Tolstoy and the Purple Chair, by Nina Sankovitch

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September 9, 2021 by ethelfritha

I supposed it shouldn’t be too surprising that a sizable subgenre of memoir is the “reading life memoir.” This sort of memoir can encompass one’s whole life, or, as seems to be more common, a relatively short epoch in the author’s life. Typically, these sorts of books are not linear, but are instead more like a series of linked essays exploring different emotions, people, or events, with each chapter or section taking a particular book as its unifying theme.

In this case, Sankovitch chronicles one extraordinary year of her life in which she committed to reading one entire book per day. Three years before, her older sister died of cancer at the age of forty-seven. She spent the intervening time coping with the situation by trying to be everything to everyone. The perfect mom. The supportive wife. The attentive daughter. But all that happened was that she was burned out AND still grieving.

To correct this trajectory, Sankovitch embarks upon her book-a-day project, scouring the library for books of the appropriate length–200 to 300 pages–and settling herself into her favorite reading spot, a sturdy purple easy chair. The mother of four school-age boys, she has to reframe how she thinks of her reading life, rescuing it from the periphery of her limited free time. In order to make her project work, she must think of it as a necessity, not a luxery. This means new chores for her kids, a withdrawal from her previous overinvolvement. This isn’t without difficulty and guilt; accepting the idea that she absolutely cannot “do it all,” even if she wasn’t reading 300 pages a day.

The books she reads provide her with a lens through which to process her grief, to come to terms with her close, but sometimes-tense relationship with her sister, and also–perhaps most surprisingly of all–to examine her parents’ grief, especially her father’s. After her sister’s death, Sankovitch came upon her father apparently in the grip of a flashback, repeating over and over, “four in one night. Four in one night.” Her father, an Estonian immigrant, had lived through both the Soviet and the Nazi occupation of his country. One night, while his mother was ill in bed, Soviet soldiers came to the family farm and killed four of his siblings in cold blood. He was away at the time, but the trauma it left upon his family left its lasting mark. Sankovitch stands in awe of her father’s grief. She lost one sister–he lost four siblings in a single blow. But grief is grief and it marks a person like a thumbprint.

In the end, if you are going to choose one “reading life” memoir, you could do a lot worse than this one. It is gentle in a way, focusing as it does on family life and the love found there; but also hard-hitting in its raw exploration of grief. I especially appreciated that she included the list of books she read–all 364 of them. Go forth and TBR.