I am a booklover so it was natural for me to find that books were my allies in rough times.
Later, when I was stronger, they provided catharsis and practical ideas for a way forward.
That’s just me. Entering into the world of a book gives me a break from harsh reality. What I get from reading, you personally might find you get from films or music or drama or something else entirely. Some healthy form of temporary escape. The emotional pressure is relaxed and, mysteriously, some inner strength begins to build so you find you can cope with and work through any reality.
The books I turn to at times like this tend to be retro and nostalgic. I bless the day I came across Persephone Books, which rediscovers and republishes ‘forgotten’ books by and about (mainly) mid-twentieth century women. Superficially, these books might appear to be about the past but read them and you discover they are timeless.
You realise there is no problem you face that some other woman at a much harder time in history has not faced before you. It’s as though a tunnel through the rockface that's blocking your way has already been begun by some earlier woman's efforts. In some mystical way, this helps you. Take confidence that you too will make it through into the daylight.
I also have a theory that nostalgic and retro books evoke comfort because their stories are safely in the past and act as a reminder that one day my pain will be in the past too.
There is something irresistible about the women I found in these books, with their retro fashions and their shopping baskets and powder compacts and stiff upper lips, who mostly didn’t have to juggle some of today’s life facets. The viciousness of the career world. The pressure to live up to the girl boss/’be a strong woman’/kickass meme. The harder side of liberation.
I admit I’m looking at the past through rose-tinted lenses here, but it’s common sense to wear sunglasses when the light is too glaring. As a woman I have always been glad I’m alive now rather than then, but it acts like a balm to escape into the lives of these women for a while.
Of special significance amongst Persephone books is
Someone At A Distance by the prolific novelist Dorothy Whipple, who told a story very much like the one I was undergoing, and whose wisdom and perception touched me. When I could not see my own way forward and felt at the mercy of forces I had no control over, one particular paragraph helped:
‘She had learnt to wait for the changes and the help that life brings. Life is like the sea, sometimes you are in the trough of the wave, sometimes on the crest. When you are in the trough, you wait for the crest, and always, trough or crest, a mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.’
Since then I’ve discovered other favourite publishers who specialise in discovering and republishing beloved books from the past, such as Handheld
Press, Dean Street Press, and Turnpike Books.
Whatever has happened in the past these books and authors have resurfaced, and so will you.
For the very worst times, for the nights, for insomnia, when my anxiety was too great to concentrate on lines of print there was Celia Haddon’s The Yearbook of Comfort and Joy, a collection she kept to see her through her own dark time, snippets of reassurance combined with her collection of cosy rural Victoriana.
I was also soothed by
The Fireside Book of David Hope (see The Varnished Culture for the retro appeal of this series). My favourite year in this series was dated 1972. Out-of-print, but easy to find in an internet-enabled world. Its idealised picturescapes and short poems gave me something to immerse myself in when longer reading was beyond me. I just entered into the balm of a cosy, comforting, beautiful picture, felt myself drawn into its reassuring world, was lapped around by it, partook of its calm.
‘A mysterious tide bears you forward to an unseen, but certain shore.’
What have you found that comforts you? Let's talk about it in the Comments section below.
