Seeking Comfort - Books in lieu of Food? Perhaps Both?
By K. Allen McNamara
Seeking comfort from a familiar object extends itself beyond the stuffed animals or blankets we may have had as children. Studies show that people (children, preteens, teens, young adults and adults) find comfort in food, music, and books.
Comfort foods are the foods we seek out when there’s a chill in the air or a chill on our social spectrum. We may look for them when we receive a rejection notice. They’re foods we turn to when we’re just feeling a little “off” or when we need balance or a grounding. Likewise, we may play a song over and over because its rhythms and words seem to speak to us (and we usually think at times the lyrics are/were written specifically for us).
In 2015 for the Atlantic, Cari Romm reported “that comfort food’s power may lie primarily in the associations it calls to mind. People who [often] have positive family relationships are more likely to reach for reminders of those relationships in times of sadness [or stress]—and often, those reminders come in the form of something edible. A grilled cheese sandwich can be a greasy, gooey, satisfying endeavor in its own right, but even more so if it features in happy childhood memories.” *
Moreover with regard to songs we play on repeat, “[m]usic is the way that we create our personal identity,” said Kenneth Aigen, director of the music therapy program at New York University. “It’s part of our identity construction. Some people say you are what you eat. In a lot of ways, you are what you play or you are what you listen to.” ** (Taylor Pittman for HuffingtonPost)
So I wondered as readers and, in particular, writers, do we have comfort books? LitHub recently posted an article citing authors who collect multiple copies of the same book. Some of these books were not, as some were quick to declare, their all-time favorite. These books they collected in multiples were not the ONE as in the one they would definitely take with them were they on a desert island and yet for others these copies collected in multiples were their immediate Go-To Book. ***
To what extent and why do we read books again and again? In true inquisitive fashion, I turned to the writers affiliated with the GrubStreet (a Boston-based writing center) and posted a recent question of this sort on Grubstreet’s Facebook page. I also posed the question to my ActsofRevision.com bloggers and to a few college students or family members who made the mistake of talking with me pre-blog post.
Some who responded offered up one or two, others a series. Here is a glance at the responses:
Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte’s Web (twice)
Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Bell Jar
Ordinary People
The Language of God
The Great Gatsby
No Great Mischief
Joy School by Elizabeth Berg
Angle of Repose
Tess, Tale of Two Cities, Gatsby and Huck Finn
The Master and Margarita
Interpreter of Maladies
Slaughterhouse Five
The Good Soldier
Harry Potter - Book 5 sometimes with Book 6
Anything Maya Angelou - she’s just so soothing
Poetry by Knute Skinner
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Shantram by Gregory David Roberts
The book I return to time and again is Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. Even though I know the ending I fall into McDermott’s lyricism of the tale of Billy, and it lulls me. And the days leading up to a July 4th holiday bbq/lobsterfest gathering for 30+ people (that I'm hosting) it stills me and I can fall asleep.
From the rest of my fellow bloggers I received these:
When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron
Frog & Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel - “I gravitate to an earlier time.”
Divine Sisters of the Ya Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee “Probably because of Atticus, the ultimate strong father figure, standing up for justice."
Like comfort foods or songs that capture our essence and drown out the worlds noise, we seek out books that remind us of something. Or perhaps it is because we need to be reminded of something. Comfort foods we hope will bring us comfort and usually because comfort has come hand-in-hand with these foods in the past. Books -our GoTo books-offer us this solace. They give us a reprieve from the world that has become too much, and reading them again restores us. When we surface from those pages we are renewed.
And let’s face it, the calorie count is a lot less with books unless you take them with a side of mac and cheese, fried rice, pasta, curry, red beans and rice, apple pie, cheesecake, ginger ale, chicken soup, french fries, pizza, egg rolls, rice with butter, grits, hot dish, tuna casserole, tomato soup, chocolate, chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, jambalaya, bbq, lobster with crabmeat stuffing, fried green tomatoes…
What’s your GoTo comfort book? Food? Separate or together?
Additional reading: Reading Again and Again - Ten Authors on Their Favorites
