The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap (25 page)

Recounting this story at yet another dinner party about a month later, when my husband had made his infamous tandoori beef curry for our friends Mark and Elizabeth, Jack laughed suddenly and stood from his chair. Holding it up, he patted its seat.

“It gets better,” he said. “Wendy caned the chair seats we’re sitting on, and we bought the frames at garage sales.” The four of us started giggling, looking around the room, pointing out the harp Jack built for me (from a kit) for Christmas; the casserole dish holding the curry, crafted by Fiona; the drawing on the wall of wine pouring into a glass, done by an appreciative customer. The big oak table where we sat—which Jack sometimes called the heart of the bookstore because of its position in the center of the fiction room, where so many special events swirled around it—came from an antique store, bought years ago in far-off Snakeland. I recounted with pride how most of our Christmas presents lay wrapped upstairs, handmade items purchased directly from their makers.

Then Mark pointed to the bookshelves Jack had built and said, “Okay, a lot of the things in this house, bookstore, whatever, come straight from the hand of the person who made them, right? What about the books?” As our hilarity and jokes about cheapo Scotsmen turned to blank stares, Mark persisted in his point. “Think about it. We’ll each pay more money to have food we trust on the table. But we want to pay less money to have things that are mass produced. Jack bought a harp kit because it was cheaper than buying a ready-made harp.”

“Aye, but also because it made the harp more special,” Jack interjected, and I nodded vigorously.

“It means so much more to me to have a harp Jack made than to have an expensive model. And the sound is just lovely. He did a great job on it. Who’s to say one bought from someone else would have been so well crafted?” My voice may have held a hint of smug self-righteousness.

“That proves my point,” Mark said, smirking. “Some things we get off the highway to shop for—I mean the mainstream marketing highway, you know, buying from Walmart or a big chain store like that. We get off the beaten path because we want them to be special. It may cost more—the food, the materials for these chair seats we’re sitting on (and by the way, Wendy, they’re really comfortable)—but it’s special. And some things we buy because they’re cheaper. The harp’s more of a fluke; it was cheaper, but it was only nicer to build one yourself because you knew what you were doing, Jack.”

I jumped in. “I just read a book about this:
The $64 Tomato.
It’s the memoir of a guy who reckons up what it costs to grow his garden—which he does every year because his family’s used to the better food from it—and he realizes that it’s way, way more expensive than buying the same things at the grocery store.”

Mark took the interruption well. “That’s what I’m saying. How much of how we shop is about making our lives better, and how much is about convenience, or just not thinking too hard about what we’re doing? Which things did you pay more for so you could be happier with them, and which did you pay
less
for so you’d be happier with them? And”—his long finger jabbed again at the bookshelves lining the room—“I’m not letting you off on this point. What about buying books new, as opposed to buying them secondhand?”

I blinked at the shelves. So did Jack and Mark’s wife Elizabeth. “I’m not understanding about the books,” I finally said.

“Authors make things. They make the words that go in the books. We all like handmade things. You’re proud of your handmade presents. You feel like you’re supporting artists. But you’re selling other people’s art in here, and they’re not getting any of the money. How do you justify that?” Mark folded his arms across his chest, then unfolded them to fill his glass with locally produced wine.

Gobsmacked
is the word in Britain for when someone startles you so totally that you can’t speak. Jack and I were gobsmacked.

At the time of this discussion, I think I summed up with something brilliant like “Uhhhhh.” Don’t be envious; years of storytelling and college teaching converged to make me so articulate on the fly.

Okay, so let’s unpack this idea. New book stores—by which I mean stores that deal in new books rather than secondhand—encounter a recurrent sore point in the way people buy now. In this era of online shopping, a few bricks-and-mortar establishments I’ve seen even have signs up in the window:
FIND IT HERE, BUY IT HERE, KEEP US HERE
. They’re referring to that famous practice some shoppers call e-bargain hunting, when a person identifies a book he or she might like from the shelf of a new book store, jots down the title, then hauls out a smartphone to check if the price on Amazon is cheaper.

