Voracious Reader

by Mindy Friddle

I was an Army brat. We moved from South Carolina to Bremerhaven, Germany when I was nine.  Then something happened that had an impact on my life -- a big old crater-sized impact.

Our television didn't work.  

Me, at nine, before my voracious tear.

Actually, all the televisons on the American base didn't work-- there was some weird technical reason. You had to connect a big buzzing transformer to use your blow dryer, for Pete's sake, and the base wasn't big enough to have its own television station.

There  was a library on base, a tiny place crammed with books. And that winter, I read just about every book in the kid's section. Hattie, Heidi, The Hobbit, all the Nancy Drews; I plowed through Little Women and Johnny Tremain and A Wrinkle in Time, to name a few I remember.

By 11, I was working my way through the adult books. I read Benchely's  Jaws, Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Stephen King's Carrie,  John Updike's Couples, James  Jones' Some Came Running, and Xaviera Hollander's The Happy Hooker  before I could wear lipstick. {I didn't check that one out...I found it in Mrs. Terry's house while I babysat her children. They weren't good children. I deserved it.]

By the time I was 12, Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding pretty much blew me away. 

What I learned?  Censorship is untenable. Don't worry about what the kids are reading-- worry when they aren't.

Mindy Friddle is the author of The Garden Angel (St. Martin's Press/Picador), selected for Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers program in 2004. 
Her second novel, Secret Keepers (St. Martin 's Press/Picador), won the 2009 Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.