A book with handwriting in the margins is a gift that keeps arriving, in waves, for as long as we have the courage to open it.
There is a box in my office that I haven’t been able to open yet.
It came from my mom’s house. A medium-sized cardboard box, sealed with the kind of tape my mom always used. Too much of it, layered over itself, the way she did everything: thoroughly, committedly, without half-measures. Inside, I know, are books. Her books. The ones that were on her bedside table, on the shelf above the kitchen counter, stacked on the floor beside the armchair she sat in every single evening of my childhood. I know they’re in there. I’m just not ready for the handwriting.
My mom wrote in her books. Not in all of them, and never a lot. She wasn’t an underliner or a margin-filler. Occasionally, when something stopped her, she would write a single word in the white space of a page. Yes. Or true. Or sometimes just a question mark, as if she were having a conversation with the author and wanted to push back. When I found the first one as a kid, I remember thinking it was almost scandalous. Writing in a book! Then I read what she’d written — this is what love actually looks like next to a paragraph in a novel I can no longer name — and I understood that she wasn’t defacing the book. She was leaving a note. For herself, maybe. Or, it turns out, for me.
We talk about heirlooms like they’re always precious objects. A grandmother’s ring. A piece of furniture that holds the shape of a family. I’ve come to believe that books are among the most powerful things we can pass down, and not because of their monetary value or their age or their beauty. Because of what they reveal about the interior life of the person who held them.
My mom’s heirloom always was and will forever be books. Thousands of them. Literally. In genres I never found interesting but suddenly see, feel and experience her differently through her collection.
When someone dies, you learn things about them through their books that they never told you directly. You learn what they were afraid of, what they were hungry for, what questions they were still carrying at the end. You learn which stories they needed to read more than once. You learn what made them stop and reach for a pen.
I have a friend who, after her father died, spent 3 days going through his library. He had been a quiet man. Not cold, careful with his words, careful with his feelings in the way that a particular generation of men often was. She expected the books to be just books. Instead she found a copy of Mary Oliver’s Upstream with every poem he’d loved folded at the corner. She found a thriller he’d started and abandoned, a bookmark left 40 pages in, and she said it was one of the strangest griefs she’d felt. There was a story he’d never finished, a small mystery now permanently unsolved. She found a book about grief, unmarked, spine barely cracked, that he must have bought after her mother died and never quite managed to read. She couldn’t stop crying. Not because the books were sad, because they were so him, in a way that even years of conversation had only approximated.
That is the particular power of a personal library. It is a portrait. It is a person, rendered in paper and ink and the small decisions of what to keep and what to let go.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, for obvious reasons. Thinking about what a library says. What mine says about me. What I want to leave behind in the margins of notes I’m still writing, what conversations I’m still having with authors I’ll never meet.
My mom’s box is going to stay sealed for a little while longer. Not forever. I need to be ready to meet her there, in the places she stopped, in the words she chose, in the stories she kept coming back to. There is a version of grieving a person that happens through their things. For the people who loved books the way my mother did, the library is the most intimate room left standing.
Books and retreats belong together
Here’s what I know about the retreat experience and books: they belong together in a way we don’t talk about enough.
When we gather — at a Createcation, at a reading weekend, at any kind of intentional retreat — we bring ourselves. What we bring includes the stories that shaped us. Some of those stories are in our heads; we carry them like a kind of inheritance we don’t always know how to name. Others are physical: the book in the bag, the one you almost didn’t pack, the one you’ve been meaning to finish for 3 years. There is something that happens when people share what they’re reading, what they’ve read, what changed them. The conversation moves differently. The walls come down faster.
I’ve watched this happen at writing retreats. Someone will mention a book, not as a literary reference, as a confession. That book was the first time I felt seen. That book made me decide to leave my marriage. That book is the reason I started writing. Suddenly the room is different. Suddenly everyone in it understands something about the person across from them that 3 days of polite conversation might not have reached.
What would it mean to pass books deliberately?
What would it mean to treat books as the heirlooms they actually are? Not just to inherit them, to pass them deliberately?
I’ve been doing this as a practice. Not a grand gesture, just a small, intentional one. To take a book that shaped me, write something in it, and give it to someone who might need what it gave me. Or to tuck it into a little free library, leave it on a park bench or at a coffee shop with notes for the next legacy it’ll leave in its pages. Leaving the book as a message. This one is for you. This is what it gave me. I hope it gives you something too.
My mother didn’t know she was leaving me notes. She was just living inside books the way she lived inside everything. Fully, with her whole self, with her opinions and her feelings and her willingness to argue back. Those notes are what I have now. They are, in some ways, the most direct conversation we’ll ever have.
The box will get opened. I’ll find her handwriting in the margins, and it will be like hearing her voice, and it will be devastating and wonderful in equal measure. Then I will probably sit with those books for a very long time, learning things about my mother that she never thought to tell me, and being grateful beyond measure that she wrote them down. Read them. Embodied them.
There is an old question that writers and readers have always asked: why do we read? There are a thousand good answers. Here is the one I keep coming back to: we read so that the people we love can keep talking to us, even after they’re gone. We read because the stories we love are the truest record of who we were. We read because a book with handwriting in the margins is a gift that keeps arriving, in waves, for as long as we have the courage to open it.
Put something in your books. Write your name in them. Write a date, a feeling, a question. Give them away when the time is right.
You are building something for the people who come after you. Let them find you there.
Your Next Fave Read
- Writing as Healing: The Quiet Medicine of Telling the Truth
- The Storykeeper Manifesto: Why Your Most Powerful Business Asset Hasn’t Been Written Yet
- The Stories We Carry
This piece first appeared in RetreatBoss Magazine, where I am Editor-in-Chief.
