very tired.
My friend and I talked over dinner about the showing up, about why we—and people in general—don’t always do it. How many times have I—an extrovert, no less!—chosen to stay home because it was just easier, even when a five-and-a-half-hour drive wasn’t involved? It’s a story as old as time that a funeral has a way of bringing together people who have allowed their bonds to wither, pointing out in the starkest of ways that it’s about damned time to pay attention. My friend and I live just far enough apart that it’s work to get together. We have jobs. For a long time, we were raising kids (she still is). But we don’t even email or text. We mostly rely on those Christmas letters.
You may be wondering what any of this has to do with reading, although if you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know I always get there.
Those of us who are readers are at least as prone to this benign neglect of community as other people, because we tend to have pretty rich imaginative lives. We can look up from a good book hours after we began (if we’re lucky enough to have hours) and feel as if we’ve been away, somewhere else, with other people, even though we haven’t.
So, God invented book clubs. (Actually, I just asked the internet who invented book clubs, and it variously told me: women who were finally admitted to previously all-male institutions of higher learning in the 1960s; Harry Scherman, who founded the Book of the Month Club in the 1920s; and the 17th-century religious renegade Anne Hutchinson, who gathered women to discuss sermons together. Take your pick.)
Over the past decade during which I’ve visited and written about and to book clubs, one of the ongoing themes has been the question of how to keep a book club on track. So many book clubs “struggle” to talk about a book for more than, say, 20 minutes, after which they often turn to other topics. I’ve offered all kinds of advice on how to stick with a discussion, go deeper into the text, even how to set up your book club so people are more likely to read the book in the first place. But today, I want to honor the reason every book club really exists: it’s a community.
Book clubs provide a chance to be with other people to share the common experience of having read something together and the intellectual and social joys of both finding you see things the same way and learning to see things differently. But when book clubs wander off after 20 minutes, they’re serving a really important function, too. They’re building and shoring up a community.
Last month, The New York Times interviewed author Robert Putnam, who wrote the now classic book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. A 20th anniversary edition was published in 2020, and now Putnam and his work are the subject of a new documentary titled “Join or Die.” Putnam’s book argued that America was shifting from “a nation of joiners to a nation of loners” and that that shift was going to have dangerous consequences. The result, he argues convincingly, is the political and social polarization we’re experiencing today. “Loneliness,” he said to interviewer Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “It’s bad for your health, but it’s also bad for the health of the people around you.”
Show up for book club, even if it isn’t perfect. Show up for your friends, but show up once in awhile, too, at a place where you’ll meet new people. (Putnam refers to this as bonding and bridging.) Show up even when the drive is long and tiring. You don’t have to show up for every single thing. But showing up is never the wrong thing to do.
I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend, Kathy. This was a beautiful post.
I'm sorry for the loss of your friend, Kathy. This was a poignant post. I think about Bowling Alone a lot.