Reflections on "Book Marks"

     After our class discussion, I reread Rebecca McClanahan’s essay “Book Marks.” When I first read the essay I knew there was more to be uncovered. The same could be true after reading it twice. However, after our class discussion I have really come to see the possibility that the writer and the woman she describes are in fact the same person. McClanahan creates herself as a character within her own story. She plays a double role as the narrator and the subject. She creates a character of a woman who is the patron at the same library and the notes in the margin to herself that she left behind to tell her own story. The author distances herself and creates a character who all these things might happen to. It is as if in this essay she is writing a cautionary tale to herself, to not go back and make all the mistakes that hindsight has shed light on. “I Tell myself I wouldn’t have stayed in that kind of situation…( how do we live with the knowledge of our past selves?)” (pg.102).  It is almost as if the writer is giving advice to her former self, as if to say,  "If I knew then what I know now."
     The essay explores her relationships with people as well as books. Often the two overlap. Her husband is abusive and unfaithful. The books are abused and tell the stories of their previous readers. She contemplates the limits of harming of books as she contemplates whether she really wants to die. Her husband ultimately let her down in every conceivable way. She becomes her own disappointment after her suicide attempts, however she is ultimately able to find her way back to her own identity. “I fall into books the way I fall into lust—fully, hungrily. Often the book disappoints, or I disappoint” (pg.98). consistently throughout the essay McClanahan uses books and the markings left in them as a metaphor for her relationships and her own journey through life. She experiences both wear and abuse as the books do, but in the end she has her own story that she decides to tell.