Secrets

Everyone has secrets. Everyone has shameful secrets that they only reveal after a few gin and tonics and they are sure that everyone loves them enough to forgive them. I’m talking about the secret DVD that is shoved to the back of the cupboard that gets pulled out only when one is alone and sure of no interruptions – no not THAT video – the one that you think everyone will tease you about for years to come. OK – I’ll confess that I have one – While You Were Sleeping with Sandra Bullock. I have watched it once a year or so since it came out in 1995. It is my feel-good movie and it is silly and soppy but the little lonely girl wins in the end and it makes me feel better when I am feeling sorry for myself. Now you know the kind of secret I am talking about.

I’m pretty sure that everyone has a literary secret too. One friend who is an academic reads romance novels – I’m talking cheap, hunky-guy-half-dressed-on-the-cover romance books. I have another friend who reads Proust and Joyce, and reads Harry Potter every year or so. I have another friend, one with whom I have discussed serious literature who finally confessed (apparently this had been weighing on her for quite a while) that she loves the Twilight series. I suspect there are quite a few of you out there. BTW I’m not one of you. I read the first one and thought that child needed counselling and some anti-depressants. Who in their right mind would let a little girl die for a boy even if he did shimmer in the sun and drink blood to stay alive. This is bad popular teenage fiction. Sorry! (I seem to say sorry every post but I guess I just have some strong opinions)

My fiction secret is a little series of mystery who-dun-its by a Seattle based author Mary Daheim. Almost 20 years ago when I was a single mother living on a pension in a small town with a little wee public library, I went to said library and looked up Seattle in the catalogue. I lived the first 24 years of my life in and around Seattle and I must have been feeling a little homesick. Up popped The Alpine Advocate by Mary Daheim. It was a little murder mystery with good enough writing to keep me reading and not too complicated that a very tired me didn’t have to think too hard. The story was set in the evergreen mountains of the Cascades near Seattle in a little fictional town called Alpine. Emma Lord, the main character, was a single mother and new editor of a small town newspaper. She was tough and soft and could solve crimes.

The next year The Alpine Betrayal came out and my circumstances hadn’t changed enough to make me want anything any harder to read so I borrowed that one too. I told my mother about them and she started buying them and sending them off to me after she read them. Through those years I did settle down to some more serious (and occasionally more silly) literature to read. I fell in love with some Australian authors and discovered English literature (all except Dickens, but don’t worry; I have now and love him as much as everyone else does). Over the past 20 years I have joined book groups, studied literature at university, tackled the classics and been a voracious reader. Still, whenever I see a new Alpine book – and they are easy to spy because Daheim has kindly written them in alphabetical order titles – The Alpine Christmas, The Alpine Decoy, The Alpine Escape, etc. I put it reserve at the library and, once in hand, settle in for couple of evenings with Emma and Vida and Sheriff Milo and the Pacific Northwest. I just got The Alpine Vengeance and it is more of the same. Lovely!

I’m not advising anyone to read these books. They are silly and simple. But I know these people now and I have a fondness for them. I like them. I’m sure that everyone has one of these types of books hiding somewhere that they are afraid to tell their serious friends about for fear of those looks and a lesser estimation in their eyes. I know that I am guilty of giving that look. The friend who confessed she loved Stephanie Meyer – I keep trying to introduce her to better vampire books but she stands firm. I half admire her for it, half scoff. But I will try to do better in the future, especially now that you know my secret!