Although Jack and I mostly shop used book stores, when we get a rare day out in Asheville, North Carolina, we make sure to stop at Malaprop’s, one of the last large independent (as in, not part of a chain) booksellers in the United States. Careful with money as we are, we see it as a point of honor to buy books there, because we believe in the store, the people, and the concept of local buy, local supply. And it’s the closest independent bookstore to us—a two-hour drive. That’s kind of a warning shot across the bow, don’t you think? When you were a kid, how many independent bookshops beckoned within twenty minutes’ drive of the house? Where I live now, besides our store there is only a Books-A-Million and one more secondhand bookseller within a forty-five minute drive.

At Malaprop’s one August morning, Jack and I cruised the shelves, picking up and putting down various tomes on travel, anthropology, music, even fiction. On this particular summer day, languid and lethargic, I found nothing that suited me—although I did pause briefly over a memoir about small-town life and work that looked interesting. In the end, I didn’t deem it enticing enough to buy. Jack got a musical biography while I, out of duty more than desire, bought a book of amigurumi patterns. (Cute baby animals to crochet. Old habits die hard.)

A few weeks later, I happened to be cruising the famous McKay Used Books in Knoxville, Tennessee. McKay is actually a local chain store for secondhand books and music, started by a husband and wife who were so successful they expanded to four locations. Stopping by my favorite section, narrative nonfiction, I spotted the book I’d eschewed at Malaprop’s, priced at seventy-five cents. Well heck, I hadn’t been willing to take a chance on it for fourteen dollars, but this fraction of a dollar was a no-brainer. I tossed it into my filling cart with nary a second thought.

It turns out I didn’t much care for the book and set it aside after a few chapters. This little anecdote can be read (no pun intended) two ways. Perhaps I dodged a $13.25 bullet, because the title wouldn’t have pleased jaded-reader me no matter what; this interpretation makes me a wise shopper taking no chances. Or perhaps, if I had paid more for it, I would have tried harder to like the book. Did expectation diminish with price? No one, me included, will ever know.

What I do know is that not everybody can afford those choices; people on minimum wage, welfare, fixed incomes, and so on have to be careful with their money. No one faults necessary frugality. Jack and I can afford (four years on from the terror of debt and humiliation) to pay more in support of smaller retailers, so we usually do, test-case memoir notwithstanding. We recognize that independent shops depend on local customers; had I been more drawn to that particular memoir, I would have bought it in Malaprop’s because I liked being in Malaprop’s. It’s akin to sitting in a restaurant; the price you’re paying isn’t for the food—the least cost of being there—but for the service, the seating, the ambiance. That’s why you get to complain about stuff; you paid for it.

New book stores are brain food stores. (So are secondhanders, but our retail concerns about sticking around are the wee bit different.) Thus, if you’re lucky enough to have a cool little bookshop near you, I’m sure you do your part to keep it there, even if it means a thirteen-dollar gamble now and again.

Back to Mark’s point, though. He brought an itchy rubbing awareness of how our bookstore fit into the wider world of reading, echoed a couple of years later when I’d actually written a book and my agent sold it. Suddenly I was an author, someone who would make money (or not) by the number of times the book retailed as a new object.

Elizabeth came over one day soon after I learned the book you are currently reading would be published. She kept me company as I did a long overdue deep clean of the upstairs rooms. When I told her about the more-than-expected advance headed my way, she teased, “Well, you can stop shopping at thrift stores now.”

Still in a daze, I blurted the first thing that came to mind. “I didn’t write it for money.” Which was true.

She responded instantly, looking me in the eye. “I know you didn’t. You wrote it because…” Her voice trailed into a question.

We stared at each other for a moment; then Elizabeth crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows. “You wrote it, because…” One hand untucked to roll in a “here’s where you talk” gesture.

Do you know, I hadn’t thought about why I’d written it? It just had to be done. Like that old cliché about climbing mountains: because it was there.

