Creating a Self and World Through Reading
Nicole Chung:
When I consume memoir, I love watching a writer bring everything they have learned and experienced to a point of discovery, surprise, or change. This is how we read, too: We aren’t robots, without independent thought or our own complicated histories, who encounter a piece of literature as empty and unquestioning vessels that download only what the writer tells us to. We read and react to the people and the stories they show us as individuals, based on everything we know and feel and have been through. In other words, because of who we are, we will take what we want—or need—from a given story. Each of us has our own relationship to it, and no one else gets to control what form that takes.