Gornick

My mother was a romantic, so she read novels, many from the nineteenth century. She had only a high school education, but she was one of those immigrants who grew up on the Lower East Side and went to every free lecture in sight. When I was a young woman I began to give her books to read. She read whatever I gave her, and I would say, Ma, how was the book? She'd narrow her eyes, look steadily at me, and say, Powerful, really powerful. Or she'd say, Not powerful, not at all powerful. But once I gave her a two-volume autobiography by a popular English novelist of the early twentieth century named Storm Jameson. Jameson was a lousy novelist, but when she was in her late seventies she wrote this autobiography called Journey from the North—she came from Yorkshire—and that was her master­piece, the one book she wrote brilliantly. A week after I'd given my mother the book, I came in and there she was, lying on the couch, reading it. I said, Oh Ma, how are you enjoying that book? She sat up, swung her legs over the side of the couch, narrowed her eyes, as always, but this time she said, It's as though she's just in the room with me. And then she said, I'm going to feel lonely when I finish this book. And I thought, What more could any writer ask of a reader?