Reader Advisory: How I Left My Wife

It was the books that did it. No, really.

People often ask your friendly bookseller what I like to read myself.

I answer with half-truths. I give incomplete responses, I mention the audiobooks I’ve listened to and the podcasts I like, but I typically don’t tell the whole truth. I read (listen to) a lot of Very Serious Nonfiction by retired journalists, I read (listen to) some academic work, but the last day that I read novels in any significant way was January 17, 2015 and it was a teen vampire romance.

I got started on the YA in about 2007 with Tamora Pierce and Sarah Rees Brennan, and I started haunting the YA sections of the Chicago Public Library. I stopped at the Albany Park branch on the way home from work to swap out my loans, or at the Lincoln Belmont branch before the gym, or I’d walk over to Bezazian and get a book before going out to a solo lunch at Thai Pastry on Broadway. I started tearing through those YA books until somehow I picked up Twilight and that was the tipping point for my long dive into teen vampire romance. I must have read three or four hundred teen vampire romances, a long streak of books getting redder and darker over the course of a few years, coming to an abrupt stop in January 2015.

I know it was January 2015 when I stopped.

It was weird, reading all those teen romances. I mean first off, they are teenagers so how much romance can there actually be, and second there is just a LOT of bloody metaphor going on. I didn’t want to tell people that I was reading all these completely trashy books. One or two, now and then, would be understandable, but every day? I’m going to my corporate job with ten teen vampire books in my laptop bag? Really?

And yet those books spoke to me. Catalogers say the difference between kids’ books and YA books is that YA is about differentiating yourself from your family, figuring out who you are when you’re not at home. And I did not want to be at home; home was a small apartment with my partner, my not-wife, my closeted girlfriend of twelve years. When we got together gay marriage was illegal and by the time it became legal we knew, or at least I knew, that it was not for us. 

Still, I call her my ex-wife, to strangers, because people think of a girlfriend as a six-month or two-year relationship, not as something with paperwork. Wills and health care proxies and estate planning. We had that second kind, the paperwork kind of relationship, and as things were falling apart I felt like estate planning was the most important part of my life because I couldn’t picture us both staying alive together in that apartment much longer.
 

I felt half-alive, really. And half-dead, living a life I did not love with a person I–

–did love?

–had loved?

–still loved but could not live with?

I couldn’t figure it out so I just worked really hard at that job and I read a bunch of books. I tore through volume after volume, series after series. Twilight. Evernight. Vampire Academy. 

I read on the train, I read on the elliptical, I read on the toilet. Blue Bloods. The Mortal Instruments. 

We went to a play together, an adaptation of Carmilla. Wildclaw Theater specializes in special effects and horror; their HR-Giger-inspired Kill Me gave me nightmares for months.

I am still irrationally frightened of pianos because of Kill Me.

Carmilla is a biography (thanatography?) of a lesbian vampire, played by one of the most talented and also, by any standard, one of the hottest actors in Chicago. People die in that play. People are horribly viciously murdered. There was an incredible stage picture with blood spatter silhouetted across the scrim, backlit over Carmilla’s coffin.

I had nightmares for months. I kept reading: Insatiable. Overbite. Tantalize. And I kept dreaming, hot, sheet-twisting, passionate nightmares.

I dreamed I left my wife for Carmilla. I dreamed I left my wife for my high school sweetheart. I dreamed I left my wife for the barista at Starbucks, the bus driver on the 92 Foster bus, the stranger who sat across from me on the Metra. I woke up in a cold sweat, every morning, not knowing what was real. Only that all was lost, everything was ruined, and it was my fault.

At Bible study on Wednesday nights I shamefacedly admitted I had read nothing. No matter how short or long the assigned selections were, somehow every week I had read another six or sixteen vampire romances and neither chapter nor verse of the Bible.

“Don’t sweat blood over it,” the leader said. “This is obviously your devotional practice. I mean, it’s a weird one, that’s for sure, but it works for you.”

My banker saw the book I carried and shuddered. “My daughter reads that,” she said. “I’m trying to stop her; it’s so morbid. Dead people all day and all night.”

“Oh, well, you know what Neil Gaiman says. These are just angels with fangs.” Immortal. Fallen. The Awakening. 

I listened to the Twilight series on repeat. Those audiobooks are supremely terrible; the narration is just as bad as the original writing. I ripped all sixty CDs onto my ancient mp3 player so I could listen on an endless loop while I worked my miserable corporate job.

It would be like losing my own heart, to leave.

But I left. I called a meeting with our couples counselor. I said, “I love you, and I am leaving you,” and I left.

It was like losing my heart. I walked around the world bloodless and shocked, for a year, then two. I packed my things, took an apartment, got a new job, kept moving. I moved eight times in 28 months. I didn’t have time to read so I stopped reading. I got addicted to Facebook. I didn’t read…books. Just like Dracula doesn’t drink…wine.

Our bookshelves are a reflection of our souls? Suddenly I had no soul. No reflection, and no need of bookshelves. I took off the silver ring I had worn and watched the tan line fade away; by spring my hand was pale and white and unmarked.

I thought surely the books would come back. You can’t bury a lifelong habit in six feet of earth and think it will stay buried. Surely they would come back, or I would go back to them.

I moved my books to the new apartment and the new apartment got bedbugs so…I threw the books away.

Out of six hundred volumes, I kept ninety-six. That’s it. I kept the books that were inscribed to me; my own journals; a few treasures from college and childhood. I packed them into opaque, locked, airtight/waterproof/bugproof boxes, sprinkled in some diatomaceous earth, and shipped them like cargo to Ohio. When they arrived at my new home in Akron, I didn’t open the boxes. I didn’t open the books.

I kept on not opening the boxes even after I bought a house with a reading nook and even after I turned that house into a bookstore’s warehouse. Finally one day I shelved them but even then, I didn’t open the actual books. One stack is the TBR pile and it’s been the same TBR pile since 2015. Untouched, and unread.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, no relation, has a famous vampire named St-Germain. According to an interview she gave, he survives on lymph, somehow. His circulatory system is all lymph instead of blood.  Without books, I think I know how he feels: the rich red blood cells that would give him life and air and let him taste the sweetness of his existence are all gone.

I am surrounded by books now and my eye doctor has a plan to let me read again. We’ll see if it works. I don’t feel bloodless or heartless or soulless anymore, I feel like I have all those things; I just still don’t have books back. I have books to sell; I have books to write; I have books to package up adorably for our Blind Date With a Book event in February, but for a long time now I have not had books to read. I’m trying to take that first taste, again, and see how it goes.