Why do writers write? After all, it’s dangerous. As Patricia Hampl, an author whose wordcraft I admire, said, “You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.” Carolyn Jourdan, author of the sweet and funny memoir
Heart in the Right Place,
cautioned me at a luncheon, “Get a psychiatrist to read your book before you publish. You have no idea what you’ll be telling people about yourself until you see it in print, and then it’s too late.”

So why take the chance on putting my whiny, neo-bitchy, self-centered prose about living the bibliophilic dream out there? I think writers write because it’s a device to make sense of what’s happening around us, to order and calm and clarify our thoughts. We scribble down flashes of insight, observations, ideas because we believe other people will identify with us, understand what we think, feel the same way about something, or even—oh great arrogance—benefit from what we have to relate.

Because it’s fun.

I wrote about the bookstore for all those reasons. In the beginning my pages didn’t feel important to anyone else, just to Jack and me, but that was enough. I needed something to turn in at the monthly writer’s group meetings, after all.

Then my friend Margie got saddled with the early draft.

Margie and I have almost nothing in common, except a wicked dry sense of humor and the belief that students are the ultimate reason for everything professors should do. She heads the natural sciences department at the college where I am on the teaching staff, and is a scientist’s scientist. I hate math almost as much as chemistry, but we wound up having coffee once a month because we started a CABs club together. (Cynical Altruist Bitches. So now you know.) Membership is limited to people who do the right thing with martyred sighs and eye rolls, easily identified by their dashing about making stuff happen while complaining loudly that “it won’t make a blind bit of difference.” You know the type.

Quick but necessary sideline: I have Margie to thank for introducing me to those microscopic “water bears” that live in moss. She picked up a
National Geographic
on the library’s coffee table and showed me an article on Tardigrades, complete with colored pictures. Tardigrades, aka water bears, are adorable cuddly looking creatures, complete with little claws and ears and everything.

Writers shouldn’t be friends with scientists; it leads to fistfights. Margie rolled her eyes as I waxed eloquent about tardigrades, inventing on the spot a marital structure and kinship system. To her they were organisms; to me, a wee forest society waiting to be written about. We practically got thrown out of the library when Margie shouted me down as I began to verbally imagine how working tardigrade mothers might organize child care on snow days, “when their schools would be closed, of course. It snows inside moss, right? Heck, one flake could wipe out an entire village.”

See, writers create because we have to. We’d explode otherwise.

Anyway, one day over coffee I told poor Margie one of the stories I’d jotted down about something that happened in the store, and she howled with laughter (earning us yet another dirty look from the library staff).

“That is really funny; you should write a book.” She sighed, wiping her eyes.

“Funny you should say that,” I said with a grin.

Margie read the whole draft, then encouraged me to send it off “to someone, you know, out there in publishing.” So did my friend Cami, author of a running memoir called
Second Wind.
We’d been friends since high school, and she knew just who “out there” I needed to talk to. A supersonic flash of e-mail exchanges later, this nice New York woman I’d never met wanted to give other people the opportunity to read about what we did in the bookshop. Gratifying, yes. Most gratifying, and I’m grateful. And of course, turning out text is a full-time job for some. For most of us, though, writing is like singing in the shower; we don’t do it believing someone will hear us.

So we write because we write. Fine. But how do we get paid for it? Well, most of us don’t. And then there’s the reality that neither Picasso nor his family received any of the massive fortunes now following his paintings, not to mention the legend of his beach drawings.

One day a man crested a seaside cliff and looked down on another man drawing with a stick in the sand—incredible swirls and lines he recognized as the work of Picasso. Without a camera, before cell phones, he simply sat and watched as the artist drew and drew until the tide came in and washed it all away. Then Pablo went whistling away with his stick over one shoulder.

Do you sing in the shower? Draw in the sand because it’s there?

Elizabeth and I were deep in this discussion as we headed downstairs for a glass of something. Mike Ward, a friend of Jack’s visiting from Scotland, was cooking evening tea—we love it when Mike visits—and added his thoughts.